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Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists
In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines—psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan’s explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is “literate in desire,” and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
246 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 25, 1994
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About the author
Joan Copjec
53 books63 followersJoan 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
November 8, 2018
I have read Read My Desire twice: the first time was in a rush, and I was unable to appreciate fully the subtlety of Copjec's arguments, while on the second reading I made sure to take more care to understand the precise outlines of her thesis. It was worth the effort.
Copjec's argument, as I see it, is not really with Foucault or the historicist's, despite the subtitle of the book, but with an erroneous assumption that all human desire can be rationalized and explained - historicism in particular seems to believe that, if there are gaps in this respect, it is only because we haven't looked hard enough. (I'm not at all convinced that this is Foucault's position, especially in light of his essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," which does take into account the importance of contingency.) In Lacanian psychoanalysis, by contrast, the subject is something that fails to come into discourse, that is detectable only by the hole that it leaves in language. That is the essence of Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 takes this critique a step further by applying it to film studies and its appropriation of the Foucauldian/Benthamite idea of the panoptic gaze. Again, Copjec shows that this conception of the subject as the product of the gaze of the law means that the subject is located purely within the realm of the symbolic. Lacan's theory of the gaze, by contrast, is instructive here, for there the gaze is defined not by what it sees, but again by a certain kind of failure (remember in Seminar XI, when the tuna can "sees" Lacan in the boat?). It is this failure, this absence, that once again defines the subject's place at the intersection of the real and symbolic.
In Chapter 3, Copjec contemplates Henri Bergson, the death drive, and Zeno's paradox in order to try and explain the difference between the symbolic and the real. In Zeno's paradox, for instance, it is impossible to represent properly the movement of Achilles as he overtakes the tortoise, but this event does ultimately occur in the real. For Copjec, psychoanalysis continues to subscribe to the principle of sufficient reason, but it differs from the usual scientific assumptions because the actual cause is never directly representable to consciousness (except as an absence).
Chapter 4 was my favorite part of the book, a brilliant piece of analysis that starts, unexpectedly, with Clérambault's bizarre collection of photographs of North African people draped in cloth. Copjec interweaves these pictures with a meditation on how utilitarianism and functionalism have changed architecture (buildings are now defined primarily by their use), an attitude that spills over into clothing, and then into the functionalist definition of humanity itself, which now becomes defined by useful work - clothing, in this perspective, becomes merely a decorative and inessential supplement. Copjec brilliantly shows how utilitarianism begins from an erroneous assumption about what human beings ought "rationally" to want, a logic that it then uses to justify tyranny (the tyrant, out of a perverse sense of "care," commands subjects to learn to do "what is good for them") and imperalism (with the colonizer using the same tyrannical logic on colonized peoples).
Chapter 5 shows an unexpected link between stories of vampirism and the championing of breastfeeding. There are some interesting discussions about anxiety in this section, especially about how human beings use the symbolic order's capacity for ritual in order to try and control the eruptions of the real that make us anxious. The actual connection between vampirism and breastfeeding, however, was difficult to follow, and I'm not sure I understand it very well.
In Chapter 6, Copjec looks at how a politician like Ronald Reagan can repeatedly tell lies and get away with it: because the people love something that is beyond truth about him. People want that love above all else, and it is this illusion of love that he gives them in return - whether he lies or not is thus irrelevant. It is a desire that cannot be rationalized: people want love regardless of whether what they are actually given is good or bad, true or false. This leads to a meditation on the figure of the detective, a figure who, unlike the policeman, has learned to disregard the outward signifiers of a speaker like Reagan and instead has become an expert at reading the irrational desire that makes people follow his message.
Chapter 7 contains a masterful analysis of the "locked room" paradox in film noir. This involves further ruminations on detective fiction and its connection to statistics and the probable. Again, Copjec argues that the policeman is too literal, too stuck in the literalness of the symbolic, whereas the detective locates desire at the point of the real, where the symbolic fails.
The final section, Chapter 8, is an extended rumination on sexual difference via Judith Butler and Immanuel Kant. While praising Butler's perceptiveness, Copjec argues that the problem with her ideas is that she ultimately locates sexuality atthe level of the signifier rather than tracing its position in the real. Copjec then launches into a very complex and hard-to-follow discussion of Lacan's theory of sexuation and how it relates to Kant. She demonstrates how the subject comes into existence (or rather, fails to come into existence) in two different ways that somehow translate into male and female. I understand the failure part, but I remain baffled as to why this equates to sexual difference. A difference of desire? Yes. A different way of approaching authority and the symbolic order? Yes. But sexual difference? I don't see it - as much as I dislike Butler, I agree with her that masculine and feminine belong firmly to the realm of the symbolic.
