Literary Criticism in Lacan's Theory of Temporality, Marxism,
and Philippine Underground Writings*
by Rolando Tolentino
March 30, 2008
and Philippine Underground Writings*
by Rolando Tolentino
March 30, 2008
Traditional views have posited psychoanalysis and marxism as strange bedfellows. Avoiding the mimetic problematique of self = society or society = self, most critics have all together abandoned any attempt to lay a common ground for the seeds of psychoanalysis and marxism as discourses of otherness or marginality to germinate or much less, to flourish. Contemporary literary criticism, however, is recognizing a need for a crucial integration between Lacanian psychoanalysis and marxism, and with good cause. According to Madan Sarup, “This is crucial because no political revolution can be completed until the very character (of) structures inherited from the older prerevolutionary society, reinforced by its instinctual taboos, have been utterly transformed” (33). In the postmodernist notion of a multiplicity of discourse of otherness, there is a need to learn from various marginal positions to challenge the dominant modes of construction and representation of reality or to posit alternative or oppositional construction and representation of realities.
Toril Moi’ assessment (in Sexual/Textual Politics), for example, of contemporary French feminist theories analyzes that while the approaches are a decentering of sexuality and textuality or a problematization of marginality and subversion that provide openings to a new field of feminist investigations, there is a need for such theories to regard a “reference to recognizable social structures” (126) or “to consider historical and economic specificity of patriarchal power, along with its ideological and material contradictions” (148). Psycoanalytic feminists too are problematizing the ground with marxism not as a path to discover an ultimate or unified discourse that can unilaterally undermine the dominant discourse but as an incremental alternative in the strengthening of positions already taken and in the further appropriation of spaces in the dominant discourse.
While marxism analyzes individual signification in terms of social relations, classes, modes of production, and forms of politics, psychoanalysis analyzes its implications for the physical life (Eagleton 152). Both deal from the positions of oppression to positions of liberation; however, psychoanalysis is perceived to be unable to explicate the domains of materiality and sociality while marxism is perceived to give insufficient weight to psychicality and individuality. Both deal with power relations and strive toward life positions or positions of liberation, and as such, psychoanalysis and marxism are complementary alternative discourses.
How does one read Philippine underground writings? Like women’s writings, Philippine underground writings are marginal(ized) writings in relation to the canonical definition of and mode of writing in Literature. Underground writings are the literature produced in the recent (around 1968 though the movement is rooting its cause and struggle from the time of the 1896 Philippine Revolution) revolutionary struggle for national liberation; its production is characterized in its “subversive” relation to the state. Its thirty-five years or so of literary production has produced a diverse range of traditional and non-traditional literary output—from mimeographed newsletters to song cassette tapes, from a new literary genre syeyring (from “sharing,” an account of a comrades’ getting-to-know-each-other session) to a testimonial book—and has grown to various regional and organizational publications. To read Philippine underground writings on orthodox marxist terms as it has been done in the past is to privilege socialist realism or Mao Zedong’s political and aesthetic criteria and thereby creates an equally homogenizing notion of literature and a political canon.
