Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique)

 

Despite Lacan's sustained attention to the character of rhetoric, scholars in rhetorical studies have rarely engaged Lacan as a rhetorical theorist. Though he explicitly contends with some of the pivotal thinkers in the field of rhetoric (Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian) and familiar topoi (the oratorical tradition, the power of trope, stasis theory, and questions of contingency and context), rhetorical studies has been reticent to embrace the French thinker not only because his writing is difficult and because his conception of rhetoric runs counter to our received wisdom regarding rhetorical discourse. Lacan's conception of rhetoric, argues Lundberg, upsets and extends the received wisdom of American rhetorical studies--claiming that rhetoric is a science, rather than an art; that rhetoric is predicated not on the reciprocal exchange of meanings, but rather on the impossibility of such an exchange; and that rhetoric never achieves a correspondence with the world of referents that it attempts to describe.

 

Lundberg proceeds from an analysis of Lacan's most recognizable maxim--"the unconscious is structured like a language"--arguing that this maxim can only be understood in the light of Lacan's proclamations that "the universe is a flower of rhetoric" and that "the psychoanalyst is a rhetor." From these starting points, Lundberg advances a rhetorical theory drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis that provides a systematic account of rhetoric while simultaneously contributing to contemporary scholarship on Lacan.

 

As Lundberg shows, Lacan's work speaks directly to conversations at the center of current scholarship in rhetoric and the humanities more broadly, including debates regarding the nature of the public and public discourses, the materiality of discourse, agency, and the contours of a theory of persuasion.