Lacan and Romanticism , livre ebook

LACAN AND ROMANTICISM
SUNY SERIES , S TUDIES IN THE L ONG N INETEENTH C ENTURY

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
L ACAN AND R OMANTICISM

EDITED BY D ANIELA G AROFALO AND D AVID S IGLER
Cover image: Leonardo Alenza y Nieto (1807–1845), Sátiras del suicidio romántico , nineteenth century, painting, oil on canvas. Madrid, Museo del Romanticismo.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Garofalo, Daniela, 1968- editor. | Sigler, David, 1977- editor.
Title: Lacan and Romanticism / edited by Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020087| ISBN 9781438473451 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438473475 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Romanticism—Great Britain. | Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981—Influence. | Psychoanalysis and literature. | English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Psychiatry in literature.
Classification: LCC PR457 .L35 2019 | DDC 820.9/145—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020087
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Lacan and Romanticism
DANIELA GAROFALO AND DAVID SIGLER
1 The Gaze of Frankenstein
PAUL A. VATALARO
2 Goya’s Gaze: Seeing Non-relation in Los Caprichos
RITHIKA RAMAMURTHY
3 Jacques Lacan and John Keats’s “Noble Animal Man”
COLIN CARMAN
4 Abandoned by Providence: Loss in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
DANIELA GAROFALO
5 Logical Time and the Romantic Sublime
ZAK WATSON
6 The Eros of Thanatos: Eighteenth-Century Graveyard Poetry and Melancholic Sublimation
ED CAMERON
7 Toric Tropes Are Stolen Boats: Reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude Topologically, with Lacan
DAVID SIGLER
8 Tyranny as Demand: Lacan Reading the Dreams of the Gothic Romance
MATT FOLEY
9 Jouissance, Obscene Undersides, and Utopian/Dystopian Formations in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
EVAN GOTTLIEB
Contributors
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.1 Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), Nobody knows himself ( Nadie se conoce ), Los Caprichos Figure 2.2 Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), Even thus he cannot make her out ( Ni así la distingue ), Los Caprichios
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HE E DITORS gratefully acknowledge the support of our colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and University of Calgary. We offer thanks for the expert editorial work performed by Amanda Lane-Camilli and Chelsea Miller at SUNY Press, that of series editor Pamela K. Gilbert, and the immensely helpful and thoughtful advice of the anonymous readers. We thank Callie Craig for her timely research assistance and the office of the vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma for facilitating that assistance. We gratefully acknowledge the comradeship of our colleagues Anna Kornbluh, Joel Faflak, David Collings, and Anna Shajirat. We appreciate colleagues met and conversations had at the LACK conferences in 2016 and 2017, and especially Todd McGowan’s work in building the LACK community. We thank The Rabbit Hole in Colorado Springs for its hospitality on several occasions as we, in league with Colin Carman, talked through our plans for this project and ideas-in-progress.
Daniela Garofalo would additionally like to thank her colleagues at the University of Oklahoma for their feedback on her work on Jane Austen and Lacan, as well as Molly Anne Rothenberg for her many insights on these two remarkable figures. Finally, she thanks Derek Hook for his wonderfully enlightening class on Lacan at Birkbeck College, University of London.
David Sigler would additionally like to thank Russell Grigg for generously welcoming him (me) into his seminar on “Psychoanalysis and Sexualities” in the spring of 2017, David L. Clark for his wise advice on a draft of chapter 7 , and Dawn Hamilton for being thoroughly spectacular. His work on chapter 7 was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I NTRODUCTION
Lacan and Romanticism
DANIELA GAROFALO AND DAVID SIGLER
W HY Lacan and Romanticism ? At a time, within Romantic studies, in which the turn to historicism has just begun to loosen its three-decades-long grasp on the field, and in which scholars have meanwhile been variously bemoaning or acclaiming the demise of theory, the study of Lacan with Romanticism might seem like a quixotic enterprise. Confronted by the juggernaut of historicism, theory, some might argue, is dead. Yet some of the richest and most interesting work in literary and cultural studies, all the while, has remained thoroughly informed by theory, and new theoretical praxes have emerged in the last decade or so. As Vincent Leitch writes: “[D]espite all the talk about posttheory and after theory that has been floating around for several decades, there is a theory renaissance underway.” 1 Jacques Lacan—engine of the twentieth century’s first theory renaissance with his ever-controversial “return to Freud”—has been an important part of that resurgence within the study of Romanticism and within literary studies more broadly.
In particular, Lacanian theory has experienced a wide-ranging revival since the 1990s, especially with the publication of Slavoj Žižek’s groundbreaking work. It emphasized (and emphasizes) how and why Lacan matters for a politicized study of culture. Concomitantly, over the last ten years, beginning with Bruce Fink’s translation of Lacan’s complete Écrits and then with the publication of Lacan’s other seminars and lectures, scholars have begun to move beyond Lacan’s most familiar writings, such as the oft-anthologized essays on “The Mirror Stage” and “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” to explore the many unfamiliar corners of Lacan’s thought.
Several books published in the last few decades have been dedicated to the purpose of aligning Lacan with current literary and cultural studies. 2 They have raised the question of what Lacan brings to the study of literature in particular and culture more generally. Although the word “symptom” is often associated with Lacan and psychoanalysis, a Lacanian focus can offer an alternative to symptomatic readings of literary texts, or offer new ways to think about the symptomatic nature of texts. Lacanians are not alone in this effort, but are an important part of a turn away from primarily historicist and new historicist approaches. There was a time when Lacanian studies of Romanticism would face inevitable, and often just, accusations of peddling seemingly timeless myths—and thus ideology. To speak of a psychoanalysis avant la lettre was considered anachronistic and thus intolerable. Psychoanalytic work in Romanticism has, in recent decades, taken seriously these concerns, adapted its methodologies, and accordingly upended such conclusions: what is more obvious today is that psychoanalytic ideas emerged as a discursive development of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that the Romantic focus on the psyche and the unconscious demanded new ways of reading and storytelling. Romanticism, in Britain and throughout Europe, was closely involved in the representation, analysis, and production of human desire—and, as Colin Carman’s essay in this volume indicates, desire beyond the boundaries of the human—and thus in many ways inaugurated psychoanalytic discourses.
New historicist approaches to Romanticism, as pioneered by critics such as Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson, have tended to see literary texts as reactions to a cultural context that informs them even (or especially) when the writer represses or ignores their political and historical milieu. 3 Thus the critic reads the text suspiciously for what the author would occlude about politics, an evasion that nonetheless thoroughly informs the work. To a text shaped by an evasion of social realities, the critic returns a missing context that illuminates the symptomatic nature of the work. Even when historicist critics are less suspicious of the text and simply want to show the importance of material culture in a work (for example, Napoleon as subtext for Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”), 4 the critic tends to find that the context is more interesting than text. When read as symptoms of their culture, texts indicate aspects of a pervasive, if dynamic, context, which thoroughly shapes them.
Lacanian readings can be just as invested in historical particularity, but typically they focus on the text itself, finding that literature, painting, film, and other art forms importantly intervene in the symbolic order and do not merely reflect and react to it. Sharply breaking from traditions of psychoanalytic literary criticism focused on psychobiography, for Lacan “it is out of the question to analyze dead authors.” Instead, he recommends:
You must start from the text, start by treating it, as Freud does and as he recommends,