Copjec's book does require some background knowledge of both Lacan and Foucault, but compared to many other similar titles it is clearly written and accessible. For me, Chapter 4, with its amazing critique of utilitarianism, is the argument's high point, a genuinely original and innovative argument that has enormous consequences for how we can counter the devastating effects of utilitarianism on our world.
Copjec's argument, as I see it, is not really with Foucault or the historicist's, despite the subtitle of the book, but with an erroneous assumption that all human desire can be rationalized and explained - historicism in particular seems to believe that, if there are gaps in this respect, it is only because we haven't looked hard enough. (I'm not at all convinced that this is Foucault's position, especially in light of his essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," which does take into account the importance of contingency.) In Lacanian psychoanalysis, by contrast, the subject is something that fails to come into discourse, that is detectable only by the hole that it leaves in language. That is the essence of Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 takes this critique a step further by applying it to film studies and its appropriation of the Foucauldian/Benthamite idea of the panoptic gaze. Again, Copjec shows that this conception of the subject as the product of the gaze of the law means that the subject is located purely within the realm of the symbolic. Lacan's theory of the gaze, by contrast, is instructive here, for there the gaze is defined not by what it sees, but again by a certain kind of failure (remember in Seminar XI, when the tuna can "sees" Lacan in the boat?). It is this failure, this absence, that once again defines the subject's place at the intersection of the real and symbolic.
In Chapter 3, Copjec contemplates Henri Bergson, the death drive, and Zeno's paradox in order to try and explain the difference between the symbolic and the real. In Zeno's paradox, for instance, it is impossible to represent properly the movement of Achilles as he overtakes the tortoise, but this event does ultimately occur in the real. For Copjec, psychoanalysis continues to subscribe to the principle of sufficient reason, but it differs from the usual scientific assumptions because the actual cause is never directly representable to consciousness (except as an absence).
Chapter 4 was my favorite part of the book, a brilliant piece of analysis that starts, unexpectedly, with Clérambault's bizarre collection of photographs of North African people draped in cloth. Copjec interweaves these pictures with a meditation on how utilitarianism and functionalism have changed architecture (buildings are now defined primarily by their use), an attitude that spills over into clothing, and then into the functionalist definition of humanity itself, which now becomes defined by useful work - clothing, in this perspective, becomes merely a decorative and inessential supplement. Copjec brilliantly shows how utilitarianism begins from an erroneous assumption about what human beings ought "rationally" to want, a logic that it then uses to justify tyranny (the tyrant, out of a perverse sense of "care," commands subjects to learn to do "what is good for them") and imperalism (with the colonizer using the same tyrannical logic on colonized peoples).
Chapter 5 shows an unexpected link between stories of vampirism and the championing of breastfeeding. There are some interesting discussions about anxiety in this section, especially about how human beings use the symbolic order's capacity for ritual in order to try and control the eruptions of the real that make us anxious. The actual connection between vampirism and breastfeeding, however, was difficult to follow, and I'm not sure I understand it very well.
In Chapter 6, Copjec looks at how a politician like Ronald Reagan can repeatedly tell lies and get away with it: because the people love something that is beyond truth about him. People want that love above all else, and it is this illusion of love that he gives them in return - whether he lies or not is thus irrelevant. It is a desire that cannot be rationalized: people want love regardless of whether what they are actually given is good or bad, true or false. This leads to a meditation on the figure of the detective, a figure who, unlike the policeman, has learned to disregard the outward signifiers of a speaker like Reagan and instead has become an expert at reading the irrational desire that makes people follow his message.
Chapter 7 contains a masterful analysis of the "locked room" paradox in film noir. This involves further ruminations on detective fiction and its connection to statistics and the probable. Again, Copjec argues that the policeman is too literal, too stuck in the literalness of the symbolic, whereas the detective locates desire at the point of the real, where the symbolic fails.
The final section, Chapter 8, is an extended rumination on sexual difference via Judith Butler and Immanuel Kant. While praising Butler's perceptiveness, Copjec argues that the problem with her ideas is that she ultimately locates sexuality atthe level of the signifier rather than tracing its position in the real. Copjec then launches into a very complex and hard-to-follow discussion of Lacan's theory of sexuation and how it relates to Kant. She demonstrates how the subject comes into existence (or rather, fails to come into existence) in two different ways that somehow translate into male and female. I understand the failure part, but I remain baffled as to why this equates to sexual difference. A difference of desire? Yes. A different way of approaching authority and the symbolic order? Yes. But sexual difference? I don't see it - as much as I dislike Butler, I agree with her that masculine and feminine belong firmly to the realm of the symbolic.
Copjec's book does require some background knowledge of both Lacan and Foucault, but compared to many other similar titles it is clearly written and accessible. For me, Chapter 4, with its amazing critique of utilitarianism, is the argument's high point, a genuinely original and innovative argument that has enormous consequences for how we can counter the devastating effects of utilitarianism on our world.
