Poststructuralism Continued:

Chapter 6
Foucault, Lacan, French Feminism, Post-
modernism.
 Agenda

Foucauldian Poststructuralist French Feminism

Postmodernism
Power Psychoanalysis
Rim Bentahar Fadoua El Hilali Fadoua El Hilali Ahmed Benseddik
Part 1
Foucauldian Power

• Michel Foucault

• Panopticism

• Discourses

• Power/Knowledge
 1. Michel Foucault
Foucault’s work was concerned with
the history of psychiatry, the rise of
clinical medicine, the evolution of
biology and economics, the emergence
of the modern prison system, and other
developments that originated in the late
18th and early nineteenth century,
1926 - 1984
a.k.a. the Englightenment era.
France

Psychology and Philosophy

 the new sciences

REPRESSIVE! (psychiatry, criminology,

medicine)

social policies

(increased regulation and

surveillance)

self-imposed
submission to
social control
2. Panopticism
"...the political dream of the plague
is the penetration of regulation into
even the smallest details of
everyday life."
 The same detailed regulation and constant surveillance
used during the 17th-century plague began to be applied to
the abnormal individual of the 19th century, and again
authorities would use the instrument of binary oppositions:

MAD/SANE
DANGEROUS/HARMLESS
NORMAL/ABNORMAL
 The word panopticon derives
from the Greek word for "all-
seeing" – panoptes.
Foucault makes use of
the Panopticon as a Jeremy Bentham, in mid-1700,
metaphor for this new invented a social control
sort of social regulation. mechanism that would become a
comprehensive symbol for
modern authority and discipline
in the western world.
 "A real subjection is
For Foucault, the panopticon stands for the born mechanically from
modern world in which we are ‘the bearers’ of our a fictitious relation."
own figurative, mental imprisonment.
 A Shift

PSYCHIATRIC
THE LAW
DIAGNOSIS

THE GENERAL
CHARACTER OF SUSPICION AND
THE CRIMINAL SURVEILLANCE
"...First they accepted and
internalized a discourse about
normality and second they turned
themselves to one of the
institutions responsible for this."
 WHY DO WE ACCEPT THIS PANOPTIC
WORLD IN WHICH WE ARE MONITORED?
We accept this panoptic world in which
we are monitored due to
the power that is at the heart of
discourses, just like Althusser’s
ideology and Gramsci’s hegemony, this
power rules by consent.

3. Discourses
Foucault’s power derives strength from
the fact that we deeply believe what it
tells us as it gives us a sense of
belonging and contributes to our well-
being.
We obey power and are loyal to it even
if it costs monitoring and suppressing
ourselves.
Discourse, as defined by Foucault, refers to:

ways of constituting knowledge, together with the

social practices, forms of subjectivity, and power
relations which inhere in such knowledge and
relations between them. Discourses are more than
ways of thinking and producing meaning. They
constitute the 'nature' of the body, unconscious and
conscious mind, and emotional life of the subjects
they seek to govern.
(Weedon, 1987, p. 108).
We must make allowance for the complex and
unstable process whereby
discourse can be both an instrument and an
effect of power, but also a
hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of
resistance and a starting point
for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits
and produces power; it
reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes
it, renders it fragile and
makes it possible to thwart it.
(Foucault 1980: 100–01)
A reverse discourse uses the same vocabulary
and categories the first discourse uses and
creates the impression that it confirms the
validity of the first discourse.
4. Power/Knowledge:
When power turns into factual knowledge

Historically, knowledge reflected a relation of

power between a subject "the knower" and an
object, which the knower knows or studies.
Foucault is focused on the set of rules or the
discursive formation that governs a discourse
and holds it together.

How is this related to literary studies?

Foucault locates power firmly in language.

Foucault, in discussing the role of discourses, is
not thinking of one party abusing certain
discourses to gain personal power, although it
does happen. He sees that even the state's
servants believe in such discourses as much as
we do.
 POWER
REDISTRIBUTES

MODIFIES PRODUCES

KNOWLEDGE
Foucault places language in
the center of social power
and social practices.
He emphasizes on the social
role of language.
Language has power, language is power, in
that it is one of the multiplicity of organisms,
forces, energies, materials, thoughts etc.’
(1976:233) by which people are constituted
in the particular discourse prevailing in their
society..

End of Part 1
Part 2
Poststructuralist
Psychoanalysis

1. Sigmund Freud

2. Jacques Lacan
A Psychoanalytical
Perspective
So far, we have seen readings of
literary texts for their meaning, form,
and politics. There is yet another
approach through which we can
analyze literary works which is the
psychoanalytical perspective through
which writers are taken to be largely
unaware of the deeper meaning of their
texts.
This mode of criticism borrows from
Freud and Lucan’s theories
1. Sigmund Freud
Unlike the liberal humanist view of the
subject as free and coherent, Freud’s
fixed developmental scheme represents
a subject fully governed by desire.

