The problem of Lacan in the subject in rhetoric and composition: A sublime matter of commitment

Post mid-1980's Rhetoric and Composition Studies (R&C) has been appropriating French theory in its serious work with students and texts. R&C's close “contact work” furthers the turn to theory in ways that literary and cultural studies have neglected. However, it has not embraced all areas of theory equally, involving itself seriously with Foucault and Lyotard, and acknowledging Derrida, but relegating Jacques Lacan (and Slavoj Zizek) to the margins. This dynamic displays R&C's tension with the problem of “absence” in the subject.;Scholars in literary and cultural studies have explored Lacan at some length, but privilege texts over students, supporting the university's project of (re)producing “subjects of knowledge,” in the service of the Enlightenment. This “work” sustains a hierarchical “content” vs. “service” relation over R&C, in effect using the difficulties of theory to signify “serious” work, and to cast the agency in work with students as a naive instrumentalism. In contrast, R&C, perhaps the area dealing most directly with students as human subjects, has most neglected Lacan.;R&C's commitment displays a tension pervasive in politically committed discourses. For many scholars, the very positing of a decentered, desiring subject in a politically committed discourse itself constitutes a dialectical encounter: the force in the term “commit” resists the agency of “absence” in a movement toward a more unified subject to achieve a sense of reliable judgment leading to responsible, instrumental action. This tension has led us to neglect continental psychoanalysis and to undertheorize “materiality,” “aggressivity,” and the role of desire and libidinal attachments.;This neglect allows some of the dynamics that inhere in our work—including the sublime encounter with the Other—to escape our discourse or to be relegated to political formations or alienated others, that is, to “things” that can be cast outside the scene of instruction, in an operation of “overcoming” what “arrives” in the sublime. In the process, we “misrecognize” ourselves and our students as subjects, actually undermining our work to “be present” to students, and inadvertently “fall” back toward Enlightenment thinking. “Being present” requires our factoring in the always/already presence/absence dialectic structured-in to identity and social relations.