Neo-marxist theories have problematized the orthodox position, shifting from the mechanical causality of reducing social ills entirely on the economic base to a structural causality where (relative) autonomy exists between the base and superstructure (Althusser). The economic base (over)determination of accounting for the ways people think of themselves and their society has been replaced by a strategy of containment (Jameson) whereby both the dominant and oppressed groups contribute to the negation of any attempt to subvert individual and societal orders. Through consent and coercion, the dominant order maintains itself (Gramsci). There is also the non-structural approach to social analysis specific to culture, the theory of dominant, residual and emergent cultures (Williams) as aspects sliding from one mode of relation to another. There remain(s); the construction of the individual subject as axiomatic to a societal positioning is still a key aspect to the marxist discourse.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, too is concerned with subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Using language as metonymically determing subjectivity, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a structure of domains, a domain of structures to understand the relation of the constitution of individual subjectivity and language. Psychoanalysis helps the individual to draw the individual speech that performs through an imago in some (re)cognition of the ego-ideals of the community. Though characterized as phallocentric, what can be reworked is the aspect of subject positioning in the production of economies of meanings. The mirror stage, oedipal complex, operations of lack, desire, and castration are not to be seen solely as concepts in the phallocentric order but as metaphors that signify displacements in a continuous flux of alteration, reconstitution, condensation, appropriation, and other movements. In the continuous flux of assignation of meanings, the mirror that constitutes the narcissistic gaze or even phallocentrism is undermined, moving towards other economies of meanings, the mirror that constitutes the narcissistic gaze or even phallocentrism is undermined, moving towards other economies of meaning. The mirror then cracks, able to reflect multi-dimensional and ranges of imagos. The possibilities for reversal that multiplies the otherness positions become endless; the potentials for new economies of meanings and desires remain possible.
Lacan’s theory of temporality (in The Function of Speech and Language of Psychoanalysis and as discussed by Forrester) mentions the function of the death instict in an individual’s quest for his/her unique self, its relation to time, and the significance that marks the end of the psychoanalytic inquiry. These ideas are useful to the understanding of Philippine underground writings. An individual caught in neurotic repetition or “unreal time” does not live for self but for a master. The ego slides in the backdrop as desire forces itself in the unconscious, in the consciousness narrative and obsessional time converge, creating altered significance and a different economy of meanings. The role of the psychoanalytic session is to negotiate a term for the suffering self of the individual, to find an imago that can lead to a quest for meaning(s) to the individual’s life.
Neurosis or suffering is not to be viewed from a pathological perspective but from a perspective of repression, a lack in a desire for an other. The traditional psychoanalytic explanation is that trauma is a delayed effect, the traumatic experience is viewed as a symbol of repetition. Thus, the cure is the restoration of trauma in a proper place of memory that the individual can effectively manage. Lacanian psychoanalysis treats trauma as an adult reading of some childhood experience that the adult has failed to cope with. The role of the analyst is to seduce through the labor of free association an alienated imago or an other imago, to act as an other subject in constructing a narrative meaning for the ego.
Lacan suggests that the analyst acts in a manner similar to a literary critic inquiring into an individual’s speech that has ceased to perform, looking for tropes and punctuations in the silences. This is where literary criticism of the text can take off from Lacanian psychoanalysis of memory, to read texts as silenced speech where articulation of the marginal is probable. The literary critic recuperates silenced voice(s) in the text, creating a narrative space and time for the understanding of the other position(s).
If for Lacan, the psychoanalyst is to figure a literary critic, then psychoanalysis can figure literary criticism. And because of the notion of the transcendental signified that can never be attained as such, literary criticism can be made analogous to psychoanalysis. In this analogy, the literary critic and psychoanalyst are quasi-revolutionaries because both explore the modes of freedom in the domain of repression. Both empower the other positions to tell a story, to construct self in its own imago, to empower the positions to tell a story, to construct self in its own imago, to empower otherness in the quest for uniqueness.
The psychoanalyst as literary critic explores the economies of meaning and desire to the individual, opening a field in Derrida’s flowers, tombs, columns, gloves … The literary critic as psychoanalyst explores similar economies to the text, opening other positions of reading and writing, of inscribing and reinscribing that may or may not provide a synthesis. The psychoanalyst/literary critic may view underground writing in a similar light, as a metaphor that alludes to other meanings that alludes to other metaphors, as a distinct yet integrated/integrated yet distinct self in the economies of meaning.
Lacan also mentions the Law of the Father as a good-in-itself because it has continued and preserved the community. Such laws or symbolic relations are questionable. The lineage that has made speech perform is also the lineage that has caused speech to cease to perform. Thus, it is crucial to ask about the issue of interest in the Lacanian discourse: for whose interest is the law being perpetuated or the community preserved? Marxism integrates this problematic to the theory of ideology, or power relations. While Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a narrative of psychical subjectivity, marxism grounds such subjectivity to material and historicized societal positions.
