The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis 1350184152, 9781350184152

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Edited by Jeremy Tambling

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Jeremy Tambling and contributors, 2023 The editor and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xv–xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Moses by Michelangelo in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, c.1513–15, marble sculpture, 235 × 210 cm © Classic Image/ Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tambling, Jeremy, editor. Title: The Bloomsbury handbook to literature and psychoanalysis / edited by Jeremy Tambling. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Series Bloomsbury handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature’s influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory”–Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022046955 | ISBN 9781350184152 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350287334 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350184169 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350184176 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis and literature. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PN56.P92 B655 2023 | DDC 809/.93353—dc23/eng/20221109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046955 ISBN:

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CONTENTS

L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS N OTES

ON

C ONTRIBUTORS

P REFACE AND A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS Jeremy Tambling A BBREVIATIONS TO F REUD AND L ACAN T EXTS Introduction – Literature: The Other of Psychoanalysis Jeremy Tambling

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Part One Forms of Psychoanalysis 1 When Psychoanalysis Plays with Words Andrea Bachner

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2 The Eyes of the Other: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Uncanny Ben Moore

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3 Artemidorus’ Interpretation of Dreams: Foucault, Freud, Derrida Paul Allen Miller

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4 The Atomystique of the ‘Purloined Letter’ Debate: Lacan and Derrida’s Minor Differences David Sigler 5 A Rose of Iron Filings: Charles Mauron and the Psychoanalytical Critical Turn Catherine Lanone 6 A Schizoanalytic Walk with Desire: Reading the Body Without Organs in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man Celiese Lypka 7 Sublimation and Symptom: Fantasy, Story, Work, Pleasure Daniel Katz

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8 Psychoanalysis’s China: Freud, Lacan, and the Chinese Script Andrea Bachner

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Part Two Reading Texts 9 The First Gift: Freud, David Copperfield, and the Sisters Bernays Peter L. Rudnytsky

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10 Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Antigone’s “No” and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis Paul Allen Miller

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11 The Alice Books: Carroll’s Wonder: An Opening on the Subject of the Unconscious Sophie Marrett-Maleval

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12 Psychoanalysis and Crime Fiction: The Singing Detective Simão Valente

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13 Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis: Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear Jeremy Tambling

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14 Reading Hamlet with Lacan: The Joint of Symptoms, Desire and Time Nicolas Pierre Boileau

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15 The Subject of Poetry: Freud and Early Analysis Daniel Bristow

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Part Three Psychoanalysis and Modernism 16 Excess, Trauma, and Negativity in Eliot and Lawrence: British Modernism and Psychoanalysis Fuhito Endo

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17 The Counter-Impulses of Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu L. Scott Lerner

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18 James Joyce, or the Literary Symptom of Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel Rabaté

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19 Entangled Minds: Bion and Beckett Angela Moorjani

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20 Badiou’s Lacan and the Beckett-Event Colin Wright

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21 Narcissism and Paranoid Interpretation: Surrealism, Ernst and Dalí Jeremy Tambling

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Part Four Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Gender 22 Hysteria Judith Roof 23 Strangers to the Aesthetic: Psychoanalysis in the Work of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva Malte Fabian Rauch

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24 Psychoanalysis and Queer Sexualities: Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood Chris Coffman

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25 The Absent Mother in Mrs. Dalloway: Woolf, Klein, and Freud Fuhito Endo

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26 Lacan, the Feminine, and Feminisms Maria Josefina Sota Fuentes

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27 Lesbian Film Theory Judith Roof

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Part Five Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory 28 The Battle for the Voice: Exploring the Ambivalent Relationship Between Psychoanalysis and Music Tom DeRose

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29 Sibling-Incest in Wagner Christopher Wintle

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30 ‘The Creature . . . Was . . . a MAN!’: Psychoanalysis, Freud and Animals Nicholas Ray

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31 Machines of Delusion and Desire: Literature, Media Theory, and Psychoanalysis Andrew Gaedtke

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32 Steve Jobs and the iGadget in the Economy of Jouissance Scott Wilson

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33 Posthumanism: Love in the Time of AI Colin Wright

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34 Unravellings: Religion, Colonialism, and Psychoanalysis Benigno Trigo

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35 (Post)Colonialism and the Persistence of Psychoanalysis: A Žižekan Intervention in Traditional Postcolonial Thought Ahmed Elbeshlawy

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36 A “Living Depersonalization”: Fanon and Mannoni on Colonialism’s Psychic Violence Christopher Lane

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37 Psychoanalysis, Suzanne Césaire, Martinique, and Caribbean Surrealism Hanétha Vété-Congolo

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I NDEX

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ILLUSTRATIONS

17.1 Carlo Lasinio, “The Sacrifice of Abraham” (c. 1812), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray. Photo ©President and Fellows of Harvard College, G2166 29.1 Sibling-incest at the close of Act One of Richard Wagner’s ‘The Valkyrie’, showing mutual excitement, arousal, penetration and conception 32.1 Invention of Delusion Diagram 1 32.2 The Discourse of the Master 32.3 Invention of Delusion Diagram 2 32.4 Name-of-the-Father 32.5 Lacan’s Master’s Discourse 32.6 The Discourse of Surveillance Capitalism

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CONTRIBUTORS

Andrea Bachner is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her research explores comparative intersections between Sinophone, Latin American, and European cultural productions in dialogue with theories of interculturality, sexuality, and mediality. She is the author of Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (2014) and The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories (2017). Nicolas Pierre Boileau is Senior Lecturer at Aix-Marseille University, France, where he teaches Virginia Woolf, modernism, psychoanalysis and contemporary literature. He is in charge of a research group on Women’s Resistance to Feminism (https://wfw.hypotheses.org). He is also a member of the ACF (association de la cause freudienne) which is interested in the connection between psychoanalysis and other disciplines. He is currently working on a book on symptoms of madness in modernist and neo-modernist literature. Daniel Bristow is a practising psychoanalyst, completing his formation with the Philadelphia Association in Hampstead, London. He is a member of the Academy of Psychoanalysis; works with the services Freedom from Fear to Love and Outcome—which provide free therapy to LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and refugees—and the Psychosis Therapy Project, as well as being a clinician with and on the board of advisors for the Red Clinic. He is author of Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis (2016), 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory (2018), and Schizostructuralism: Divisions in Structure, Surface, Temporality, Class (2021). He cocreated and co-runs the radical publisher 1968 Press. Chris Coffman is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The author of Insane Passions (2006), Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity (2018), and Queer Traversals: Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), she has published on modernism, queer film, and theory in TSQ;GLQ; Postmodern Culture; Culture, Theory, and Critique; Angelaki; Texas Studies in Literature and Language; and Arizona Quarterly. Tom DeRose is Research Manager at the Freud Museum London, where he organizes conferences and academic partnerships, as well as contributing to the museum’s wide-ranging public programme. His research explores the philosophical aspects and cultural implications of Freud’s theories, and his most recent publications include an article comparing the work of Freud, Wagner, and Nietzsche for the Wagner Journal (2017). Ahmed Elbeshlawy is an independent scholar of comparative literature, author, and poet. His books include Unappeasable Ghosts (2021), Savage Charm (2019), Twenty-Five Meditations on x

CONTRIBUTORS

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Writing and Subjectivity (2019), Woman in Lars von Trier’s Cinema (2016), America in Literature and Film (2011). His other publications include various articles and book chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City (2016), Sexuality and Culture (2014), The Comparatist (2008), Scope (2008), and fe/male bodies (2005, 2006). Fuhito Endo is Professor of English at Seikei University in Tokyo and was a visiting professor at University College London. His articles have appeared in journals like Twentieth-Century Literature or (a): a Journal of Culture and the Unconscious. He co-edited The Pleasure in/of the Text: About the Joys and Perversities of Reading (2021). He contributed a chapter to Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (2020). Maria Josefina Sota Fuentes is a practicing psychoanalyst in São Paulo (Brazil), graduated in Psychology (1991) from the Institute of Psychology at the University of São Paulo, where she defended a Master’s thesis (1996) and Doctorate (2009), which was the basis of the book, Women and Their Names: Lacan and the Feminine. She is also a Member of Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise (EBP) and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) since 1998, where she has been President of the EBP (2021–2022) and Analyst of the School of the WAP (2017–2020), having been dedicated to the transmission of psychoanalysis in many WAP Schools around the world. Andrew Gaedtke is an associate professor and a Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Department of English and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. He is the author of Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds (2017), and he has published articles on modernism, contemporary literature, the history of mental illness, disability studies, and medical humanities. Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Author of the monographs Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (1999), American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (2007), and The Poetry of Jack Spicer (2013), and Editor of Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer (2021), he has published widely on modern and contemporary literature and thought, and is also Editor of the book series “Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics.” His current book project is “The Big Lie of the Personal: Poetry, Politics, and the Lyric Subject.” Christopher Lane taught medical humanities and the history of medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, until his retirement in 2022. He is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (2017), The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (2011), and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007), translated into six languages and awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing. He is a regular contributor to Psychology Today. Catherine Lanone is a professor of English Literature at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. She has published a book on E.M Forster’s fiction and written an introduction and footnotes for a new edition of Charles Mauron’s translations of E.M. Forster (Monteriano, Le Bruit du Temps, 2012, La Route des Indes, Le Bruit du Temps, 2013, Le Legs de Mrs Wilcox, Le Bruit du Temps,

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2015). Besides a critical study of Howards End written with Laurent Mellet, she has coedited with him a collection of essays on E.M. Forster in Ebc in 2020. L. Scott Lerner is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities and French and Italian at Franklin and Marshall College, USA. His work on Proust has appeared in MLN, Diacritics, Modern Fiction Studies, Romanic Review, and elsewhere. Celiese Lypka is a member of the Manitoba Métis Nation and an Assistant Professor in the department of English at the University of Winnipeg, teaching women’s writing and Indigenous literatures. She has publications related to gender, affect theory, and Indigenous Studies in the Journal of Modern Literature, American Studies (AMSJ), The CEA Critic, English Studies in Canada, Rhizomes, and a chapter in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism (Bloomsbury, 2019). Sophie Marret-Maleval, after teaching as Professor of English Literature, is now Professor and Head of the Department of Psychoanalysis at Paris 8 University, and is also Head of the Research Team: “La Section Clinique” EA 4007. She is a Psychoanalyst, member of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne, of the New Lacanian School and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. He has held visiting appointments at the University of the Ruhr (Bochum), the University of Paris 13, and Beijing Language and Cultural University. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas. Dr Miller is the author of nine books on theory, Latin poetry, and Greek philosophy. He has edited fifteen volumes of essays and published ninety articles. His tenth book, Foucault’s Late Lectures on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth, was published by Bloomsbury. Ben Moore is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He works mainly on nineteenth-century literature and has published in journals including MLR, Modernism/ modernity, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Victorian Culture, Dickens Quarterly and the Gaskell Journal, as well as in various edited collections. His books Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity and Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895 are due to be published by Edinburgh University Press and Palgrave respectively. Angela Moorjani, Professor Emerita of Modern Languages and Intercultural Pragmatics at the University of Maryland (UMBC), explores the multidimensional writings of Samuel Beckett in her books and articles, fusing psychoanalytic, pragmatic, and feminist approaches. These include Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Becket (1982, reissued 2017), Beckett at 100 (2008, with Linda Ben-Zvi), and Beckett and Buddhism (2021). Her books The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness (1992) and Beyond Fetishism and Other Excursions in Psychopragmatics (2000) investigate the effects of trauma and mourning on modernist writers and artists. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, co-founder of Slought Foundation, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory. Recent titles include:

CONTRIBUTORS

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Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), After Derrida (2018), Rire au Soleil (2019), New Beckett (2019), Understanding Derrida / Understanding Modernism (2019), Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of literature and film (2020), Beckett and Sade (2020), Rires Prodigues (2021), James Joyce Hérétique et Prodige (2022), On Beckett On (2022), and Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics, co-edited with Angeliki Spiropoulou (2022). Malte Fabian Rauch works at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. After studying in Hamburg, London and New York, he is currently completing his PhD on the aesthetics of decomposition. Nicholas Ray teaches in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis (2009), editor of Interrogating ‘The Shield’ (2012), and co-editor of Seductions and Enigmas: Laplanche, Theory, Culture (2014). He is co-translator of Jean Laplanche’s final volume of essays, Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006 (2011) and of several shorter works of French psychoanalytic theory. He is currently writing a book on Freud and the limits of the human. Judith Roof is the author of A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (1991), Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (1996), What Gender Is, What Gender Does (2016) and co-editor of Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1989) with Richard Feldstein, and Lacan and the Posthuman (2018) with Svitlana Matviyenko. She has taught in the English Departments at Illinois State University, the University of Delaware, Indiana University, Bloomington, Michigan State University, and Rice University. Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida and Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs as well as Chair of the Committee on Confidentiality of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge and co-editor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series for Bloomsbury. Having served from 2001 to 2011 as editor of American Imago, he is now co-General Editor of The Network Edition of the Complete Writings of Sándor Ferenczi, to be published by Phoenix. He received the Gradiva Award for Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002) and is the author most recently of Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (2022). David Sigler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. He has written two monographs, Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis 1757–1835 (2015) and Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism (2021). He is also the co-editor, with Daniela Garofalo, of Lacan and Romanticism (2019). Jeremy Tambling, Visiting Professor at SWPS, Warsaw, was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester. He has published articles and books on literary and critical theory, on opera and on film, and on several authors, including Dante, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Benigno Trigo is Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities. His publications include Malady and Genius; Self-Sacrifice in Puerto Rican Literature (2016), Remembering Maternal Bodies