August 30, 2018
This book is incredible. Not because every argument is bulletproof, but because it is audacious, comprehensive, and necessary. To separate Lacan and Foucault is an essential task in modern philosophy/critical theory. To understand the functioning of historicism and the science of psychoanalysis is equally crucial. Copjec aids her readers in achieving these goals. As heart-stopping as Copjec's introduction is, Foucault is less involved in this text than one might realize. Instead, Copjec spends her time deep in the complexities of Lacan's thinking, exposing obvious contradictions with historicism and Foucault's major work.
Copjec's introduction is wonderful and serves as a great mission statement for the project of this text. Copjec aligns the primal father of Freud's Totem and Taboo, the death drive, and the generative principle of a given society (as opposed to its 'cultural content') as extra-discursive figures of a different order of what they precipitate (the society of equal brothers, the pleasure principle, and the aforementioned cultural content respectively.) This paradigm is crucial to all of Copjec's arguments as they proceed, and she seeks to analyze what desire evinces despite it potentially existing outside of the sphere of discourse. Copjec claims, via Lacan, that desire can be articulated even if it is not manifest in discourse in the way that what desire precipitates is manifest.
The strongest chapters beyond the introduction are the 3rd and 6th. Still, just about every one has some value. The 6th chapter, in particular, deserves special attention in the age of Trump. Copjec even mentions Trump in the same breath as Reagan! I imagine her sense of vindication is a vexed one. Copjec argues that the media attacks on Reagan could never destroy the object a, the object cause of desire, that made American's love him. Critics of Trump would be wise to consider this chapter closely, and Copjec's call for a cultural studies literate in desire more broadly.
Brilliant thinkers can't always be right, however. Copjec is at her worst making baffling conflations of indeterminate terms. In her final chapter, she uses Lacan's articulation of sexual intercourse to make a critique of sexual difference. This is an enormous mistake. Intercourse and sexual difference must be taken differently, outside of the linguistic accident that one word, 'sex,' can refer to both. Overall, her final chapter leaves a lot to be desired. Still, it is a fascinating argument that offers a worthwhile, if incomplete, rendering of Lacan's writing on sex/gender.
I would much prefer a big failure to a small success. However, Copjec manages to mostly succeed, and her minimal failures stem from an argument audacious enough to make them marvelous in their own right. Copjec's missteps are worth more consideration than most thinker's most valued contributions to philosophy.
Copjec's introduction is wonderful and serves as a great mission statement for the project of this text. Copjec aligns the primal father of Freud's Totem and Taboo, the death drive, and the generative principle of a given society (as opposed to its 'cultural content') as extra-discursive figures of a different order of what they precipitate (the society of equal brothers, the pleasure principle, and the aforementioned cultural content respectively.) This paradigm is crucial to all of Copjec's arguments as they proceed, and she seeks to analyze what desire evinces despite it potentially existing outside of the sphere of discourse. Copjec claims, via Lacan, that desire can be articulated even if it is not manifest in discourse in the way that what desire precipitates is manifest.
The strongest chapters beyond the introduction are the 3rd and 6th. Still, just about every one has some value. The 6th chapter, in particular, deserves special attention in the age of Trump. Copjec even mentions Trump in the same breath as Reagan! I imagine her sense of vindication is a vexed one. Copjec argues that the media attacks on Reagan could never destroy the object a, the object cause of desire, that made American's love him. Critics of Trump would be wise to consider this chapter closely, and Copjec's call for a cultural studies literate in desire more broadly.
Brilliant thinkers can't always be right, however. Copjec is at her worst making baffling conflations of indeterminate terms. In her final chapter, she uses Lacan's articulation of sexual intercourse to make a critique of sexual difference. This is an enormous mistake. Intercourse and sexual difference must be taken differently, outside of the linguistic accident that one word, 'sex,' can refer to both. Overall, her final chapter leaves a lot to be desired. Still, it is a fascinating argument that offers a worthwhile, if incomplete, rendering of Lacan's writing on sex/gender.
I would much prefer a big failure to a small success. However, Copjec manages to mostly succeed, and her minimal failures stem from an argument audacious enough to make them marvelous in their own right. Copjec's missteps are worth more consideration than most thinker's most valued contributions to philosophy.
June 11, 2025
Continuing to circle Lacan via the secondary lit… this was really good! Wide-ranging and interesting, sometimes mindbending.
December 27, 2021
A few months ago, I read Preciado's attack on psychoanalytic theory, "Can The Monster Speak?", a speech attended by 3,000 psychoanalysists in 2019. Who knew that 25 years earlier Joan Copjec had already rendered Preciado's argument pointless! The monster can speak, Preciado, but its words will fail - always.
Undoubtedly essential reading for Lacanian theory, _Read My Desire_ is a spiritual successor to Slavoj Žižek's _Sublime Object of Ideology_. Whereas the latter conjures up Hegel avec Lacan, Copjec gives us Lacan avec Kant (_LaKant_) in her attack on the historicists, i.e. Foucault. Just as Žižek added the concept of jouissance to Althusser's theory of ideology, Copjec disarms historicism with the concept of desire. Her engagement with Butler and sexual differentiation is notable.
