ABSTRACT
Slavoj Zizek begins his recent article “Lacan Between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism,” published in the psychoanalytic journal Umbr(a), with this call to arms: “We are witnessing today the struggle for intellectual hegemony – for who will occupy the universal place of the ‘public intellectual’ – between postmodern-deconstructionist cultural studies and the cognitivist popularizers of ‘hard’ sciences, that is the proponents of the so-called ‘third culture’ ” (Zizek 2000: 9). Zizek attacks both camps in his essay, styling the cultural studies “deconstructionists” as relativists and the “cognitivist popularizers” as objectivists, so that he may present Lacanian psychoanalysis as a necessary third option. Along the way, Zizek dismisses those theorists of cultural studies who would lump Lacan and psychoanalysis with the other relativists. The problem with historicist relativism, for Zizek, is that it offers no epistemological escape from the “proto-Nietzschean notion that knowledge is not only embedded in, but also generated by a complex set of discursive strategies of power (re)production” (Ibid.: 14).
