Original scientific paper
Lacan and Critical Musicology
Bert Olivier
; Philosophy, Centre for Advanced Studies, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Abstract
In this paper an attempt is made to show the significance, for critical musicology, of the work of the psychoanalytical poststructuralist thinker, Jacques Lacan. To that end Lacan's registers of the imaginary and the symbolic are elucidated, especially in so far as the former represents the sphere of the imaginary identification and alienation of the subject as moi, ego or self, and the latter, in turn, instantiates the sphere of language, that is, of the subject as 'I' or je. The imaginary also represents the realm where the subject, via primary misrecognition in the socalled 'mirror phase', finds (spurious) unity and wholeness in its 'image' - something that sets the pattern of all subsequent alienating identifications on its part. Lacan, it is argued, offers an understanding of those possibilities, available to the subject, of intermittent emancipation from the potentially suffocating armour of the imaginary, which may also be understood in ideological terms. These possibilities involve both the symbolic realm as well as the unconscious as a 'third term' that not only destabilizes the subject as ego, but is also, as 'discourse of the Other', the locus of the subject's 'desire'. Brief attention is also given to the third of Lacan's registers, namely the 'real', and to its significance in the present context. To conclude, the potential fruitfulness of the Lacanian conception of the subject (as being precariously suspended among these three registers) for the hermeneutic or ideology- critical dimension of musicology is explored.
Keywords
Lacan; imaginary; symbolic; 'real'; identification; alienation; discourse of the Other; ideology-critique
Hrčak ID:
64282
URI
Publication date:
14.1.2005.
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