The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject

By Carolyn J. Dean

Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of ‘man’ as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared belief that the boundaries between self and other had disappeared during the Great War helps explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts and literary works alike. The Self and Its Pleasures offers a pathbreaking understanding of the boundaries between theory and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501705403

Carolyn J. Dean

Richard Iton is associate professor in the departments of African-American studies and political science at Northwestern University.

Book preview

Introduction

In 1966 the historian Michel Foucault declared that the concept of man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.¹ Foucault’s dramatic declaration represented the culmination of nearly a century of philosophical and aesthetic commentary that questioned whether man was in fact a unitary, transcendental, rational, knowing subject. Indeed, French modernists, existentialists, phenomenologists, structuralists, and now poststructuralists have decentered the self in radically different ways since the late nineteenth century. They have developed the idea that the self no longer masters the world through its reason but is mired in and constituted by culture. This book is about the development of one contemporary form of self-dissolution, whose different and most recent manifestations have often been termed structuralist or poststructuralist. But it is above all an attempt to account for the idea of a decentered self as it has been articulated primarily in the works of two French thinkers who were friends as well as contemporaries: Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). I use their work to frame three interrelated questions: Why, quite simply, has France been the home of the most influential theories of self-dissolution? How, then, is the decentered self historically and culturally specific? And how do we account for rather than just describe what Judith Butler has called the regulatory fictions that constitute it?²

Why, first of all, Bataille and Lacan? Intellectual historians and others usually place them in different categories. Scholars consider Lacan a structuralist (or a poststructuralist in disguise). No one calls Bataille a structuralist, since he never implicitly or explicitly used Saussurian linguistics to ground his thought. Instead, Jürgen Habermas places him first in a line that leads from Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida³ implying that Bataille is closest to poststructuralist thinkers. There have in fact been several recent attempts to see Bataille as a forerunner of poststructuralism, and one critic claims that Bataille’s work constitutes an urtext of deconstruction.⁴

This effort to understand their work by reference to theories of the decentered subject helps us place Bataille and Lacan in the history of ideas. It tells us to whom they demonstrated intellectual affinities or allegiances, and it accounts for the significance of their contributions to the development of structuralist psychoanalysis or poststructuralist literary theory. But while it may be true, for example, that Lacan was Foucault’s structuralist contemporary (insofar as the early Foucault was seen as a structuralist), and Bataille his proto-poststructuralist predecessor, this kind of assertion still begs the question of the historical meaning and relevance of structuralism and poststructuralism (not to mention the difficulty of pinning down Foucault). I have chosen Bataille and Lacan because they are each slippery enough to defy easy categorization and yet important enough in the history of French (and Western) theories of the self to be considered predecessors, founders, or exemplars of particular schools of thought. So, what if we were to conceive their formulations of the self as local, historical practices rather than in terms of broad, shifting paradigms of subjectivity?

In this book I seek to account for Bataille’s and Lacan’s formulation of decentered subjectivity as part of a cultural crisis in interwar France in which all the criteria defining what makes a self and what gives it legitimacy were perceived as having dissolved. In the chapters that follow, I look at the relationship between this self and changing constructions of the other in order to account for what makes the French interwar critiques of the subject—in particular the works of Bataille and Lacan—culturally specific. More precisely, I try to document the process through which, in France, all psychoanalytic and literary attempts to rescue the self after the Great War led instead to its dissolution, and all attempts to stabilize the self in new theoretical terms reiterated its instability.

This approach requires treating ideas as historical practices. Yet what it means to do so is far from clear. Other scholars have written the history of how the decentered self emerged prior to structuralism and poststructuralism in terms of a complex meshing of intellectual influences facilitated by cultural, spiritual crises. Most trace decentering to a general philosophical recognition of the other.⁵ Beginning in the nineteenth century, philosophers and members of literary movements in particular effected a shift away from a rational or empirical to what might be called an intuitive model of the sources of subjectivity: from seeing as a primary mode of cognition to an emphasis on being which rejects the supposed neutrality or passivity of the observer.

