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Secondary literature 2015

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists

Joan Copjec

by Joan Copjec (2015)

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Synopsis

Joan Copjec's Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994; Verso reprint 2015) mounts a sustained philosophical argument that contemporary theory's dominant mode — historicism, principally in the Foucauldian vein — systematically forecloses the Real by collapsing being into appearance, social existence into discursive construction, and the subject into the realization of a cultural possibility. Against this, Copjec argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the only rigorous account of how the subject is produced not as the fulfillment but as the surplus, the constitutive failure, of the symbolic order. The book proceeds across eight chapters that move from metatheoretical critique (of film theory, of Foucault, of apparatus theory) through a series of historically grounded case studies — Clérambault's drapery photographs, vampire fiction and Enlightenment breast-feeding advocacy, American democratic hysteria, film noir, and the formulas of sexuation — each designed to show that the Real intrudes in every social, aesthetic, and political domain as an irreducible excess that no historicist account can dissolve. Central to the argument is the claim that desire, the death drive, the gaze, and sexuation are not empirical contents delivered by history but quasi-transcendental structures that condition any empirical field whatsoever, and that Lacan — read with and against Kant, Freud, Aristotle, and Foucault — alone furnishes the conceptual apparatus adequate to their analysis. By the book's final chapter on sexual difference and Kant's antinomies, Copjec has recast Lacanian sexuation as a rigorous philosophical position that preserves the subject's radical unknowability against the voluntarist constructivism of Butler's Gender Trouble, thereby defending both psychoanalytic ethics and political universality from the twin threats of nominalism and skepticism.

Distinctive contribution

What no other work in the Lacanian secondary corpus quite accomplishes in the same way is Copjec's systematic confrontation of Lacanian theory with the specific theoretical formation she calls "historicism" — not a straw man but the fully articulated tradition running from Foucault through apparatus-theory film studies to Judith Butler's constructivism — and her demonstration that this tradition, however sophisticated, shares a single structural error: the elimination of the Real and the consequent reduction of the subject to a positively determined cultural effect. Where Žižek's parallel project tends to deploy Lacan against Hegel and against ideology-critique, Copjec's focus on Foucault, panopticism, and the specific institutions of film theory, colonial psychiatry, detective fiction, and American democratic discourse gives the argument a different texture — more historically specific and methodologically self-reflective about what a "Lacanian historicism" would have to look like. The book's insistence that "structures are real," that the death drive is the transcendental condition of the pleasure principle rather than its rival, and that the gaze is a blind, non-validating objet petit a rather than a panoptic confirmation, represents one of the most precise and enduring correctives to the misappropriation of Lacan in cultural and film studies.

The book's other singular contribution is its extended philosophical reconstruction of Lacanian sexuation through Kantian critical philosophy. No other secondary work so carefully traces the homology between Kant's mathematical and dynamical antinomies and Lacan's formulas of sexuation, arguing that sexual difference names two distinct modes in which reason fails to coincide with itself — two logics of the limit — rather than two empirical kinds. This reading allows Copjec to preserve both the universality of the subject (against nominalist particularism) and its irreducible sexuation (against the desexualized neuter subject of liberal philosophy), and to show that Butler's "euthanasia of reason" in fact forecloses the very radicalism it claims. This Kant-Lacan articulation, combined with the argument that sex is the impossibility of completing meaning rather than incomplete meaning, makes Chapter 8 one of the most rigorous philosophical treatments of feminine sexuality and the not-all in any secondary Lacanian text.

Finally, Read My Desire is distinguished by the range and quality of its concrete analyses. From the sardine-can story in Seminar XI and the orthopsychic subject in Bachelard, through the figure of Clérambault's drapery as a symptom of utilitarianism's constitutive disavowal, to the locked-room paradox in film noir as a formal instantiation of suture and the limit of signification, the book demonstrates that Lacanian concepts are not simply "applied" to cultural objects but are clarified and sharpened in the encounter with them. This dialectic of theory and case study is the book's most durable methodological legacy to Lacanian cultural theory.

Main themes

  • Lacanian psychoanalysis as critique of historicism and Foucauldian nominalism
  • The Real as irreducible excess structuring every social and symbolic field
  • The death drive as transcendental condition of the pleasure principle and social causality
  • The gaze as blind objet petit a versus the panoptic confirming eye
  • Utilitarianism's structural disavowal of the superego and the lost object
  • Anxiety as the affect of bare existence encountered at zero symbolic distance
  • Democratic subjectivity, hysteria, and the impotent (unvermögender) Other
  • Detective fiction and film noir as formal figures of suture, the locked-room paradox, and the drive
  • Lacanian sexuation as two modalities of reason's antinomical failure, read through Kant
  • Universality, singularity, and the defence of the subject against voluntarist constructivism

Chapter outline

  • Introduction: Structures Don't March in the Streets — p.1-15
  • The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan — p.15-38
  • Cutting Up — p.39-65
  • The Sartorial Superego — p.65-116
  • Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety — p.117-139
  • The Unvermögender Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America — p.140-162
  • Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir — p.163-199
  • Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason — p.200-236

