Jacques Lacan and his work have drawn no small amount of criticism. This page specifically treats the claims of various critics. Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was an influential French psychoanalyst as well as a structuralist who based many of his theories on the work of Sigmund Freud as well as on Ferdinand de Saussures theories on language. ...

Criticism was levelled at Jacques Lacan in the essays of Jacques Derrida, who made a considerable critique not only of Lacan's analytic writings, but his structuralist approach as a whole and its various underpinnings. Lacan, like Freud, was also the target of numerous feminist critics, who saw Lacan as carrying on the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Other feminist critics, such as Judith Butler and Jane Gallop have offered readings of Lacan's work that opened up new possibilities for feminist theory. It is reasonable to argue that although feminists have taken exception to specific elements of Lacan's work, there are no small number of feminists who are still willing critically to use his work as a resource rather than to dismiss or discredit it as a whole. Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher of Jewish descent, considered the first to dev elop deconstruction after it emerged in the work of Martin Heidegger. ... Structuralism is an approach that grew to become one of the most widely used methods of analyzing language, culture, philosophy of mathematics, and society in the second half of the 20th century. ... Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies. ... Sexism is discrimination against people based on their sex rather than their individual merits. ... Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies. ... Judith Butler Judith Butler (b. ... Jane Gallop is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. ... Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies. ...

Lacan faced far harsher criticism that has tended to dismiss him and/or his work in a more or less wholesale fashion. François Roustang, in The Lacanian Delusion, called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish. Lacan was described by Noam Chomsky (who had "met him several times") as "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print". [1] In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), authors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accused Lacan of abusing scientific concept Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (French: Impostures Intellectuelles, published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures) is a book by professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. ... Alan David Sokal (born 1955) is a physicist at New York University. ... Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist and a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. ...

There are critics who have been harsh yet still have redeeming comments to make about Lacan and his work. In a 750-page French biography of Lacan (translated into English by Barbara Bray) by Elisabeth Roudinesco, a psychiatric historian, Lacan was portrayed as a megalomaniac and compulsive womanizer who was dishonest when it was expedient. Notable, however, is that Roudinesco has also characterized Lacan as "the last great living master of psychoanalysis" (Roudinesco w/ Derrida, Of What Tomorrow..., p. 167) and further argued:

Lacan is the only heir to Freud who attempted to think the question of a school of psychoanalysis that would be neither a professional corporation, nor a party, nor a sect, nor a bureaucracy. He pushed the reflection on this subject very far, and I can testify to this, having participated in this adventure as a member of the EFP beginning in 1969. (ibid, p. 182)

The example of Chomsky

- The comment by Noam Chomsky (please follow the link: it is prefaced by a remark that attribution is not firm) is more enlightening when the remarks are put in context. Chomsky begins by noting that he has been asked over the years to extend his political criticism in a "theoretical" context. Chomsky then states that he hasn't any familiarity with "theory" or, for that matter, any idea of what body of scholarship would be referenced by that name. He does, however, restate what his preconception is of what theory should look like to warrant his interest: - - :"a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to" the kinds of problems and issues that Mike, I, and many others (in fact, most of the world's population, I think, outside of narrow and remarkably self-contained intellectual circles) are or should be concerned with: the problems and issues we speak and write about, for example, and others like them. To put it differently, show that the principles of the "theory" or "philosophy" that we are told to study and apply lead by valid argument to conclusions that we and others had not already reached on other (and better) grounds; these "others" include people lacking formal education, who typically seem to have no problem reaching these conclusions through mutual interactions that avoid the "theoretical" obscurities entirely, or often on their own. - - Chomsky's preconditions are arguably predispositions rather than positions from which to dismiss "theory", the leading practitioners of which Chomsky claims not to understand: - - :Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but ... no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. - - Chomsky immediately follows with an overly schematic remark that this must be either because the advance in their theoretical work represents a "quantum leap" or "genetic mutation" or because "... I won't spell it out". In short, Chomsky's engagement is not that of one with any familiarity or for that matter comprehensive understanding of Lacan or the others (although we shall see shortly that where he does claim understanding of Lacan, his remarks are generally favorable), but he believes that, lacking familiarity or understanding, he can allow for its dismissal by implication and thereby avoid making any salient critique of it, although he does attempt some negative remarks about Derrida's Of Grammatology, which one may set to one side for lack of sustained argument ("I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence"), and Foucault, which culminate in favorable comments about the promise of his historical research tempered by complaints about "'posturing'" (in quotes in original), taken to arise from the "corrupt intellectual culture of Paris," which he further believes uninteresting to the audience of that article and therefore does not elaborate (those interested in such elaborations may find some published in the course of the "Faurisson affair"). - - This position may reasonably be summarized as anti-intellectual in its particular mode of "self-containment", however much this might shock those who appreciate Chomsky as a scholar or a political commentator it is perhaps most remarkable in that it finds Chomsky speaking as a political commentator about scholarship while refusing fully to engage in it on his own part. Chomsky is in some sense aware of the unsatisfactory nature of his remarks and therefore virtually suspends them on delivery by apologizing for them ("That's a broad brush, and I stress again that it is unfair to make such comments without proving them... I'm not going to undertake an essay on topics that don't interest me."). It would perhaps be of greater interest to examine at greater length the reasons given for Chomsky's lack of interest. - - One may in any case take Chomsky's initially cited remark to reflect a character judgement that largely sets aside Lacan's work (even the unelaborated compliments). Roudinesco's commentary is perhaps more compelling in that it is unrelenting in showing Lacan's character failures without conflating these with an assessment of his work, which is, as a distinct entity, generally praised. Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... Robert Faurisson The Faurisson affair is a term given to a major academic scandal in wake of a book by Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier. ...

Conclusions

The concerns of Sokal and Bricmont can be considered to have some similarities in that they are not "internal" criticisms of Lacan's work. They are themselves interdisciplinary in the sense that they are policing the borders of what they consider to be scientific discourse based on their expertise in the physical sciences and mathematics. Their argument is with what they consider to be implicit arrogation of scientific authority by way of linguistic misappropriation. This is not, however, to say that they claim the privilege of an a priori definition of science or its essence (as, for example, Heidegger in "The Question Concerning Technology"). Their work may thus be taken as an aggressive defense of an undefined border via the policing of terminology, which is to say empiricism without analysis and therefore questionable as to the science of its method and occasional lack of interest in context. While psychoanalysis is not scientific in the sense of the physical sciences or even the sense too often imposed on the social sciences by implication, its capacity for the production of truth is demonstrably not a concern of Sokal and Bricmont and, after a different fashion, Chomsky.

Sources

• Chomsky's remarks
• Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow..., Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004