Four discourses  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 11:20, 10 August 2008; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that there were four fundamental types of discourse. These could be expressed as the permutations of a four-term configuration showing the relative positions of the subject, the master signifier, knowledge and objet petit a.

Lacan's theory of the four discourses was initially developed in response to the events of May 1968 in France. He defined four discourses, which he called Master, University, Hysteric and Analyst, and showed how these relate dynamically to one another.

  • Discourse of the Master - Struggle for mastery / domination / penetration. Based on Hegel's Master-slave dialectic
  • Discourse of the University - Provision and worship of "objective" knowledge - usually in the unacknowledged service of some external master discourse.
  • Discourse of the Hysteric - Symptoms embodying and revealing resistance to the prevailing master discourse.
  • Discourse of the Analyst - Deliberate subversion of the prevailing master discourse.


Slavoj Žižek uses the theory to explain various cultural artefacts, including Don Giovanni and Parsifal.

Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Duke University Press, 1993). Read chapter 5 - and see especially note 24 on page 274. There are similar examples in some of his numerous other books.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Four discourses" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools