It's worth a look-see, though I have to add a caveat that the quality of articles collected in it is uneven.
>There is a real problem here. The charge that Freud's
>account is ahistorical is, in many respects, correct. But
>this doesn't say much - that's Freud's point. The
>psychical life of the mind *isn't* historical. Yes, it is
>embedded contingently in history, but its "reality" is
>deeply and profoundly ahistorical. So claiming that
>psychoanalysis has no social grounding is, in many respect,
>a fine and dandy claim. But a historicist account simply
>cannot explain the pscyhe then (see Joan Copjec's book,
>Read My Desire for a critique of Foucault from a Lacanian
>perspective here). Psychoanalysis remembers what
>hermeneutics forgets (to spin Wellmer's phrase about
>critical theory) - that the reality that we live in is a
>product of our imaginary. Fantasy makes reality possible.
By now it must be obvious that I don't think highly of Lacan (much less Joan Copjec) either, though there are many entertaining sections in _Ecrits_, _The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis_, etc. The poor Althusser went severely wrong especially at the points where he was most indebted to Lacan (e.g. Althusser's analysis of the ISA), too. It is my opinion that Marxists should enjoy Lacan, if they want to, as they might enjoy, say, Luis Bunuel's _L'Age d'or_ (1930).
The class-based structure of Lacanian stories may be of interest to some here:
***** It is a true story. I was in my early twenties or thereabouts -- and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country, say, or at the sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time, Britanny was not industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fishermen went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn't all danger and excitement -- there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that's what we called him -- like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class - this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were supposed to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me -- _You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!_
He found this incident highly amusing -- I less so. I thought about it. Why did I find it less amusing than he? It's an interesting question.
To begin with, if what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated -- and I am not speaking metaphorically.
The point of this little story, as it had occurred to my partner, the fact that he found it so amusing and I less so, derives from the fact that, if I am told a story like that one, it is because I, at that moment -- as I appeared to those fellows who were earning their livings with great difficulty, in the struggle with what for them was a pitiless nature -- looked like nothing on earth. In short, I was out of place in the picture. And it was because I felt this that I was not terribly amused at hearing myself addressed in his humorous, ironical way. (_The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis_ 95-6) *****
Lacan's "point of light" emerges through the separation of the intellectual and the working class, and it is this historical division of mental and manual labor that Lacan's theory of the Real eternalizes ("the function of the _touche_, of the real as encounter -- the enconter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter" [55]). The same must be said for Heidegger's Being.
Yoshie