A common discourse, however, between psychoanalysis and marxism is just one aspect in resolving the problem. After all, there are no metadiscourses that can profess to know and encompass everything. To speak of interest is to speak of hybridity, interests vary in different individual and collective subject positions. The self (itself) is not fixed, having been inscribed in a matrix of race, gender, ethnicity, occupation, age, nationality, health and other standards of cultural measure. Self and, for this project’s purpose, nation are also metaphors in a continuous flux of significations. The discourse of hybridity provides possible openings for reversals and liberation. Multiculturalism—if thought of as a “flow” among peoples, able to sustain distinct and integrated self and groups—also provides openings that politically nurtures otherness, collectively serving the interests of marginal groups.
The Philippine colonial experience (three hundred years of Spanish rule, fifty years of American rule) and neocolonial experience (in capitalism and imperialism) have produced both patronage and dissent. Through consent and coercion, colonial and neocolonial economic and political structures through local elites have dominated the Philippine landscape and have constructed a dominant mode of viewing the world and the self. Resistance to these social, cultural, and psychical structures entailed marginalization and consequently, has ceased for speech to perform. Marginal sectors are unable to articulate themselves in the discourse of language, perpetuating their existence in the otherness.
What the present revolutionary experience and underground writings have done is to act as a session to bring the otherness to an imago narrative—awakening, organizing, and revolutionizing. Viewing the session as a collective diagnosis of Philippine individuals, past precolonial and colonial experiences conjure with present neocolonial experiences for the promise of a (socialist) future.
Philippine underground writings manifest the recuperation of speech that performs. Its absence in the past, given the thematic modes of oppression that has preceded its existence, is a void caused by lack of speech. The appropriation of writing, an act and a language that has always been there, is the recognition of language and speech that performs to participate in the construction of the discourse at the same time as it is (mis)constructed by the discourse. Underground writings, by venturing to the marginal mode and discourse to find an imago and construct its subjectivity, are life positions, nourishing and nurturing the individuality and collectivity.
The hierarchic and canonical practice of being inscribed, named, positioned by the dominant discourse is decentered in and by Philippine underground writings. Nationalist imagery becomes a composition of attempts to grope with the speech that performs. Nationalist imagination is the labor to free association whereby an alienated or new imago is brought to light. Within the session of free association, nationalist imageries become metaphors among metaphors in the positioning of underground writings into economies of meaning of otherness. Underground writings are also metaphors among metaphors, conjuring with other marginal(ized) writings in the social elaboration for meanings and desires of otherness. Imagining nation is the attempt at finding or fixing an imago. Within the psychoanalytic session, Philippine underground writings have become narratives that interpret, rewrite, and liberate life positionalities.
Such is the possibility in the poem “The Guerilla is Like a Poet” by Jose Ma. Sison. The characteristics of the guerilla and the poet, non-traditional roles in Philippine society, are entwined for the purpose of revolution using the structures within (academe) and without (forest) the discourse of power. The self assumes a dual imago, creating a principal subject for the operational function of revolutionary work: leader and follower, teacher and student, revolutionary and builder. These positions are not binary functions but reveal a multi-faceted individual in the struggle against the forces of oppression. The individual assumes several roles in appropriating more space within the discourse of power. From these different positions, the individual is able to territorialize the dominant discourse in reversing or subverting the order of power. The poem also unfolds images of death (ashes, ensnare the enemy, swarming, flood) conjuring with images of life (river, red flowers) and images of hope (people’s epic, people’s war). These images are metaphors that negate the romantic rhetorics of revolutionizing, offering in the poem temporal and spatial conditionalities of the individual in the struggle for liberation.
