Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation

by Joan Copjec

A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality. Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman , Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention. In the book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/ Antigone's burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, the cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Theory, Psychology, Nonfiction, Feminism, American

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Joan Copjec is a philosopher, theorist, author, feminist, and prominent American Lacanian psychoanalyst. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The descriptive summary from the back cover is impressively comprehensive, so there's no need for me to provide a chapter guide. I most appreciate the sustained analyses of contemporary art forms, a perspective sharpened by Copjec's uniquely twinned focus on cultural studies and psychoanalysis. Her formidable acumen in both domains draws distinct connections between ethics and sublimation, each of which inquires, "I see very well what you're doing, but what are you getting at?" This elusive/inescapable "It" is of course das Ding as Lacan embellished it in the Ethics Seminar. I was hoping Copjec would linger in more detail on the Seminar, but she concisely gathers what she needs and moves on. In fact, this is by no means a(nother) commentary on S.VII but something much more alive: observations and diagnoses at the throbbing juncture of culture and psychoanalysis, to the benefit of both.

Although the essays all share this common drive, they are also all standalone pieces. The only item specifically missing from the back cover's description is a rather academic dispute with Jonathan Crary regarding how the gaze is embodied (Ch 7). So there's no momentous building and culmination as one might expect from a book-length study, but rather an array of distinct parts, each astonishing, and although pulled from a common thread they do not explicitly tie together.

No matter how much one has read on Antigone, death drive, desire, in/finitude, sexuation, narcissism, sublimation, history, racism, cinema, hysteria, melodrama, perversion, Law, evil, envy, jealousy, justice, beauty, equality, the body, the gaze, and anxiety, Copjec still surprises and clarifies what you never saw was missing.

[Alex Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Copjec examines the role of ethics in relation to sublimation -- that is what is the normal process for grasping what should be -- and how normal needs to be sutured from the point of the sublime.

She defines the sublime through Lacan, that there is no single universal view -- but that we must posit such a metaphysical view in order to have a corporeal coherency -- even if this metaphysical view is grounded in the incoherency of the Real. In the last essay, Copjec even shows us that the Real is not real -- that the non-sublimated view is not a view at all. Rather, the sublimation must erase its own position even while it leaves a trace for it to be effective.

Overall this book is an amazing collection presenting us with a more cogent examination of Lacan than Zizek who tends to try to say too much too quickly. Copjec is far more measured in her presentation.

[Nicholas Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a new favorite, that's for sure.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Returning to this in the wake of Copjec's latest, what is first most striking is Copjec's insistence that Lacan is a realist, but formalist in his realism, opposing nominalism with a Real universal, which is to say, an impossible or non-all one. Copjec thus characterizes Lacan as opposing Kant's claim that maxims are universalizable with the counter-imperative to "Imagine there's no Poland!," and in this way connects Lacan's approach to psychoanalytic ethics to the logic of the feminine, the non-all. Copjec turns to sublimation as the mediation between (ontological) being and the (ethical) act, between singularity and sociality, which leads her to read Antigone through perseverance as opposed to fixation, through the freedom gained in death as opposed to the external sanction of the Kantian imperative, through the insistence on the singularity of love (as sublimation of desire) as opposed to the superegoic demand to enjoy. By thus ontologizing the death drive, Copjec thinks the immortality of the (sexed) body as a secularized infinity accessible only through the jouissance of the partial drives. I think this is what makes her argument so much more convincing than Zupančič's reading of Seminar VII: the "drive" comes to stand in for a Lacanian ontology in general, and not as a psychological category to counterpose to desire, which would simply ignore Lacan's entire argument in VII. After connecting sublimation to narcissism (helpfully reminding us that, for Lacan, castration is not the split between child and mother, but instead between the mother and her own breast, giving rise to "partial objects" as the only access to jouissance), Copjec reads Kara Walker's work through Freud's Moses and Monotheism (here, again, her reading is a bit too "heavy," importing theoretics into art that doesn't seem pre-existing), and Stella Dallas through hysteria and melodramatics as finding the world groundless and therefore false which is redressed through the imposition of imaginary limits, before turning to Pasolini, Rawls, Scarry, Crary, Zapruder, through reference to Foucault, Deleuze, Levinas, Sartre.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Towering accomplishment. (Re)Working of Sublimation a highlight.

[Leonardo]

Copjec es perfectamente consciente de que las categorías psicoanalíticas no son regionales, sino que pertenecen al campo de lo que podría denominarse una ontología general. Ella afirma, por ejemplo, que la teoría de las pulsiones en Freud ocupa el terreno de las cuestiones de la ontología clásica. Es cierto que su argumento -como ocurre con frecuencia en el psicoanálisis- tiene un carácter predominantemente genético, pero puede ser replanteado fácilmente en términos estructurales. La totalidad mítica, la díada madre/hijo, corresponde a la plenitud no alcanzada, evocada -como su opuesto- por las dislocaciones ocasionadas por las demandas insatisfechas. La aspiración a esa plenitud o totalidad, sin embargo, no desaparece simplemente, sino que es transferida a objetos parciales que son los objetos de las pulsiones. En términos políticos, esto es exactamente lo que hemos denominado una relación hegemónica: una cierta particularidad que asume el rol de una universalidad imposible. Es porque el carácter parcial de estos objeros no es resultado de una narrativa particular, sino que es inherente a la propia estructura de la significación, que el objeto "a" de Lacan constituye el elemento clave de una ontología social. El todo siempre va a ser encarnado por una parte. En términos de nuestro análisis: no existe ninguna universalidad que no sea una universalidad hegemónica. Sin embargo, hay algo más: como en los ejemplos del "close up" y del "valor de pecho" de la leche discutidos por Copjec, no hay nada en la materialidad de las partes particulares que predetermine a una u otra a funcionar como totalidad. No obstante, una vez que una parte ha asumido tal función, es su misma materialidad como parte la que se vuelve una fuente de goce.

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[Quinn Slobodian]

I got no head for the theory right now.

[Leonard Houx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not at all as much about gender as I had hoped. Still, *Imagine There's no Woman* is a fantastic collection of essays. I learned so much from reading it. Copjec is definitely the real deal.