“Psychoanalytic Bullshit” by Eugenie Brinkema: Summary and Critique

🔹Redefining Bullshit Beyond Frankfurt

• Brinkema begins by engaging with Harry G. Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit” as “a lack of connection to a concern with truth” (✧ Frankfurt, 2005, p. 34).
• Frankfurt distinguishes bullshit from lying by noting that the liar cares about truth to conceal it, while the bullshitter is indifferent to truth entirely: “What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made” (✧ p. 47).
• Brinkema argues that this concept collapses under psychoanalytic scrutiny: “If all subjects in the psychoanalytic universe confess a split between what they believe and what they say… are complaints like Aristotle’s obsolete in the wake of the Freudian discovery?” (✧ Brinkema, 2007, p. 63).

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🔹 The Psychoanalytic Subject: Speech and the Unconscious

• Psychoanalysis refutes the idea of sincere, unified speech. It reveals a fundamental split between enunciation and belief.
• “The unconscious admits contradictions without contradiction” (✧ p. 63), which destabilizes any clear boundary between truth and falsehood.
• Speech in psychoanalysis always exceeds the speaker’s intent: “It speaks—truth speaks—independent of the necessarily phenomenal load of bullshit that the patient produces” (✧ p. 78).

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🔹 The Lie and the Truth: Paradox as Method

• Brinkema explores scenarios where truth-telling and lying become indistinguishable due to enunciative slippage:
  • The case where someone lies but accidentally tells the truth.
  • The case where truth is told but perceived as deception.
• “Truth-telling can lie, and lie-telling can correspond to truth” (✧ p. 75), destabilizing the binary logic of language.

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🔹 Cratylus, Heraclitus, and the Pointing Finger

• Philosophical skepticism is revisited through the figures of Heraclitus and Cratylus.
• Cratylus, who refused to speak and only pointed, dramatizes language’s failure to signify stably.
• “Even hysterical silence does not exempt one from the chaos of a spoken reality” (✧ p. 62).

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🔹 Psychoanalytic Truth and the Impossible

• Psychoanalytic truth is not verifiable or stable but appears in contradictions, symptoms, and jokes.
• “Hold open this space of the paradox becoming a negation, and that is the psychoanalytic field of truth” (✧ p. 75).
• Truth in psychoanalysis is not a correspondence but a structure of failure that reveals the Real.

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🔹 The Joke and Bullshit: Freud’s Jewish Train Parable

• The famous Freud joke about Jews and lying through truth is key: “Why are you lying? I know you’re really going to Cracow!” (✧ p. 72).
• This joke illustrates absurdity as the route to truth in psychoanalytic terms.
• “It is precisely by way of absurdity that we arrive at the field of truth” (✧ p. 73).

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🔹 Indifference to Truth Is Not Indifferent

• Even apparent indifference (bullshit) is meaningful in psychoanalysis.
• “The speaker of bullshit may imagine him- or herself to be indifferent to their statements in relation to the field of truth, but that indifference is not itself indifferent” (✧ p. 74).

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🔹 Woman, Bullshit, and Lacan’s Feminine Exception

• Brinkema provocatively suggests that only the category of “Woman” in Lacan’s theory may truly speak bullshit.
• Because Woman is doubly excluded (from phallic logic and speech’s guarantee), she can occupy a space “indifferent” to truth.
• “Her not-knowing the not-knowing of speech opens up the space for an indifference that is not collapsible back into a symptom of the truth” (✧ p. 77).

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🔹 Ending in Silence and the Body

• Brinkema ends by invoking the radical silence of women—Dora (Ida Bauer), Fania Pascal, and an unnamed wife—as voices that resist interpretation.
• Bullshit becomes not noise, but the site of a bodily, symptomatic truth: “So too does shit speak… it is, in matter, the sign of my speech” (✧ p. 69).
• Psychoanalysis insists: “Yes, psychoanalysis insistently says. Like the unconscious, there is no ‘No’ in psychoanalysis either” (✧ p. 76).

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🔹 Final Thesis: Bullshit as Truth’s Symptom

• In psychoanalysis, bullshit does not oppose truth but confirms it as an unconscious process.
• “Bullshit is what affirms the truth of the unconscious” (✧ p. 74).
• The paper ultimately argues for a rethinking of sincerity, deception, and truth as always implicated in the logic of the symptom, not excluded by it.

📘 🧠 Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

• Main Contribution: Redefines the relation between speech and unconscious truth, reframing sincerity, lying, and “bullshit” as modes of psychoanalytic revelation.
• Bullshit becomes a symptom: “In psychoanalysis, ça parle—it speaks; truth speaks—independent of the necessarily phenomenal load of bullshit that the patient produces” (✧ p. 78).
• Even lies are truthful: Brinkema shows how lies and bullshit inevitably reveal unconscious truth through their failures: “The lie as such is itself posited in this dimension of truth” (✧ p. 74).
• Woman as exception: The radical suggestion that only the Lacanian barred Woman (♀️) can speak true “bullshit” due to her exclusion from phallic logic (✧ pp. 76–77).

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📚 🧾 Rhetorical and Discourse Theory

• Focus on enunciation vs. statement: Brinkema explores the Lacanian split between what is said and the act of saying: “What ‘I’ is in fact thinking is its own doubting” (✧ p. 74).
• Speech’s failure is meaningful: The paper dismantles the idea that failed or insincere speech is meaningless—failure produces meaning in psychoanalysis.
• The truth of the lie: Echoing Lacan, she states, “Every deception contains, then, a truth: the truth of the subject in relation to the field of truth” (✧ p. 74).