Every chapter offers a masterclass of Lacan's teachings which is simultaneously stimulating and challenging, and I often struggled to grasp all of her arguments, but this is to be expected. To help me out a bit, I read this book as I listened to the three episodes at the Why Theory podcast with Todd McGowan and his co-host (I forget the name) on the book. Very useful and helped me out loads.
Undoubtedly essential reading for Lacanian theory, _Read My Desire_ is a spiritual successor to Slavoj Žižek's _Sublime Object of Ideology_. Whereas the latter conjures up Hegel avec Lacan, Copjec gives us Lacan avec Kant (_LaKant_) in her attack on the historicists, i.e. Foucault. Just as Žižek added the concept of jouissance to Althusser's theory of ideology, Copjec disarms historicism with the concept of desire. Her engagement with Butler and sexual differentiation is notable.
Every chapter offers a masterclass of Lacan's teachings which is simultaneously stimulating and challenging, and I often struggled to grasp all of her arguments, but this is to be expected. To help me out a bit, I read this book as I listened to the three episodes at the Why Theory podcast with Todd McGowan and his co-host (I forget the name) on the book. Very useful and helped me out loads.
March 13, 2018
I can't say I fully understood this book, and yet, as a Foucauldian, this book is no less than a sheer revelation. It is somewhat immodest, to say the least, and yet it is totally is. Mainly, though, it leaves me with a burning question: why didn't I put more emphasis on learning Lacan, on studying his writings? And why, to say the least, isn't he's taught more in other departments? As a sociologist, I now feel that I need some more Lacan, and if this is not a compliment to Copjec's masterful tour de force, I don't know what is.
May 26, 2025
Read over a period of time. A book I always return to but went over this again cover to cover. Just insanely clarifying but worried this time around about its efficacy beyond those that have bought in. Ofc it’s irrefutable to me but how much so to the wider public this many years onward.
Still inevitably goated, can’t get enough
Still inevitably goated, can’t get enough
Read
July 27, 2021An ingenious selection box of essays
Read
February 4, 2025I have to read this again. I Kant explain it yet.
July 21, 2025
This will require a re-read after I’ve gotten further into Lacan’s seminars, especially Seminars VII, XI, and XX. This is a classic in Lacanian criticism that has been hyped up in my mind for a bit. While I agree that Lacan as presented here offers a way to think through some of the (perceived? really existing?) impasses in Foucault’s middle period, Copjec to me does a less convincing job at explaining why Lacan is actually correct or more convincing than Foucault or the other “historicists” she finds to be Foucaultian. Many times Copjec’s argumentation seemed to go something like, “while Foucault thinks this, what he misses is this insight from Lacan who states something else is happening instead,” but in few instances is it really shown that Lacan is *right*. I also would have appreciated a bit more connective tissue and signal phrasing throughout to help me identify where we’re located in the argument; at times I really wasn’t sure how the different subsections in each chapter supported its thesis. I’m fine with a writer asking me to work for it but too often I felt the analysis went far afield from the stated point of the chapter. I felt the book was best when being direct at explaining contrasting perspectives with particular emphases in explicating what psychoanalysis and Lacan specifically have to offer, but I think other texts do a better job at simply explaining Lacanian thought more fully. 3.5 stars for now, though I won’t be surprised if when I come back to it just a little smarter that I’ll see it for its full value.
June 11, 2008
A must-read for anyone interested in psychoanalysis
November 4, 2015
The main ambition of the book gets lost along the way. Quite early, no less.
Read
July 28, 2022One becomes visible—not only to
others but also to oneself—only through (by seeing through) the
categories constructed by a specific, historically defined society. These
categories of visibility are categories of knowledge.
incompleteness of every
meaning and position
When Lacan says that the subject is trapped in the imaginary, he means
that the subject can imagine nothing outside it; the imaginary cannot
itself provide the means that would allow the subject to transcend it
this point at which something appears
to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the
point of the Lacanian gaze. It marks the absence of a signified; it is an
unoccupiable point,
The subject, in
short, cannot be located or locate itself at the point of the gaze, since
this point marks, on the contrary, its very annihilation
Lacan argues, rather, that
beyond the signifying network, beyond the visual field, there is, in fact,
nothing at all
The fact that it is materially
impossible to say the whole truth—that truth always backs away from
language, that words always fall short of their goal—founds the subject.
