In a recent article published in Theory, Culture & Society Michael Billig proposed a formal, rhetorical method of evaluating Lacanian theory, applying it in a critical reading of Lacan’s early work on the ‘mirror stage’. What is crucially at stake in this reading is Lacan’s citation practices: indeed, Lacan is credited with significant omissions. Central among them is the ‘repression’ of the work of the French psychologist Henri Wallon in Lacan’s article on the ‘mirror stage’. Furthermore, it is also argued (...) that such omissions have been instrumental in the creation and reproduction of a whole Lacan mythology, which is supposedly uncritically accepted by Lacanian scholars. What this note attempts is a brief assessment of this critical method and of its conclusions. Is Lacan’s ‘repression’ of Wallon as straightforward as it seems? What criteria should be employed in evaluating Lacan’s complex citation practices? Is the assumed complicity of Lacanian scholars in Lacan’s mythologization really representative of the current status of Lacanian bibliography? Billig’s own repressions seem to cast serious doubts on the validity of his proposed method of evaluating Lacan. But his critique does open a much-needed debate on issues of intellectual debt and repression, and on the relation between psychoanalysis and academic discourse. (shrink)

The "apathetic fallacy" dominates literary criticism: to make critical inquiry "epistemologically objective" (rational and disinterested) literary critics have mistakenly tried to restrict their study to that which is "ontologically objective" (not a matter of subjective reality). Absurdity results, particularly when, because of a combination of New Critical orthodoxy, and cherry-picked psychoanalytic concepts, intentional meaning is denigrated as "merely" subjective. Fredric Jameson's account of postmodernism is a case-study in such absurdity; further folly can be avoided only by a disciplinary audit that (...) purges literary inquiry of the "apathetic fallacy.". (shrink)