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Lacan's Medievalism.

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Lacan's Medievalism

By Erin Felicia Labbie

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006

The central thesis of Erin Labbie's Lacan's Medievalism is that Lacan can rightfully be considered a medievalist not only because he draws upon medieval texts in elaborating the concepts that constituted his return to Freud, but principally because his conceptualization of the unconscious situates him as a realist in the realism-nominalism debate that pervaded medieval philosophy. I would like to state at the outset that this book's proposal to expose the confluences between medieval philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is extraordinarily ambitious because it brings together two fields that, in their scope and complexity, would require several lifetimes (or at least more than one academic career) to grasp with any confidence. This is, at least, my opinion, and I approach writing this review with a sense of my own lack of expertise in both the intricacies of the medieval debate concerning particulars and universals, and in Lacan's writings. On the other hand, Lacan himself said that "understanding" was a sham, an instance of meconnaissance, and that the experience of lack provokes desire and signification, and so I proceed in this spirit.

Establishing a contrast between Lacan and myriad other twentieth-century intellectuals who may be considered medievalists because of their engagement with medieval texts, including Agamben, Arendt, Bataille, and Barthes (a topic Bruce Holsinger covers in The Premodern Condition), Labbie argues that Lacan is a medievalist because "his methodologies follow those established by the medieval scholastic scholars who sought to determine the potential of the human subject to know and represent real universal categories" (2). Richard R. Glejzer's article "Lacan with Scholasticism: Agencies of the Letter," published in American Imago (1997), helps Labbie to articulate the main reason that provokes both scholars to associate Lacan's mode of thought with that of the school-men: "As Glejzer rightly points out, 'both scholasticism and psychoanalysis are founded on an imperative to consider a knowledge that resists signification ...' The foundational structures of both scholasticism and psychoanalysis seek to investigate the limits of knowledge based on linguistic representation" (3). More specifically, just as the scholastic thinkers (and I believe she is referring mainly to Thomas Aquinas; she cites several times medievalist-psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's assertion that "Lacan is a Thomist") acknowledge the limit of the ability of human reason to know God, Lacan asserts that there is a limit in the ability to know and represent the unconscious. In other words, just as Aquinas recognizes that humans cannot fully know God, Lacan asserts that the Real, the kernel of the unconscious, will forever elude the operations of the Symbolic register.

Situating Lacan on the side of the realists in the realist-nominalist debates, she takes this analogy one step further by asserting that Lacan views the unconscious as a "real universal." She defines a "real universal" as something that exists no matter what, whether or not it receives a name (nominalists, obviously, would take a different position). The unconscious, she argues, is indeed a real universal. This raises an...

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