On the other hand, in the terms of Lacan, underground writings do not exactly “say what it means or mean what it says” (Eagleton 117). If (an)other subject positionality is assumed, new economies of meaning are then produced. Are the life positions merely a bouquet of flowers dressing death, the phallus? What is time defining, a life or death position? One may view underground writings as the phallus and logos of ultimate and protracted sacrifice privileged in the name of the revolutionary enterprise. The slave evokes the ideals of a capitalist master in the name of reaping greater profits for the master and with the hope that such profits will have trickling effects to the good slave. One may also view it from a different position, a life position based on organization and collectivity, in the collective struggle for a position of liberation. Thus, the signified evoked becomes an arena of constant struggle for appropriable meanings. Even when meanings are appropriated in the Philippine underground writings, those meanings become another space in the world of naming, in the naming of the world.
To view psychoanalysis and Marxism as contradictory is to be lost the discourse of the dominant mode of viewing self and the world, either as an organic individual capable of contained development or a homogenous class devoid of any individual initiatives. Marginal positions are posited by the dominant discourse as self-contained and disparate, with their own phallocentric ordering of ideas. Yet marginal positions share positionalities in relation to arbitrary power structures and power relations. Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism are corollary discourses to other marginal discourses – feminists, ethnic, disabled, aged, etc. – in positioning subjectivity and in organizing intersubjectivity. This is the experience that can be drawn from a project such as this.
Notes:
The French marxist Louis Althusser attempted to integrate Marxism with the ideas of the frontrunners of psychoanalysis in “Freud and Lacan.” Neomarxist’s notion of structural causality is also attributed to Althusser in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.” Both essays are in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Frederic Jameson’s strategy of containment is discussed in his The Political Unconscious while Raymond Williams’ dominant, residual, and emergent cultures are in his Marxism and Literature. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is in Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
Works Cited:
The poem “The Guerilla is Like a Poet,” is from Jose Ma. Sison’s collection Prison and Beyond: Selected Poems, 1958-1983.
Derrida, Jacques. GLAS. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Eagleton, Terry. “Psychoanalysis.” LITERARY THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Forrester, John. “Dead on time: Lacan’s theory of temporality.” SEDUCTIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD, LACAN AND DERRIDA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. “The function and field of speech and the language of psychoanalysis.” ECRITS: A SELECTION. London: Travistock Publications, 1977.
Moi, Toril. SEXUAL/TEXTUAL POLITICS: FEMINIST LITERARY THEORY. London: New York, 1985.
Sarup, Madan. “Lacan and Psychoanalysis.” AN INTRODUCTION GUIDE TO POST-STRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
* Url:http://rolandotolentino.multiply.com/journal/item/5
Toril Moi’ assessment (in Sexual/Textual Politics), for example, of contemporary French feminist theories analyzes that while the approaches are a decentering of sexuality and textuality or a problematization of marginality and subversion that provide openings to a new field of feminist investigations, there is a need for such theories to regard a “reference to recognizable social structures” (126) or “to consider historical and economic specificity of patriarchal power, along with its ideological and material contradictions” (148). Psycoanalytic feminists too are problematizing the ground with marxism not as a path to discover an ultimate or unified discourse that can unilaterally undermine the dominant discourse but as an incremental alternative in the strengthening of positions already taken and in the further appropriation of spaces in the dominant discourse.
While marxism analyzes individual signification in terms of social relations, classes, modes of production, and forms of politics, psychoanalysis analyzes its implications for the physical life (Eagleton 152). Both deal from the positions of oppression to positions of liberation; however, psychoanalysis is perceived to be unable to explicate the domains of materiality and sociality while marxism is perceived to give insufficient weight to psychicality and individuality. Both deal with power relations and strive toward life positions or positions of liberation, and as such, psychoanalysis and marxism are complementary alternative discourses.