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(2006), Subjects of Crisis (2000), Noir Anxiety (Co-authored with Kelly Oliver 2003), as well as two edited collections: Kristeva’s Fiction (2014) and Foucault and Latin America (2002). He is currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled Sacred Nationalism; Revolt, Religiosity and Poetry in Puerto Rico. Simão Valente is Assistant Professor at the University of Porto where he teaches Semiotics. He works on crime fiction, world literature, and his current project is concerned with literary realism and sustainability. His first book, on the Portuguese canon and world literature, will be coming out in 2023. Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College, Maine, Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She is affiliated to the Africana, the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Programs of her institution. Her most recent publication is Nous sommes Martiniquaises. Pawòl en bouches de femmes châtaignes : Une pensée existentialiste noire sur la question des femmes (2020). Scott Wilson is an independent scholar. His most recent books are Stop Making Sense: Music from the Perspective of the Real (2015) and Scott Walker and the Song for the One-All-Alone (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is the co-editor with Michael Dillon of The Journal for Cultural Research. He is the UK corresponding editor of The Lacanian Review. Christopher Wintle is Emeritus Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, UK. He has published widely on music theory and analysis relating to music from the seventeenth century on, and for twenty years reviewed opera for the Times Literary Supplement. His What Opera Means appeared in 2018, and includes a section on opera and psychology. He has also edited several volumes of writings by Hans Keller, a leading Freudian of the 1940s, including Essays on Music (1994) and Music and Psychology (2003). Colin Wright is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Head of the Department of Cultural, Media & Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is also a practising Lacanian psychoanalyst and current secretary of the London Society of the New Lacanian School. In addition to articles in journals such as Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Philosophy Today and The Lacanian Review, he is the author of books such as Perversion Now! (2017, with Diana Caine) and Badiou in Jamaica: The Politics of Conf lict (2013).

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The aim of this volume comprising newly commissioned essays is to explore interrelations and cross-fertilizations between ‘literature’ and ‘psychoanalysis’. These terms are used both in their accepted sense, while questioning – as each of them question themselves, and each other – what either of them mean. Each term – literature, and psychoanalysis – shades into other areas, and both terms support each other. The Introduction following outlines some of the concerns that this project hopes to address. The essays included here, all new, are varied in scope: some attempt to ‘teach’ a topic, some provide a literature-review of what has been discussed of a topic; some are speculative; some try a new line of their own. Some are intended for a newish reader, others are only for the advanced, but it is hoped that the Handbook will bring many readers to an advanced state by the end. Thanks are due to the many people who have helped with this project. First, many thanks to the contributors, who in the time of great difficulty and isolation caused by COVID, and including times when University and other libraries were closed, have worked hard to produce the excellent chapters which follow. This Handbook, however massive it may appear, could have been twice the length, because this subject is inexhaustible, and all that a single volume can do is to point in directions for further research. The Bibliographies at the end of the chapters will I hope point to ways in which gaps in the coverage may be addressed. There are people whom I approached to write, who, in the event, found it impossible, but I thank them for their help, and good suggestions. Much gratitude is due to all the contributors here for their willingness, their good cheer, their flexibility, their bearing with me, and for the imaginative and original essays which have made my life so much easier. Many have offered advice on the way as well, which has been much appreciated. With several, debts and conversations and friendship go back over years, for example through a graduate reading group which I conducted in Manchester University from 2008 until 2013; that influence is felt here, though not necessarily the Hegelianism which so many liked so much. With others, this collaboration and friendship has been new, and has won me a very positive sense of what sharing scholarship and entering into agreements to think afresh can mean. It has often struck me during the course of editing that such collaboration has happened in spite of University duties, and bureaucracy thus imposed. I can say I have learned a lot from everyone, and enjoyed many friendships through the editing. I must also thank Ben Doyle for his confidence in commissioning the project in 2019, which makes this the fourth time I have worked with him, and to the four Readers for the Press who offered plenty of advice and encouragement to be going on with. In 2019, the relevance of this Handbook for students was obvious: just think of the pro-worst-of-Jung Jordan Peterson and his views on ‘masculinity’, and the politics of Viktor Orban which have censored gender-studies in Universities in Hungary (17 October 2018). They imply a backlash against the liberatory programme within psychoanalysis, which this Handbook will counter, as a defence of it; to compare the xv

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quondam adviser to the British Government Dominic Cummings (blog of 2 January 2020): ‘you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties’. It is to be hoped that all these names will be beyond the sunset by the time this Handbook appears, but they are likely to be replaced. Fired with those sorts of straws showing how the wind is blowing in many countries, several colleagues and friends have wanted to advise me then and since the commission came through. All help has been very useful. Here I would like to mention James Smith, at an early stage of planning, Jonathan White, David Bennett, Dennis Walder, Andy Grundy, Felix Tambling who found me one contributor, Tom DeRose, after he had worked at the Freud museum, Kirsten Tambling, always a source of ideas, Pauline Tambling, who as in everything I have written has encouraged, and provided help of all kinds, and has been actively helping with the project all the way, Pam Morris, for her readings of draft chapters, Jonathan Hall for his advice and readings and for much intellectual stimulus, now, and over many years, and finally to Jo Rose for impeccable and enthusiastic editing, positive advice, and help. Writing or editing one book requires borrowing or buying many others, to a surprising amount, each book being unpredictable, and so I would thank my little independent bookshop, Browsers, and Martin Whitaker and Anna Virgoe, who against all odds in COVID lock-down times and after got me all the books I needed, showing me I did not need Amazon. JEREMY TAMBLING

ABBREVIATIONS TO FREUD AND LACAN TEXTS

SIGMUND FREUD SE

Fliess

Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey and Alix Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis: 1953–1974. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1877–1904. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, Mass; Belknap Press: 1985.

JACQUES LACAN E S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S10 S11 S17 S19 S20 S23

Écrits 1966. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. W.W. Norton: 2006. Seminars of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller. Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–54. Trans. John Forrester. Norton: 1988. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–55. Trans. S. Tomaselli. Norton: 1988. The Psychoses 1955–56. Trans. Russell Grigg. Routledge: 1993. The Object Relation 1956–57. Trans. A.R. Price. Polity: 2020. The Formations of the Unconscious 1957–58. Trans. Russell Grigg. Polity: 2017. Desire and Its Interpretation 1958–59. Trans. Bruce Fink. Polity: 2019. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60. Trans. Dennis Porter. Norton: 1992. Transference 1961–62. Trans. Bruce Fink. Polity: 2015. Anxiety 1962–63. Trans. A.R. Price. Polity: 2014. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Hogarth: 1977. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 1971. Trans. Russell Grigg. Norton: 2007 . . . or Worse 1971–72. Trans. A.R. Price. Polity: 2018. Encore, on Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–73. Trans. Bruce Fink. Norton: 1998. The Sinthome 1975–76. Trans. A.R. Price. Polity: 2016.

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Introduction Literature: The Other of Psychoanalysis JEREMY TAMBLING

Traffic passes between literature and psychoanalysis on a well-travelled road. Literature informed psychoanalysis from the beginning; psychoanalysis has created literature in its wake, as with Italo Svevo’s novel La concienza di Zeno (1923). Thinking about similarities and differences between literature and psychoanalysis make both of these shifting categories, and hard to separate. One premise of this Handbook is that psychoanalysis tends towards literature in not being a science – though Freud thought otherwise (e.g. SE 20: 57–58) – in not dealing with Cartesian objective knowledge. Freud writes: in my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand the riddles of the world in which we live, and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution. — SE 20: 253 Such an interest in riddles, inevitably recalling Oedipus, evokes ambiguity, doubleness, and unstable identity. Psychoanalysis, like literature, cannot deal with anything determinate. It is committed to what is riddling; a word suggesting the enigma, which in the Renaissance was another word for ‘allegory’, bringing us back to literature. Psychoanalysis and literature share an impulse towards dissemination and away from ‘closure’; they dissolve single authoritarian structures; this starts with Freud’s ‘Copernican revolution’. They reject such concepts as the purity of the origin of anything for defining its essence, or the singleness of truth, or patriarchal authority – which claims to embody that – seeing these as sanctioning cruelty, and terror. Both speak for plurality within issues of gender and race. To consider these points, we must remember the history of psychoanalysis as it expanded from Vienna. This Introduction not only maps out the contents of the book, and its contributors, but thinks about psychoanalysis especially with regard to Marxism and psychosis, and pulls its diverse elements together from a feminist novel, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) because women’s writing has been helped by, and has fashioned, psychoanalytic thought. Lacan wrote that Marguerite Duras, the author, ‘knows without me, what I teach’ (Lydon: 352).

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CRITICAL THEORY Psychoanalysis starts with Freud, and with Jewish – especially – and non-Jewish intellectuals in middle Europe, and Zurich. In Paris, Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962), amongst other enterprises, wrote on Edgar Allan Poe, a study which was to influence Lacan; while the Polish Rudolph Loewenstein (1898–1976) analysed Lacan (1901–1981). The histories of Freud (1856–1939) in Vienna, of Sandor Ferenczi (1873–1933) in Budapest, and of Karl Abraham (1877–1926) in Berlin record self-conflictual states, and intellectual and emotional complexities. They show heroism, and a sense that theory and marginal lives went together; they witnessed tragedy, partly resulting from personality clashes, and partly because so much was lost by the destruction of European Jews and cities in the 1930s and 1940s. These figures lend themselves to narrative treatment, as has been tried out on Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) from Boiany, Bukovina, one of those psychoanalysts who fell out with Freud (Stanton: 163–174). As did Alfred Adler (1870–1937) in 1911, and, more complexly, Otto Rank (1884–1939) who ended in New York. The most notorious break with Freud occurred with the Zurich-based Carl Jung (1875–1961) in 1913, in an intellectual and a religious division. Freud had hoped that psychoanalysis would lose its Jewish specificity through Jung, who himself showed anti-Semitic tendencies. Despite justified accusations of patriarchy and phallocentrism, almost from the beginning psychoanalysts have been women as well as men, to say nothing of the number of gifted feminist critics who have written on the subject. Berlin-based psychoanalysis included the Lutheran Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), and the non-Jewish Karen Horney (1885–1952), who moved to the USA in 1932, where she was associated with Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) and Erich Fromm (1900–1980). Groddeck influenced Horney, and Erich Fromm (Fuechtner: 65–112) and wrote two psychoanalytical novels, The Soul Searcher (Das Seelensucher, 1921) and The Book of the It (Das Buch vom Es, 1923). This comprises letters from a fictional psychotherapist, Patrick Troll, to a female correspondent. It defends bisexuality, which is said to emerge from the Es, which precedes the ‘I’ and any concept of identity. Indeed, the term ’Es’ preceded Freud’s essay ‘Das Ich und das Es’, translated as ‘The Ego and the Id’ (SE 29: 3–66). Freud summarizes Groddeck: ‘our ego behaves essentially passively in life, and . . . we are lived by unknown and uncontrollable forces’ (SE 19: 23). Freud thought that Groddeck took ‘das Es’ from Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose writings comprise some of the most important in anticipating Freud, and indicate the difficulties of drawing the boundary-lines around psychoanalysis. American psychoanalysis turns away from Freud’s patriarchalism, as with Karen Horney, and to an emphasis on ego-development, which threatens to leave the unconscious behind. It also adopts ‘object-relations’ theory. Heinz Kohut’s The Analysis of Self (1971) indicates the difference that America implied: the self is not the split subject, but an ego which needs to be built up; the same tendencies had already been explored in Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950). Psychoanalysis belongs to a middle-class and journalistic culture, as in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). It produced some early distinguished – sometimes very literal – applications of it to literary texts: Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Steven Marcus, Norman H. Holland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Phyllis Greenacre, and, initially, Frederick Crews. Britain first heard Freud’s name in 1893, through F.W. Myers, in the Society for Psychical Research. The British Psychoanalytic Society was founded by Ernest Jones (1879–1958) in 1919, with such figures as Joan Riviere (1883–1962), and the Bloomsbury intellectuals: James Strachey

