Secondary literature 1994

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists

Joan Copjec

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Synopsis

Joan Copjec's Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (MIT Press, 1994) mounts a sustained philosophical and political argument for Lacanian psychoanalysis against the prevailing "historicist" tendency in cultural and film theory—above all the Foucauldian reduction of subjectivity to the immanent, self-sufficient play of power/knowledge relations. Copjec's central claim is that historicism, by refusing the concepts of repression and desire and collapsing the symbolic into a fully positive, panoptic field, generates a "realtight" social reality that forecloses the Real and thus makes both genuine subjectivity and political resistance theoretically impossible. Against this, the book demonstrates across a range of domains—film theory, the gaze, the death drive, ethics, Gothic fiction, democracy, detective fiction, and sexual difference—that the Lacanian Real (the internal limit of signification, the non-coincidence of appearance and being) is not an optional metaphysical add-on but the very condition of any coherent account of the subject, desire, ideology, and politics. Each chapter is organised as a confrontation: screen-as-mirror versus mirror-as-screen; Bergson's intussusceptive duration versus Freud's death drive and Aristotle's automaton; utilitarian ethics versus the ethics of psychoanalysis; the panoptic subject versus the split, culpable Lacanian subject; Butler's constructivism versus the formulas of sexuation. The book's answer to the opening question—what does it mean to "read desire"?—is that desire is precisely that which registers itself negatively in speech, and that only a theory that holds open the gap between language and being can account for it.

Distinctive contribution

Read My Desire occupies a unique position in the Lacanian secondary corpus because it prosecutes a systematic, philosophically rigorous critique of Foucauldian and post-structuralist historicism from within a Lacanian framework, rather than simply applying Lacan to cultural objects. Where Žižek's concurrent work tends to move quickly from philosophical argument to ideological symptom-reading, Copjec sustains slow, close confrontations between Lacan and specific theoretical opponents (Foucault, Bergson, Kant, Butler, Althusser), spelling out at each turn precisely why the Lacanian concept at stake—gaze as objet a, death drive as automaton, Real as internal limit—cannot be assimilated to the historicist alternative. The book thus functions as a foundational methodological text that explains why Lacanian concepts resist sociologization, making it indispensable for any reader who wants to understand what is philosophically at stake in the Lacan/Foucault distinction.

The chapter on the gaze remains the most cited contribution: by distinguishing the screen-as-mirror (film theory's Foucauldian Lacan) from the mirror-as-screen (Lacan's own formulation in Seminar XI), Copjec shows that the Lacanian gaze is not a panoptic instrument of visibility but the objet petit a in the scopic field—the point of impossibility that prevents total knowledge of the subject rather than achieving it. Equally distinctive is the final chapter, "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason," which offers the first sustained reading of Lacan's formulas of sexuation through Kant's mathematical and dynamical antinomies, arguing that sexual difference names two distinct modes of the failure of reason and that this is why sex cannot be deconstructed, culturally re-signified, or treated as equivalent to race or class. This Kant-Lacan alignment, and the concluding call for an "ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited" proper to the female side of the formulas, has shaped an entire strand of feminist Lacanian theory.

Main themes

Lacanian Real versus Foucauldian historicism: the impossibility of metalanguage as social generative principle
The gaze as objet petit a versus the panoptic apparatus of total visibility
Death drive, automaton, and the limits of pleasure principle
Utilitarian ethics, the superego, and the psychoanalytic ethics of division
Gothic anxiety, the extimate object, and the structure of freedom in modernity
Democracy, hysteria, and the unvermögender (impotent) Other
Detective fiction, statistics, suture, and the locked-room paradox
Sexual difference as two modes of failure of the phallic/symbolic function, mapped onto Kantian antinomies
The split subject versus the self-surveilling subject of film theory
Desire as inarticulate, negative, and resistant to historicist literalism

Chapter outline

Introduction: Structures Don't March in the Streets — p.10-25
The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan — p.26-63
Cutting Up: The Death Drive, Cause, and the Law — p.39-88 (ch.3)
The Sartorial Superego — p.65-139 (ch.4)
Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety — p.117-160 (ch.5)
The Unvermögender Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America — p.141-200 (ch.6)
Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir — p.163-199 (ch.7)
Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason — p.201-236 (ch.8)

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Structures Don't March in the Streets (p.10-25)

Copjec opens by revisiting the May 1968 student slogan against structuralism and tracing its legacy through Glucksmann's concept of 'the pleb' and into contemporary multiculturalist identity politics. The introduction establishes the book's central antagonism: Foucault's historicism, which reduces society to immanent relations of power/knowledge, produces a self-enclosed, 'realtight' social reality that forecloses the exteriority constitutive of the social itself. Copjec argues that Foucault's critique of language-based (structuralist) analysis—that it 'flattens out' phenomena by refusing metalanguage—is, ironically, correct in one sense but catastrophically wrong in another: acknowledging the impossibility of metalanguage does not result in a flattened society but rather installs a 'generative principle' that cannot appear among positive relations, splitting society between its appearance and its being.