The horrible truth, revealed to Lacan by
Petit-Jean, is that the gaze does not see you. So, if you are looking for
confirmation of the truth of your being or the clarity of your vision, you
are on your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming; it will not
validate you
It must, rather, consist in the belief that one’s
own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism, then,
seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject constantly
finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize itself. What one
loves in one’s image is something more than the image (“in you more
than you”).29 Thus is narcissism the source of the malevolence with
which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity it unleashes on all
its own representations.
the subject’s narcissistic relation to the
representation that constructs him does not place him in happy accord
with the reality that the apparatus constructs for him
The effect of
representation is, instead, the suspicion that some reality is being
camouflaged, that we are being deceived as to the exact nature of some
thing-in-itself that lies behind representation. In response to such a
representation, against such a background of deception, the subject’s
own being breaks up between its unconscious being and its conscious
semblance.
Her complicity and even her pleasure are secured as she looks
at and constructs herself through the categories provided by these
discourses.
The subject constructed by language finds
itself detached from a part of itself. And it is this primary detachment
that renders fruitless all the subject’s efforts for a reunion with its
complete being
Language can
only present itself to the subject as a veil that cuts off from view a reality
that is other than what we are allowed to see.
colonialism was the historical partner of
functionalism’s rise
Through language, the
human subject maintains a symbolic relation to the world
others but also to oneself—only through (by seeing through) the
categories constructed by a specific, historically defined society. These
categories of visibility are categories of knowledge.
incompleteness of every
meaning and position
When Lacan says that the subject is trapped in the imaginary, he means
that the subject can imagine nothing outside it; the imaginary cannot
itself provide the means that would allow the subject to transcend it
this point at which something appears
to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the
point of the Lacanian gaze. It marks the absence of a signified; it is an
unoccupiable point,
The subject, in
short, cannot be located or locate itself at the point of the gaze, since
this point marks, on the contrary, its very annihilation
Lacan argues, rather, that
beyond the signifying network, beyond the visual field, there is, in fact,
nothing at all
The fact that it is materially
impossible to say the whole truth—that truth always backs away from
language, that words always fall short of their goal—founds the subject.
The horrible truth, revealed to Lacan by
Petit-Jean, is that the gaze does not see you. So, if you are looking for
confirmation of the truth of your being or the clarity of your vision, you
are on your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming; it will not
validate you
It must, rather, consist in the belief that one’s
own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism, then,
seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject constantly
finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize itself. What one
loves in one’s image is something more than the image (“in you more
than you”).29 Thus is narcissism the source of the malevolence with
which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity it unleashes on all
its own representations.
the subject’s narcissistic relation to the
representation that constructs him does not place him in happy accord
with the reality that the apparatus constructs for him
The effect of
representation is, instead, the suspicion that some reality is being
camouflaged, that we are being deceived as to the exact nature of some
thing-in-itself that lies behind representation. In response to such a
representation, against such a background of deception, the subject’s
own being breaks up between its unconscious being and its conscious
semblance.
Her complicity and even her pleasure are secured as she looks
at and constructs herself through the categories provided by these
discourses.
The subject constructed by language finds
itself detached from a part of itself. And it is this primary detachment
that renders fruitless all the subject’s efforts for a reunion with its
complete being
Language can
only present itself to the subject as a veil that cuts off from view a reality
that is other than what we are allowed to see.
colonialism was the historical partner of
functionalism’s rise
Through language, the
human subject maintains a symbolic relation to the world
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 19, 2021
Within the time I approached the end of the first chapter of this book, I was convinced that I’ve encountered something novel, a Lacanian world. When someone normally gazes something, she thinks she is the subject which perceives an outer object; with Lacan’s gaze we are confronted with a visual field which, instead of oozing out of the subject, is something that constitutes the subject: The subject is the subject of the gaze, instead of the gaze being the gaze of the subject. “Lacan argues, rather, that beyond the signifying network, beyond the visual field, there is, in fact, nothing at all. The veil of representation actually conceals nothing; there is nothing behind representation.” (The Orthopsychic Subject)
Conceiving the Other gives us the feeling of wanting to comprehend what the Other enjoys. As it enjoys itself, it does so with a desire for the useless; the utilitarian principle urges us to undress this desire: Imperialism undertakes its surge. But what would comprise the most disgusting form of the utilitarian fantasy of un-concealment? Perversion. Rather than attacking the Other’s secret enjoyment, we rather respect its uselessness, we are caught within the fantasy and accept it, the Other becomes tropic, exotic, an object of perversion. “The pervert places himself in the position of ‘never being deprived with regard to knowledge, and most particularly knowledge concerning love and eroticism.’” (The Satorial Superego)
The object of desire should never come too close, for we then realise that it is nothing. Hence the symbolic order collapses, the house collapses. Every house occupies a room no one enters, because it is by not entering the house that the whole stabilizes itself. Coming too close triggers anxiety. We should also not get too far away, since this will make the symbolic disintegrate. “What the barred room bars, first of all, is the rest of the house, it marks the limit that allows the house to constitute itself as a whole – but a whole from which this room is absent.” (Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety)
The way of understanding themes, from politics and sexuality to film theory and Kant, makes this book an important read. I am totally moved and sure that this is definitely the best book I will read in a while. Both was I by this book gifted with the psychoanalytic perspective, as well as highly manageable tools in studies concerning culture as a whole.