How does one read Philippine underground writings? Like women’s writings, Philippine underground writings are marginal(ized) writings in relation to the canonical definition of and mode of writing in Literature. Underground writings are the literature produced in the recent (around 1968 though the movement is rooting its cause and struggle from the time of the 1896 Philippine Revolution) revolutionary struggle for national liberation; its production is characterized in its “subversive” relation to the state. Its thirty-five years or so of literary production has produced a diverse range of traditional and non-traditional literary output—from mimeographed newsletters to song cassette tapes, from a new literary genre syeyring (from “sharing,” an account of a comrades’ getting-to-know-each-other session) to a testimonial book—and has grown to various regional and organizational publications. To read Philippine underground writings on orthodox marxist terms as it has been done in the past is to privilege socialist realism or Mao Zedong’s political and aesthetic criteria and thereby creates an equally homogenizing notion of literature and a political canon.
Neo-marxist theories have problematized the orthodox position, shifting from the mechanical causality of reducing social ills entirely on the economic base to a structural causality where (relative) autonomy exists between the base and superstructure (Althusser). The economic base (over)determination of accounting for the ways people think of themselves and their society has been replaced by a strategy of containment (Jameson) whereby both the dominant and oppressed groups contribute to the negation of any attempt to subvert individual and societal orders. Through consent and coercion, the dominant order maintains itself (Gramsci). There is also the non-structural approach to social analysis specific to culture, the theory of dominant, residual and emergent cultures (Williams) as aspects sliding from one mode of relation to another. There remain(s); the construction of the individual subject as axiomatic to a societal positioning is still a key aspect to the marxist discourse.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, too is concerned with subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Using language as metonymically determing subjectivity, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a structure of domains, a domain of structures to understand the relation of the constitution of individual subjectivity and language. Psychoanalysis helps the individual to draw the individual speech that performs through an imago in some (re)cognition of the ego-ideals of the community. Though characterized as phallocentric, what can be reworked is the aspect of subject positioning in the production of economies of meanings. The mirror stage, oedipal complex, operations of lack, desire, and castration are not to be seen solely as concepts in the phallocentric order but as metaphors that signify displacements in a continuous flux of alteration, reconstitution, condensation, appropriation, and other movements. In the continuous flux of assignation of meanings, the mirror that constitutes the narcissistic gaze or even phallocentrism is undermined, moving towards other economies of meanings, the mirror that constitutes the narcissistic gaze or even phallocentrism is undermined, moving towards other economies of meaning. The mirror then cracks, able to reflect multi-dimensional and ranges of imagos. The possibilities for reversal that multiplies the otherness positions become endless; the potentials for new economies of meanings and desires remain possible.
Lacan’s theory of temporality (in The Function of Speech and Language of Psychoanalysis and as discussed by Forrester) mentions the function of the death instict in an individual’s quest for his/her unique self, its relation to time, and the significance that marks the end of the psychoanalytic inquiry. These ideas are useful to the understanding of Philippine underground writings. An individual caught in neurotic repetition or “unreal time” does not live for self but for a master. The ego slides in the backdrop as desire forces itself in the unconscious, in the consciousness narrative and obsessional time converge, creating altered significance and a different economy of meanings. The role of the psychoanalytic session is to negotiate a term for the suffering self of the individual, to find an imago that can lead to a quest for meaning(s) to the individual’s life.
Neurosis or suffering is not to be viewed from a pathological perspective but from a perspective of repression, a lack in a desire for an other. The traditional psychoanalytic explanation is that trauma is a delayed effect, the traumatic experience is viewed as a symbol of repetition. Thus, the cure is the restoration of trauma in a proper place of memory that the individual can effectively manage. Lacanian psychoanalysis treats trauma as an adult reading of some childhood experience that the adult has failed to cope with. The role of the analyst is to seduce through the labor of free association an alienated imago or an other imago, to act as an other subject in constructing a narrative meaning for the ego.
Lacan suggests that the analyst acts in a manner similar to a literary critic inquiring into an individual’s speech that has ceased to perform, looking for tropes and punctuations in the silences. This is where literary criticism of the text can take off from Lacanian psychoanalysis of memory, to read texts as silenced speech where articulation of the marginal is probable. The literary critic recuperates silenced voice(s) in the text, creating a narrative space and time for the understanding of the other position(s).