Abandoning the pose of the neutral recorder of experience, philosophers, including Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson, engaged in a common effort to save the self from a world they perceived as being dominated by technology and consumerism and hence by the hegemony of instrumental reason. In distinct ways, they looked to lived experience, intuitively known, transmissible, and not reducible to mechanical laws, as recourse against that hegemony. Thus, the French philosopher Henri Bergson emphasized the power of intuition and insisted that experience could not be explained in purely mechanistic terms. Bergson, whose lectures influenced a generation of French intellectuals, facilitated the theoretical tum away from the Cartesianism still evident in French positivism and naturalism at the turn of the century.

With and after Bergson, French thinkers and especially French artists and writers sought to uncover what Habermas has called the unthought and hidden foundations of performing subjectivity.⁶ In other words, they tried to locate and retrieve the sources of the self. They looked to the other of the instrumental reason that they believed dominated the world—to the authentic, original self, now conceived as hidden or obscured. The Great War most dramatically brought the question of the self to the fore and made many French thinkers, many of them war veterans, ever more receptive to ideas touting the power of the irrational and calling for spiritual renewal through the exploration of the nether regions of the soul. For the first time, psychoanalysis found French adherents, above all in the surrealists, who looked to Freud’s teaching for inspiration in their own effort to recover the so-called true self. And while the surrealists also paid tribute to the post-Cartesian German dialectician Hegel, it was not until the 1930S that Hegel was afforded a broad French reception.⁷

The most influential interpreter of Hegel in France was the Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève (Kozhevnikov), who studied in Germany from 1921 to 1927 under the influence of Heidegger. From 1933 to 1939, Kojève presented his phenomenological-existentialist reading of Hegel in a course on The Phenomenology of Mind, which drew some of the most notable intellectuals of the era, including Bataille, Lacan, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. This émigré philosopher, to whom both Bataille and Lacan paid homage, conceived the dialectic as a struggle for recognition illustrated above all in Hegel’s analysis of the master-slave conflict. He focused on The Phenomenology of Mind, instead of Hegel’s other texts, and stressed the existential forces of desire, lack, and struggle over Hegel’s more metaphysical emphasis on reason, totality, and knowledge. He thus participated in a more general rejection of rationalism by focusing on the paradoxes and indeed the violence implicit in Hegel’s account of the dialectic. In other words, Kojève focused on the other side of reason, on struggle rather than on synthesis, and hence turned Hegel’s positive dialectic of self-recognition into a negative one. He pointed to what one philosopher has called the unreasonable origins of reason.⁸

Bataille and Lacan drew in different ways on both surrealism and Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, and used them to frame their other interests in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. They both participated in the general attempt to rescue the self from reification, and both assimilated Kojève’s reading of Hegel in terms of a negative dialectic. Together and yet separately, they redefined the relation of desire to culture and aesthetics and, in so doing, constructed the foundations of a new theory of subjectivity that extended and transformed modernist and psychoanalytic thought. Both conceived the true self to be an other. But closer to Kojève (and in Bataille’s case, to Nietzsche) than to the surrealists, Husserl, or Heidegger, they did not see the self as simply cut loose, alienated from its origins¡ they believed these origins to be irretrievable. Bataille and Lacan thus conceived the true self, paradoxically, as an unsymbolizable and hence inaccessible other. In so doing, they separated truth from knowledge in a new and radical way. The self, in their view, is impossible to locate either metaphorically underneath (in the unconscious as Freud conceived it) or above something else (it perpetually falls).

Historians and literary critics insist through this kind of narrative that the self is culturally and ideologically constructed¡ they generally agree that it is constructed of a new interest in otherness, but they seldom specify how and why the relationship between self and other is constructed the way it is. Even the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who has contributed significantly to our understanding of the constructed nature of reality, and the historian Michel Foucault, who has demonstrated to what extent ideas are constructs of discourses of power, have been less successful in helping to explain why and how concepts are constructed the way they are. In their work, an emphasis on historical processes, and hence a concern to account for the formation of concepts, is methodologically irrelevant. Derrida asserts that there is no reality outside the text.⁹ Foucault analyzes discourses as constitutive of power. Both, that is, emphasize the primacy of language over historical actors and thus conflate language with history, so that ideas—writing, concepts—are always already historical practices. Questions about how and why ideas are generated by specific social relations are neglected in favor of locating contradictions immanent in texts (Derrida) or of providing brilliant descriptions of how power works but no explanation of why power works the way it does (Foucault).