Conceiving the Other gives us the feeling of wanting to comprehend what the Other enjoys. As it enjoys itself, it does so with a desire for the useless; the utilitarian principle urges us to undress this desire: Imperialism undertakes its surge. But what would comprise the most disgusting form of the utilitarian fantasy of un-concealment? Perversion. Rather than attacking the Other’s secret enjoyment, we rather respect its uselessness, we are caught within the fantasy and accept it, the Other becomes tropic, exotic, an object of perversion. “The pervert places himself in the position of ‘never being deprived with regard to knowledge, and most particularly knowledge concerning love and eroticism.’” (The Satorial Superego)
The object of desire should never come too close, for we then realise that it is nothing. Hence the symbolic order collapses, the house collapses. Every house occupies a room no one enters, because it is by not entering the house that the whole stabilizes itself. Coming too close triggers anxiety. We should also not get too far away, since this will make the symbolic disintegrate. “What the barred room bars, first of all, is the rest of the house, it marks the limit that allows the house to constitute itself as a whole – but a whole from which this room is absent.” (Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety)
The way of understanding themes, from politics and sexuality to film theory and Kant, makes this book an important read. I am totally moved and sure that this is definitely the best book I will read in a while. Both was I by this book gifted with the psychoanalytic perspective, as well as highly manageable tools in studies concerning culture as a whole.
February 10, 2025
In the Introduction, Copjec defines historicism as immanentism, charging Foucault with his inability to think extimacy, transcendence. In "The Orthopsychic Subject," she critiques a "panoptic" conception of the gaze which would determine those caught within it, à la Christian Metz (I disagree that this is meant as a subliminal critique of Laura Mulvey). In "The Sartorial Superego," she uses the colonialist notion of the Oriental veil as a barrier to sexual relation to theorize the rise of functionalism in architecture, the denigration of ornament as non-utilitarian, and thus to utilitarianism as an ethic (duty as masculine, fashion as feminine) that shies away from the Neighbor. In "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason," she deploys the Kantian antinomies to think Lacanian sexual difference against Butler: "sex is the stumbling block of sense," "masculine" and "feminine" as two "mode[s] of the failure of our knowledge," on freedom and on origin. However, some of the other readings are much more mundane applications of Lacan, such as the reading of Zeno's paradox, Ronald Reagan, vampires, Frankenstein, and detective fiction: signifiers cut up the body, the objet a is operative, the oral drive is also found in breast-feeding and incites anxiety as partial object, the uncanny marks an excess which cannot be re-assimilated into a Hegelian master-slave dialectic, intersubjective space is not reducible to a statistical investigation.
January 30, 2022
Excellent book about psychoanalytic (Freudian/Lacanian) response to historicism and deconstructionism and how film theory's incorrect reading of Lacan caused them to embrace Foucault's theory (who had famously decried psychoanalysis and the agency of change promised by it and instead adopted the panoptic argument to provided a measure of indetermination via multitude of different discourses and which this book is critical of) to explain the concept of the Gaze in Cinema. The final chapter is a clincher that connects Kant's concept of mathematical and dynamic antinomies with Lacan's theory of sexual difference which fundamentally posits that sex is the failure of reason and there are two modes of this failure - Male and Female. Using this connection, it provides critical opposition to Judith Butler's explaining away of sex as such in her epochal book Gender Trouble without invalidating the emancipatory effort that book undertook.
Read
September 1, 2025Is power complete, or does it lack? Copjec takes the Lacanian view that power is necessarily incomplete as it is created by desire, which comes from lack. Foucault, at least in his later career, argued that power is complete, and that any desire comes from the power structure itself. At least that is an over-simplified version based on my current understanding.
This book is challenging and difficult, and I will need to reread again later on to get a better grasp. For a first read, I got a lot out of better understanding the gaze, universality vs particularity, the death drive (especially the idea of a second, symbolic death). The final chapter exploring the relationship between Kant's arguments about the limits of reason with Lacan's idea that there is no such thing as a woman was thought provoking.
This book is challenging and difficult, and I will need to reread again later on to get a better grasp. For a first read, I got a lot out of better understanding the gaze, universality vs particularity, the death drive (especially the idea of a second, symbolic death). The final chapter exploring the relationship between Kant's arguments about the limits of reason with Lacan's idea that there is no such thing as a woman was thought provoking.
