Juliet Flower MacCannell

Juliet Flower MacCannell's earlier book [b:Figuring Lacan: Criticism And The Cultural Unconscious|5935496|Figuring Lacan Criticism And The Cultural Unconscious|Juliet Flower MacCannell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1524506289s/5935496.jpg|254559] was, for the most part, a straightforward introduction to the thought of Jacques Lacan. The Regime of the Brother, by contrast, is a much more difficult and challenging reflection on the political consequences of Lacan's ideas.

Before I get into the substance of this book, I want to pause for a moment and reflect on its style. MacCannell writes using the kind of over-the-top, full-blown rhetoric that turns off most uninitiated readers off immediately - indeed, even I found her prose to be heavy going most of the way. Quite simply, if you are not already deeply versed in Freud and Lacan, I doubt this book will have anything to offer you. That is a pity, considering some of the points MacCannell raises.

The other bone I have to pick with MacCannell is that she does not walk the reader through any kind of deeper rationale for her basic philosophical assumptions. What exactly is the regime of the brother? How did we come to be living in a post-patriarchal world? Too much of that basic groundwork is simply skipped over in order to get to the core of her argument. Again, if you don't have the basic theoretical groundwork at your disposal, little of what MacCannell claims will make much sense.

That really is a pity, because the basic thesis of the book is an interesting and revolutionary one. The largely unexplained "regime of the brother" refers to the myth told by Freud in Totem and Taboo, in which a group of brothers band together to kill their tyrannical father, only to find that his death leads them, out of guilt, to stick even more strongly to the paternal law.

MacCannell argues (Ch.1 and 2) that the political revolutions that have taken place since the eighteenth century have indeed overthrown the patriarchal structures of the old order, ushering in a new age of "fraternity" that downplays - even actively forgets - the past and its paternal traditions. Far from ushering in a new era of sexual and political equality, MacCannell argues that the fraternity turns from one masculine model (patriarchy) to another (fraternity), the latter being even more poisonous because of its inherent narcissism. Particularly notable for her is the way in which the fraternity finds a new way to deny sexual difference and thus disqualifies women from having a proper social identity.

Having outlined this basic theory, MacCannell then turns to some analyses of literary texts designed to back up her point. In the first and best of these chapters, she provides a brilliant reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Ch.3), showing how his political and fictional writings converge in a tactic she labels "egomimesis": rather than identifying with the other, the subject identifies instead with what he *imagines* the other to be feeling or thinking. This internal "drama" is reinforced in Rousseau's writings by an extensive meditation on the modern function of theater.

Chapter 4 focuses on another excellent reading of Stendhal's text Love. MacCannell shows how Stendhal, an adept reader and critic of Rousseau's, analyzes and undermines the narcissistic structure of the modern fraternal model. Drawing from a revamped model of courtly love, which MacCannell opposes to the narcissistic idealism of Petrarchan love, Stendhal finds a way to push aside the ego of the male lover and allow the woman, who is usually placed in the position of the Other, to speak for herself.

MacCannell then turns her attention to the fiction of Marguerite Duras, Henry James, and Jean Rhys, showing how these writers have created female characters who have resisted the new fraternal order. Their tactics are particularly poignant when placed in the colonial context, which only serves to highlight the subordination of women.

The Regime of the Brother was a frustrating book to read, overall. It contains some brilliant insights, but MacCannell's difficult style and tendency to gloss over important points often made it difficult to follow its argument. The readings of Rousseau and Stendhal are outstanding, and the analysis of Duras is quite good, but the latter parts of the book lost focus, so that the text only limped to its conclusion in spite of its bold intentions.… (mer)

Reading Juliet Flower MacCannell's Figuring Lacan was an uneven process, with long stretches of dull commentary and criticism interspersed with some interesting insights. Unfortunately this style of writing appears to be a strong tendency among American critics influenced by Lacan, as I had a similar experience with Shoshana Felman's [b:Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis|187416|Writing and Madness Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis|Shoshana Felman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348203277s/187416.jpg|181169].

The introduction emphasizes the importance of Lacan to literature - indeed, it "is *literature* and not language or linguistics that is the proper model for figuring Lacan" (p.14). Chapter 1 is a survey of the critical response to Lacan, involving Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Clément, Schneiderman, Kristeva, and Barbara Johnson. Chapter 2 focuses on the way in which the word produces not only the subject, but also a community, an emphasis that will become important later in the book. Chapter 3 explains the theory of narcissism and its relation to the Lacanian split subject. Chapter 4 contrasts speech and language by comparing the seminars to Lacan's Écrits. Chapter 5 explains the role of metonymy and metaphor. To this point in the book, there is little that is particularly new or revealing about Flower MacCannell's reading of Lacan.

The book suddenly comes to life, however, in Chapter 6, which is focused on the symbolic order. One of the strengths of Flower MacCannell's book is that she maintains a strong distinction between Lacan as a diagnostic thinkers as opposed to a prescriptive one. With this in mind, she outlines how Lacan presents *two* versions of the unconscious, the first being the symbolic order that structures society, civilization, community, call it what you will. The second version of the unconscious, by contrast, is one that escapes this symbolic order, that eludes speech and consciousness. (Of course, this is a blatant misreading of Lacan, for whom the unconscious can *never* enter the symbolic order, but instead belongs to the register of the real; Flower MacCannell has mistaken the pre-conscious domain of the symbolic order with the unconscious realm of the real.)

The best part of Flower MacCannell's analysis comes in the form of her critique of the leftist/feminist attempt to "subvert" the symbolic order, with a particular focus on Laura Mulvey's famous analysis of visual pleasure. Through a reading of Lacan's essay "Kant with Sade," Flower MacCannell shows how strategies like Mulvey's ultimately fall into the same paradoxical trap as Sade: by attempting to overthrow the Other, in trying to be defiantly subversive, such "revolutionaries" only end up reinforcing the importance of the Other and the symbolic order it institutes. Chapter 7 largely reiterates the findings of the previous chapter, returning to the bland style of the earlier sections of the book.

Flower MacCannell is generally a capable reader of Lacan, but apart from the dynamic Chapter 6, Figuring Lacan too often pulls up short on showing just how revolutionary his ideas can be.… (mer)