For Freud, everyone goes through a set

of developmental stages that he puts in
order as follows:
The Pre-Oedipal Stage

Newborn babies living in an instinctual world where the

child is the center that everything radiates from, the
child is one with the cosmos and has no distinction
between itself its mother, and its surroundings.
Everything that exists is geared towards fulfilling the
child’s desires
As the child grows, he comes to realize that the sense of
continuity between him, his mother, and his
surroundings is nothing but an illusion and is filled with
a sense of loss, this sense of loss in the child produces
desire.
The Oedipal Stage

The child is further separated from his mother who

becomes the primary subject of his erotic desires.
In the oedipal stage, boys become aware of their
mother’s lack of a penis and are confronted with the
fear of losing their own which leads them to submit to
the social authority and lose the erotic interest they had
in their mother.
Girls become aware of their lack of a penis and replace
their desire to own one with the desire to have babies.
These early development stages that we all supposedly go
through force us to give up on our early desires because we
realize that they are unattainable. We tend to accumulate
oppressed desires as we grow up because they are socially
unacceptable.

These desires do not fade away but are rather stored in our
unconscious mind and can manifest themselves in different
ways such as in slips of tongue, dreams, and figurative
language. The unconscious repressed pains or desires slip
through the language that we use through metaphors,
allusions, and symbols. this use of figurative language and
images to unleash repressed desires is what Freud calls
displacement.
Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on
these cracks or slips in the text to derive
the deeper meanings and the
unconscious desires of the writer or
characters hidden in the text.

Psychoanalytic criticism is also

interested in the hidden agenda behind
the language employed in the text, the
unconscious dimension of the text.
 2. Jacques Lacan
Offers a less rigid developmental
scheme leaving more room for
difference, this scheme is relational
rather than fixed.
 The imaginary stage
Just like in Freud’s pre-oedipal stage, Lacan also sees
that newborn babies are subject to desires, drives,
impressions, fantasies, and the feeling of limitlessness.
The child’s unawareness of his surrounding simply puts
him in a position where he believes that he is the center
of the universe. We can call this the preverbal/imaginary
stage.

In this stage, infants live in a feeling of bliss and

wholeness that is later on shattered when they come
face to face with the limitations and prohibitions of the
world outside themselves.
 The symbolic stage
After the imaginary stage comes the symbolic stage in
which they enter the real world or the world of language.
the real world is symbolized and represented through the
way of representational systems like language

This stage requires acceptance and acknowledgment of the

prevailing cultural and social systems of powers of the
environment in which that person exists. the acceptance of
these systems means accepting the power it has over us and
its power to limit and prohibit us from practicing our
desires.
so the child moves from that initial state of immediacy to
this state of limitation.
The passage from the imaginary stage to the symbolic stage
happens via a mirror stage which is according to Lacan the
image that the outside world gives back to us about ourselves.
this image is often distorted leading to a misrecognition that we
take as the basis of our identity.
Our subjectivity and our identity are constructed through our
interactions with the other.

The other can be our subconscious, an individual, or the larger

social order.

Since our identities do not originate from ourselves but from the
outside, and the social and personal configuration in which we
find ourselves is subject to change, identity then, is not
something fixed but rather a process that will never lead to
completion.
 Identity is not coherent
Besides being subject to constant change, identity is not coherent:
1. we are forced to come to terms with our limitations by giving up
our pre-verbal fantasies and are forced to bury them in our
unconscious.
2. our identity depends on a co-existing other since it is
constructed through our surroundings and does not originate from
ourselves.
3. And finally, since we leave the pre-verbal phase and enter the
real world of language we can say that identity is a linguistic
construct, it is a hindrance since language is not our own.
in the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, we
lose our feeling of wholeness as we submit to reality
and reason.
The loss of this preverbal self/original state leaves us
with a feeling of loss which results in desire. The loss
brings an unspecified un-replenish-able feeling a deep-
felt longing or yearning that can only be temporarily
filled with substitutes such as love, and passion…
Lacan’s view of the conscious and unconscious is
different from Freud’s in the way it situates the coming
into being of the unconscious in a larger social scale
whereas Freud locates it within the nuclear family.

Lacan affirms that repression is the effect of the direct

entry into the social order, he believes that there is a
direct connection between the repressive nature of
language and culture and the coming of being of the
unconscious in the way that we expect that any
ideologically undesirable thing within a given culture
finds refugee in the unconscious minds of the
individuals within that culture
Considering ideology is the conscious aspect of a giving
culture unconsciousness is everything that has been
suppressed by ideology such as social inequality etc.
and just like our individual unconsciousness cracks,
these ideologically suppressed parts of culture will
eventually try to slip break into the surface.