If for Lacan, the psychoanalyst is to figure a literary critic, then psychoanalysis can figure literary criticism. And because of the notion of the transcendental signified that can never be attained as such, literary criticism can be made analogous to psychoanalysis. In this analogy, the literary critic and psychoanalyst are quasi-revolutionaries because both explore the modes of freedom in the domain of repression. Both empower the other positions to tell a story, to construct self in its own imago, to empower the positions to tell a story, to construct self in its own imago, to empower otherness in the quest for uniqueness.
The psychoanalyst as literary critic explores the economies of meaning and desire to the individual, opening a field in Derrida’s flowers, tombs, columns, gloves … The literary critic as psychoanalyst explores similar economies to the text, opening other positions of reading and writing, of inscribing and reinscribing that may or may not provide a synthesis. The psychoanalyst/literary critic may view underground writing in a similar light, as a metaphor that alludes to other meanings that alludes to other metaphors, as a distinct yet integrated/integrated yet distinct self in the economies of meaning.
Lacan also mentions the Law of the Father as a good-in-itself because it has continued and preserved the community. Such laws or symbolic relations are questionable. The lineage that has made speech perform is also the lineage that has caused speech to cease to perform. Thus, it is crucial to ask about the issue of interest in the Lacanian discourse: for whose interest is the law being perpetuated or the community preserved? Marxism integrates this problematic to the theory of ideology, or power relations. While Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a narrative of psychical subjectivity, marxism grounds such subjectivity to material and historicized societal positions.
A common discourse, however, between psychoanalysis and marxism is just one aspect in resolving the problem. After all, there are no metadiscourses that can profess to know and encompass everything. To speak of interest is to speak of hybridity, interests vary in different individual and collective subject positions. The self (itself) is not fixed, having been inscribed in a matrix of race, gender, ethnicity, occupation, age, nationality, health and other standards of cultural measure. Self and, for this project’s purpose, nation are also metaphors in a continuous flux of significations. The discourse of hybridity provides possible openings for reversals and liberation. Multiculturalism—if thought of as a “flow” among peoples, able to sustain distinct and integrated self and groups—also provides openings that politically nurtures otherness, collectively serving the interests of marginal groups.
The Philippine colonial experience (three hundred years of Spanish rule, fifty years of American rule) and neocolonial experience (in capitalism and imperialism) have produced both patronage and dissent. Through consent and coercion, colonial and neocolonial economic and political structures through local elites have dominated the Philippine landscape and have constructed a dominant mode of viewing the world and the self. Resistance to these social, cultural, and psychical structures entailed marginalization and consequently, has ceased for speech to perform. Marginal sectors are unable to articulate themselves in the discourse of language, perpetuating their existence in the otherness.
What the present revolutionary experience and underground writings have done is to act as a session to bring the otherness to an imago narrative—awakening, organizing, and revolutionizing. Viewing the session as a collective diagnosis of Philippine individuals, past precolonial and colonial experiences conjure with present neocolonial experiences for the promise of a (socialist) future.
Philippine underground writings manifest the recuperation of speech that performs. Its absence in the past, given the thematic modes of oppression that has preceded its existence, is a void caused by lack of speech. The appropriation of writing, an act and a language that has always been there, is the recognition of language and speech that performs to participate in the construction of the discourse at the same time as it is (mis)constructed by the discourse. Underground writings, by venturing to the marginal mode and discourse to find an imago and construct its subjectivity, are life positions, nourishing and nurturing the individuality and collectivity.
The hierarchic and canonical practice of being inscribed, named, positioned by the dominant discourse is decentered in and by Philippine underground writings. Nationalist imagery becomes a composition of attempts to grope with the speech that performs. Nationalist imagination is the labor to free association whereby an alienated or new imago is brought to light. Within the session of free association, nationalist imageries become metaphors among metaphors in the positioning of underground writings into economies of meaning of otherness. Underground writings are also metaphors among metaphors, conjuring with other marginal(ized) writings in the social elaboration for meanings and desires of otherness. Imagining nation is the attempt at finding or fixing an imago. Within the psychoanalytic session, Philippine underground writings have become narratives that interpret, rewrite, and liberate life positionalities.
