JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

when reading Jacobsen, and on the other hand may be useful for
the many readers who have the peculiar idea that a text has an un-
conscious and that it imagines gender positions. The quotation is
from book XX of the seminar of Jacques Lacan, is located in the
section about “The Function of the Written” and goes like this:
“In your analytic discourse, you assume that the subject of the un-
conscious knows how to read. And this business of true uncon-
scious is nothing other than that. Not only do you assume that it
knows how to read, but you assume that it can learn how to read.
The only problem is that what you teach it to read has absolutely
nothing to do, in any case, with what you can write of it” (The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX, translated by Bruce Fink,
New York 1999: W.W Norton & Company, page 37).
Paper, SASS (Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies), May 2, 2003,
University of Minnesota
Jørn Erslev Andersen, Associate Professor, PhD, Institute of Aesthetic Studies,
Department of Comparative Literature, University of Aarhus
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