정신분석과 문학 - 소외에서 분리로

Psychoanalysis and Literature: From Alienation to Separation

  What is the relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and literature? Admittedly, both psychoanalysis and criticism are essentially acts of interpretation, and the former is as textual and rhetorical as the latter. Their insight, if there is any, is not of the nature of context-free and endurable scientific knowledge but of the nature of a temporal event that takes place out of the encounter between the reader and the text. As such, critics are never in a privileged position of mechanically applying psychoanalytic theories to literary texts. But the scene of Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism in Korean academia is full of such applications on the one hand, and of commentaries (verging on annotations) of Lacan"s texts on the other. Both of them share the common lot of the imaginative poverty of Korean criticism. They are crude and rigid in their conception of Lacanian psychoanalysis and in their practice of Lacanian literary criticism. To make it worse still, there is found in Korean academia a split between the camp of Lacanian commentaries and the camp of Lacanian practical criticism, depending on their academic fields of specialization. Mostly scholars of foreign literature (especially of English literature) of psychoanalytic affiliation tend to tackle and explicate Lacan"s seamy and unsystematic texts only in order to transform them into a seamless and systematic whole. And it follows that such a rigid knowledge is ready for use by scholars of Korean literature for their reading of literary texts. One does theory, the other, practice. There is a chain of co-dependence and mutual justification. They need each other for their academic survival. Then the question arises "How can we get out of this vicious circle born out of the self-enclosed system of Lacanian psychoanalysis?" I suggest that we have to go back to the original insight of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is nothing other than the respect for the temporal event of reading. What we should learn is not Lacan"s psychoanalytic knowledge, but his rhetorical and textual act of reading. The production of meaning that attains in the reading performance continues to need our critical attention. Our critical desires have been too long obsessed with a Lacanian system of knowledge almost to the point of fixation (a severe form of alienation): we did not read Lacan, we just interpreted Lacan. In Lacanian terms, we now have to learn to "separate" ourselves from Lacan"s desires and to "dialectize" our own Korean critical desires.