This split, Copjec argues, is precisely what Lacan's 'structures are real' claim means, and it is paralleled in Freud's theorization of the primal father and the death drive. The chapter culminates in the book's programmatic statement: 'to take desire literally'—in Lacan's sense—is simultaneously to insist that desire registers itself negatively in speech, as an irreducible inarticulate residue. Historicism's refusal of repression and desire produces a society built on the repression of a named desire, paving the way for a neo-populist politics of declared identity. The book's declared intention is to make analysts of culture 'literate in desire,' capable of reading what is inarticulable in cultural statements.

Key concepts: Real, Historicism, Desire, Metalanguage, Splitting of the Subject, Ideology Notable examples: May 1968 student revolt; André Glucksmann's 'pleb'; Foucault on plebness and power

The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan (p.26-63)

This chapter is the book's most concentrated theoretical intervention in film studies. Copjec identifies what she calls the 'central misconception' of film theory: believing it follows Lacan, film theory conceives the screen as mirror—an apparatus of total visibility and subject-confirmation—whereas Lacan's more radical move conceives the mirror as screen, meaning that representation always has a residue that cannot be captured, a blind spot that undermines full self-knowledge. Film theory's appropriation of Foucault's panopticism—the 'Re-Vision editors' passage on the woman carrying her own panopticon—serves as Copjec's primary example of how the panoptic gaze was smuggled into Lacanian film theory, collapsing the distinction between the visibility the panopticon enforces and the unsymbolizable gaze that Lacan elaborates in Seminar XI.

Copjec then turns to Bachelard's 'orthopsychism' as an intermediary case: objective self-surveillance necessarily reveals not transparency but extimacy—the subject is external to itself, haunted by the ineradicable suspicion (Nietzsche: 'what does he wish to hide?') that something is being concealed. This is the split subject, and it is crucially distinguished from the film-theory subject, which snugly fits the space carved out for it by the social apparatus. The chapter's culminating move reads Lacan's sardine can story from Seminar XI against Hegel's epic of recognition: the gaze is not an instrument of total visibility but the objet petit a in the scopic field, a point of jouissance-absorbed impossibility at which the subject is not confirmed but annihilated—the subject as a 'photo-graphed' effect of a gaze to which it never has access. Narcissism, accordingly, is not the subject's happy self-identification with its image but its constitutive dissatisfaction: one loves in one's image 'something more than you,' which is why narcissism is a source of aggressivity rather than of social harmony.

Key concepts: Gaze, Objet petit a, Imaginary, Splitting of the Subject, Ideology, Extimacy Notable examples: Lacan's Television; Vigo's Zero for Conduct; Re-Vision editors on panopticism and women; Bachelard's Le rationalisme appliqué ch.4; Lacan's sardine can story (Seminar XI)

Cutting Up: The Death Drive, Cause, and the Law (p.39-88 (ch.3))

Chapter 3 constructs a philosophical genealogy of Lacan's death drive by triangulating Bergson, Aristotle, and Freud. Copjec begins with Freud's citation of Bergson's 'Laughter'—specifically Bergson's claim that laughter is elicited by the mechanical encrusted on the living—and shows that while Freud appears to agree, he radically subverts the Bergsonian framework. For Bergson, 'organic elasticity' names life's irreversible, forward-moving creative duration; repetition is a mechanical intrusion into this organic flow. Freud, however, re-deploys the same term to name the death drive's regressive inertia, the compulsion to repeat that is not a mechanical intrusion into life but life's own deepest tendency. The Lacanian elaboration of this, via Aristotle's concept of automaton (the general category of coincidence and failure of final cause), re-frames the signifying chain: language does not transparently communicate intention or reflect reality; it exceeds intention, and this opacity—far from trapping us in a social construction—introduces doubt, the suspension of existence, the possibility of thinking nothing. The death drive extends the pleasure principle rather than negating it; it is the capacity of the signifier to delay, and therefore to produce, desire.