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Structures Don't March in the Streets (p.1-15)

Copjec opens with the 1968 student slogan against structuralism and traces its aftermath through Glucksmann's concept of the 'pleb' and Foucault's qualified endorsement of it, using this genealogy to introduce the central opposition of the book: psychoanalysis versus historicism. Her diagnosis is that Foucault, despite recognising the necessity of accounting for the instituting principle of any regime of power, ultimately abandons that project because he disallows any reference to a structural transcendence — a principle that exceeds the relations it organises — and thus collapses into the nominalism and historicism he otherwise criticises. The rehabilitation of the linguistic model, Copjec argues, is the remedy: language's ban on metalanguage does not flatten phenomena but instead designates a domain whose instituting principle is immanent and real, not exterior or ideal. This is the Lacanian claim that 'structures are real,' meaning the instituting principle of a social regime negates and exceeds its own positive contents without occupying a meta-position above them.

Key concepts: Historicism, Real, Signifier, Symbolic, Death Drive, Pleasure Principle Notable examples: Glucksmann's concept of the 'pleb'; Foucault's Discipline and Punish; Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle

The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan (p.15-38)

This chapter delivers Copjec's foundational critique of apparatus theory — the 1970s film-theoretical tradition of Baudry, Metz, Comolli, and Heath — which, she argues, misreads Lacan's mirror stage as endorsing a model of the screen as mirror: a positive, self-confirming apparatus that produces the subject as master of its own image through narcissistic identification. Copjec shows that this apparatus theory is in fact a synthesis of Althusserian ideology-critique with Foucauldian panopticism, producing a subject whose innermost desires are always already implanted by the law and who is perfectly, totalisably visible to power. The conflation of desire with the realisation of the law, she argues, obliterates the psychoanalytic subject entirely.

Key concepts: Gaze, Imaginary, Splitting of the Subject, Objet petit a, Desire, Ideology Notable examples: Lacan's Television; Vigo's Zero for Conduct; Lacan's sardine-can story from Seminar XI; Bachelard's orthopsychic relation in Le rationalisme appliqué

Cutting Up (p.39-65)

Beginning from the observation that contemporary theory has expelled the Real from the psycho-social relation by conceiving it as governed entirely by the pleasure principle, this chapter proposes the death drive as the causal principle that properly unites the psychic and the social. Copjec traces a detailed confrontation between Freud and Bergson on repetition, laughter, and duration, arguing that Bergson's vitalist temporality makes becoming a process of continuous accumulation in which nothing comes from nothing, whereas Freud's (and Lacan's) account of the signifier reveals that the past is not fixed but retroactively constituted, making the return-of-the-same structural rather than biological. The signifier's opacity — its inability to reflect an exterior reality or carry a speaker's intention — produces a constitutive surplus, the objet petit a, that Lacan names the cause of the subject created ex nihilo.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Pleasure Principle, Repetition, Automaton, Objet petit a, Signifier Notable examples: Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Bergson's 'Laughter'; Aristotle's Physics and the concept of automaton; Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise; Peirce's pragmaticism and semiotics

The Sartorial Superego (p.65-116)

This chapter undertakes a historical-theoretical analysis of G. G. de Clérambault — Lacan's 'only master' in psychiatry — whose obsessive photographic documentation of North African drapery and whose Beaux-Arts lectures on the Fold are read not as private perversion but as a symptom of a structural revolution in the concept of 'type.' Copjec traces how the rise of industrial utilitarianism redefined man as will-directed-toward-work, producing a functionalist architecture, a sartorial egalitarianism, and a colonial policy of assimilation predicated on the assumption that the subject is transparent to itself and driven by pleasure. Clérambault's lectures exposed — and were dismissed precisely for exposing — the irreducible split between utility and fetishistic excess that utilitarian rationality structurally cannot acknowledge.

Key concepts: Superego, Jouissance, Fantasy, Ideology, Extimacy, Ethics of Psychoanalysis Notable examples: Clérambault's Moroccan photographs and drapery lectures; Bentham's panopticon and utilitarian ethics; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Le Corbusier's functionalist architecture; Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents

Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety (p.117-139)

Copjec reads Enlightenment breast-feeding advocacy alongside Gothic vampire fiction as two expressions of the same structure: anxiety. Both phenomena, she argues, register the same structural event — the detachment within the modern definition of the free subject of an internal 'double,' the objet petit a, which is now the extimate kernel of the subject's autonomy. When the subject comes too close to this double — when the fantasy distance from the object collapses — anxiety replaces desire and jouissance floods in. The chapter reads Freud's dream of Irma's injection as a paradigmatic staging of this logic: the symbolic order sustains itself by positivising its own failure to reach the Real, and the objet a is simultaneously the Real itself and the symbolic's inscription of its inability to reach the Real.

Key concepts: Anxiety, Objet petit a, Jouissance, Fantasy, Real, Extimacy Notable examples: Rousseau's Emile on breast-feeding; Wollstonecraft's Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; Hitchcock's Rebecca; Chris Marker's La Jetée; Freud's dream of Irma's injection

The Unvermögender Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America (p.140-162)

Opening with the phenomenon of the 'Teflon President' — Ronald Reagan's impervious persistence despite televised exposure of his lies — this chapter develops a Lacanian theory of American democratic subjectivity. Copjec argues that the medium's 'realist imbecility' (its confusion of the signified with the referent, its erasure of the marks of enunciation) failed to comprehend Reagan's structural invulnerability, which derives not from any property of the man but from his function as objet a — the indeterminate X that sustains the democratic subject's singularity. Democracy, properly conceived via Lefort, is the social order in which power 'belongs to no one,' meaning that no positive entity can claim to embody it; but this structure is inherently unstable and slides toward totemic brotherhood (Tocqueville) or totalitarianism (Foucault) unless the impotence of the Other is maintained as a structural principle.

Key concepts: The big Other, Desire, Splitting of the Subject, Universality, Ideology, Point de capiton Notable examples: Reagan's 'Teflon' presidency; Lacan's 'Seminar on the Purloined Letter'; De Tocqueville's Democracy in America; Foucault's Discipline and Punish; Freud's Totem and Taboo

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

This extended chapter uses Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) as its primary case to argue that classical detective fiction and film noir instantiate two incompatible spatial logics corresponding to desire and drive respectively. The emergence of actuarial statistics and the 'avalanche of numbers' in the nineteenth century constituted both the modern surveillance apparatus and new categories of subjectivity — this is the historicist (Foucauldian and D.A. Miller's) explanation. Against it, Copjec uses Lacan's reading of Frege through Jacques-Alain Miller's 'suture' to argue that counting requires a zero element — a nonemprical interior limit — that is not a hidden surplus beneath the structure but the structure's own constitutive failure. The locked-room paradox is the literary figure of this logic: the room is infinite not because it has hidden passages but because it contains its own limit as an immanent excess, the corpse that functions as objet a.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Drive, Desire, Gaze, Repetition, Jouissance Notable examples: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944); Hitchcock's North by Northwest assembly-line scene; Freud's fort/da game from Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Barthes on the grain of the voice; Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason (p.200-236)

The book's final and most philosophically ambitious chapter opens by framing the debate about sex as a replay of Kant's antinomies: faced with reason's inevitable self-contradiction when applied to ideas like the 'world' or 'sex,' theory either clings to dogmatic structuralism or abandons itself to the skeptical voluntarism of Butler's constructivism — what Copjec calls, borrowing Kant's phrase, the 'euthanasia of reason.' Copjec's central argument is that Butler's deconstruction of sex-as-substance illegitimately converts the progressive, regulative rule for determining meaning (always incomplete, always retroactive) into a determined meaning (sex is just incomplete, unstable signification), thereby making sexuality communicable and the subject knowable — the precondition for the calculability that underwrites racism and homogenisation.

Key concepts: Sexuation, Not-all, Feminine Sexuality, Universality, Superego, Negation Notable examples: Butler's Gender Trouble; Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (mathematical and dynamical antinomies); Lacan's formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX; Freud's 'Negation'; Kant's Critique of Judgment on the dynamically sublime

Main interlocutors

  • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
  • Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
  • Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
  • Sigmund Freud, Negation
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar II (The Ego in Freud's Theory)
  • Jacques Lacan, Television
  • Jacques Lacan, Ecrits
  • Jacques-Alain Miller, Suture
  • Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
  • Henri Bergson, Laughter
  • Aristotle, Physics
  • Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic
  • Slavoj Žižek
  • Claude Lefort
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
  • Roland Barthes
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  • Gaston Bachelard
  • D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police
  • Ian Hacking

Position in the corpus

Read My Desire occupies a pivotal position in the Lacanian secondary corpus as one of the founding texts of Lacanian cultural and political theory in the Anglophone academy. It should be read alongside Slavoj Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which it presupposes and implicitly extends by shifting the polemical target from Marxist ideology-critique to Foucauldian historicism. Where Žižek focuses on the symptom, fantasy, and the ideological function of enjoyment, Copjec focuses on the gaze, the drive, sexuation, and the specifically Kantian dimension of Lacanian ethics. Readers coming from film and media studies should begin here, since it provides the most sustained and technically precise critique of apparatus theory available; those coming from feminist theory should read it alongside Jacqueline Rose's Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986) and after Mitchell and Rose's Feminine Sexuality (1982), since Chapter 8 presupposes familiarity with the formulas of sexuation. The book also repays reading alongside Lacan's Television and Seminar VII, which Copjec edited and on which several chapters directly depend.

For those working in political theory or democratic theory, Chapters 6 and 3 together constitute an important contribution to the Lacanian theory of the social link that anticipates later work by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The book is considerably more demanding philosophically than most Lacanian secondary literature — its Kant-Lacan parallelism in Chapter 8 in particular requires some prior acquaintance with the Critique of Pure Reason — and should generally be approached after Žižek's introductory texts and some familiarity with Seminars XI, VII, and XX. For specialists in Lacanian theory, Read My Desire remains indispensable: no other single volume so rigorously defends the irreducibility of the Real against culturalist dissolution across as wide a range of domains.

Canonical concepts deployed