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🌀 🧷 Deconstruction

• Destabilizing binaries: Truth vs. lie, sincerity vs. insincerity, meaning vs. nonsense—these oppositions collapse under psychoanalytic scrutiny.
• Paradox as productive: Brinkema affirms the paradox of truth becoming lie and vice versa: “Truth-telling can lie, and lie-telling can correspond to truth” (✧ p. 75).
• Language as insufficient: Echoes Derrida’s view of meaning’s slipperiness: “Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real” (✧ Lacan via Brinkema, p. 76).

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📖 🗣️ Feminist Literary Theory

• Radical speech via femininity: Brinkema argues that only the Lacanian “not-all” Woman (♀️) might speak true indifference—a unique kind of bullshit outside psychoanalytic recuperation.
• Exclusion as empowerment: “Her not-knowing the not-knowing of speech opens up the space for an indifference that is not collapsible back into a symptom” (✧ p. 77).
• Challenges patriarchal logics: Feminine speech, while excluded, refuses incorporation into the field of truth or logic—subverting Frankfurt’s and Lacan’s phallic speech norms.

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🤹‍♂️ 🎭 Theories of Irony, Satire, and Absurdity

• Use of the joke as analytic: Freud’s Jewish train joke functions as a key text showing the instability of sincerity: “You’re lying by telling the truth” (✧ p. 72).
• Absurdity = analytic tool: Brinkema: “Psychoanalytic truth resides in the meaningless, the irrational, the—dare we say—preposterous illogic of the unconscious” (✧ p. 73).
• Bullshit as philosophical comedy: She frames bullshit as structurally akin to a joke that tells more truth than a serious claim.

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📜 🧮 Epistemology and Literary Hermeneutics

• Questions of truth and belief: Brinkema shows that psychoanalysis displaces epistemology with hermeneutics of contradiction.
• Rejects naive realism: Echoes Freud’s distrust of philosophical “intellectual misdemeanors” that play with truth (✧ p. 67).
• Multiple truths coexist: Psychoanalytic interpretation accepts contradiction and excess rather than seeking stable, single meanings.

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🗣️ 📣 Speech Act Theory (Austin/Searle)

• Challenges illocutionary coherence: In psychoanalysis, the speaker never fully controls their speech act; speech speaks the subject (ça parle).
• Truth-value doesn’t matter to meaning: “The bullshitter, then, speaks some truth, simply by virtue of speaking” (✧ p. 68).
• Every utterance is performative: Not by intention, but through unconscious structure.

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⚖️ ⚙️ Ethical Criticism

• Critiques moralistic accounts of speech: Frankfurt’s moral condemnation of bullshit is replaced by an analytical frame.
• Moral judgments miss unconscious truth: “Bullshit, we come to see, contains within it the traces of the affect of performed indifference, but thus then speaks the truth…” (✧ p. 74).

🌀 Overextension of Psychoanalytic Universality

• Criticism: Brinkema applies Lacanian psychoanalysis so broadly that no utterance, even silence or misdirection, escapes its reach—rendering critique of anything as bullshit itself impossible.
• Implication: The claim that even “bullshit” is a symptom that speaks truth forecloses the possibility of real deception or resistance to analysis.
• Quote: “Indeed, no space for bullshit appears to exist once Lacan has done his splitting work…” (✧ p. 74).
• 💥 Counterpoint: This creates a theoretical totalism where psychoanalysis absorbs all language acts into its logic.

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🗣️ Dismissal of Frankfurt’s Moral Philosophy

• Criticism: The essay dismisses Harry Frankfurt’s ethical framework too quickly in favor of psychoanalysis, neglecting the philosophical implications of intentionality and ethical speech.
• Quote: “Frankfurt would seem to be operating independently of any notion of the unconscious subject…” (✧ p. 67).
• ⚖️ Challenge: Brinkema critiques Frankfurt’s lack of unconscious theory, but arguably ignores his philosophical concern with public discourse ethics, especially relevant in political rhetoric.

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♀️ Ambiguous Feminist Position

• Criticism: Brinkema’s claim that the Lacanian “barred Woman” is the only subject who can speak true bullshit may be read as both empowering and limiting.
• Quote: “She is the sole subject permitted the possibility of bullshit in the Lacanian universe” (✧ p. 77).
• 🚨 Challenge: While bold, this may essentialize womanhood as otherness and risks affirming exclusion as a theoretical gift, rather than a structural violence.

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🎭 Playful Tone Risks Philosophical Clarity

• Criticism: Brinkema’s ironic tone and metaphoric flourishes (e.g., jokes, familial anecdotes, bodily metaphors) blur analytic precision.
• Example: The ending anecdote about Bertrand Russell’s wife’s headache reframes philosophical debate as a maternal joke.
• 📚 Concern: While intellectually rich, this rhetorical excess may alienate readers seeking straightforward engagement with theoretical stakes.

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🧩 Theoretical Paradox vs. Resolution

• Criticism: The essay emphasizes paradox (e.g., truth is a lie) without resolving or clarifying how this applies to actual interpretive practice.
• Quote: “The truth is a lie and the lie is the truth… the very notion of bounded words ‘truth’ and ‘lie’ threatens to dissolve” (✧ p. 75).
• ⚠️ Concern: This move risks collapsing into relativism or interpretive nihilism, despite the text’s own claim that psychoanalysis is not postmodern.

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💬 Dependence on Lacanian Orthodoxy

• Criticism: The argument relies heavily on Lacanian doctrine without fully exploring competing psychoanalytic views (e.g., Kleinian, relational, object-relations).
• Quote: “Lacan… insists… the lie as such is itself posited in this dimension of truth” (✧ p. 74).
• 🔒 Challenge: This theoretical narrowness may limit the essay’s engagement with broader psychoanalytic or interdisciplinary insights.