Historicist Avoidance of the Real

Historicist Avoidance of the Real names a structural tendency Copjec diagnoses in historicist critical practice: the substitution of an endless chain of signification—contextual, discursive, genealogical—for the psychoanalytic obligation to circumscribe the Real as an irreducible, unbridgeable remainder. Where psychoanalysis insists that the modern subject is not an external agent who accidentally fails to achieve some social ideal but is instead constituted by and as that failure (the monster-as-failed-invention figure makes this explicit), historicism systematically dissolves this constitutive negativity into a series of contingent historical determinations. Each gap, each failure, each inassimilable remainder is re-narrativized as the effect of a prior signifier, thereby foreclosing the encounter with the Real in favor of an always-extendable hermeneutic chain.

The concept is thus not merely a methodological complaint but a structural claim: historicism performs, at the level of discourse, something analogous to what Lacan identifies as the neurotic's relation to anxiety—rather than circumscribing the unbridgeable lack (via symbolic negation or repudiation), it papers it over with more symbolic material. The proper psychoanalytic alternative, as Copjec frames it, is to hold open the gap—to let the Real remain unintegrated, to mark it through negation rather than absorb it through historical chains. The corset-tightening remark attributed to "Mme. Historicist" condenses this tendency: the historicist intervention tightens the symbolic fabric around the subject ever more firmly, multiplying mediations rather than admitting the irreducibility of what exceeds them.

This concept appears in october-books-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-october and is central to Copjec's overarching polemic: that Foucauldian and New Historicist critical practice, despite its sophistication, systematically evades what Lacanian theory demands we confront. It functions as a specification and critique operating across several of the cross-referenced canonicals simultaneously. With respect to the Real, historicist avoidance is precisely the failure to let the Real be Real—to acknowledge that the subject's constitutive failure cannot be historicized away but only circumscribed through symbolic negation. With respect to the Gap, historicist discourse refuses the productive negativity of the gap, instead treating every structural hole as a contingent absence that more context could fill. With respect to Foreclosure, the concept carries a structural analogy: just as foreclosure refuses the primordial inscription of a signifier and thus bars the subject from symbolic castration, historicism forecloses the Real by refusing to let any remainder resist symbolization. And with respect to Anxiety, the historicist move is precisely the defensive maneuver that anxiety would otherwise compel the subject to undergo—by multiplying signifiers, the tightening of the symbolic corset wards off the encounter with the unbridgeable that anxiety would signal.

The concept thus extends the Fantasy structure in a critical direction: historicist chains of signification operate as a collective fantasy that screens the Real, lending coherence to the social field precisely by refusing to traverse it. It also inverts the Ego Psychology critique—whereas Ego Psychology adapts the subject to social reality by strengthening the ego, historicism adapts the subject to social reality by historicizing its failures, both maneuvers converging on an erasure of the constitutive negativity Lacan's framework insists upon.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 1994 (p.136)

Mme. Historicist interjects the following observation, 'In the old days, three or four people were needed to pull on the laces of a corset to tighten it.'

The image of multiple people tightening corset laces is theoretically loaded because it figures the historicist gesture as one of constriction through collaboration—multiple signifying hands pulling together to close the symbolic fabric ever more tightly around the body of the subject, enacting precisely the foreclosure of any unbridgeable remainder; the corset as symbolic apparatus leaves no room for the gap or the Real to breathe, literalizing the structural suffocation Copjec's argument diagnoses.