December 5, 2024
Honestly, what an insane book. If I will ever obtain 2% of the grasp and creative interpretability Joan Copjec has on Lacan, I can die peacefully. Even though I did not understand everything, it is a convincing argument for a Lacanian/Kantian understanding of reality supported by a split between desire/drive and phenomena/noumena over a Foucauldian and Butlerian historicist understanding of reality. Reality, for Copjec, can only exist precisely because there is a void, a failure, a lack at its heart. The last chapter - Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason - is mind-blowing, on how she interprets Lacan's formula that the sexual relation does not exist through a Kantian lens. The critique of utilitarianism - and why it is extremely unethical to be utilitarian - was also very good.
Read
July 15, 2019excellent book. Reads beautifully, offers meandering analysis, the chapter on Clérambault is like well-written fiction, and the juxtaposition between Lacan and Foucault is really thoughtful and nuanced in a way that most works aren't. To extrapolate her argument into your own work is tricky, but ensures you'll actually be adapting it rather than just cutting and pasting a pull quote. But if you have to have a pull quote, the introduction is rich.
January 1, 2025
Some of this was definitely over my head...
One off those 80% comprehending reads.
But worth it alone for the chapter on democracy.
Had to keep looking at the pub date to make sure it wasn't current.
Not Trump but Reagan.
But TOTALLY the same.
Astute critique absolutely here.
So timely..
We are destined to be f*cked...
One off those 80% comprehending reads.
But worth it alone for the chapter on democracy.
Had to keep looking at the pub date to make sure it wasn't current.
Not Trump but Reagan.
But TOTALLY the same.
Astute critique absolutely here.
So timely..
We are destined to be f*cked...
July 6, 2025
The title of this book can be misleading, but this book is not just about Lacan and his position against historicist. This book is about so many things. This book is so dense that you have to open your notebook to start talk about it, you can't just talk about a single topic, as everything is crisscrossing everything in a very chaotic and beautiful manner.
July 15, 2019
While some critiques stood but it was largely nebulous
October 19, 2021
Phenomenal.
September 9, 2022
Would be five stars if the last chapter on Judith Butler weren't entirely incomprehensible to someone who doesn't have a PHd in Lacanian theory
September 18, 2023
Copjec is that rare Lacanian who says precisely what she means as clearly and precisely as possible. When necessary, she draws blood.
March 27, 2024
Best lacanian since lacan.
August 3, 2024
definitely clarified some things for me, though wasnt convinced by all of her applications esp frankenstein
October 8, 2025
Læste ikke alle de essays som var i bogen, men dem som jeg læste var virkelig spændende, men holy hell det er også svært
Read
November 17, 2025GOATed
March 3, 2024
2020 Reading
Early in Joan Copjec's Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, she describes the predominant distinction between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian historicism as one of desire, specifically how and what each of these approaches does with desire. She writes, "Psychoanalysis, via Lacan, maintains that the exclusivity of the surface or of appearance must be interpreted to mean that appearance always routs or supplants being, that appearance and being never coincide. It is this syncopated relation that is the condition of desire. Historicism, on the other hand, wants to ground being in appearance and wants to have nothing to do with desire." As it relates to being, according to Copjec, psychoanalysis sees discord. By contrast, historicism seeks to repress discord. As she later explains, historicism "refuses to believe in repression." In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek makes a similar point about "appearance and being" never coinciding when he writes, "The subject is constituted through his own division, splitting" (204).
This distinction matters for Copjec. She suggests that too often these two theories (Lacanian psychoanalysis on one side and Foucauldian historicism on the other), "have failed to be perceived as different." The shape of historicism many credit to Foucault was the dominant mode of critical inquiry when Copjec published Read My Desire in 1994. Copjec wants to unmoor Lacan from Foucault by emphasizing the radicality of Lacan and psychoanalysis. Copjec explains how historicism disentangles the jumbled, messy contours of being. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, attempts to sustain and reveal those messy contours.
Copjec also returns her reader's understanding of the gaze to its psychoanalytic roots. Laura Mulvey popularized a reading of the gaze in film studies as a process that places spectators in a default male position. Because of the constitutive role of the male gaze, women or "the woman" become objects of desire. This gaze creates the conditions for women to be either voyeuristic objects or fetishistic objects. Conversely, Copjec reads the Lacanian gaze as "located 'behind' the image, as that which fails to appear in it and thus as that which makes all its meanings suspect." Copjec continues, "The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment." As I read it, the gaze is not something the subject can channel or harness because "The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see. The gaze, the object-cause of desire, is the object-cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible. In other words, it is what the subject does not see and not simply what it sees that founds it." Therefore, what the subject does not see establishes subjectivity. The gaze structures the subject; it is not a weapon the subject deploys.
