Abstract
In his book Not Saussure (1988), Raymond Tallis launches a vehement critique of recent French literary theory influenced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Tallis takes particular aim at Lacan, arguing that his focus on language creates a disconnection from reality that amounts to linguistic idealism. This chapter locates Lacan’s use of structural linguistics in the broader context of his work, and engages earlier criticisms of Lacan’s appropriation of Saussure, with an in-depth focus on Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s The Title of the Letter. Seeing Lacan’s work through this wider lens not only reveals the narrowness of Tallis’s reading, but also shows how Lacan himself engages and subsequently moves away from Saussure and structural linguistics, a shift that is reflected, most importantly, in the interest of recent critics (such as Slavoj Žižek) in the later period of his thought.
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Notes
- 1.
Such observations about Lacan’s evolution as a thinker were still innovative in 1990, whereas they are now commonplace—see, for instance, James M. Mellard’s chapter ‘Which Lacan?’ in Beyond Lacan (Mellard 2006, pp. 47–73).
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Mathews, P.D. (2020). Lacan the Linguistic Charlatan. In: Lacan the Charlatan. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45204-9_2
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