For example, most of the voluminous literature on Lacan locates the originality of his work in its new synthesis of Freud, phenomenology, and structuralism. And much of this work is solely concerned with the internal coherence or explication of Lacan’s text itself.¹⁰ Most historical studies of Lacanian psychoanalysis hail Lacan as the man who saved Freud from the deviations of French psychoanalysts still beholden to Cartesianism. Jean-Pierre Mordier and Elisabeth Roudinesco have both argued that French psychiatry and psychoanalysis represented a deformation of Freud’s thought until Lacan revived a more authentic version of Freud, returned to him.¹¹ Some recent works do insist on the connection between Lacanian analysis and the historical context in which it emerged, but they do not go beyond Lacan’s reading of Kojève to explain why he may have read Kojève the way he did.¹²

Discussions of Bataille have been largely confined to monographs or conventional intellectual histories. One recent work does attempt to go beyond conventional notions of genesis and impact, however.¹³ In his analysis of Bataille and other interwar writers, Allan Stoekl proposes an essentially Derridean evaluation of the so-called otherness of modernist texts. These texts are subversive, he suggests, less because of what they represent than because they call their own representations into question. Thus, Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Maurice Blanchot (among others) have been excluded from literary histories because they necessarily fall between its cracks, not because they lack importance but because of a subversiveness that can never be erected and displayed as a law of the land.¹⁴ But here Stoekl fails to resolve the question about the historical meaning of these works because he conflates the product (the discourse or the text) with the process that produces it. He takes otherness out of the world and roots it in language itself.

This book is not an effort to see theory and history as continuous with each other. Nor do I insist on a clear conceptual boundary between theory and history in which history would by itself account for or function as the background of textual production. In order to analyze why the self was constructed as an irretrievable other, I focus on how the relationship between texts and contexts was formulated rather than on one realm or the other. I analyze the process by which the self comes to symbolize an other. In other words, I try not to privilege either history or theory or to conflate the two. Instead, I look at how theory and history are implicated in each other or, more specifically; how theory represents, symbolizes, and hence constructs history, makes it mean (in this case, certain things about the self). I do not mean to argue simply that theory is infused with history and vice versa but to describe and account for a specific process of cultural symbolization, for why and how the self is produced the way it is, for its regulatory fictions. My focus, then, is on the process by which meaning is constructed as meaning: it is an effort to account for why one story was told about the self and not another.¹⁵

Each part of this book focuses on the criminal as a metaphor for an other self that interwar psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and avant-garde writers sought to rescue. And each traces symmetrical and overlapping movements aimed at self-renewal: the mental hygiene movement, French psychoanalysis, and surrealism. Together they explore how these various attempts to rescue the self laid the foundation for its unraveling. The first part examines how psychiatrists’ and psychoanalysts’ efforts to rehabilitate criminals led to Lacan’s earliest revisions of Freud. In the second part, I focus on how the recovery of the marquis de Sade’s work shaped new literary and psychiatric constructions of the self. In it I also seek to establish a common ground on which medical and avant-garde discourses meet. The third part explores how the surrealists’ commitment to rescuing the self shaped Bataille’s concept of literary production.

All three parts show how the self is replotted¹⁶ after the Great War and how Bataille, Lacan, and others dissolved the self by trying to rescue it from dissolution.¹⁷ The chapters are thus layers of shifting and interrelated themes whose unity is determined by a coherent, if complicated, dialectic. I use the blurring of the boundaries between self and other as perceived and constructed by medical experts and writers as one particular expression of interwar anxieties, concerns, and politics. My focus is on how the representation of political and cultural threats as deviance both reinforced and dissolved conventional distinctions between self and other; I emphasize locally constituent moments at the expense of other, broader contextual and also textual referents.