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(1887–1967), his American-born wife Alix (1891–1973) – the translators of the Standard Edition – and Adrian Stephen (1883–1948 – the brother of Virginia Woolf) and his wife Karin (1889–1953). Writings on Shakespeare by Ella Sharpe (1875–1947) are also worth noting. In 1926, Melanie Klein (1882–1960) who had been analysed by Ferenczi and Abraham, arrived in London, and her work on the psychoanalysis of children created a group whose most important member was Donald Winnicott (1896–1971). His work on ‘object-relations’ has had an impact on literary criticism second only to Lacan and Freud. But it was not simply with children: Klein significantly influenced W.D. Fairbairn (1889–1964) – who analysed Harry Guntrip (1901–1975) – and Paula Heimann (1899–1982), Susan Isaacs (1885–1948), the Polish-born Hanna Segal (1918–2011), and John Bowlby (1907–1990). He worked on mother-child attachment, but his relationship with psychoanalysis became attenuated. Klein also gave a new direction to Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), whose work is noted in this Handbook by Angela Moorjani. Her influence is noted in Scott Lerner’s essay on Proust, whose subject is the relationship with the mother. (Lerner virtually makes a case for seeing Proust as devising a psychoanalytic method himself.) English Modernism was conscious of Freud, as with D.H. Lawrence’s attempts to reaccentuate psychoanalysis, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Other essential names include James Joyce, Proust, and Djuna Barnes in Nightwood, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) whom Freud met, and corresponded with (Prawer: 102–103). W.H. Auden’s 1939 poem memorializing Freud after his death coincides with the end of Modernism. The Hogarth Press which Leonard and Virginia Woolf had founded, began publishing Freud in translation in 1924. English Freudians were often upper-middle-class. Some were Pacificists (e.g. with Quaker backgrounds – primarily Protestant, not Jewish). They held ‘controversial discussions’ over the analysis of children, dividing Klein and her followers from those of Anna Freud (1895–1982), who was in London after 1982. These arguments followed no rigid pattern, and if the dispute seems more parochial than it might, and the British contribution to literature less than it should have been, it may relate to an Empiricist tendency within English Freudians which for example – unlike Klein – rejected Freud’s speculative argument for the death-drive. Jones, Strachey, and most seriously, Winnicott are examples, and it perhaps softens their work; unlike with Klein. Perhaps significantly, there is less interest in literature with these figures, even if literary criticism has used them plentifully. Perhaps too a softening of the primacy of the sexual in these figures may be discerned, and may be significant; for example, for Fairbairn, the libido was ‘the object-seeking principle’ (quoted Hughes: 96), where ‘objectrelations’ draws in the exterior and the interior world, the latter including, for Klein, the fantasies populating the inner world as internal objects (Hughes: 59–62), good or bad. A new turn to theory, structuralist, and post-structuralist, marks France after 1945, with Jacques Lacan, whose work is reviewed here in essays by David Sigler, Maria Josefina Sota Fuentes, Sophie Marret-Maleval and by Andrea Bachner, and Scott Wilson. Many worked at a qualified distance from Lacan for example: Julia Kristeva (1941–), the subject of Malte Fabian Rauch’s essay. Further French feminist voices who should be mentioned include Luce Irigaray (1930–), analysed by Serge Leclaire (1924–1994), and Michèle Montrelay (1950–), whose feminism incited Lacan to write on Duras (the influence of the feminist critic Marcelle Marini (1932–2007) is also noteworthy here). Michel Foucault, hostile to psychoanalysis’s perceived tendencies towards ‘normalizing’ analysands, was part of a nucleus including Georges Bataille (1897–1962), also discussed by Rauch; Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Alain Badiou (1937–). Deleuze and Guattari are discussed in the Handbook by Celiese Lypka, and Badiou by Colin Wright. Further,

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Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), shows fascination with psychoanalysis, with perhaps a third of his work being on it; writing double texts (Glas, ‘Living On / Border Lines’), and working across languages. Hélène Cixous (1937–) associates with Derrida, and Catherine Clément (1939–) with Cixous. Finally there is the impact of Slavoj Žižek (1949–), Lacanian and Marxist, and of his associates: Mladen Dolar (1951–), Alenka Zupancˇicˇ (1966–), and Renata Salecl (1962–) (the work of many of these is more philosophical than psychoanalytic, but see the essay by Ahmed Elbeshlawy). This theoretical turn included a Modernist Marxism which pre-War was associated with the Frankfurt School, with Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), who is discussed by Andrew Gaedtke. Further, a new feminism contested the patriarchy of many names already mentioned. Juliet Mitchell (1940 –) saw Freud as analysing the power of patriarchy, describing how things were (and are) in ideological terms, rather than supporting such patriarchy. Gender-studies by the end of the 1980s claimed much attention in America: it included ‘queer’ studies via Judith Butler (1956–) (see the essays by Chris Coffman and Juliet Roof in this volume). We should add post-colonial criticism and critiques of Eurocentrism, classically, in Edward Said (1935–2003). He examines Freud’s Moses and Monotheism’s relation to Jewishness. Freud argues that Moses was Egyptian, not Jewish; Said uses that to critique belief in single identity, personal, or national, and joins theorizations of race, gender, and colour, which changed earlier – still persisting – presumptions that there could be an assertion of universal values to which all must submit. The essays by Benigno Trigo, Christopher Lane, and Ahmed Elbeshlawy, and Hanétha Vété-Congolo, joining Surrealism to the Marxist challenges posed by Fanon, and Suzanne Césaire in Martinique, are relevant here. So too is the sense of a ‘posthuman’ state, approached in different and fruitful ways in this Handbook by Nicholas Ray, and Colin Wright, the latter linking it with psychoanalysis’s relationship to technology and digital media, discussed by Andrew Gaedtke, and by Scott Wilson. The turn to theory, in showing the literary character of much in philosophy, in Freud, and in much speculative writing which is inside ‘theory’ itself, has questioned the very sense of what literature is. In the Freud/Lacan/Derrida nexus we see the breakdown of separate disciplines – i.e. literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, plus different feminisms questioning each. In the mobilization of this literary and cultural work addressing psychoanalysis, of their separation from each other has been weakened. Each position contests each other. Literature extends into critical theory. In another combination, literature/theory/psychoanalysis became film, and film-criticism – and film, born in the same year as Studies in Hysteria, the subject of one of Judith Roof ’s two essays may be a way of considering what literature and psychoanalysis are. Film, not dispensing with text but relying on it, shows the secret of the male gaze, and the objectifying of women, as Judith Roof ’s essay on ‘Lesbian Film Theory’ demonstrates. Like the dream, film finds something unintelligible within the frame which cannot be interpreted, when truth goes by at 24 frames per second. It comments on ways of seeing in its emphasis on its own apparatus. Novel writing, too has learned from film, as in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.

LITERATURE Freud opens ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’: Works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend

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a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected, and what it is that affects me. — SE 13: 211 Freud’s personal correspondence and his writings show that he lived and thought through literature, quoting it freely, and from memory. His quotations from Goethe are most plentiful, especially from Mephistopheles in Faust, being at their most developed in the Schreber analysis. Didier Anzieu shows how much Freud identified with Goethe (Anzieu: 118–120), while his use of English and American literature is the subject of S.S. Prawer’s monograph. How unprogrammed, and unself-conscious it was (i.e. not just reading masterpieces) comes out when in 1907, Freud contributed to a questionnaire on reading, giving ten significant (not essential) examples of world literature (SE 9: 243–245). The use of E.T.A. Hoffmann constructs The Uncanny, the text discussed in this volume by Ben Moore; it is a rare person who can recall the plot of The Devil’s Elixirs, but Freud did. Freud called his own work literature, telling Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) in 1934 that he was writing Der Mann Moses: ein historischer Roman (The Man Moses: An Historical Novel) – i.e. Moses and Monotheism (SE 23: 1–137). Interest in Moses had shown itself in the essay on Michelangelo’s quasi-Roman sculpture of Moses, which was designed to be placed on the tomb of Pope Julius II. Moses is seen as two states in one, split: angry and composed, Jewish, yet incorporated into Roman religion. Contrastedly, in Moses and Monotheism, Moses is actually two people, the Egyptian monotheist who led the Jews out from captivity, and the figure the Jews created after Moses was murdered by them, in a primal slaying of the father (as in Totem and Taboo). Hence Judaism can claim no pure single originary identity. This split in thinking accords with Freud’s ambivalence about Rome, as the Semite confronting the city whose religion authorized anti-Semitism. It made Freud identify with Hannibal, the Semitic hero who would destroy Rome: ‘To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolised the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organisation of the Catholic church’ (SE 4: 196). Freud’s insights approach, then, European culture from a marginal position. And psychoanalysis responds to a sense of splitting which is imposed upon the subject – you and me – who can never sit easily within ‘civilization’. Freud’s thinking is motivated by memories, personal and cultural/ historical, which are the sphere of literature read from at an angle from its normal interpretations.

WHAT IS LITERATURE? What evidence does psychoanalysis offer for its critical positions? The arguments for Freud’s work as scientific may be stronger than admitted, but may not be worth fighting for. The testimonials people have given that psychoanalysis has helped them must not be ignored. But with literature, who could define that, and pronounce on its epistemological value? Literature needed to turn to critical theory to discover something about itself – including psychoanalytic theory. And that learning to read through reading psychoanalysis helps to answer the question of its relevance to earlier texts, such as the ‘early modern’. We cannot access that as though it described a world we

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understood in immediate terms. If we only historicize it, which is the favoured model, with, currently a commanding position, that ignores the point that ‘history’ exists in textual forms, and is itself not beyond the need of interpretation; it cannot be known in positivist terms. Reading literature as ‘cultural history’ is reductive since texts resist a single reading which thinks it can explain and contextualize it. If literature gives the firmest basis for Freud, and for post-Freudian psychoanalysis, literature and psychoanalysis become puzzling interdependent forms of discourse. We may have to think that the power of the text is to speak anachronistically, to disconfirm first readings, to require re-reading. For Freud, literature was the archive helping in his self-analysis. He likened repression to burial, and used the image of the archaeological excavations at Pompeii to undo the effects of repression: there is, in fact, no better model for repression, by which something in the mind is made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades. — SE 9: 40 He considered literature as an access to historical repression. This is sometimes to dangerous effect, because of the connections of literature with myth, which gives access to ways of thinking which are at the same time mystificatory. For to find the solutions to conflicts in mythology, as though this supported the idea of an unchanging human nature whose divisions could be resolved at the level of a story, is deeply ideological, and Freud much less Jung, was not free from it. Freud theorized ‘the antithetical meaning of primal words’ (SE 11: 155–161), on the uncanniness by which words mean one thing, and its opposite, and on the power of ambiguity. William Empson (1906–1984), in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) paid tribute to Freud here in his analysis of equivocations, puns, and contrary meanings in English poetry, and the psychoanalyst and art-critic Ernest Kris (1900–1957), in a review essay of this expands on these types, adding ‘disjunctive ambiguity’, as in the oracle given by a Shakespearian witch, Margery Jourdan: The Duke yet lives that Henry shall depose. — 2 Henry VI 1.4.30 The two interpretations (the Duke will depose Henry; Henry will depose the Duke) exclude each other, but each ‘sanction a guilty wish’ (Kris: 417). Here Kris quotes Freud on ‘switch words’, i.e. ‘ambiguous words’. These: act like points at a junction. If the points are switched across from the position in which they appear to lie in the dream, then we find ourselves on another set of rails; and along this second track run the thoughts which we are in search of but which still lie concealed behind the dream. — SE 7: 65 These switch words because they set interpretation off on another track, launch a metonymic series. Exclusionary interpretations run side by side.

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That interest in metonymy, drawn from dream-analysis, (see Allen Miller) where it associates with displacement, contrasts with what Freud says about condensation, which is associated with metaphor. Thus Freud describes Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Madonna and Child with St Anne; the Leonardo essay is the subject of Daniel Katz’s essay on ‘sublimation’. This painting makes grandmother (Anne) and mother look equally young: One is inclined to say that [the mothers] are fused together like badly condensed dream-figures, so that in some places it is hard to say where Anne ends and Mary begins. He adds a comment on the Leonardo London cartoon (the only surviving large-scale drawing by Leonardo) – here the forms of the two mothers are fused even more closely and their separate outlines are even harder to make out, so that critics . . . have been forced to say ‘It is as if two heads were growing from a single body’. — SE 11: 114–115 Fusion and condensation. The hybridity which Freud sanctions, two heads on one body, is not just Surrealist (it influenced Max Ernst) but points to something marking psychoanalysis: one thing is more than one; identity is plural; opposites merge. Condensation and displacement, both constructing dreams (SE 4:308), imply (a) that there is never one image, meaning, or identity (b) anything may act as a switch-word, starting contrary and irreconcilable interpretations. The switch-word may imply lines of interpretation, but the dream-thought may be a ‘nodal point’ upon which a great number of dream thoughts converge, so that: ‘each of the elements of the dream’s content turns out to have been “overdetermined” – to have been represented in the dream-thought many times over’ (SE 4: 263). There are apparently multiple representatives in the dream of the dream-thought, and the thought comes from multiple determinants. The psychoanalysis which is associated with ‘object-relations’, with child development, and which focuses on the mother, uses literature in a realist sense, to illustrate successes and failures in the development of a secure ego-identity. With Lacan, exhibiting an easy familiarity with the figures of rhetoric Quintilian (35–100 CE) formulated (E 390–391, 421), which feed his interest in metaphor and metonymy, there is also a confidence in literature, as is apparent in Nicolas Boileau’s essay on Lacan’s reading of Hamlet, included here, and Sophie Marret-Maleval on Lewis Carroll, also here. But it is less as a body of knowledge which may be drawn upon, though it is valid for that as in his analysis of Antigone, which is discussed by Miller, than as the play of the signifier, i.e. as language whose compound of metaphor and metonymy, punning, intentional and unintentional, and display of repetitions and unconscious insistences show how language constructs the subject. Lacan’s readings have been criticized by Jacques Derrida, and so by ‘deconstruction’, as paying insufficient attention on the text, indeed imposing a ‘frame’ upon the text to accommodate a theory. The debate between Lacan and Derrida over the former’s reading of Poe’s short story ‘The Purloined Letter’ appears elsewhere in this volume, discussed by Sigler, and that neither Lacan nor Derrida could ‘prove’ their point was demonstrated by Barbara Johnson. No doubt there was something personal in the dispute (Rapaport: 184–201), and both approaches show the absolute

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dependence of psychoanalysis on language, and language become literature, which beyond Lacan and Derrida is taken up in Andrea Bachner’s two essays, and by Daniel Bristow.

PSYCHOANALYTIC AND MARXIST CRITICISM Marxism has used psychoanalysis, and these bodies of thought need comparison, because they both address ‘civilization and its discontents’, especially, for Freud, in the face of anti-Semitism and Fascism. Much in psychoanalysis sided with Marxism. Both modes of understanding start with the non-unified, split subject. Psychoanalysis recognizes the individual subject as split because the unconscious bars me from my own meaning; repression is how I become a divided self. In Lacan, language itself severs a statement from its meaning. In Marxism, we must consider the subject as alienated from his or her own being. When Walter Benjamin discussing Kafka writes: ‘the most forgotten source of strangeness is our body – one’s own body’ (810), that is both a Marxist and psychoanalytic reading. Three European Jews, migrants to the USA, influenced by Marxism, need mentioning. Wilhelm Reich (1987–1957) opposed Fascism by advocating the free flow of sexual impulses (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933), but his libertarianism meant his death in a US prison. Erich Fromm (1900–1980), associated with the psychotherapist of the ‘real self ’, Carl Rogers (1902–1987), wrote on Fascism/authoritarianism in Escape from Freedom (1941), seeing Fascism as a desire for group identity in order to escape aloneness, and absorbing sadomasochism in order to escape feelings of impotency, which were socially determined. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), author of Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) uses psychoanalysis on repression, as the damning up of psychic energies; he attacks capitalism, whose work ethic depends on its blocking such energies. All were concerned with bridging the gap between the Freudian single subject and a sociological take on society, and in terms of literary criticism, their influence was felt on the Nietzschean critic Norman O. Brown (Wolfenstein: 53–91). One take on the relation between blocked political desire and sexuality appears in Fredric Jameson, reading Balzac’s Cousin Bette (Jameson 1981). The contrast between the single subject of psychoanalysis and the divided classes within capitalist society in Marxist thought is great – though class as a marker of difference must be articulated with awareness of race, and gender-divisions, the latter essential for psychoanalysis. Marxism has responded to how psychoanalysis takes the solutions to problems as themselves the problem, being suspicious of bourgeois ideology as expressed in defining identity, the family, and attitudes to sexuality, authoritarian or liberatory. Freud finds repression the key to how things are not stated: neurotic or obsessional behaviour is symptomatic of something hidden; it proclaims bourgeois ideology/culture to be incomplete and unable to tell the truth. Louis Althusser (1918–1990), writing ‘Freud and Lacan’ for New Left Review in 1964, when Lacan was virtually unknown in the UK, or USA, commented on Freud’s radical discovery being that the ego is not the master in its own house. This critiqued much American psychoanalysis, and psychology in general, as well as commenting on Existentialism. Freud: has discovered for us that the real subject, the individual in his unique essence, has not the form of an ego, centred on the ‘ego’, on ‘consciousness’ or on ‘existence’ – whether this is the existence of the ‘for-itself ’, of the body proper or of ‘behaviour’ – that the human subject is de-centred,

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constituted by a structure which has no ‘centre’ either, except in the imaginary misrecognition of the ‘ego’, i.e. in the ideological formations in which it ‘recognises’ itself. . . . this has opened up one of the ways which may perhaps lead us to a better understanding of this structure of misrecognition, which is of particular concern for all investigations into ideology. — Althusser: 170–171 Ideology, for Althusser means the discursive practices and thinking which act unconsciously on people’s lives and on their habitual practices – voiced by the media, by social media, and all forms of communication, including literature, and reinforced by education and religious practices – which do people’s thinking for them. And even their talking. Althusser claims that ‘ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real state of existence’ (36). Groups and peoples which are oppressed or exploited so often identify with the interests of their oppressors. The ‘imaginary’ draws on Lacan’s mirror-stage, wherein the child is flattered by its image, and thinks of itself as at the centre of the world. ‘Misrecognition’ (méconnaissance) is equally Lacanian, for thinking in the ‘Imaginary’ state includes recognition, though incorrect: ‘to misrecognise presupposes recognition, in which case we must certainly admit that what is denied is in some way recognised’ (Ecrits: 135). We know, and we don’t know, at once. The child in the mirror thinks it is at the centre, but also knows it is not. Is literature ideology, a way of ‘representing’ (= narrating) people’s lives so that it flatters them that their way of seeing the world is the right one? A reply could begin with acknowledging that literature favours the ideology of the ruling class, but not fully, because the rule – the hegemony – of the ruling class is always contested; it never dominates solely. There are always diverse voices, and voices within a text who manage to exceed the limits of ideology; perhaps never more so than now, when all certainties of gender, race, and post-colonial voices are making themselves heard. Twenty-first century psychoanalysis has enabled these. And literature has plural voices. Psychoanalysis enables a ‘symptomatic’ reading of texts; that is, detecting in what texts say traces of what they cannot say. There is an unconscious to the text, which must be read: symptoms indicate ‘absent causes’ in the text, as Fredric Jameson (35), following Althusser and Pierre Macherey (1938 –) calls them. Though absent in the text, they silently testify to injustices, evidences of ‘what hurts, what refuses desire’ (Jameson ‘La Cousin Bette’ 1981: 102) which the text’s ideological construction necessarily omits. But does the hegemonic language, that of ‘the symbolic order’, as Lacan calls it, disturb those who are unhappy in it, to madness? Does its normalcy even threaten those subjects who are happy inside it? A question for the following section.

MADNESS Freud writes: ‘Shakespeare was right in juxtaposing fiction and madness (“fine frenzy”)’. (Fliess 251). ‘Fine frenzy’ quotes A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.12), where Theseus compares the lunatic, the lover, and the poet. Freud, writing to Wilhelm Fliess (31 May 1897), sees Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther as showing Goethe’s own impulse to suicide being resolved by identifying himself with a contemporary suicide, and ‘by means of that fantasy’ of turning it into fiction, protecting himself, indicating that ‘the mechanism of fiction is the same as that of hysterical fantasies’. The insight is interesting, and speculative, but we may note an always-present strain in

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psychoanalytical thinking which finds a biographical relation between text and author, and thus treats the text as analogous to the author, to be psychoanalysed itself. Biographical approaches to writers tend towards banality, and it is inadequate to base psychic problems on individual, as opposed to social and discursive, formations which have set their mark on lives. Such formations call individual uniqueness into question. Amongst French theorists influenced by psychoanalysis, there has been an argument for a madness within writing itself. We can start with Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), on the ‘semiotic’ aspects of language. These begin with the child’s relationship to the mother, focussing on how, as Wordsworth writes of his infancy in his autobiographical poem: by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my mother’s heart — The Prelude (1805) 2.262-3 ‘Semiotic’ communication works through bodily flows and compulsions, but is replaced by the dominance of the symbolic; which is patriarchal, imposing language, fixing identity and gender and meaning. Kristeva theorizes that there may be a writing which responds to the semiotic, which may be more feminine, questioning gender, as happens in Lautréamont and Mallarmé, where language resists being at the service of stateable meaning. The ‘revolutionary’ in language refers to the subversion of the symbolic by the musicalization of language, its rhythms, and breaks with grammar. It points to the relationship between language and the way the subject is constituted by the contrasting forces of the symbolic and the semiotic, the latter showing the mother’s repressed presence. This theme accounts too for Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, which shows how the fear of the mother’s body (and fear of her jouissance) invades male writing, and Black Sun, on a melancholia induced by the need to escape the mother: this is a theme in Marguerite Duras. Elsewhere, in Blanchot, Foucault, and Derrida, writing evades the control the subject would impose on it; it exhibits delirium, it says something other than it says, and bars the speaking/writing subject from the meaning of their own language, saying more at all times. Freud’s fascination with Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903) by Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911) (see SE: 12.82), shows him responding to the language of the mad. Freud never knew Schreber but deduces that his Memoirs revealed paranoia. Lacan, whose Seminar 3 is devoted to Schreber, says that the latter is ‘no poet’: he doesn’t introduce us to a new dimension of experience. There is poetry wherever writing introduces us to a world other than our own and also makes it become our own, making present a being, a certain fundamental relationship. The poetry makes us unable to doubt the authenticity of St John of the Cross’ experience, or Proust’s, or Gérard de Nerval’s. Poetry is the creation of a subject adopting a new order of symbolic relations to the world. There is nothing of this in Schreber’s Memoirs. — S3: 78 A definition of paranoia is implicit here as much as of poetry. Further, we note that what was once deemed sacred might now be thought mad. Constructions of sanity have changed. Freud

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confines himself to neurosis save with Schreber: the Wolf Man exhibits ‘infantile neurosis’ (SE 17: 3–123), though the term ‘repudiation’ (Verwerfung), used of him (SE 17.84–85), is taken by Lacan as definitional for psychosis. The Wolf Man has ‘foreclosed’ (Lacan’s version of Verwerfung) on the symbolic authority of the father who gives coherence to the patriarchal ‘symbolic order’. He has not acknowledged the symbolic force of castration and the ‘name (nom – which puns on non) of the father’, wherein the child enters the ‘symbolic order’, which secures meaning and, creatively, the possibility of a discourse evoking the other. Outside the Symbolic, the subject is confined to the Imaginary state, where allows no dialogue; the subject thinks itself supreme. The ‘paternal metaphor’, Lacan’s name for the signifier of the father, guarantees meaning within what is recognized as a conventional structure; this order partially blocks ‘the real’, an unspeakable reality. Hence, ‘what is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears in the real’ (S3 13) – in hallucinatory form. The term ‘the real’ borrows from Freud saying that not everything in the dream is interpretable – i.e. capable of being brought into the symbolic (SE 5. 524–525). Lacan’s subject is, essentially, ‘the real’, to which he keeps returning under various synonyms, each evoking it: the Thing, the objet a, the gaze, the stain, the remainder, the ‘extimate’. It is also at the heart of Žižek’s use of Lacan. In ‘foreclosure’, language has never been accepted as a series of conventional signs protecting against ‘the real’, which disturbs to annihilating effect. Lacan does not maintain Freud’s division between neurosis and psychosis (S3 45). Paranoia is a schizophrenia, when this means not a ‘split mind’ (its etymological sense), but a radical breakdown of rationality marked by hallucinations and a loss of a sense of the distinction between what is inside, and outside the self. Psychosis becomes Lacan’s topic, as Wilson brings out, as paranoia had been for him in the 1930s. He quotes Freud saying of sufferers from paranoia, delusions, psychosis, that ‘they love their delusions as they love themselves’ (S3: 215 – Fliess: 111). That aligns paranoia and delusional states, including fantasy, with narcissism.

HÖLDERLIN AND ARTAUD Psychosis marks a crisis-situation in relation to language. The psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) discussed the tragic madness of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), as resulting from a relationship to father-substitutes, especially Schiller. Madness effectively silenced him. He foreclosed on the ‘name of the father’. Rainer Nägele, commenting, finds a fruitful ambiguity in Laplanche’s analysis. Has Hölderlin missed the name of the father, i.e. his authority, which would be an error at the level of the signified (i.e. failure to know what the father’s authority means) or is it the name of the father, i.e. an error in relation to naming, and so to the signifier? Is it that he does not know what to call the father? Madness oscillates between a confused relation to the authority of the father, who is too distant, or returns in the Real in a fantasmatic way, and to another failure: to be able to say what the father is, which Laplanche attributes to ‘a certain faultline in language’ (xxxi–xxxii, 140). If so, classical madness – as in Greek tragedy (see Miller’s essay), Shakespeare, Smart, Blake, and the madness discussed in Foucault’s Histoire de la folie (1960) – may be the first type. Modernist madness (Nerval, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Artaud, Woolf, Joyce) may be the second. Perhaps that is too general a thesis to be stated here, but it is worth considering, so long as these two forms of madness are not seen as mutually exclusionary, or periodized too narrowly. This second madness Foucault commented on, discussing Laplanche:

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the father has never assumed the role of nomination, and . . . the position of the signifier, through which the father names himself, and, according to the Law, through which he is able to name, has remained vacant. It is towards this ‘no’ that the unwavering line of psychosis is infallibly directed, as it is precipitated inside the abyss of meaning, it evokes the devastating absence of the father through the forms of delirium and phantasm, and through the catastrophe of the signifier. — Laplanche 2007: 82 It is less that the child has ‘foreclosed’ on the name of the father than the father being absent and everywhere. His absence is part of the meaning of the ‘death of God’, subject of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra; if sanity responds to a centring force which guarantees ‘meaning’ and ‘value’, such a stabilizing force has gone, and condemns those who experience it to mourn the death of God, that is, trying to retain a centring force which has actually gone. Yet try thinking that paternal, phallic authority, has gone! Derrida gives a corrective to the thought of the father being absent, discussing Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), a topic of Gaedtke’s essay. saying Artaud’s psychosis resulted not from the death of God, but from the enforcement in Western metaphysics of a language, a set of norms, and a way of thinking about the body and about the nature of ‘man’ which Artaud finds intolerable; the more so as his protests against it, for example in his correspondence with the journal-editor Jacques Rivière in 1923 and 1924, were met with accusations that he was not expressing himself in the conventional terms of art. Hence Artaud asks for a theatre which, like life, has no prompter giving him the words he must speak, or robbing him of what he wants to say; Artaud’s theatre of cruelty wants no repetition (the word includes the idea of ‘rehearsal’), where nothing has been pre-scripted. Derrida quotes the poetry of Artaud which is the basis of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus speaking of ‘the body without organs’, the subject of Lypka’s essay: ’The body is the body,/It is alone/and has no need of organs,/the body is never an organism,/organisms are the enemies of bodies,/ . . . every organ is a parasite’ (Derrida 186). The body has been appropriated, or expropriated, its uniqueness or unknowability subjected to a disciplinarity which knows what is good for it (Sylvia Plath’s record of electric-shock therapy in The Bell Jar will be recalled). Psychology, which stabilizes the subject as producer, consumer, obedient voter, and family-oriented is Artaud’s target. Yet, says Derrida, Artaud’s opposition can, ironically, only play into the hands of Western metaphysics, confirming it. It is not a madness coming about from the absence of norms. For Lacan, the three orders, the three interlaced rings of the Real, Symbolic, Imaginary (RSI) are integrated by the ‘Borromean knot’, which is virtual (there cannot in reality be three interlocking circles forming the RSI, held together by a fourth ringing them all). This fourth circle is the sinthome, discussed in the seminar on Joyce (S23) – see Jean-Michel Rabaté. The sinthome includes the meaning of ‘symptom’, which recalls Žižek’s appropriation of Lacan, which sees social reality in terms of ‘symptoms’ of ‘the real’. The symptom is to be interpreted, but it is also how a subject organizes/controls/represents/substitutes for his or her traumas (Freud thought of the symptom as a ‘compromise’ with a psychic disturbance [2 May 1897, Fliess: 239]). In Žižek, the Real is in the symbolic order, which is ‘crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility structured around an impossible / traumatic kernel, around a central lack’ (Žižek: 122). Something crazy infects, but constitutes the symbolic order. Fantasy conceals how the symbolic order is structured round some ‘traumatic impossibility’ which ‘cannot be symbolised’ (123). For Žižek, Marx demonstrated:

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how all phenomena which appear to everyday bourgeois consciousness simple deviations, contingent deformations and degenerations of the ‘normal’ functioning of society (economic crises, wars, and so on), and as such abolishable through the amelioration of the system, are necessary products of the system itself – the points at which the ‘truth’, the immanent antagonistic character of the system, erupts. ‘To identify with a symptom’ means to recognise in the ‘excesses’, in the disruptions of the ‘normal’ way of things, the key offering us access to its true functioning’. — 128 Such symptoms are like Freud’s dreams, jokes, and slippages; they point to the unconscious. They impose symptomatic, i.e. neurotic, even psychotic, behaviour on those they make its subjects. Yet that the symptom may not be so easily interpretable shows in Dean’s reading of Laplanche, on the ‘enigmatic signifier’. In Laplanche, this has the sense of something of sexualizing significance passed from adult to child, neither assigning it a meaning. He follows Lacan: between the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a current signifying chain , a spark flies that fixes in a symptom – a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element – the signification, that is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved. — Ecrits: 431 The ‘enigmatic signifier’, replaced by the ‘symptom’ remains inaccessible. Dean (20–41) gives this a strong reading, making psychoanalysis, anti-hermeneutic, anti-interpretation. John Fletcher however takes the enigmatic signifier as an unreadable sign within the ego’s constitution, a foreign body within it, compromising a facile ‘translatability’ of symptoms.

A CASE STUDY I braid these introductory comments together via Marguerite Duras (1914–1996), Madness, trauma, and the woman’s relation to language connect for this novelist, who was too feminist for the Communist Party to tolerate. She scripted Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) whose subject is Nachträglichkeit – delayed reaction experienced at some unspecifiable time after an event (or a fantasized event), and one of Freud’s key insights (SE 17: 37–38). The heroine is in Japan but she was in France, in Nevers, during the Occupation, when she (‘treacherously’) loved a German soldier and was humiliated and punished, while he was killed, as a result of her inadvertently revealing his repeated appearances to meet her on the river-bank. The Japanese with whom she is now in love awaits the trauma of Hiroshima to have its impact on him; in repeating to her that she ‘never saw Hiroshima’, he intimates the difference between thinking such an experience as Hiroshima can be absorbed, passed by, and having a deferred reaction to it. The Japanese, and Hiroshima, makes her remember the German lover, and her punishment (see Kristeva 1989: 231– 238, who discusses Duras’s ‘sadness’, her own ‘black sun of melancholy’). Duras’s novel, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) was discussed by Lacan in Ornicar?, in a ‘Homage’ which aligned literature and psychoanalysis, saying that ‘the practice of the letter converges with the work of the unconscious’ (Lacan: 124). Lola’s madness and history is narrated by the male medic, Jacques Hold, lover of Lola’s childhood friend, Tatiana Karl. Lola was

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traumatized, maddened, by her fiancé Michael Richardson leaving her for another woman, a mother, Anne-Marie Stretter, at a ball at T Beach, near S Tahla. Tatiana does not accept that this caused Lola’s illness (Hold’s explanation); Tatiana says there was already something lacking in Lol, something which kept her from being, in Tatiana’s words, ‘there’ (là (3) – là is repeated several times; that Lola drops the a of her name emphasizes the point). The là / ‘la’ (she) pun indicates how women are not ‘there’, since patriarchal culture erases them; women do not count because they have no place; that is Lola’s case. Further, there is no ‘essence of woman’. A Proustian hint in the novel implies that Lola’s mother, and her absent father might have failed her, which would suggest a lack in ‘object-relations’ causing her psychosis. Hold is fascinated by Lol, and his efforts at interpretation resemble the psychoanalyst’s; at the same time, he maddens himself in trying to interpret/organize her. He is de-centred in and by his text, called both ‘he’ and ‘I’, subject and object of a narrative he cannot control, sometimes forced to see himself through Lola’s eyes. He seduces her on a repeat visit to T Beach when trying to undo the trauma which he has deduced is at work; he assumes that she is trying to restage the ‘primal scene’ of her abandonment by her fiancé. At the ball the triangle (fiancé and Anne-Marie and Lola) was not quite a triangle, because the first two were unaware of Lola behind the potted plants; she has been erased, both in the triangle and as an excluded spectator of a duo. Hold deduces that she wants to be seen and not seen (i.e. to be absent, to be a void); hence she sees the love-making of Hold and Tatiana through the window of a cheap hotel, as if repeating a fantasy of Richardson and Anne-Marie together, so denying and affirming her exclusion at once. Hold speculates about Lola missing a sense of an ‘unknown’ in the situation in the ball, because of ‘lack of a word’: if Lol is silent in her daily life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose centre would have been hollowed out into a hole . . . By its absence, this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh . . . — 38 As Lola has been forced into a position of absence, there is an absence in language which is to be spoken by or for her. We return to the argument that Modernist madness finds an absence in language, but if that word existed it would be a ‘hole word’ (evoking the vagina, an absence, in contrast to the phallic which orientates the symbolic order). The hole-word, a black hole into wherein the subject is lost speaks of abjection, which appears too with the ‘dead dog on the beach’ – on the border between the knowable land and the sea – as a figure of the abject ‘real’. Kristeva sees the border as the site of anxiety, being the space between or connecting subjects who desire separate identities. Lola tells Hold that she saw Tatiana, with whom she identifies, and also sees as a figure of Anne-Marie, (making Hold into Richardson) ‘naked beneath her black hair’ (105–106). The hair makes Tatiana, for Lacan, the ‘stain’, the Real, annihilating vision and disturbing the sense that there can be a unified love relationship: a relationship is of more and less than two: Lacan calls it a relation of three (the two parties plus Language as the Other). The American translation lessens Duras’s stress on the signifier, by cutting out the single letters which are prominent in it: the V, before ‘Stein’. (Lola Valerie Stein has as it were ‘castrated’ her name in her psychosis) is omitted. Similarly, it rationalises ‘U. Bridge’ as ‘Uxbridge’! In Surrealist fashion, Lacan plays with the signifiers, as the letters in Lola’s name forming the unconscious:

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Lol V. Stein. paper wings, V, scissors, Stein, stone, in love’s guessing game you lose yourself. (Lol V. Stein: ailes de papier, V, ciseaux, Stein, la pierre au jeu de la mourre tu te perds’). — See Lydon: 357 The L and l suggest wings and elle (she) – and so la/’là’. Lacan thinks of the guessing game – the jeu de la mourre – of stone/scissors/paper, and introduces hazard, chance – and the chance encounter –, while ‘la mourre’ suggests ‘l’amour’ (love) and ‘la mort’ (death) and the Italian mora, – delay. There may be a word-play on Marivaux’s comedy, Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard, which also plays on double identities and concealed viewpoints. Much that Lacan says recalls his analysis of ‘The Purloined Letter’, as if he was fascinated by a triangular structure denying to all in it the possibility of full vision. No-one can be in their place, as the letter cannot be. Lacan takes from Duras ways of bringing together word-play, literature, psychoanalysis, and a literary-critical response. Ultimately, this woman’s writing discusses male interpretation, which reveals its limitations, and cannot supply the absent word: perhaps the best psychoanalysis can do is to show that, given that it works with language, and with the letter patriarchally imposed, the source of alienation, then, to those who speak within it. And that is no small achievement.

THE HANDBOOK OF LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS It remains to outline the Handbook’s overall plan. Its interests spread over five sections, but it proved impossible to confine any topic to any one section, or even indicate the range: the reader ultimately must have recourse to the Index! The first includes discussion of different modes of psychoanalysis, and some neglected figures, such as Charles Maurron (see the essay by Catherine Lanone) plus some different topics within it, as with Katz discussing sublimation. The book’s second section looks at psychoanalytically-motivated critical readings of some classic texts, including one highly original treatment of a text which Freud deeply admired. David Copperfield (Peter Rudnytsky). It looks at one field which psychoanalysis has made its own, starting from Oedipus: crime fiction (see essays by Simão Valente and Sigler). The third section gathers together readings on Modernist texts, which because they are contemporary with the first great wave of psychoanalysis, perhaps offer significant commentaries on it. The essays on European Modernism include Scott Lerner on Proust, my work on Surrealism, and Fuhito Endo on Eliot. Modernism is also the topic of Lanone, and of Endo on Woolf, and Chris Coffman on Nightwood, but the main stress is with Joyce, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s subject. Joyce is referred to throughout the book. The other author claiming multiple attention is Beckett, discussed by Moorjani, and Wright, and another underestimated Modernist is Mina Loy (see Gaedtke). The fourth section considers the impact of psychoanalytic thought on feminism and gender, and on women’s writing, plus, in Chris Coffman’s essay, trans-gender issues. Fuentes on Lacan’s Seminar 20 deserves attention here. The fifth considers contemporary cultural theory, including, as we have seen, how psychoanalysis relates to new technologies. My essay on Surrealism considers psychoanalysis and the visual image, while there are two excellent essays on music, one by Christopher Wintle taking in Wagner, the other by Tom DeRose, considering the voice. Apart from music, a topic Freud seems deaf to, though he admired Don Giovanni, the Handbook attempts to cover some unfamiliar ground, as with Lanone’s essay on Charles Mauron, the French psychoanalysis

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before Lacan. It blends theory with the reading of literature, as with Moore’s essay which takes in Frankenstein, as Lypka looks at another Mary Shelley text, The Last Man. Essential for thinking about psychoanalysis today is the question of how it relates to its nonEuropean contexts. The essays by Trigo, by Lane, by Elbeshlawy, and by Hanétha Vété-Congolo mark a close relationship between Marxism and post-colonialism, questioning both when they are isolated from each other. But in all these there is the sense that psychoanalysis has thoroughly entered into critical thinking, being essential beyond the concerns of the individual subject, but impacting upon culture itself, whose relationship to the subject psychoanalysis takes in so fully. Its worth, and significance, plus its dangers when it is used as simply a tool by itself, are the subjects of this Handbook.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Althusser, Louis. Essays on Ideology. Verso: 1984. Anzieu, Didier. Freud’s Self-Analysis. Trans. Peter Graham. Hogarth Press. 1986. Badiou, Alain. Lacan. Trans. Kenneith Reinhard and Susan Spitzer. Columbia U.P 2018. Bann, Stephen. (ed.) The Coral Mind: Adrian Stokes’s Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis. Pennsylvania U.P. 2007. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings 4 vols. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Harvard U.P. 1996–2004. Bergstein, Mary. Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art. Cornell U.P. 2010. Dean, Tim. ‘Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism’. Diacritics. 32 (2002): 20–41. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Megan Paul. 1978. Duras, Marguerite. The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press. 1966. Frankland, Graham. Freud’s Literary Culture. Cambridge U.P. 2000. Fuechtner, Veronika. Berlin Psychoanalytic. California U.P. 2011. Gay, Peter. A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. Yale U.P. 1987. Hale, Nathan G. Freud in America. 2 vols. Vol 2: The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States 1917–1985. Oxford U.P. 1995. Hughes, Judith M. Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain: The Work of Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and D.W. Winnicott. California U.P. 1989. Jameson, Fredric. ‘La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism’. PMLA. 86 (1981): 241–254. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Methuen. 1981. Kaplan, Abraham, and Ernst Kris. ‘Aesthetic Ambiguity ’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948): 413–435. King, Pearl and Riccardo Steiner (eds.). The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–1945. Routledge. 1991. Kris, Ernst, 1948. ‘Aesthetic Ambiguity ’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1948): 415–435. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia U.P. 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Melanie Klein. Trans. Ross Guberman. Columbia U.P. 2001. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Homage to Marguerite Duras’ trans. Peter Connor in Duras by Duras. City Lights 1987: 122–129. Laplanche, Jean. Seduction, Translation and the Drives. Ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton. London: ICA. 1992. Laplanche, Jean. Hölderlin and the Question of the Father. Trans. Luke Carson. Introduction by Rainer Nägele. Victoria, Canada: ELS Editions. 2007. Lydon, Mary. ‘The Forgetfulness of Memory: Jacques Lacan, Marguerite Duras, and the Text’. Contemporary Literature 29. 1988: 351–368. Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Penguin. 1974. Parker, Ian. Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Pluto. 2004. Pavón-Cuéllar, David. Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology. Routledge. 2017. Phillips, Adam. Winnicott. Harvard U.P. 1988.