Copjec also clarifies significant differences between desire and drive and how both modes affect and influence the subject. She writes, "The psychoanalytical subject is not infinite, it is finite, limited, and it is this limit that causes the infinity, or unsatisfiability, of its desire. One thing comes to be substituted for another in an endless chain only because the subject is cut off from that essential thing that would complete it." She continues, "The subject is never fully determinate according to psychoanalysis, which treats this indeterminateness as a real feature of the subject. This is why the historicist response to the psychoanalytic concept of the subject is so misguided. The response...approaches the universal subject as a vague concept that can, with more or less effort and a better knowledge of history, be given more precise attributes." Certain words and phrases ("finite," "cut off," and "indeterminateness") are essential for understanding psychoanalysis's approach to the subject, especially in contrast to historicism. Recognizing the subject as barred flies in the face of, as Copjec's sees it, historicism's desire to unknot and disavow contradictions and inconsistencies. This is what is at stake for psychoanalysis. It wants all of us to see the degrees of inconsistency that are constitutive to our being.
***
2024 Reading
While Read My Desire is almost 30 years old, its contribution to psychoanalysis still holds. I reread this book for a particular reason that was, unfortunately, fruitless, but returning to Copjec is never a bad time.
Early in Joan Copjec's Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, she describes the predominant distinction between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian historicism as one of desire, specifically how and what each of these approaches does with desire. She writes, "Psychoanalysis, via Lacan, maintains that the exclusivity of the surface or of appearance must be interpreted to mean that appearance always routs or supplants being, that appearance and being never coincide. It is this syncopated relation that is the condition of desire. Historicism, on the other hand, wants to ground being in appearance and wants to have nothing to do with desire." As it relates to being, according to Copjec, psychoanalysis sees discord. By contrast, historicism seeks to repress discord. As she later explains, historicism "refuses to believe in repression." In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek makes a similar point about "appearance and being" never coinciding when he writes, "The subject is constituted through his own division, splitting" (204).
This distinction matters for Copjec. She suggests that too often these two theories (Lacanian psychoanalysis on one side and Foucauldian historicism on the other), "have failed to be perceived as different." The shape of historicism many credit to Foucault was the dominant mode of critical inquiry when Copjec published Read My Desire in 1994. Copjec wants to unmoor Lacan from Foucault by emphasizing the radicality of Lacan and psychoanalysis. Copjec explains how historicism disentangles the jumbled, messy contours of being. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, attempts to sustain and reveal those messy contours.
Copjec also returns her reader's understanding of the gaze to its psychoanalytic roots. Laura Mulvey popularized a reading of the gaze in film studies as a process that places spectators in a default male position. Because of the constitutive role of the male gaze, women or "the woman" become objects of desire. This gaze creates the conditions for women to be either voyeuristic objects or fetishistic objects. Conversely, Copjec reads the Lacanian gaze as "located 'behind' the image, as that which fails to appear in it and thus as that which makes all its meanings suspect." Copjec continues, "The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment." As I read it, the gaze is not something the subject can channel or harness because "The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see. The gaze, the object-cause of desire, is the object-cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible. In other words, it is what the subject does not see and not simply what it sees that founds it." Therefore, what the subject does not see establishes subjectivity. The gaze structures the subject; it is not a weapon the subject deploys.
Copjec also clarifies significant differences between desire and drive and how both modes affect and influence the subject. She writes, "The psychoanalytical subject is not infinite, it is finite, limited, and it is this limit that causes the infinity, or unsatisfiability, of its desire. One thing comes to be substituted for another in an endless chain only because the subject is cut off from that essential thing that would complete it." She continues, "The subject is never fully determinate according to psychoanalysis, which treats this indeterminateness as a real feature of the subject. This is why the historicist response to the psychoanalytic concept of the subject is so misguided. The response...approaches the universal subject as a vague concept that can, with more or less effort and a better knowledge of history, be given more precise attributes." Certain words and phrases ("finite," "cut off," and "indeterminateness") are essential for understanding psychoanalysis's approach to the subject, especially in contrast to historicism. Recognizing the subject as barred flies in the face of, as Copjec's sees it, historicism's desire to unknot and disavow contradictions and inconsistencies. This is what is at stake for psychoanalysis. It wants all of us to see the degrees of inconsistency that are constitutive to our being.
***
2024 Reading
While Read My Desire is almost 30 years old, its contribution to psychoanalysis still holds. I reread this book for a particular reason that was, unfortunately, fruitless, but returning to Copjec is never a bad time.
January 19, 2011
Copjec is no Zizek but she takes Lacan more literally than Zizek does, which is good for understanding the finer points of the clinical side of Lacanian theory. But this book focuses mainly on Lacanian discourse analysis and film theory (the chapter on noir is outstanding). But the main point Copjec wants to get across (and I think she does a good job of it) is that neo-Foucauldians have largely misunderstood Lacan over and over again (as well as Foucault for that matter) because they don't take the time to give psychoanalytic theory a chance. It's the most complicated branch of critical theory there is, so of course it's unpopular, but Judith Butler converted and so cancer you! Foucault is sect, what with his groovy modalities of power and what not, but the fact is that the entire Foucauldian oeuvre is covered in about one-fourth of the Ecrits. But whatever.
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