What gives a figure like Jacques Lacan his continued prestige and influence?

In the first place, there is the attraction of an authoritarian discourse, that is, an intellectual tradition based on an authority figure, or figures. Behind Lacan there stand two or three authorities, Freud, Jakobson, Saussure, who are no longer seen as part of an ungoing tradition of intellectual inquiry, but as fixed beacons. When Lacan speaks of the unconscious as being structured as a language, he has in mind a particular version of structural linguistics. To the extent that the authority of Lacan is based on superannuated scientific models (Freud and Saussure), it is possible to ask whether his work can be questioned from a purely scientific perspective.

Of course, literary critics do not appeal to Lacan as a scientist: the idea is that this version of psychoanalysis is a convenient fiction of purely heuristic value. But if this is the case, though, what is the point of translating one fiction (a novel by Faulkner say) into another (a Lacanian metalanguage)? Why gives the theoretical metalanguage “authority” over a literary language? In the U.S. academy, certain kinds of theory are frozen, detached from the context of their original production and debate, and so become virtually meaningless. To object to such use of “theory” is not to be “antitheoretical,” but to call for a more rigorous investigation of why we believe what we do.

Paul de Man’s rhetorical analyses are not what they seem: to me, their famous appeal to rigor and unrefutability seems rather specious. It has been pointed out, for example, that what he calls a metaphor in Proust is actually a metonymy or synechdoche.

David Antin, in a recent book-length interview with Charles Bernstein, points out that the “theory” behind much language poetry is based on an antiquated linguistics. Bernstein does not object. His Wittgenstenian background saves him from some of these theoretical quagmires.