SLSL Intro "John Kennedy's Role Model"

[Dave Monroe]

>From Skip Willman, "The Kennedys, Fleming, and Cuba:
Bond's Foreign Policy," Ian Fleming and James Bond:
The Cultural Politics of 007, ed. Edward P. Comentale,
Stephen Watt, and Skip Willman (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 2005), pp. 178-205 ...

   In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas
notes that both JFK and his younger sibling "shared a
fascination with secret operations and spy stories"
....  Their interest was sparked as adolescents by the
fiction of John Buchan and was cultivated as adults
with th work of Ian Fleming.  The Kennedys were also
intrigued by Fleming himself ....  Fleming actually
met the future president at a dinner JFK gave in his
Georgetown home on March 13, 1960 ....
   The encounter between Fleming and Kennedy has been
employed by various historians to underscore how out
of touch JFK was with the reality of clandestine
operations ....  Such accounts tend to reinforce a
sharp distinction bewteen fantasy and reality that the
Lacanian psychoanalytic work of Slavoj Zizek disputes.
 According to Zizek, the experience of social reality
is always mediated by fantasy.  Fantasy supports
reality, providing it woth meaning and coherence....

[...]

... Fleming represented for the Kennedys what Jacques
Lacan calls "the subject supposed to know," the
"central axis, anchor, of the phenomenon of
transference" ....

[...]

According to Freudioan convention, transference occurs
when the analysand displaces onto the analyst
feelings, emotions, and attitudes associated with
another figure, typically a parent....  Lacan contends
that transference entails a necessary illusion on the
part of the analysan that the analyst possesses
knowledge unavailable to him or her: the meaning of
his or her symptoms.  The analyst occupies the
position of what Lacan calls "teh subject supposed to
know" .... This attributed knowledge is false, but the
beliefe in the analyst enables the analysand to
interpret his or her symptoms.  Eventually, the
transference dissolves when the analysand recognizes
that the analyst does not possess the presumed
knowledge, and that the analysand has produced the
meaning of his or her own symptoms.  Importantly,
Lacan contends taht this tranference relatiobship is
not to be found only in the analytic situation .... 
Zizek has perhaps gone further than anyone in taking
this cue, developing the notion of "the subject
supposed to know" into a cultural logic of sorts, a
way in which to describe the causal mechanism of
certian events based on the attribution of some
knowledge (or enjoyment, belief, or desire ...) to an
imagined third party, a proverbial "they" or "them."
(pp. 178-81)

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=22165

"John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to
make his name by kicking third-world people around,
another extension of the boy's adventure tales a lot
of us grew up reading." (SL, "Intro," p. 11)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72588

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com