The Originality of Jacques Lacan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375200 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shoshana Felman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 1b |
| Pages | 45 |
| Publication date | 1980-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1772238 |
| OpenAlex | W2318779205 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 2 |
Conservatism, writes Charles Sanders Peirce, the sense of a dread of consequences, is altogether out of place in science which has on the contrary always been forwarded by radicals and radicalism, in the sense of the eagerness to carry consequences to their extremes (1955:58). Simply put, the originality of Jacques Lacan lies in his radical understanding of the radicality of Freud's discovery, and in his eagerness to carry the consequences of this discovery to their logical limits. In so doing, Lacan assesses and thinks out as no one has done before him not just the significance of psychoanalysis but, specifically, the significance of the difference that it makes, of the difference it has introduced into Western culture. Lacan's originality, in other words, lies in his unprecedented inquiry into the originality of psychoanalysis. Lacan himself refers to his own originality only to disclaim it: What I have just said, he writes for example in the inaugural Rome Discourse the first important exposition of his theoretical innovations I have just said has so little originality, even in its verve, that there appears in it not a single metaphor that Freud's works do not repeat with the frequency of a leitmotif (E 260, N 51).1 And in another inaugural occasion, at the opening of the first issue of his periodical Scilicet, Lacan repeats: The originality we are allowed is limited to the scrap of enthusiasm we have adopted... concerning what Freud was able to name (1968:6). By his own definition, Lacan's originality is, paradoxically enough, nothing other than the originality of repetition: the originality of a return to Freud
Art · Enthusiasm · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Originality · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.09 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1992 - 2011 (20) |
| Highly cited | No |