At issue here is the stake these thinkers have in metamorphosing the self into an irretrievable other, for in discovering why this transformation is so important, we may begin to explain why France has been so hospitable to the most radical forms of it. To the extent that Bataille—as well as such writers as Pierre Klossowski—has begun to be seen as a forerunner of poststructuralism, this book is about its prehistory. That is, it seeks to explain the history of poststructuralist thought by reference to a context other than structuralism, phenomenology, and existentialism. This book bears out the insight, implicit in many recent critical works, that structuralism and poststructuralism are convenient rather than historically accurate categories.¹⁸

What follows is a poststructuralist history of the cultural origins of (what we now call) poststructuralism. This may be perceived as a rather paradoxical (if not impossible) procedure, but I hope to make a case for its usefulness. I understand poststructuralism here not as a form of pan-textualism but rather as the assumption that meaning can never fully reside in either texts or contexts.¹⁹ I hope this book begins to assess under what conditions self-fragmentation can be conceived as part of a radical politics; to assess, for the time period discussed here, whose selves were at risk and why, and why those who put the self at risk did so. That is, if the self was and still is at stake, and if dissolving its boundaries or reshaping its contours was conceived as a meaningful, even subversive, gesture, it is essential to figure out precisely what that act meant. It is essential to know how theory may be specific to history and culture, how theory always refers to something outside its conceptual boundaries.

---

¹ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 387.

²Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), p. 33.

³ Jürgen Habermas, Modernity—An Incomplete Project, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 14.

⁴ Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. xiii. Other attempts are Michèle Richman, "Introduction to the Collège de Sociologie: Post-structuralism before Its Time?" Stanford French Review 12 (Spring 1988),79–95; Jean-Michel Heimonet, Politiques de l’écriture: Bataille/Derrida: Le Sens du sacré dans la pensée française du surréalisme à nos jours (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 3, 9–58. Pefanis warns us to resist calling Bataille a poststructuralist or postmodernist in order to avoid the easy retrospective projection of Bataille into a seminal prehistory of these two categories (p. 40). Nevertheless, he proceeds to analyze Bataille more or less in those terms.

⁵Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p. x. Habermas links this post-Cartesian turn to Othemess to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who problematized in a specific way the religious foundations of truth. He argues that the Judeo-Christian notion that truth is always located in an only indirectly accessible other (God) formed the premise of traditional Western metaphysics in which truth was guaranteed because built on a religious foundation. Nietzsche and Heidegger set this othemess loose from religion, Habermas says, and, in so doing, point[ed] into the domain of radical experiences that the avant-garde has opened up. The redefinition of self as other thus represents a modern, secularized reworking of the Western metaphysical tradition (pp. 182–84). For a discussion of Lacan’s Christian ethics which reiterates Habermas in a different way, see Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourses on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 47–64.

⁶Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, p. 263.

⁷See Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 3. See also Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 81–146; Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 63–79. On French Marxism (which requires an analysis of the reception of Hegel), see Arthur Hirsch, The French New Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). On the relationship between the Great War and the avant-garde, see H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage, 1961). One literary critic has written that the development of nonmimetic art was symptomatic of a world deprived of referents. The void of language, he claims, mirrored in complicated ways the abyss symbolized by the power vacuum in French politics during the 1930S. Heimonet, pp. 33–51.

⁸Descombes, p. 14.

⁹Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158.

¹⁰The list of works about Lacan is endless. See, among others, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1985); Alain Juranville, Lacan et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises 1984); Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); François Roustang, Lacan: De l’équivoque à l’impasse (Paris: Minuit, 1986); Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989.

¹¹ Jean-Pierre Mordier, Les Débuts de la psychanalyse en France, 1895–1926 (Paris: Maspéro, 1981); and the most important study of French psychoanalysis to date, Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 1 (Paris: Ramsay, 1982); and Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psyehoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). The latter is a translation of the second volume of Roudinesco’s history. For a critique of Roudinesco’s view of French psychoanalysis, see Paul Bercherie, The Quadrifocal Oculary: The Epistemology of the Freudian Heritage, Economy and Society 15 (February 1986), 39, 66.

¹²See David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso, 1988), and especially Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan.

¹³ For a discussion of this trend as it affects intellectual history, see Dominick LaCapra’s essay Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts, in LaCapra and Steven Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1982), pp. 47–85.