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Prawer, S.S. A Cultural Citizen of the World: Sigmund Freud’s Knowledge and Use of British and American Writings. Oxford: Legenda. 2009: 5–21. Rapaport, Herman. Between the Sign and the Gaze. Cornell U.P. 1994. Said, Edward. Freud and the Non-European Introduction by Christopher Bollas, response by Jacqueline Rose. Verso, 2003. Salecl, Renata. On Anxiety. Routledge. 2004. Sprengnether, Madelon. Mourning Freud. Bloomsbury. 2018. Stanton, Martin, ‘Wilhelm Stekel: A Refugee Artist and his English Reception’ in Edward Timms and Naomi Segal (eds.), Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and its Vicissitudes. Yale U.P. 1988. Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. Psychoanalytic Marxism: Groundwork. Free Association Books. 1993. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso. 1989.

PART ONE

Forms of Psychoanalysis

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CHAPTER ONE

When Psychoanalysis Plays with Words ANDREA BACHNER

MUCH TOO PLAYFUL In a recent German handbook on Literature and Psychoanalysis, Paul Fleming starts his entry on “Witz” (“jokes”) with a reflection on the marginal position of the joke in psychoanalysis, seeing the absence of an entry on “Jokes” in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis as an expression of psychoanalysis’s discontent with humor (Fleming: 478). And indeed, in addition to omitting “Jokes,” Laplanche’s and Pontalis’s standard reference work of 1967 does not feature any other term directly related to this chapter’s topic of linguistic play either. And yet, when we read psychoanalytic texts with this interest in mind linguistic play is at work everywhere. This disconnect has much to do with a split inherent in how we read and do psychoanalytical work: between an emphasis on scientific knowledge and clinical analysis and a foregrounding of theoretical insights, particularly in the fields of literary theory and cultural studies. Of course, psychoanalysis has always, to some extent, maintained a double vision across this divide, ever since Freud’s multiple interests. After all, the journal Imago, created in 1921 under Freud’s editorship, as “Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften” (“journal for the application of psychoanalysis in the humanities”) had the express purpose to bridge disciplines. But the late 1960s also marked this split as a temporal shift—one that the 1967 Vocabulary missed by a hair’s breadth: with the publication of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) and Écriture et difference (Writing and Difference) in 1967 and Gilles Deleuze’s Différence et répétition (Difference and Repetition) in 1968 what we now refer to as French poststructuralism was born. And in that atmosphere, philosophers like Derrida and psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan worked and thought side by side. This created a powerful transdisciplinary and stylistic feedback loop. The psychoanalytical interests of theorists and literary critics flourished as they turned their attention to Freud’s engagement with literature and culture. By the same token, their investment in linguistic experimentation also, no doubt, inspired psychoanalytical thinkers, such as Lacan, to experiment with playful elements in their theoretical writing. In what follows, rather than tracing concrete vectors of influence, I will attempt to sketch a sense of a generalized linguistic playfulness among some of the key theoretical figures of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. For this purpose, I comment on some particularly suggestive examples of linguistic play. Even though this eclectic series of textual moments starts with Freud, it is not meant as a theoretical genealogy. Even though I touch upon some representative figures of the field, this is not 21

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an exhaustive treatment of the matter. Instead, these examples are intended to provide some insights into the structure and use of linguistic play in theoretical texts in the field of, or at least in dialog with the field of psychoanalysis. Rather than focus on a particular figure or genre, I group these examples under the broad category of linguistic play, understood here as playful manipulation of linguistic material. It is here, where language becomes material or matter to be molded, broken, and reassembled, where we can locate one of the most productive interfaces between psychoanalytical thought and literature.

“FAMILIONÄR” (FREUD) In 1905, Freud published a book entirely dedicated to jokes: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious). Often seen as a lesser companion piece to The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900), or, as Freud himself would have it (in his 1925 Selbstdarstellung [An Autobiographical Study]), a “Seitensprung,” “side-issue” (GW 14 91/SE 20 65; “act of adultery,” literally a “lateral jump”), the structure of the joke shows the logic of the dreamwork and vice versa (GW 14 91–92/SE: 20 66). Both dreams and jokes give pleasure by allowing the unconscious to manifest itself—albeit in a safe, since deformed and displaced manner. But where dreams are personal, even asocial, jokes are a social phenomenon, and hence have to communicate there where dreams often remain opaque. In this sense, maybe jokes, and not dreams, are the real “royal road (Via regia) to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (GW 3 613/SE: 5 608). For the similarity between dreams and jokes to work, though, a particular group of jokes constitutes the basis and model example for Freud’s analysis of jokes: jokes that play with words. The very first example of a joke in Freud’s book sets the tone. It is drawn from the work of Heinrich Heine, a late nineteenth-century Austrian writer whom Freud included in a 1907 list of his favorite books (see Gilman 1992: 77). The reference to Heine, “the exemplary cultural Jew for late nineteenth-century Austria” (Gilman: 77), at the very beginning of Freud’s book on jokes signals also the work’s ambivalent treatment of jokes on Jews. Freud’s first joke example is a “brilliant joke of Heine’s, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, the poor lotteryagent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal—quite ‘famillionairely’ (ganz famillionär).” (GW 6 8–9/SE 8: 12–13). It appears first in Freud’s survey of existing theories of the joke and is quoted not directly from Heine, but from an article by Heymans. But where Heymans, and another joke theorist quoted by Freud, Lipps, read this example from Heine to illustrate the joke’s character as a rapid, surprising shift from bafflement to understanding, Freud uses it instead to point to the importance of the linguistic material of the joke for its effect, to the “formation of that word” (“Bildung dieses Wortes”) and the “characteristics of the word thus formed” (“Charakter des so gebildeten Wortes”) (14/13). That this is the first joke in Freud’s book and that it will allow Freud to develop his theory of the technique of jokes is thus by no means a “lead presented to us by chance” (“[Wink] des Zufalls”) (8/16) as Freud claims. Freud sets out with a “translation” of the joke as he paraphrases the implied message of Hirsch-Hyacinth’s slip of the tongue: “Rothschild treated me quite as his equal, quite familiarly (ganz familiär) – that is, so far as a millionaire (Millionär) can.’ (15/17). For Freud, the original form of the joke, especially its core, the word “famillionär,” constitutes a considerably shorter, pithier form. But Freud zooms in even further, providing a rather lengthy description of this mixed word:

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The word ‘familiär [familiarly]’ in the unjoking expression of the thought has been transformed in the text of the joke into ‘famillionär [famillionairely]’ and there can be no doubt that it is precisely on this verbal structure that the joke’s character as a joke and its power to cause a laugh depend. The newly constructed word coincides in its earlier portion with the ‘familiär’ of the first sentence, and in its final syllables with the ‘Millionär [millionaire]’ of the second sentence. It stands, as it were, for the ‘Millionär’ portion of the second sentence and thus for the whole second sentence, and so puts us in a position to infer the second sentence that has been omitted in the text of the joke. It can be described as a ‘composite structure’ made up of the two components ‘familiär’ and ‘Millionär’, and it is tempting to give a diagrammatic picture of the way in which it is derived from those two words: (16–17/18–19) And, in fact, as if this description did not make matters sufficiently clear, Freud provides such a graphic representation. And then he explains in a footnote how this graphic representation works, conjecturing that the origin of the joke lies precisely in the fact that both words share several syllables (17, second footnote/19 first footnote). And then he segues into yet another explanation of this wordplay, now dramatized as a process in which a “compressing force” (“zusammendrängende Kraft”) is at work, eliminating the second sentence and against which only the strongest word, “Millionär,” puts up a successful resistance, even though fused into the first sentence’s “familiär.” (17/19). And, of course, Freud provides us with yet another graphic representation before concluding that this exemplary joke constitutes a case of “condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute” (“Verdichtung mit Ersatzbildung”): “The joke is thus generated: ‘R. treated me quite famili on är.’ ” (17/19) (mili)

(är)

And although Freud postpones a discussion of the reasons for our pleasure in this and other similar jokes to a future point in his book, a reader familiar with The Interpretation of Dreams can guess what Freud’s conclusion will be. After all, the technique of jokes reminds them of the similar treatment of the dream language in which the dream-thought can only express the dream-content after it has undergone condensation and displacement (GW 2 284–315/SE 2: 279–309). What has disappeared here, though, after all the explanations and representations, is the laughter and glee that every successful joke needs (also according to Freud). Freud protests too much, overexplaining a rather simple fusion of two words into one that works thanks to their similar syllabic material. What a listener grasps intuitively, Freud’s explanatory effort overdoes. In any case, this example of a joke had already been given to us amply framed, through several sources (Heine, Heymans) as relay stations. Freud’s business with jokes is serious; not only can we speak of a joke work (in analogy to the dreamwork); it also demands rigorous work on the analyst’s part. And thus, this example also shows psychoanalysis’s ambivalent relation to literature. Freud’s work with jokes brings psychoanalysis in contact with literature even more forcefully than in his explicitly literary analyses or literary examples such as Oedipus, Hamlet, or E.T.A. Hoffman’s “Sandman” (“Der Sandmann”). Not only are many of Freud’s examples in Jokes culled from a literary (or at least semi-literary) milieu. What is more important, from our contemporary vantage point, is another type of literariness that surfaces in Freud’s analysis of jokes: a focus on work in and with language itself. This understanding of literariness on the microlevel of linguistic material was proposed, for

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instance, by Russian formalist Roman Jakobson via the poetic function of language, as an additional aesthetic criterion when selecting and stringing words together (see Jakobson 1960: 358). Literariness defined as a certain manipulation of linguistic material has influenced poststructuralist and deconstructivist thinkers such as Derrida or Paul de Man. Through such a lens, Freud, then, becomes effectively a kind of literary critic, especially there where he engages closely with the minute matters of language. But, of course, Freud’s interest is not primarily to trace the aesthetic pleasure of a text; and his textual analyses are a means to an end, a way of excavating the functioning of the human psyche. Even as it highlights linguistic manipulation, Freud’s analytical work inevitably unravels (and thus undoes) the joke and strips it of its literariness.

“S(H)IESTORKA”1 (ABRAHAM AND TOROK, WITH DERRIDA) In the footsteps of Freud’s legacy psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok play it safer with linguistic manipulations. In their Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups (1976, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy) they attempt a re-analysis of one of the most famous cases of analysis, that of the so-called Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff [Pankeyev]), treated by Freud himself as well as his associate Ruth Mack Brunswick for many years. Abraham and Torok “analyse” the Wolf Man entirely on the basis of textual material on the case (by Freud, Mack Brunswick, and Pankeyev himself). This textual basis no doubt helps determine their conclusions. Their analysis reinterprets the Wolf Man’s case as the introjection of the figure of the sister, burdened with ambivalence due to her erotic relationship with the father, as well as the younger brother, Pankeyev himself. Abraham’s and Torok’s breakthrough hinges upon language, or rather, a multiplicity of languages: in addition to his native language Russian, and to his fluency in German, the analysand had spoken English with a governess in his childhood. Freud’s example of a fetishistic attachment to a “Glanz auf der Nase” (“shimmer on the nose”) in the 1927 essay “Fetischismus” (“On Fetishism”) reminds us of the Wolf Man’s multilingual context: Freud “translates” “Glanz” (“shimmer”) into its English near homophone “glance,” a “glance at the nose.” Abraham and Torok begin to unravel the mystery of the Wolf Man once they translate words from German to Russian or English. The famous wolf dream (the origin of the pseudonym Wolf Man) thus becomes intelligible when the six or seven wolves sitting on a tree in the dream that cause the boy terror are translated into Russian: Six in Russian, SHIEST, also means perch, mast, and probably genitals, at least symbolically. This could have satisfied an ill-formed psychoanalytic mind. Fortunately, the authors’ eyes fell on the neighboring words: SHIESTIERO and SHIESTORKA, meaning six or a lot of six people. Contaminated by the German Schwester (sister), they could not help checking the word sister as well, and there they discovered, to their amusement and confirming their suspicion, the words SIESTRA and its diminutive SIESTORKA. It became clear that the “pack of six wolves” did not contain the idea of multiplicity, but of the sister instead. Were we not justified from then on to look for the same association of ideas elsewhere? It was likely, in fact, that in the nightmares and

1 The French original follows a different transcription from Russian than the English translation; for instance, “chiestorka” and “siestorka” in contrast to “shiestorka” and “siestorka,” as well as “siestierka” instead of “siestorka.” I use the transcription of the English translation here for simplicity’s sake.

