Introduction: Lacan Now

Introduction: Lacan Now Concetta Principe (bio) I recently completed editing a collection of articles on Lacan’s Écrits “Science and Truth.” While that project had a very clear focus, a single Lacanian text, very different from this project which was an open call, that project and this project show some striking similarities that I would argue indicate a “now” in Lacanian scholarship. Themes such as psychosis, Marxism and capital, and racism evident in the Science and Truth project are also here in this special issue of English Studies in Canada. There are differences of course, the most striking being that these articles are reading Lacan very broadly, drawing on a large body of scholarship on social and political theory to make their argument. Moreover, these articles are written predominantly by Canadian scholars. And there are two autotheory projects (Kuitenbrouwer and Soros) that I am very happy to be including. In its migration from the clinic to political and cultural analysis, Lacanian thought has contributed much to understanding contemporary political and cultural phenomena. And it all started with the “unconscious.” What Freud had initiated in his scientific inquiry of irrational behaviour and the talking cure, Lacan evolved into a more dynamic project of the impossible truth that reveals so much about the modern subject. That is, [End Page 1] for Lacan the cure is secondary to the process experienced by the analy-sand who, in listening to her unconscious speak, is lead to her particular and incomplete truth. Whereas Freud saw the irrational of the unconscious as a path of resistance, Lacan saw the path of the unconscious to the truth as a mobius strip, running along the path of the lie. Why do we behave against reason? Well, when we follow the unconscious through the bracken, thorns, and forest of our confusion, we come upon an understanding of the self. That is, the unconscious is no longer a conflicted alien element of the self but the part that is the most compassionate and caring. This project of the analysand’s work, her truth, is enabled by what Lacan promotes as the analyst’s refusal to be the “one supposed to know.” The labile quality of words, the analysand’s unconscious, and human interest in understanding perhaps together explain how Lacanian thought managed to move beyond the clinic and become a tool for understanding socio-political and cultural phenomena. There was the minor failure of psychoanalytic application in film analysis in the 1970s that did not diminish the great success of the application to political thinking made possible by Althusser’s project on Marxist ideology. This political work became the ground for first generation Lacanianists such as Alain Badiou and his Being and Event, as well as Slavoj Žižek and his The Sublime Object of Ideology and Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire. Copjec took an interest in Lacan’s sexuation paradigm, where the feminine position, or ethics and woman in Lacanian terms, are not biologically determined but extra-lingual. Much of this work grounds Allan Pero’s article in this special issue. The second wave of Lacanians like Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnson, Richard Boothby, Derek Hook, Callum Neill, Stijn Vanheule, Matthew Flisfeder, Clint Burnham, and Duane Rousselle—the latter two of whom have papers in this issue—Patricia Gherovici, Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, and George Sheldon, as well as the late Mary Ruti, ground much of the scholarship in this issue. They have pushed the envelope on how we can apply Lacan, inspiring the spread of his thought into diverse and specialized fields on issues as varied as racism, sexuation, extractivism, addiction, and psychosis. Lacanian thought is increasingly global in its scope and impact. Communities as far from us as Australia, the long-standing communities in Ireland, England, France, United States, Scotland, South America, Central America, and the transatlantic/transpacific dialogues happening at the global level confirm that Lacanian thought is a vital contribution to contemporary scholarship, acting in the spirit that Lacan encouraged: since we know our desires will never fully reveal themselves, we can finally throw [End Page 2] up our hands and stop pretending to have everything under control. This is the spirit with which...

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