¹⁴Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation, p. xiv. In his book politics constitutes the other of the text. Stoekl makes this argument most forcefully in Nizan, Drieu, and the Question of Death, Representations 21 (Winter 1988), 117–45.

¹⁵On history as a kind of storytelling with no ontological status, see Lynn Hunt, History as Gesture; or, The Scandal of History, in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson eds., The Consequences of Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 102–3.

¹⁶I am borrowing Malcolm Bowie’s particularly apt term from Jacques Lacan, in John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 131.

¹⁷ For a discussion of this dynamic in a literary context, see Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

¹⁸See, among others, Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation, p. xiii¡ Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1982), 8–9; Macey, pp. 4–5·

¹⁹On this point (in reference to deconstruction), see Martin Jay, The Textual Approach to Intellectual History in Gisela Brude-Fimau and Karin J. MacHardy, eds., Fact and Fiction: German History and Literature: 1848–1924 (Tübingen: Franke Verlag, 1990), pp. 77–86.

PART ONE

PSYCHOANALYSIS

AND THE SELF

In a most annoying manner, M. Lacan says the constitution of reality instead of simply reality.

—Edouard Pichon,

La Famille devant M. Lacan, 1939

The reception of psychoanalysis in France is usually said to have been rather inhospitable. Freud’s version of the unconscious was allowed in only through the back door—by way of the literary avant-garde.¹ Although at least one medical periodical, l’Encéphale, was receptive to psychoanalysis, in general the discipline had no official embodiment in France until 1926, when twelve men and women—Marie Bonaparte, René Laforgue, Edouard Pichon, Adrien Borel, Angelo Hesnard, Raymond de Saussure, Charles Odier, René Allendy, Georges Parcheminey, Rudolph Loewenstein, Eugénie Sokolnicka, and Henri Codet—formed the Société Psychanalytique de Paris.

At the time, Freud’s theories were so controversial that the society’s members debated whether to place his name on the cover of the new Revue Française de Psychanalyse. Most French commentary on Freud and translations of his work were inadequate at best and erroneous at worst, and thus helped mar his reputation. In 1913 the great psychiatrist Pierre Janet offered a critique of Freud filled with what the scholar C. M. Prévost calls the most narrow and vulgar clichés that have circulated about psychoanalysis for the last half-century.² Janet believed incorrectly that Freud’s theories about dreams were archaic, in part because they neglected interpretative techniques drawn from French psychopathology, especially Janet’s own teachings.³ Furthermore, the first important medical article to appear on Freud in L’Encéphale, Le Doctrine de Freud et son école by Emmanuel Régis and Angelo Hesnard, represented an entirely adulterated version of his thought.

Sherry Turkle believes that psychoanalysis was received with skepticism in France because professional establishments, and psychiatry in particular, were wedded to a strong Cartesian tradition intrinsically hostile to Freudian assumptions about human irrationality. Moreover, France had its own hero in Janet, often touted by the French as the real father of psychoanalysis. Finally, Germanophobia and anti-Semitism led to the rejection of psychoanalysis as a foreign and Jewish theory incompatible with le génie latin.⁴

In France, nevertheless, as in most European countries and in the United States after World War I, the increasing recognition of the psychological origin of pathological symptoms was linked to psychoanalytic insights into unconscious motivation. Yet whereas elsewhere psychoanalysis rescued the rational subject, the self, from the domination of the unconscious,⁵ in France it was tied in with the dissolution of the self, a dissolution that the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan made the organizing principle of his work.

How and why, then, did French psychoanalysis contribute to the dissolution of the self? Here I concentrate primarily on texts Lacan wrote before the advent of Lacanian analysis in 1953.⁶ I analyze how Lacan’s work both reflected and recast in new, psychoanalytic terms the dissolution of conventional boundaries between normality and pathology after the Great War. Of course that dissolution was itself the product of and a response to cultural perceptions, in particular the psychiatric perceptions of criminals, the New Woman, and other deviants who threatened the return to normalcy after the unprecedented upheaval of that great war. I focus on the relationship between those perceptions and three aspects of Lacan’s work: his analyses of criminality, the patriarchal family, and schizophrenia, which are connected, if freely, to the categories Lacan later termed the imaginary, the symboic, and the real, respectively. This triad loosely corresponds to Freud’s ego, superego, and id, though Lacan’s concept of the role of these psychic agencies is by no means equivalent to Freud’s.

