5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
either by the woman’s body or the subversive relationship of women to language.
However, some feminists have argued that this merely reinstates a ‘female essence’
prior to the construction of sexual subjectivity, and is therefore in danger of
reinforcing traditional gender divisions through an unintended biologism (see Moi,
1985; Frosh, 1987; Flax, 1990; Elliott, 1992). Related to this is the concern that these
theories erase the mediating factors which link fantasy and social reality, either by
displacing the psychoanalytic account of the construction of sexual difference (as in
the case of Irigaray and Cixous), or by essentialism (as with Kristeva’s merging of the
semiotic and motherhood). (For further discussion on these points see Benhabib and
Cornell, 1987; Cornell, 1991.)
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POSTMODERN THEORY
The Enlightenment reading of psychoanalysis—represented in, say, Habermas’s
rendition of Freud’s epigram ‘Where Id was, there Ego shall become’ as culturally
prefigurative of the possibility for undistorted communication—has come in for
sustained criticism in recent years. One of the sources of the suspicion of modernist
psychoanalysis, with its characteristic emphasis on maximizing an individual’s
freedom, derives from the Lacanian argument that the notion of the autonomous ego
is itself an imaginary construct. Some authors and analysts associated with the
postmodern turn of recent theorizing rework the Lacanian order of the Imaginary and
apply it to culture and knowledge in general, reinterpreting warnings of the death of
the subject as a kind of dawning realization that the whole category of subjectivity is
itself illusory. The postmodern critique, which combines elements from the
philosophical standpoint of post-structuralism with elements of anti-psychoanalysis,
tries to dismantle the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious,
cultural prohibitions and repressed libido, subjugation and liberation. In postmodern
conditions, with its dramatic speed-up in technologies, the subject is not only
decentred but desubjectivized as well. What this means, at least in its more
thoroughgoing versions, is a radical deconstruction of the notion of subjectivity itself.
How can psychoanalysis, after all, conceivably represent the subject as a bundle of
organized dispositions, affects and appetites, when contemporary society is marked
in its entirety by fluidity, pluralism, variety and ambivalence? A radical assault on
fixed positions and boundaries of all imagination, the postmodern re-writing of
psychoanalysis underscores the fluid and multiple trajectories of libidinal enjoyment.
The indeterminacy of desire, repetition, the death drive, bodily zones and intensities:
these are core elements of the postmodern celebration of the multidimensional and
fragmented aspects of our contemporary imaginary.