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the Wolf Man’s phobic moments, wolf and sister would occur together. We simply had to survey the Russian vocabulary of the dreams and phobias and, where needed, fill in the gaps with his second language, German. — 112/17 At a later moment in the text, a gloss of the whole wolf dream, Abraham and Torok reiterate their reading (or translation) in shorter form: “‘There were six or seven of them’ (Es waren sechs oder sieben Stück.) As was shown earlier, a “pack of six,” a “sixter” = shiestorka: siestorka, does not denote a number but simply the sister. In a word: There was the sister.” (150–151/37.) The linguistic epiphany of the two analysts turns into a method: looking for further, similar translingual co-occurrences of terms related to wolves and sisters. And, in fact, a number of different series leads (via Russian, German, and English) from “wolf ” and/or “sister” to cognates of “scratching” or “rubbing,” “cancer,” and so forth, listed in a “Verbarium” at the end of the book. It is not only because of the repeated glossing of “Shiestorka/Siestorka” (“pack of six/siss”) and the list of the Wolf Man’s cryptic terms decrypted at the end of the book that “s(h)iestorka” reminds us of Freud’s “famillionär.” After all, we can read “s(h)iestorka” as a verbal displacement of the sister— across different languages (between the German “sechs Stück” and the Russian “shiestorka”), reinforced by the analysand’s oscillation between numbers as the “sechs oder sieben” become five wolves in the drawing he makes to illustrate the dream. And yet, “siestorka” (much as “Millionär”) cannot be completely erased, at least if you can draw on different languages. For Abraham and Torok, the introjection of the sister creates, also, an encrypting of words. As Freud described for the dreamwork, words are treated like things. But here, the work with linguistic material is complicated by multiple languages. The analyst needs to translate between languages as well as between the different expressions of the dream-thought and the dream-content. The Wolf Man’s dreamwork creates a “metonymy of words,” not of things (see 117–118/19), the processes of deformation squared as the “contiguity that presides over this procedure is by nature not a representation of things, not even a representation of words, but arises from the lexical contiguity of the various meanings of the same words, that is, from the allosemes, as they are catalogued in a dictionary” (118/19). Unlike “famillionär,” of course, “s(h)iestorka” is not a joke; it is, rather, a complicated chain of signifiers read, in the end, as a trace of psychic trauma. The key to an individual’s psychopathology lies in the analysts’ nimble movement between terms, associations, and languages. Who plays with language here? The Wolf Man? His unconscious? Or Abraham and Torok? If this is the analysts’ play with words, it is only playful for a short moment, though. After all, the multiple possible meanings of the Wolf Man’s translingual associations must become intelligible to the analysts (and their readers) not only in the form of a list of archeonyms, but also as a coherent whole, in the form of a dialog between the Wolf Man’s different psychic personae (see 79/lxxi). This aim, however, limits the Wolf Man’s (or Abraham’s and Torok’s) linguistic inventions to a monotonous main melody: “there was the sister,” always already there, everywhere. Jacques Derrida’s foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok” (“Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok”), a text that has become almost more famous than the book itself, highlights, for me, Abraham’s and Torok’s suggestive ambivalence vis-à-vis linguistic play. Unsurprisingly, for an author like Derrida whose texts are usually rife with wordplay—this is visible, for instance, in the very title of his essay: the

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“fors” (“force/dehors/for/s” or “force/outside/except/core”) as well as the “mots anglés/anglais” (“slanted/English words”)—the Wolf Man’s cryptonyms in their translingual, polysemic gliding are particularly suggestive. But Derrida’s reflections on the literariness of Abraham’s and Torok’s work strikes an ambivalent tone: On the one hand, according to Derrida, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word itself reads like literature, “like a novel, a poem, a myth, a drama, the whole thing in a plural translation, productive and simultaneous” (31/xxv). On the other, Derrida praises the lucidity and, indeed, lack of stylistic mannerism (read also: wordplay) of the book, unlike what he diagnoses as a fad in contemporary criticism “within the psychoanalytic agora, outside it, or in that intermediary zone that expands so rapidly” (31/xxv). In contrast, according to Derrida, Abraham’s and Torok’s writing comes from “the Thing (la Chose) they are occupied with” (32/xxv). In his preface, Derrida praises at once the literariness of The Wolf Man’s Magic Word and its literality, its lack of literariness. In fact, he splits literariness itself into something inherent to the object of Abraham’s and Torok’s psychoanalytical endeavor and something external and superficial, a literary fad. But the literariness he endorses effectively erases (or, at the very least, blurs) the limits between analyst and analysand, as well as between dream-thought, dream-content, and analysis. Where does that leave Derrida’s own reading of Abraham and Torok reading Freud and others reading the Wolf Man? The attempt at drawing a clear boundary between different types of literariness, as well as between literary criticism (also that of Derrida’s deconstruction) and psychoanalysis is constantly questioned by a similar interest in matters of language and linguistic play, if not always in a similar use thereof. In fact, it is no longer clear who plays or who is being played here. But, unlike “famillionär,” the fun here is not in the joke’s instant epiphany but, maybe, in the ironic ramifications of analytic deformation and (de)construction.

“RÉVOLUTION D’OCTOBRE” (LYOTARD) At the other extreme of the spectrum (in the play between psychoanalysis and literature staged here) stands Jean-François Lyotard work with Freud in his 1971 Discourse, Figure (Discours, Figure). As philosopher and literary critic Lyotard is probably best known today for his work on postmodernism. But in Discourse, Figure Lyotard engages extensively with Freudian psychoanalysis. In a key chapter of the book provocatively titled “The Dream-Work Does Not Think,” Lyotard revisits The Interpretation of Dreams, but his focus is on theorizing a force in language (and other forms of expression) that exceeds and, potentially, disrupts signification and communication (understood as the transmission of information). Lyotard calls this force that of the figure, the figural, and contrasts it with discourse, the signifying, discursive thrust of language—hence the book’s title. Often in evidence in art or literature, the figural is for Lyotard above all “a spatial manifestation that linguistic space cannot incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification” (13/7). The emphasis here, then, is on the functioning of language (and other artistic expressions) and only secondarily on psychoanalysis. Or rather, the emphasis lies on psychoanalysis’s possible contributions to analysing and understanding art, but no longer on the analysis of the individual’s psyche. For this purpose, however, Freud’s techniques of the dreamwork—condensation, displacement, regard for representability (Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit), and secondary revision—merit Lyotard’s discussion. To illustrate the joint work of displacement and condensation, Lyotard provides a simple, graphic example taken from the movie poster of Frédéric Rossif ’s 1967 documentary Révolution

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d’Octobre. Lyotard first explains the plastic illusion of the “folds” that make “Révolution d’Octobre” appear as if on a “flag carried by someone who is walking fast toward the left” (247/242). But if we follow Lyotard and imagine a stronger wind, the banner carried at a gallop, and the banner’s text in movement captured by a camera snapshot, “Révolution d’Octobre” might be read “Révons d’Ore” (as some of its letters disappear in the banner’s “folds”) and understood as “Rêvons d’or” or “Let’s dream of gold” (247–248/242). The plasticity of its concrete material makes or breaks this illustration: the pliable surface of the banner in movement (or at least its graphic illusion) as well as the letters understood as material here. Lyotard describes the process (before providing his example) in words that closely echo Freud’s evocation of the process in which a condensing force and the resistance of the word material on which it works produce “famillionär”: “In condensing themselves, the dreamthoughts crush certain parts of the discourse, leaving others visible. [. . .] Imagine that before the grip of condensation compresses the dream-thoughts, displacement has reinforced certain zones of the text, so that they resist contraction and remain legible.” (247/242–243). Rather than citing another’s joke, Lyotard here constructs his own, albeit based on the found object of a textually manipulated film title on a movie poster. The analogy with Freud’s dreamwork, as well as, I would claim, his joke work, however suggestive at a first glance, remains ultimately fraught. Lyotard himself points to the open question of “choice,” namely of the elements that resist deformation and remain visible: for the example’s effect “it is the beginning (REV, D’O) and the end (ON, RE) that must remain visible” (248/243). The introduction of choice (albeit in quotation marks—at least in the original French) puts the intentionality of the subconscious process to the question; it also implicitly points to the question of Lyotard’s own authorial agency in constructing his example. There is also, in Lyotard’s example, a suggestive slippage between the visual and the oral: we might read the letters left over from the banner’s folds; but only what is “heard” (“s’entende”) (248/242), a disregard of graphic details, gets us to “rêvons d’or.” But the worst (or the best) is yet to come. Before closing his chapter, Lyotard comes back, once again, to his pun “Révolution d’Octobre” after a discussion of regard for representability in dreams. In order to read beyond the dream-content toward the hidden dream-thought we have to mistrust the meaning that it proffers at the surface. By the same token “It is necessary to disbelieve ‘rêvons d’or’ in order to grasp ‘Révolution d’Octobre’. We must reconstruct a primitive text, hidden under the gilded text, which the work has deconstructed [. . .]” (269/266). According to the logic of the dreamwork, “Rêvons d’or” would indeed constitute a deformation of the “Révolution d’Octobre” that it hides. Under the thirst for riches lies the political impetus. But Lyotard’s process enacts, for us as readers, exactly the opposite, and this is what makes this funny and not only an exercise in theoretical illustration. The political thrust of “Révolution d’Octobre” reveals, with a little manipulation, its real face: an economic, rather than a political motivation. With some material folding, linguistic condensation, and a good dose of imagination we can easily flip back and forth between apparent opposites. But the fun in the pun is also the end of definite theoretical meaning. Which text and which meaning constitutes the surface lure and which the real content when it is not clear which one only plays at intelligibility (see 269/266)? The reversibility of the pun runs counter to analysis, since analysis, as the reconstruction of a hidden message, needs to establish a clear, temporal division between dream-thought and dream-content. Artful manipulation of linguistic material, however, is not bound by the same laws. And yet, Lyotard also misses some of his own theoretical mark here. His analogy between the dreamwork and the work of figural force upon language holds only to a certain point. Where an analysis of the dreamwork puts emphasis on

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the processes of deformation only to get from the dream-content to the dream-thought, Lyotard is interested in the process (and the forces at work in it) itself. But the two sides of “Révolution d’Octobre/Rêvons d’or” are entirely too readable; there is, to use Lyotard’s own terms, too much discourse and not enough figure here. As we delight in this pithy fusion of opposites, we might forget to pay attention to the textual folding that got us there.

NOT PLAYFUL ENOUGH When psychoanalysis plays with words, it seems, it is either not playful enough, or else, too playful for its own good. In psychoanalytical wordplay much of the fun potentially to be had is lost in analytical maneuvers (as with Freud’s overdone reading of “famillionär”) or sacrificed from the outset to the theoretical cause it illustrates (as with Abraham’s and Torok’s reduction of the Wolf Man’s phantasmatic verbiage to the foregone conclusion of “there was the sister”). Or else, as with Lyotard’s rather witty pun around “Révolution d’Octubre” and “Rêvons d’or,” linguistic play escapes its theoretical bounds, and ultimately, the joke might be on the theorist who tried for a playful effect while also making their conceptual point. Or maybe the joke is on they who expect linguistic play to be both conceptually useful and funny at once, searching at a theoretical metalevel the confluence of insight and pleasure that the joke can convey, and thus conflating levels, wanting the object and its analysis to do similar (pleasure) work. But those levels are already constantly brought into contact, and indeed, blurred when psychoanalysis plays with words: linguistic play there can both describe a psychic symptom to be analysed (for instance, the Wolf Man’s magic words) and become a vehicle for psychoanalytic thought itself—often in the form of an analogy (the dreamwork functions like a pun). And the line that separates the wordplay as theoretical object and as the vehicle for theoretical work and representation is often rather flimsy. This is also one (rather thin) line between psychoanalysis and literature. It can connect the textual production of psychoanalysis and literary work (through their shared use of word play for instance) or strategically disconnect them when psychoanalysis claims to use literature merely as its object or vehicle. I will close these reflections by letting two other examples of psychoanalytical wordplay speak (almost) for themselves, two examples that, in their different ways, productively circumvent the divide between the theoretical insights and the affective charge of linguistic play, if not also quite that between psychoanalysis and literature.

CODA 1: “LITURATERRE” (LACAN) Jacques Lacan is one of the psychoanalysts in Freud’s footstep who paid the closest attention to Freud’s work with language, especially the theories of the dream and the joke work. After all, one of Lacan’s famous claims was that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan 1968, 333) thus pushing the linguistic analogy squarely to the (unconscious) center of psychoanalytical interest. And the unconscious makes itself felt in discourse precisely through instances in which language draws attention to itself by (mal)functioning differently. For Lacan, as Françoise Meltzer points out, the same laws of condensation and displacement apply to symptoms, dreams, and jokes. These laws are those that create meaning in language, much as they are also the structural laws of the unconscious (159). Consequently, to read a literary text such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake with its multilingual wordplay is, for Lacan, precisely like the analyst’s work (see Ulmer: 178).