The content of Lacan’s categories shifted between the 1950S and the 1970S as they were developing, and a full elaboration of these shifts is outside the scope of this book. Instead, I use them as a sort of retrospective frame to give coherence to my argument. It seems necessary to employ them in this way if I am to preserve a clear focus and a clearly defined context, and permissible to do so as long as I do not project a final state—an ahistorical, idealized conception of his corpus—onto Lacan’s early writing.⁷ Thus, I recognize that his earlier work anticipated such shifts (and I often refer to them), but I focus on a specific historical context before 1950. (I make an exception in Chapter 3, which I hope the reader will deem justifiable). No doubt Lacan scholars will find my focus too narrow and reductive and historians will find my focus too general, but such are the perils of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Lacan rejected the post-1920 Freudian topography outlined in The Ego and the Id, wherein Freud conceived the ego as an agent of adaptation, integration, and synthesis—of reality—and theorized sexual identity more generally as constituted by the normative regulation of unconscious drives through oral, anal, and genital stages. Lacan rejected both the ego’s adaptive role and Freud’s model of sexual maturation. Instead, he used Freud’s earlier writing on narcissism—one’s desire to be recognized and, ultimately, to be desired—as a model for ego formation. He believed that sexual identity was dependent not on innate or instinctual structures but on the mediation of others. That is, as Fredric Jameson has put it, a previously biological instinct must undergo an alienation to a fundamentally communicational or linguistic relationship—that of the demand for recognition by the Other—in order to find satisfaction.⁸ While the psychic agencies perform the same analytic work for Lacan as for Freud, Lacan sees identity as constituted through the mediation of others, through, paradoxically, a process of self-alienation, so that the psychic agencies’ operations are determined by, conceal or reveal a lack, an other (as Lacan called it) at the very heart of the self.

In his discussion of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, Lacan theorized the different ways in which this other constitutes the self. But what precisely is the other? In Lacan, it refers to the forces that shape the unconscious (on both primary and secondary levels) and is defined in so many ways that it seems infinitely convertible and difficult to pin down. For example, the imaginary other may be the mother with whom the child first identifies. The symbolic other is the father, who represents the language that organizes unconscious (imaginary) perceptions. The real other, however, according to Lacan, is impossible to symbolize.⁹

In the chapters that follow, I attempt to pin down the other in its various incarnations by reconstructing the process through which, it came both to symbolize and structure the unconscious, the locus of the Other, our real self. Yet my emphasis is not exclusively on theory but on history: How are these others constructed as other and how, then, does the self come to be constructed as an-other?¹⁰ How did interwar culture generate the structures of the unconscious? Chapter 1 focuses on Lacan’s reconstruction of the criminal other, Chapter 2 on the female other, and Chapter 3 on the psychotic, the other side of reason. The story, however, does not begin with Lacan.

---

¹ See Pamela Tytell, La Plume sur le divan (Paris: Aubier, 1982); and Roudineseo, Lacan and Co., pp. 22–25. Here, I address only the advent of psychoanalysis in France as it relates to French psychiatry and certain of Lacan’s texts. I omit a discussion of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, who were instrumental in dissolving the distinction between normality and pathology. But as Roudinesco has pointed out, they had little relation to French psychoanalysis (Lacan and Co., p. xx). For general histories of the movement, see, above all, Roudinesco, La Bataille, vols. 1 and 2; Mordier; Victor N. Smirnoff, De Vienne á Paris: Sur les origines d’une psychanalyse á la française, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 20 (Autumn 1979), 13-58; Marcel Scheidhauer, Le Rêve freudien en France, 1920-1926 (Paris: Navarin, 1985).

²C. M. Prévost, quoted in Scheidhauer, p. 71. Janet had developed a model of the psyche in which a hierarchy of different levels maintained