The Other Side of Political Correctness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Master's Discourse

Orit Yushinsky
Issue 56 | Summer 2022
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In this essay I will discuss political correctness as a phenomenon grounded in the modern “master’s discourse,” which psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “university discourse.” University discourse is the discourse of the conventional truths of current scientific knowledge, which presently responds to identity politics and its demands for recognition and acceptance. Political correctness is the rhetoric that expresses these political-scientific conventions. At the same time, political correctness permits representation to increasingly more social groups and the individuals who identify with those groups. But it overlooks the subject who carries a disturbing and antagonistic untamable element in the world, who does not fully identify with the group identity. The analytical discourse, as the inverse of the master’s discourse, can offer an answer for the subject whose identification is not complete. The analytical discourse offers the capacity of “speaking well” (bien-dire), which is an analytical interpretation, an enigmatic expression meant for each subject in their own idiosyncrasy. The “speaking well” touches each and every one in a way it knows how to do with the disturbing and irresolvable elements of the subject.

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