Such is the possibility in the poem “The Guerilla is Like a Poet” by Jose Ma. Sison. The characteristics of the guerilla and the poet, non-traditional roles in Philippine society, are entwined for the purpose of revolution using the structures within (academe) and without (forest) the discourse of power. The self assumes a dual imago, creating a principal subject for the operational function of revolutionary work: leader and follower, teacher and student, revolutionary and builder. These positions are not binary functions but reveal a multi-faceted individual in the struggle against the forces of oppression. The individual assumes several roles in appropriating more space within the discourse of power. From these different positions, the individual is able to territorialize the dominant discourse in reversing or subverting the order of power. The poem also unfolds images of death (ashes, ensnare the enemy, swarming, flood) conjuring with images of life (river, red flowers) and images of hope (people’s epic, people’s war). These images are metaphors that negate the romantic rhetorics of revolutionizing, offering in the poem temporal and spatial conditionalities of the individual in the struggle for liberation.
On the other hand, in the terms of Lacan, underground writings do not exactly “say what it means or mean what it says” (Eagleton 117). If (an)other subject positionality is assumed, new economies of meaning are then produced. Are the life positions merely a bouquet of flowers dressing death, the phallus? What is time defining, a life or death position? One may view underground writings as the phallus and logos of ultimate and protracted sacrifice privileged in the name of the revolutionary enterprise. The slave evokes the ideals of a capitalist master in the name of reaping greater profits for the master and with the hope that such profits will have trickling effects to the good slave. One may also view it from a different position, a life position based on organization and collectivity, in the collective struggle for a position of liberation. Thus, the signified evoked becomes an arena of constant struggle for appropriable meanings. Even when meanings are appropriated in the Philippine underground writings, those meanings become another space in the world of naming, in the naming of the world.
To view psychoanalysis and Marxism as contradictory is to be lost the discourse of the dominant mode of viewing self and the world, either as an organic individual capable of contained development or a homogenous class devoid of any individual initiatives. Marginal positions are posited by the dominant discourse as self-contained and disparate, with their own phallocentric ordering of ideas. Yet marginal positions share positionalities in relation to arbitrary power structures and power relations. Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism are corollary discourses to other marginal discourses – feminists, ethnic, disabled, aged, etc. – in positioning subjectivity and in organizing intersubjectivity. This is the experience that can be drawn from a project such as this.
Notes:
The French marxist Louis Althusser attempted to integrate Marxism with the ideas of the frontrunners of psychoanalysis in “Freud and Lacan.” Neomarxist’s notion of structural causality is also attributed to Althusser in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.” Both essays are in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Frederic Jameson’s strategy of containment is discussed in his The Political Unconscious while Raymond Williams’ dominant, residual, and emergent cultures are in his Marxism and Literature. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is in Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
Works Cited:
The poem “The Guerilla is Like a Poet,” is from Jose Ma. Sison’s collection Prison and Beyond: Selected Poems, 1958-1983.
Derrida, Jacques. GLAS. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Eagleton, Terry. “Psychoanalysis.” LITERARY THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Forrester, John. “Dead on time: Lacan’s theory of temporality.” SEDUCTIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD, LACAN AND DERRIDA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. “The function and field of speech and the language of psychoanalysis.” ECRITS: A SELECTION. London: Travistock Publications, 1977.
Moi, Toril. SEXUAL/TEXTUAL POLITICS: FEMINIST LITERARY THEORY. London: New York, 1985.
Sarup, Madan. “Lacan and Psychoanalysis.” AN INTRODUCTION GUIDE TO POST-STRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
* Url:http://rolandotolentino.multiply.com/journal/item/5