The chapter then addresses the problem of cause in Lacan, distinguishing his position from covering-law models (Newton) and from Hart and Honoré's deviation-from-norm model (though noting significant overlap with the latter's emphasis on failure and context). Lacan's cause is constitutively indeterminate—linked to the failure rather than the regularity of change, to the accidental conjunction rather than the teleological sequence. The extended case study of Clerambault's 'mental automatism' illustrates the psychoanalytic account of overdetermination: subjects are constituted by meanings they never consciously experience, meanings that operate like cause in the Lacanian-Aristotelian sense—from outside the subject's intentional life. The section 'Achilles and the Tortoise' uses Samuel Weber's reading of Saussure and Peirce to argue that the Derridean solution to the problem of infinite semiotic deferral (iteration, habit-change) remains insufficiently radical: only by acknowledging the subject as a surplus created ex nihilo—constituted by the opacity and indeterminacy of the signifier rather than as its realization—can psychoanalysis avoid collapsing into the sociologism it opposes.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Automaton, Real, Signifier, Pleasure Principle, Repetition Notable examples: Bergson's 'Laughter'; Aristotle's Physics on automaton; Hart and Honoré, Causation in the Law; Clerambault's mental automatism; Peirce on Achilles and the tortoise (via Samuel Weber)

The Sartorial Superego (p.65-139 (ch.4))

This is the book's longest and most historically dense chapter, weaving together the history of colonial architecture and drapery, utilitarian ethics, the Lacanian critique of Kant, fantasy and fetishism, and the case of the psychiatrist G. G. de Clérambault's Moroccan photographs. Copjec opens with Le Corbusier's pun on 'type' (building type / man-type) to show how the functionalist redefinition of architecture was simultaneous with a functionalist redefinition of man: utility became a psychological as well as an architectural principle, man was defined as a tool directed toward work rather than contemplation, and the 'sartorial superego'—the uniformity and simplification of male dress—became the visible expression of utilitarian egalitarianism. Woman, by contrast, was submitted to the accelerated renewal of fashion, her image endlessly re-defined.

The critique of utilitarianism operates on both ethical and psychoanalytic levels. Against Kant's erasure of the enunciating instance of the moral law (such that the subject takes itself to be the source of the voice of conscience), and against utilitarianism's maximization of happiness (which presupposes a subject of zero-resistance manipulability), psychoanalysis insists on reinstating the superego as the sadistic enunciator who always benefits from the sacrifice of enjoyment. The section 'Fantasy and Fetish' distinguishes the neurotic's fantasy structure (split subject in relation to the object a as externalized image of loss) from perversion (subject placing himself in the position of the object a, becoming the instrument of the Other's jouissance). Copjec reads Clérambault's practice of photographing Moroccan women—whose drapery both concealed and promised an excess jouissance—not simply as colonial fantasy but as a perverse positioning: Clérambault sometimes placed himself as the gaze of the Moroccan Other rather than as the colonialist subject confronted with its own lack. The chapter closes by reading Frankenstein through this lens: the monster is not Frankenstein's botched invention but the failure of invention, a figure for the modern subject constituted ex nihilo at the point where causal sequence breaks down.

Key concepts: Superego, Fantasy, Objet petit a, Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance, Ideology Notable examples: Le Corbusier on 'type'; J. C. Flugel's The Psychology of Clothing; Clérambault's Moroccan photographs; Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis on Kant and utilitarianism; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Frances Ferguson's 'The Nuclear Sublime'

Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety (p.117-160 (ch.5))

Chapter 5 argues that the eighteenth-century advocacy of breast-feeding and the simultaneous emergence of vampire fiction are not merely historically coincident but structurally equivalent phenomena—both are manifestations of the anxiety produced by the Enlightenment definition of the subject as free. The chapter begins with a precise account of anxiety as a signal that works without signifiers: unlike fear (which takes an object) or doubt (which can be negated), anxiety is an affect tied to certitude, not uncertainty. It signals the over-proximity of the Real—the 'absence of absence,' the uncanny eruption of the undead—and cannot be interpreted in terms of any external cause.