The psychoanalytical critical views of Lacan are often

evoked to demonstrate why individuals are as
susceptible to power and ideology.
Lacan’s developmental scheme introduces us to the idea
of the unshakable feeling of being incomplete which is
a direct result of the processes that we go through as we
grow up. he explains that our awareness of that deep
lack and our desire to feel whole turns us towards
ideology, the latter is tempting because it constantly
addresses/ interpolates us as “concrete subjects” and as
if we are already whole.
End of Part 2
Part 3
French Feminism

1. Helene Cixous

2. Julia Kristeva
1. Cixous
Lacan also refers to the massive
configuration of power through the use
of language for example the name of
the father indicates the patriarchal
aspect of our society this same
recognition leads him to talk about the
phallus as a signifier of the patriarchal
order
his views were far more suited for feminist
critics than Freud's views which made Cixous
pick up on the concept of phallocentrism
Cixous believes that though works in dual
hierarchized/ binary oppositions: strong/ weak,
superior/ inferior...
She also believes that everything relates to the
man women opposition with the women being
on the passive inferior side and men on the
active superior one
these male-female oppositions are central to
most cultures
These oppositions are present even in the things
that appear to have nothing to do with males
and females.
all that is strong and superior is presented as
masculine and all that is weak is feminine, she
calls this the solidarity of phallocentrism and
logocentrism and believes that it harms us all/
is repressive to both genders
Laugher, sex, and writing can have liberating
effects. but since writing is often used to
solidify the patriarchal order she proposes a
new form of writing that she calls feminine
writing which would escape the restrictions set
by the phallocratic order
feminine writing is not an exclusive domain for
women, it is only called feminine writing
because everything that is oppressive is male, it
is a sort of writing which surpasses what Lacan
calls the symbolic (it transcends the limitations
set by the social order)
Cixous does not think of the essential nature of
women when talking about female writing, she
rather refers to the oppressive patterns that both
men and women find themselves in and can
fight against and transcend through that form
of writing
Julia Kristeva develops Lacan's idea of the
imaginary and calls it the semiotic
what is repressed in the semiotic breaks
through all forms of use of language that
are unregulated by the writer or speaker
like the language of children, mentally ill,
or poetry
The language that we use is a mixture of
both the symbolic and the semiotic, none
of them exist separate from the other
whenever we use language both our
conscious and unconscious (the semiotic
and the symbolic) are at play

semiotic purity only exists in nonverbal

signifying systems like music
End of Part 3
Part 4
Postmodernism

1. Definition

2. Postmodernism from the View of

Postmodern Theorists

3. Postmodern Fiction
1. Definition
Postmodernism can be seen as a general
term or current that gathered theorists of the
20th century who had an opposing stand
against Marxism and Structuralism
(Derrida, Foucault, Lacan…). The
postmodern shift started somewhere around
the 1950s but was made famous in the
1970s thanks to the writings of American
theorist Ihab Hassan.
The aim of postmodernism was to criticize
and undercut the works and notions of both
modernism and structuralism by using
Derrida’s notion of Deconstruction to create
a skeptical attitude toward the
Enlightenment values and all the disciplines
of humanities in addition to religion.
2. Postmodernism from the View of
Postmodern Theorists
Lyotard: (1924-1998)
Postmodernism represents a break
away from the modern belief of
objective truth and the tradition of
metanarratives as named by famous
postmodern philosopher Jean Francois
Lyotard in his book The Postmodern
Condition. According to him, a
metanarrative is a story a culture tells
itself about its practices and beliefs.
Almost all postmodern intellectuals
favor the emergence of local narratives
that explain local practices without any
claim of universality.
Jean Baudrillard: (1929-2007)
French theorist and philosopher, Jean
Baudrillard, adheres to the existence of
“hyper realities”. Reality as we know it does
not exist anymore as we rather share a
collective illusion of what reality is triggered
by world media similar to a simulation.
Therefore, Baudrillard suggests that in the
postmodern world we are unable to
distinguish between what is real and what is
artificial.
While on the other hand, American
Marxist critic Frederic Jameson argues
that postmodernism is strictly related to
the rise of capitalism. It is the culture
of consumer capitalism; a culture that
wipes out national and individual
identities in favor of globalization.
Another version of Postmodernism is
that of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari where they call for a
dismantling of all Western values
especially those of unity, order, and
identity.
 2. Postmodern Fiction
Postmodernism remains pertinent in the domain of contemporary post-1960s fiction.
This literary mode is born as a reaction against the principles of modern literature
embodied in the works of T.S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Albert Camus…. The
ultimate goal of postmodern fiction is to mock and reverse modern literature through
the deliberate creation of unexpected and confusing plot twists that adhere to no
meaning using dark humor, unrealistic plots, and intertextuality to deconstruct
modern literature and promote undecidability.
Characteristics of Postmodern
Fiction
Randomness: postmodern works often reject the idea of
absolute meaning by introducing plots that fail to create any
sense of meaning. Such is the case with Thomas Pynchon's
postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49 where the
protagonist’s search for meaning results in a state of
confusion and meaninglessness.
Intertextuality: the use of already existing
works as a ground for their unrealistic plots,
similar to what J.M Coetzee did in his work
Foe
Playfulness: using tools of wordplay and irony,
postmodern authors make fun of modern storytelling
by transcending the line between a high and low
culture which is apparent in Snow White by Donald
Barthelme.
 Postmodern Fiction
and Poststructuralism
Postmodern writers and poststructuralist theorists share the same interest
of questioning modern metanarratives that claim the existence of an
objective greater reality. Postmodern authors accomplish this goal through
textual elements that suggest depth and meaning while simultaneously
presenting elements that break the conventional illusion of an authentic
reality.
End of Part 4
END OF

Chapter 6
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