SOURCE: “Belaboring the Obvious: Reading the Monstrous Body in King Richard III,” in Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare, Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 33-51.

In the following excerpt, Charnes explains how the murderous and physically monstrous Richard transmogrifies Anne's hatred into sexual desire during the emotionally charged wooing scene.

What we regard as “history” is always “mediated through subjectivity”: it becomes history only by the process of repetitive inscription in and through the symbolic. Consequently its “Truth arises from misrecognition”—whatever it signifies in the social formation necessarily routes through the misrecognition of consciousness (what Zizek calls “the opinion of the people”—Sublime Object, p. 61). “If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself” (p. 63). And this Truth is that the significance of history is consolidated only retroactively, like the “truth” of the analysand who has come through...