Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Rhetoric and the Power of Non-Understanding

Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Rhetoric and the Power of Non-Understanding Daniel Adleman (bio) and Chris Vanderwees (bio) Lacan Parle Due to their respective disciplinary silos, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Kenneth Burke’s “new rhetoric” are rarely spoken of in the same breath. In this article, we zero in on Jacques Lacan’s watershed approach to psychoanalytic oratory and his pioneering ideas about the rhetorical tradition’s relevance to psychoanalysis. While he does not seem to have been aware of Burke’s body of work, we argue that Lacan’s recondite rhetoric of psychoanalysis reverberates with a number of critical vectors of Burkean thought. The optics that emerge from underscoring Lacan’s status as a rhetorical practitioner and theorist have profound implications for the entwined legacies of psychoanalysis and the new rhetoric. During the early 1950s, Jacques Lacan gave private seminars on Wednesdays at lunchtime in Sylvia Bataille’s living room at 3 Rue de Lille in Paris.1 Before a small gathering of psychoanalytic trainees, he lectured on the canonical case histories, including Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man. He also engaged the group in close readings of Freud’s books on dreams, parapraxes, and jokes. Lacan eventually relocated his private [End Page 201] seminars to the Saint-Anne Hospital, where they evolved into the much more public Seminar in 1953. Élisabeth Roudinesco recounts that the early years at “the amphitheatre at Sainte-Anne acted as a kind of research laboratory for everyone who attended the lectures … The atmosphere resembled that of a Socratic symposium” (260). In his seminars, Lacan reinvented psychoanalysis as a modern quasi-Socratic dialectical process that evolved into “a technique which substitutes the strange detours of free association for the sequence of the Dialogue” (“Some” 12). Rather than focusing on its Socratic dialectical dimension, rhetorician Kenneth Burke would likely have characterized the socio-pedagogical environment as an expansive parlour. For Burke, the parlour represents a charged, open-ended rhetorical crucible, where speakers and listeners, operating as both orators and audiences, engage in interminable, far-reaching conversations. While the Socratic philosopher, who properly understands the Truth, ironically feigns ignorance in order to win over his dialectical interlocutors, the scene of Burkean rhetoric admits of no such hard-and-fast distinctions. The philosophical dialogue, according to Burke, is merely one of many possible varieties of rhetorical gatherings: “Bring several rhetoricians together,” writes Burke, and “let their speeches contribute to the maturing of one another by the give and take of question and answer, and you have the dialectic of Platonic dialogue” (A Rhetoric 53). While those in attendance may seek out “a higher order of truth” (53), the endeavour may never transcend the realm of mere “opinion,” which the rationalist philosopher too readily dismisses as inconsequential. Viewed from this Burkean angle, Lacan’s rhetorical method and the ongoing parlour that it has engendered (which far transcends the space of the rooms in which he spoke) figures not as a knowing philosopher’s dissemination of his proper understanding of the objective Truth (as viewed from an imagined God’s-eye-view) but as an ingenious act of rhetorical choreography. In Lacan’s galvanic parlour, interlocutors’ opinions (the signifiers they produce and the attitudes they betoken) come freely into relief, and the psychoanalyst’s hallowed status as the “subject supposed to know” the truth of their patients’ and acolytes’ desires is productively undermined. What we are left with is a noisy rhetorical scene in which the status of truth is much murkier than Plato would have it, but this void opens a space for the vital work of psychoanalysis. In order to present a more rhetorically-informed perspective on the style and import of Lacan’s pedagogical method, we will begin by presenting the context, coordinates, and mise-en-scène of Lacan’s parlour. We will then zero in on pivotal aspects of his rhetorical method, including [End Page 202] his unprecedented integration of rhetorical theory into his ideas about psychoanalysis, in order to make the case that Lacan’s unique pedagogical rhetoric was engineered to perform, through its suasive effects, the very same revelatory transformation of subjectivity that it theorized and analyzed as its lines of...

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