Lacan's reconstruction of psychoanalytic theory under the pervasive influence of Saussure's structuralist linguistics may be called a poetics of everyday life. It is a reconceptualization of the "unconscious" significance of speech, simply put, a significance generated in viewing ordinary speech, literal, "objective," and the intentional world of desire, through a complex template of figurative functions. For Lacan, metaphor and metonymy are, in the relevant way here, figurative operations which constitute and enable one to exhibit an order of significance normally hidden under the disorder of our everyday speech and action, seemingly so bland and utterly unpoetic. Moreover there is a dramatics incorporated within this poetics, for the order of significance at stake is strictly formed intersubjectively. (Lacan frequently denies that psychoanalysis is a psychology. Neurosis, perversion, even certain varieties of psychosis, are primarily relational, existing between persons, "complexes" of individuals only in virtue of strategies of speech embedded in and conditioned by these relations.) It is a dramatics oriented with respect to a problematic of freedom, identity and recognition, in the tradition of German idealism and informed by, though not merely rationalizing, existentialist and phenomenological concepts.
A simple illustration may help. On a common aesthetic analysis of the place of rosebud in the film, Citizen Kane, the sled functions like a literary "symbol," an icon of unfulfilled promise, perhaps. Its essence is a matter of aesthetic "representation," more or less subjective impression. But in the Lacanian world, the figurative "power" of rosebud represents little Charles's teleological shaping of life, a meaningful integration of speech, action and world, which is actually focussed in this childish limb. This condensation of childish mastery is sustained, however, only within the delicate (non-literary) symbolic/intersubjective balance that is broken when Charles Foster Kane is taken away to be made fit for his inheritance. In Lacanian terms, his desire is subjected to the mechanisms of the symbolic order, the big Other. By the same token, Kane's adult life is filled with projects, "objects," which exude a very public impotence, for all the symbolic recognition that has been conferred upon him/them by others--perhaps the fundamental paradox of the film. So instead of reading the film in terms of an aesthetic overlay, something added as the expressive view of an artist, or aesthetically sensitive viewers, Lacanian theory has us see the world of our desires as filled with such foci of teleological "necessity," possibility, promise, and failure--in other words, the content of our specific freedom. The importance of film, then, is not a matter of a special aesthetic point of view, artistic vision, etc., but its power to exhibit the "poetic" dimensions and content of ordinary life. Film is ideally suited to such analysis given the effects of the power of the eye of the camera to focus on the intentional objects of desire, a shift away from theater's compression of focus upon psychology and character. On this view, the old formalist idea that speech is the heart of drama is wrong. "Spectacle" is the material substance of drama, and speech only the anticipation or the reflection of this substance, "seen in a glass darkly."
Under this "poetic" template, each of us becomes "larger than life," that is, metaphysically more substantial (in view of a certain problematic of freedom), than we ordinarily appear to one another. The tragic, comic, beautiful, sublime, heroic and pathetic come into high relief. But this relief has a form which is in part dominated by the unfreedom which flows from (1) a dilemma of justified paranoia in virtue of the subject's relation to other subjects mediated by a rigorously dense "symbolic"/social order, and (2) a dialectic of desire favoring strategies of self presentation and presence to self which leave one largely "unconscious" of the game one is playing (a matter of a "circulation" of signifiers) except in glimpses and mostly after desire's horses have gotten out of the stable. In short, the hidden significance that psychoanalysis always posits, is for Lacan a significance with respect to freedom, to unrecognized necessity (in the idealist sense of that which may not be changed, including our own pasts) and unrecognized possibilities in what remains. Despite important qualifications, Lacan lies squarely in the tradition of idealism, working over an essentially dialectical concept of the person and inscribing the central concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis within this dialectic.
It is difficult to come away from a careful and sustained reading of Lacan without a sense of the romance in everyday life--and not the "oedipal" romance of the usual caricatures of psychoanalytic theory, reinforced in many current reductions (as opposed to applications) of psychoanalysis to issues of sex and gender. On Lacan's reading of Freud, eros, in its widest significance, is a metaphor for the dialectics of desire, for intentional projections and retrenchments of self, investments, identifications, blanketing abstract divisions between the subject and the object. (Here, Lacan incorporates aspects of Heideggerian concepts in his reconstruction of the concept of the unconscious with respect to the subject-object relation, philosophically speaking.) "Oedipus" is a figure for this dialectics of desire generally, not, primarily, sexual desire.
The course is an introduction to Lacanian thought with special reference to film. The following indicates some of our principal topics along with some recent (and a few not-so-recent) films for our consideration.
1. The symbolic stage of desire, the big Other, signifiers and signification (The End of the Affair)
2. The imaginary: primary and secondary narcissism, metaphor and metonymy (The Little Thief)
3. The real, meaning and radical contingency (Dead Man)
4. The death drive, time and the eternal, missed encounters the two deaths (Magnolia) or perhaps (Bringing Out the Dead)
5. The modern (paranoid) subject, the tragic dilemma of meaning and being, Is it ever other than foolish to think "I'm the one?" (Matrix)
6. Neurosis, psychosis, perversion (The Talented Mr. Ripley)
7. Family values (American Beauty)
8. Dream and Fantasy (Being John Malkovich), (Fight Club)
9. Jouissance vs. the pleasure principle (Eyes Wide Shut)
Texts: a number of selections from Lacan's Seminar, Zizek's Looking Awry, and Kristeva's The Black Sun.