Lacan and Jameson: The Creation and Confirmation of Post-modern Cultural Criticism

Abstract

Although Jacques Lacan’s cultural theory has been specifically studied by foreign scholars since 1980s, the domestic academic circle has ignored it for a long time, regardless of the relations between Lacan’s theory and postmodern cultural criticism. For the renowned postmodern cultural critic Fredric Jameson, Lacan’s theories have been mentioned many times in his construction of “the cultural logic of late capitalismâ€, such as Lacan’s “schizophrenic structure†of cultural linguistic in literary works and “the breakdown of signifying chain†have been treated as critical features of postmodernism. This reflects the mixture of psychoanalysis and Marxism in the 1980s and 1990s, which vividly illustrates the diachronic process from “cultural linguistics unconscious†to “cultural politics unconsciousâ€. In the cultural context of late capitalism, further detailed studies of the relation between the creator and confirmer of postmodern cultural criticism are still needed.