Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy From Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys by Gregory L. Ulmer

Author:Gregory L. Ulmer [Ulmer, Gregory L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781421430164
Google: SgC9oQEACAAJ
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1984-11-15T23:57:52.503262+00:00

7

Seminar: Jacques Lacan

We have already seen in a number of contexts the extent to which grammatology uses psychoanalysis and the notion of the unconscious in order to challenge the metaphysics of presence and of the self-conscious subject. Psychoanalysis is equally important in the application of grammatology to pedagogy, for it provides a resource for dealing with one of the principal difficulties facing this experiment. To reiterate, the strategy of Writing is not to eliminate speech, representation, science, or “truth” from academic discourse, but to put them in their place, to break their dominance by bringing them into balance with a nonverbal element that is not associated with the virtues of classicism—clarity, simplicity, harmony, unity. The practical question, then, is how to talk, lecture, mount a discourse in a grammatological classroom. One of the best models available upon which to base a new pedagogical discourse is Jacques Lacan’s seminars, of which at least five volumes (of the twenty-four listed as forthcoming) have been published.

While it is true that Lacan’s phallogocentric ideology is unacceptable to Derrida (as noted earlier with respect to Derrida’s critique of the seminar on “The Purloined Letter” in “The Purveyor of Truth”), it is equally true that the presentational strategies Lacan used in his famous seminars, attended on occasion by Derrida, Barthes, and many other important French intellectuals, are compatible with grammatological Writing—that a grammatologist could use Lacan’s technique the way Mallarmé, according to Derrida, used mimesis: retaining its structure while abandoning its reference. In fact, Derrida Writes the way Lacan lectured, with the double science and the contra-band being a version of Lacan’s “double inscription”—both address and draw on the resources of the conscious (secondary process, discursive, logical) and the unconscious (primary process, non-sense) mind, combining in one operation the scientific with the poetic.

Lacan was working in a specific set of circumstances which do not apply to grammatology directly. He introduced his nonmagisterial style into the classroom as a necessary corollary of his attempt to teach psychoanalysis—to undertake the formation of analysts—as a university course. His project was doubly controversial. There were those who thought that psychoanalysis as a special mode of knowledge could not be separated from a personal analysis (the clinical context). But those who thought that analysis could be taught in the university argued that it should be taught in a scholarly and abstract manner, like any other discipline. Lacan, however, as Sherry Turkle explains, insisted that “only the theory constitutes the science, and only the science is subversive as a new epistemology, a new way of knowing.”1 As for the manner of presentation, although Lacan wanted to move into the university in order to work more closely with linguists and mathematicians who could help formalize psychoanalysis into mathematical statements—mathemes—he also rejected the abstract academic tone for a style based on the peculiarities of the clinical situation, a style that he explicitly characterized, in contrast to the “classical” tone of the university, as “baroque.”

Lacan’s project is applicable beyond the context of psychoanalysis as a

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