Joan Copjec

I have read Read My Desire twice: the first time was in a rush, and I was unable to appreciate fully the subtlety of Copjec's arguments, while on the second reading I made sure to take more care to understand the precise outlines of her thesis. It was worth the effort.

Copjec's argument, as I see it, is not really with Foucault or the historicist's, despite the subtitle of the book, but with an erroneous assumption that all human desire can be rationalized and explained - historicism in particular seems to believe that, if there are gaps in this respect, it is only because we haven't looked hard enough. (I'm not at all convinced that this is Foucault's position, especially in light of his essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," which does take into account the importance of contingency.) In Lacanian psychoanalysis, by contrast, the subject is something that fails to come into discourse, that is detectable only by the hole that it leaves in language. That is the essence of Chapter 1.

Chapter 2 takes this critique a step further by applying it to film studies and its appropriation of the Foucauldian/Benthamite idea of the panoptic gaze. Again, Copjec shows that this conception of the subject as the product of the gaze of the law means that the subject is located purely within the realm of the symbolic. Lacan's theory of the gaze, by contrast, is instructive here, for there the gaze is defined not by what it sees, but again by a certain kind of failure (remember in Seminar XI, when the tuna can "sees" Lacan in the boat?). It is this failure, this absence, that once again defines the subject's place at the intersection of the real and symbolic.

In Chapter 3, Copjec contemplates Henri Bergson, the death drive, and Zeno's paradox in order to try and explain the difference between the symbolic and the real. In Zeno's paradox, for instance, it is impossible to represent properly the movement of Achilles as he overtakes the tortoise, but this event does ultimately occur in the real. For Copjec, psychoanalysis continues to subscribe to the principle of sufficient reason, but it differs from the usual scientific assumptions because the actual cause is never directly representable to consciousness (except as an absence).

Chapter 4 was my favorite part of the book, a brilliant piece of analysis that starts, unexpectedly, with Clérambault's bizarre collection of photographs of North African people draped in cloth. Copjec interweaves these pictures with a meditation on how utilitarianism and functionalism have changed architecture (buildings are now defined primarily by their use), an attitude that spills over into clothing, and then into the functionalist definition of humanity itself, which now becomes defined by useful work - clothing, in this perspective, becomes merely a decorative and inessential supplement. Copjec brilliantly shows how utilitarianism begins from an erroneous assumption about what human beings ought "rationally" to want, a logic that it then uses to justify tyranny (the tyrant, out of a perverse sense of "care," commands subjects to learn to do "what is good for them") and imperalism (with the colonizer using the same tyrannical logic on colonized peoples).

Chapter 5 shows an unexpected link between stories of vampirism and the championing of breastfeeding. There are some interesting discussions about anxiety in this section, especially about how human beings use the symbolic order's capacity for ritual in order to try and control the eruptions of the real that make us anxious. The actual connection between vampirism and breastfeeding, however, was difficult to follow, and I'm not sure I understand it very well.

In Chapter 6, Copjec looks at how a politician like Ronald Reagan can repeatedly tell lies and get away with it: because the people love something that is beyond truth about him. People want that love above all else, and it is this illusion of love that he gives them in return - whether he lies or not is thus irrelevant. It is a desire that cannot be rationalized: people want love regardless of whether what they are actually given is good or bad, true or false. This leads to a meditation on the figure of the detective, a figure who, unlike the policeman, has learned to disregard the outward signifiers of a speaker like Reagan and instead has become an expert at reading the irrational desire that makes people follow his message.

Chapter 7 contains a masterful analysis of the "locked room" paradox in film noir. This involves further ruminations on detective fiction and its connection to statistics and the probable. Again, Copjec argues that the policeman is too literal, too stuck in the literalness of the symbolic, whereas the detective locates desire at the point of the real, where the symbolic fails.

The final section, Chapter 8, is an extended rumination on sexual difference via Judith Butler and Immanuel Kant. While praising Butler's perceptiveness, Copjec argues that the problem with her ideas is that she ultimately locates sexuality atthe level of the signifier rather than tracing its position in the real. Copjec then launches into a very complex and hard-to-follow discussion of Lacan's theory of sexuation and how it relates to Kant. She demonstrates how the subject comes into existence (or rather, fails to come into existence) in two different ways that somehow translate into male and female. I understand the failure part, but I remain baffled as to why this equates to sexual difference. A difference of desire? Yes. A different way of approaching authority and the symbolic order? Yes. But sexual difference? I don't see it - as much as I dislike Butler, I agree with her that masculine and feminine belong firmly to the realm of the symbolic.

Copjec's book does require some background knowledge of both Lacan and Foucault, but compared to many other similar titles it is clearly written and accessible. For me, Chapter 4, with its amazing critique of utilitarianism, is the argument's high point, a genuinely original and innovative argument that has enormous consequences for how we can counter the devastating effects of utilitarianism on our world.… (meer)

Radical Evil, the second volume in the S series, marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, where Kant first proposed, and quickly withdrew in horror, the concept of radical evil - an evil at the very heart of the ethical problematic. It also marks the recent publication in English of Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis, arguably one of the most important and influential of Lacan's seminars, in which he discusses the rise since the nineteenth century of a certain 'happiness in evil'. The events of the twentieth century have made the assertions of both Lacan and Kant credible and concrete - the Holocaust and the attendant attempts to cast doubt on its existence, the rise in racism worldwide, the engagement by philosophers with ethics as critical to relevant issues but without the consideration of the problems which lead Kant to his formation of radical evil. The contributors to this volume were asked to consider radical evil in its philosophical, political and cultural dimensions. What emerges is a clear introduction to the problematic, including discussions of the Holocaust, the placement of homosexuals in concentration camps, the creation of the Machiavellian in politics and literature - a full and fascinating exploration of the radical nature of modern evil.… (meer)