The paradox of the 'barred room' in Gothic fiction (illustrated through Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca) is used to distinguish two modes of absence: signified absence (Rebecca's absence from the vanity, registered within a differential network of objects) and the uncanny presence of the beach house (where the differential network has deteriorated, and what remains is not registered absence but pure existence without sense). The extimate object—the barred room that simultaneously belongs to and negates the house—is Copjec's figure for the Real within the Symbolic. The advocacy of breast-feeding is then read as a response to the anxiety generated by the Enlightenment's detachment of a 'double' of the subject—not an immortal soul but a pure negation of the subject's attachment to the world—that guarantees freedom but, once loose in the world, occasions anxiety whenever it is approached too closely. The chapter ends with Kant's aesthetics of the beautiful as the proper symbolic inscription of this impossibility: the beautiful 'writes' the impossibility of 'saying it all,' and it is this writing—not interpretation—that is the appropriate response to anxiety.

Key concepts: Anxiety, Real, Extimacy, Objet petit a, Jouissance, Symbolic Notable examples: Rousseau and Wollstonecraft on breast-feeding; Vampire fiction (Gothic literature); Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca; Jean Jacques Lequeu's 'He is Free'; Frankenstein (structural reading); Kant's aesthetics of the beautiful

The Unvermögender Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America (p.141-200 (ch.6))

This chapter develops a Lacanian theory of democratic subjectivity by reading the 'Teflon President' (Reagan) phenomenon through the distinction between the enunciated (referential content of statements) and the enunciating instance (the surplus object a that retroactively constitutes the subject's consistency). Television's 'realist imbecility'—its conviction that repeated demonstrations of Reagan's mendacity should have destroyed his credibility—is explained by the Lacanian distinction between the signified/referential dimension and the dimension of subjective consistency. Reagan survived because what sustained him was not the truth of his statements but the surplus object that is irreducible to any statement: this is the Cartesian cogito as objet a under the aspect of love.

The chapter then develops the need/demand/desire triad to theorize how democracy itself hystericizes the subject: demands addressed to the Other are constitutively insatiable not because the Other fails accidentally but because the psychoanalytic Other is structurally unvermögender (impotent, without means). Unlike American pluralism—which clings to belief in a consistent Other of the Other and thereby forecloses the radical difference psychoanalysis defends—democracy in the Lefortian sense institutes 'the dissolution of the ultimate markers of certainty,' confronting the subject with a blind spot in the Other. The chapter critiques Foucault's account of modern disciplinary power for treating it as a permanently viable form, neglecting both de Tocqueville's analysis of tutelary democracy's instability and the historical fact of totalitarianism. Power 'belonging to no one' in Foucault means self-guaranteeing anonymity; in Lefort it means a structural absence of guarantee—and this difference is the difference between totalitarianism and democracy.

Key concepts: Hysteria, The big Other, Objet petit a, Ideology, Universality, Desire Notable examples: Ronald Reagan as 'Teflon President'; Lacan's 'Seminar on The Purloined Letter'; Barthes on the reality effect; De Tocqueville's Democracy in America; Foucault's Discipline and Punish; Dora case (unvermögender/vermögender)

Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir (p.163-199 (ch.7))

Chapter 7 develops an original theory of detective fiction by connecting the 'locked-room paradox' (how can a corpse appear in a fully surveilled space?) to the actuarial origins of statistical thinking and to the Lacanian-Millerian logic of suture. Copjec reads the scene in Double Indemnity where Keyes demolishes Norton's position by citing actuarial tables as an entry into the question of why numbers are felt to be decisive in detection: counting, following Frege/Miller, registers not just objects but the zero—the empty set, the category of the 'not-identical-to-itself'—which is the internal limit that makes counting possible at all. The locked-room paradox thus figures the constitutive incompleteness of any symbolic field: the corpse that falls from the assembled Ford car represents the objet petit a, the real object that no differential series can capture.

The chapter then reads film noir against classical detective fiction as a topological transformation: the locked room (infinite, inexhaustible space of desire and nonknowledge) gives way to the 'lonely room' (depopulated, emptied of desire, no longer interpretable). This transformation is explained through the fort/da game and the distinction between desire and drive: in noir, the enunciating instance surfaces alongside the narrative statement (the voice-over of the dead narrator); jouissance is no longer sheltered by sense but exposed. The femme fatale is theorized not as a figure of deception or male anxiety about female sexuality but as the narrative-level defense against drive—the symbolic mechanism that provides ersatz depth in a world from which genuine desire has been evacuated. Deep-focus photography and chiaroscuro lighting are read as technical compensations for the diegetic collapse of the symbolic.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Drive, Jouissance, Point de capiton, Real, Signifier Notable examples: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944); Hitchcock's planned Ford plant scene for North by Northwest; Lacan's 'Seminar on The Purloined Letter'; Frege/Miller on suture; Detour (Edgar Ulmer, 1946); Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955); Dashiell Hammett's 'Bodies Piled Up'

Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason (p.201-236 (ch.8))

The final chapter makes the book's most philosophically ambitious argument: that Lacan's formulas of sexuation theorize sexual difference as two distinct modes of the failure of the phallic (symbolic) function, and that these two modes map precisely onto Kant's distinction between the mathematical and dynamical antinomies. The chapter opens with a polemic against Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, arguing that Butler's constructivism commits a subreption: it moves from the correct observation that the meaning of the term 'woman' is unstable and historically variable to the incorrect conclusion that sex as such is an unstable, deconstructible cultural product. Against this, Copjec argues that sex is not produced where signification succeeds but where it fails—sex is the internal limit, the impossibility, of signification, not its product. Because the drives are the 'other of culture,' not reducible to cultural manipulation despite having no existence outside culture, sex cannot be deconstructed: the operation simply has no purchase on its object.

The bulk of the chapter works through the Kantian antinomies in careful detail. The mathematical antinomy (the attempt to think the 'world' as an unconditional whole, which generates the contradictory thesis and antithesis that the world is both finite and infinite) maps onto the female side of the formulas of sexuation: the statement 'The Woman does not exist' is an indefinite judgment (in Kant's technical sense), which neither affirms nor denies woman's existence but posits an internally limited field without pronouncing on what lies beyond it. This, Copjec argues, is precisely what makes the Lacanian position anti-essentialist in the right way: it does not banish woman to a 'dark continent' but holds open the impossibility of any positive, totalized category of woman, thereby making every historical construction of her challengeable. The dynamical antinomy (freedom and causality), by contrast, maps onto the male side: man's existence can be affirmed, but only by excepting one element from the universal class—an exception that generates the possibility of a universe while rendering masculinity itself an imposture. The chapter closes by aligning the dynamical antinomy, the male formulas, and the psychoanalytic superego (all sharing the logic of limit/exception), and calling for a new 'ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited' proper to women—beyond the superego's foreclosure of existential judgment.

Key concepts: Sexuation, Not-all, Universality, Phallic Function, Superego, Real Notable examples: Butler, Gender Trouble; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (mathematical and dynamical antinomies); Kant, Critique of Judgment (dynamical sublime); Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore); Freud on anatomy and convention; Lacan's formula: 'Everything implied by the analytic engagement... it makes up for it'

Main interlocutors

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar II
Jacques Lacan, Television
Jacques Lacan, Écrits
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution and 'Laughter'
Aristotle, Physics
Jacques-Alain Miller, 'Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)'
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory
Gaston Bachelard, Le rationalisme appliqué
Samuel Weber, 'Closure and Exclusion'
Slavoj Žižek
G. G. de Clérambault

Position in the corpus

Read My Desire occupies a foundational position in the Lacanian secondary corpus as the definitive methodological polemic against Foucauldian-historicist assimilations of Lacan. It should be read alongside Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which shares the anti-historicist impulse and the Lacanian-Hegelian framework, and The Plague of Fantasies (1997), but Copjec's work is more philosophically careful and slower-paced in its confrontation with specific opponents. It directly complements—and in some respects founds—the film-theoretical tradition that includes Kaja Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror and E. Ann Kaplan's work, but as a polemic against the Screen theory that produced them. For readers coming from Lacanian clinical or theoretical texts, Read My Desire is best approached after some familiarity with Seminar XI, Seminar XX (Encore), and the Écrits, as Copjec assumes working knowledge of the gaze as objet a, the formulas of sexuation, and the distinction between need, demand, and desire.\n\nWithin feminist Lacanian theory, Read My Desire is a key interlocutor for any work on sexual difference: Chapter 8's reading of sexuation through Kantian antinomies anticipates and informs subsequent work by Alenka Zupančič, Lorenzo Chiesa, and others. The book's engagement with political theory (democracy, hysteria, the unvermögender Other) also links it to Lacanian political philosophy as developed in the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Renata Salecl. Readers should proceed from Read My Desire to Copjec's later Imagine There's No Woman (2002) for the further development of the sexuation argument and the ethics of the unlimited, and to Miller's seminars on extimacy for the political Lacan that animates much of the democratic theory in Chapter 6.