《《艺术作为一种症兆》（英文版）》.pdfVIP

20 ART AS SYMPTOM ∨ ∨ ZIZEK AND THE ETHICS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM TIM DEAN ∨ ∨ This paper tackles a problem that is exemplified by, but not restricted to, Slavoj Zizek’s work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so widespread in the humanities that it qualifies as a contemporary critical norm. As a norm, it may be subject to debate and even contestation. Today it is normative to read literature, film, and other cultural texts primarily as evidence about the societies that made them—evidence that necessarily requires our hermeneutic labor in order to yield its significance. This methodological protocol remains in place whether one inhabits critical perspectives as ostensibly disparate as historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic modes of thinking; it is also a grounding assumption of cultural studies, irrespective of how one defines that critical practice. Indeed, the issue I want to address is quite as much a Marxist problem ∨ ∨ as it is a psychoanalytic one, and therefore the way in which Zizek articulates Lacan with Marx makes his work especially fertile terrain on which to engage this matter. As ∨ ∨ Zizek reminds us in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Lacan claimed that Marx invented ∨