TY - JOUR
T1 - “Lacan’s Difficult Literary Dandyism,”
T2 - Special issue of Paragraph "Difficulty’s Knots", edited by Richard Mason and Kasia Mika. Forthcoming: issue 47.1, March 2024.
AU - Richards, Sinan
PY - 2024/3
Y1 - 2024/3
N2 - Jacques Lacan was a notoriously difficult and idiosyncratic thinker. But is there any value in his hermetically difficult style? By highlighting certain crucial elements of his practice, I show how Lacan enlists the notion of difficulty to press home that he did not want his readers to understand directly. Instead, as Foucault and Althusser explain so well, Lacan wished his readers and auditors would discover themselves as subjects of desires through reading him. Indeed, in miming the language of the unconscious, Lacan believed he could throw into sharp relief the notion of the unconscious itself and, paradoxically, better express himself. This temporary detour through misunderstanding is the programmatic value of the concept of difficulty itself. By commenting on the comedic aspect of Lacan’s difficult literary dandyism, I also seek to playfully remind the reader that Lacan was a master of comedy and irony and that it is only by adopting a comparative literary approach to his work that we can appreciate how his theory of misunderstanding is at the heart of his conceptualization of madness and psychosis, allowing
AB - Jacques Lacan was a notoriously difficult and idiosyncratic thinker. But is there any value in his hermetically difficult style? By highlighting certain crucial elements of his practice, I show how Lacan enlists the notion of difficulty to press home that he did not want his readers to understand directly. Instead, as Foucault and Althusser explain so well, Lacan wished his readers and auditors would discover themselves as subjects of desires through reading him. Indeed, in miming the language of the unconscious, Lacan believed he could throw into sharp relief the notion of the unconscious itself and, paradoxically, better express himself. This temporary detour through misunderstanding is the programmatic value of the concept of difficulty itself. By commenting on the comedic aspect of Lacan’s difficult literary dandyism, I also seek to playfully remind the reader that Lacan was a master of comedy and irony and that it is only by adopting a comparative literary approach to his work that we can appreciate how his theory of misunderstanding is at the heart of his conceptualization of madness and psychosis, allowing
M3 - Article
SN - 0264-8334
JO - PARAGRAPH
JF - PARAGRAPH
ER -