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But we might want to concern ourselves here less with the psychoanalyst who affirms, yet again (although in strong terms) the analogy between linguistic play and the unconscious, and more with the writer whose style is rife with wordplay. Among the many possible examples one could discuss, I will focus, for obvious reasons, on Lacan’s term “lituraterre.” This word, as Lacan explains in the essay of the same title (published originally in 1971 as the opening text of the journal Littérature), comes to him from the slip between “letter” and “litter” (understood here as “waste”) in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Its coinage is authorized, as Lacan explains, by the Latin dictionary of Ernout and Meillet in the series “lino” (from “linere,” “to smear”), “litura” (“blotting out,” “erasure”), “liturarius” (“a book kept for rough drafts,” “a blotter”) (71/29). “Literature” is transmuted on the basis of its letters first, by changing the place of the “u” and “e” of the French word “littérature” (which makes the accent on the “e” unnecessary) and, for emphasis, omits the doubled “t” and doubles the “r” in the new term instead. Thus, replacing literature by psychoanalysis’s “lituraterre” underlines the movement between writing (as the letter) and nothing (the letter’s erasure), understood also as the signifying hole of the unconscious; oscillating (with the slip of a letter) between signification and (fecal) matter. But “lituraterre” also inserts itself into Lacan’s textual movement between land and sea, between the solid and the fluid in this essay, hence the slippage between “literal” (as pertaining to the letter) and “littoral” (the letter’s liminal status with regard to the unconscious’s hole or the flux of pleasure): “The blotting-out of no trace whatsoever that might be beforehand, this is what turns the littoral to terrain. Litura pure is the literal. [. . .] Between centre and absence, between knowledge and jouissance, there lies the littoral that only fetches to (vire au) the literal provided that you are able to take this very same bend (virage) at all times” (16/35). While we could parse each of these moving letters and the resulting wordplay with a view to Lacan’s theoretical apparatus, what impresses me most here (and elsewhere when Lacan plays with words) is also an associative pleasure (as well as a pleasure to obscure matters for an audience) at work, in the gliding of cultural references and the combinatorial excess of assonant series and connected thoughts. Theoretical thought here, it seems, no longer dictates the presence of wordplay as mere vehicle for the sake of illustration; instead, in the gallop of Lacan’s wordplay the conceptual narrative has trouble keeping pace, even as “lituraterre,” branching out into its different assonant and associative companions, combines some of Lacan’s concepts in new ways. Of course, this essay is also a reflection on the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis (with its references to Lacan’s work on Poe, the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter”). Lacan critiques superficial links between psychoanalysis and literature: The use of literature in psychoanalysis (for instance the use of Oedipus or Freud’s mention of a text by Dostoyevsky) does not contribute to literary criticism (see 12/30). Nor does he endorse “the literary smoochy-woochy (ce frotti-frotta littérarie) that denotes the psychoanalyst wanting for inventiveness” (12/30). Instead, Lacan imagines a productive juxtaposition and agon between psychoanalysis and literature: “if literary criticism could effectively renew itself, this would be as a result of psychoanalysis being there for texts to pit themselves against it (pour que les textes se mesurent à elle), the enigma residing on the side of the latter (de son côté)” (13/31). But this very distinction between a productive intersection of literariness (and literary criticism) and psychoanalysis collapses when we read it through Lacan’s linguistic play around “lituraterre.” After all, doesn’t his critique of the literary crutch of uninventive psychoanalysts as a “smoochy-woochy” posit it precisely in the terrain of “litura,” a “smearing” or “blotting”? And if literature’s letter turns to litter (pace Joyce, pace Lacan), where exactly is the boundary between

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literary posturing in psychoanalysis and the potentially productive play of “lituraterre”? This also begs the question of the productively different interaction of literary criticism and psychoanalysis that Lacan proposes. After all, where does that leave Lacan’s own use of linguistic play? Lacan gives us an answer of sorts, collapsing the level of (textual) object and analysis, when he proclaims in the same essay that “There is no such thing as metalanguage” (18/36). But, as usual with Lacan, and as typical of the terrain of linguistic play, this is an evasion rather than a straightforward answer.

CODA 2: “SNARK” (DELEUZE) In his 1969 Logique du sens (The Logic of Sense) French philosopher Gilles Deleuze converts Lewis Carroll into a teacher of the logic, or meaning, of sense. This makes sense, but it also makes us laugh as understanding sense here hinges, above all, upon understanding nonsense and paradox. With The Logic of Sense, we tread the terrain of philosophy and logic rather than that of psychoanalysis proper. And yet, Deleuze’s critical engagement with psychoanalysis throughout his work justifies the inclusion of Deleuze’s (and Carroll’s) “snark” into this rather eclectic series of psychoanalytic wordplay (at least in the form of a coda). After all, Freud’s treatment of jokes was interested—much as Deleuze’s exploration of sense—in its potential to suspend reason by making sense (otherwise). And, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops psychoanalysis as the “psychoanalysis of sense” (113/92) in contrast to “bad psychoanalysis” in a discussion of Carroll and Antonin Artaud: “Bad psychoanalysis has two ways of going wrong: by believing to have discovered identical materials, that one can inevitably find everywhere, or by believing to have discovered analogous forms which create false differences. Thus, the clinical psychiatric aspect and the literary critical aspect are botched simultaneously.” (113/92, translation slightly altered). Deleuze here speaks to psychoanalysis’s failure on both the literary and psychiatric side as a problem with managing similarity and difference. Rather than constructing systems and histories from cases, psychoanalysis should, instead, read its examples “geographically,” as “different countries, different dimensions without connection” (114/93, translation slightly altered). Only the critic unmoored from the “countries” and “dimensions” of its objects (Artaud’s and Carroll’s works, but also of the “cases” they and their protagonists present) can—but according to Deleuze, should not—connect them. Deleuze draws a line between good and bad psychoanalysis, here, equating his own work with the former, but without dwelling on the difference between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism. Deleuze’s “snark,” however, shows a potential way out of the dilemma between sense and humor, between literature and psychoanalysis. Namely, through a meta-playful sleight-of-hand. What is a “snark”? To answer that it is a portmanteau word made of (for Deleuze) “snake” and “shark”—or, for others, “snail” and “shark”—cannot (and should not) satisfy us. After all, Carroll’s wordplay and Deleuze’s reflections probe a space in which things behave like words and words like things (which also resonates with psychoanalysis’s interest in language). The “snark” does at least double conceptual work for Deleuze. On the one hand, in expressions such in the line “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see?” from Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” the “snark” showcases the operation of sense (as nonsense): It shows how language (and particularly literary language) is expressive (makes sense) even there where denotation fails: there are no snarks nor boojums, and to connect one term to the other, thus doubling denotation (see 83/66), makes matters worse. On the other hand, as a portmanteau word that combines two elements, “snark” also constitutes what Deleuze calls an esoteric word that helps understand the structure of Carroll’s

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logic: “it circulates throughout the two series of alimentary and semiological orality, or throughout the two dimensions of the proposition—the denotative and the expressive” (59/44). At the intersection of corporeality and signification, “snark” is, in a way, a synonym of “sense” itself, with its double reference to meaning on the one hand and to sensation or feeling on the other. For Deleuze’s purpose, “snark” is a polyvalent word, a kind of master portmanteau or pun. Its function within Deleuze’s reflections mirrors its chimeric structure—it is at once everything and nothing. But Deleuze’s use of Carroll’s snark is funny (rather than only useful), also as a meta-commentary on the use of puns. Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark” ascribes a set of characteristics to the snark, among which figures its peculiar relation to puns: The third is its slowness in taking a jest. Should you happen to venture on one, It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed: And it always looks grave at a pun. The snark, a portmanteau word treated (and hunted) like a beast, illustrator of non-sense (or, indeed, nothing, really), doing conceptual double duty in The Logic of Sense, is itself not receptive to jesting and punning. In other words, a pun (such as “snark”) cannot appreciate the joke that it itself represents. Much as it “looks grave at a pun” it itself looks hilarious as a pun. The very suggestion of such an absurd circularity—the pun’s (non-)appreciation of a pun—is, of course, itself quite funny. But, read back into Deleuze’s work with and through “snark,” it also introduces a vertiginous meta-perspective. In somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion, Deleuze sums up his theorization of sense so far in the chapter “Eleventh Series of Nonsense” in comparison to wordplay: One could object that all of this means nothing. It is a bad play on words to suppose that nonsense expresses its own sense since, by definition, it has none. But this objection is unfounded. The play on words would be to say that nonsense has a sense, the sense being precisely that it hasn’t any. This is not our hypothesis at all. When we assume that nonsense says its own sense, we wish to indicate, on the contrary, that sense and nonsense have a specific relation which can not copy that of the true and false, that is, which can not be conceived simply on the basis of a relation of exclusion. — 84–5/67–68 As Deleuze explains, theorizing the sense of nonsense/non-sense is not bad wordplay, in fact, it is no wordplay at all, since it doesn’t just locate the sense (or meaning) of nonsense in the fact that it doesn’t have any sense at all. Both examples of wordplay around sense and nonsense here pivot, after all, on the opposition and mutual exclusivity of sense and nonsense. Instead, for Deleuze, sense and nonsense make sense together precisely because they are not exclusive opposites such as truth and falsehood. But, of course, “snark,” as a master pun, as wordplay, does much to illustrate such a non-exclusionary connection between sense and nonsense in The Logic of Sense in the first place. And, indeed, if the border between sense and nonsense constitutes a productive zone rather than an absolute demarcation line, the border between puns as examples and as conceptual tools, between object and meta-level needs to be blurry, as well.

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* I have used Lacan’s “lituraterre” and Deleuze’s (and Carroll’s) “snark” here as possible antidotes against the problematic limit between psychoanalysis and literary criticism, inscribed in their different use of literary phenomena (such as linguistic play)—always either too utilitarian or too excessive. In my reading, Lacan’s terminological playfulness strikes a balance between conceptual work and linguistic pleasure and Deleuze’s reflections reproduce on a meta-level the productive logical confusion at play in portmanteau words such as “snark.” Both thus strike a balance between play and usefulness, between sense and nonsense, but also, between psychoanalytical and literary work. From a different vantage point, Lacan’s and Deleuze’s puns do not present a solution so much as confirm that the quandary between psychoanalysis and literature that manifests around linguistic play does not need a solution. Instead, the very quandary is a productive ground for both literary and psychoanalytical endeavors precisely because it allows for a play with boundaries, between objectand meta-level, between aesthetic pleasure and conceptual usefulness. Instead, my own work with linguistic play in this chapter is itself susceptible to scrutiny and analysis. The examples presented here, eclectic and spurious as they may seem, do not exactly have to plead guilty of the charge of “combinatory paranoia” (kombinatorische Paranoia), the misreading of small details as indices of structural connections that Freud himself had anxiously invoked and then refuted in his 1916 Introductory Lectures precisely in relation to his own work on what we now call the Freudian slip (GW 11 60–61/SE 15 66–67). After all, my reflections here do not aspire to elevate a sampling of examples to a theoretical system. And yet, the strong resonances between the handful of puns glossed here speak, inevitably, to a type of combinatory bias, one that, in my case, probably focuses too much on seeking out and highlighting the linguistic playfulness of psychoanalysis against all odds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrahams, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups. Flammarion, 1976; trans. by Nicholas Rand as The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minnesota UP, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Minuit, 1969; translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale as The Logic of Sense. Columbia UP, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok.” Cryptonymie. 7–73; trans. by Barbara Johnson as “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: xi–xlviii. Fleming, Paul. “Witz.” Handbuch Literatur and Psychoanalyse. Ed. Frauke Berndt, and Eckart Goebel. De Gruyter, 2017: 478–494. Gilman, Sander L. “Freud Reads Heine Reads Freud.” The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine. Ed. Mark H. Gelber. Niemeyer, 1992: 77–94. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. MIT Press, 1960: 350–377. Lacan, Jacques. “Lituraterre” (1971). Autres Écrits. Seuil, 2001. 11–20; trans. by Beatrice Khiara-Foxton and Adrian Price. Hurly-Burly. 9 (May 2013): 29–38. Lacan, Jacques. “La méprise du sujet supposé savoir ” (1968). Autres Écrits: 329–339. Lyotard, François. (1971). Discours, figure. Klincksieck, 2002; trans. by Anthony Hudek as Discourse, Figure. Minnesota UP, 2010. Meltzer, Françoise. “Eat Your Dasein: Lacan’s Self-Consuming Puns.” On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Ed. Jonathan Culler. Blackwell 1988: 156–163. Ulmer, Gregory. “The Puncept in Grammatology.” On Puns: 164–189.

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FURTHER READING Critchley, Simon. On Humour. Routledge, 2002. Culler, Jonathan, ed. On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Blackwell, 1988. Gherovici, Patricia and Manya Steinkoler eds. Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy. Cambridge UP, 2016. Kofman, Sarah. Pourquoi rit-on: Freud et le mot d’ésprit. Galilée, 1986. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie and Mark Bracher, eds. Lacan and the Subject of Language. Routledge, 1991.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Eyes of the Other Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Uncanny BEN MOORE

THE EYES OF THE OTHER: FRANKENSTEIN AND THE UNCANNY Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) is one of the most important meeting points between literature and psychoanalysis. From the beginning, the uncanny is for Freud an aesthetic and literary question more than a psychoanalytic one: “It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics . . . he works in other strata of mental life” (SE 17: 218) he writes. This improper subject, one which marks a “crisis of the proper” (Royle: 1), brings psychoanalysis together with its literary “other,” in Shoshana Felman’s sense that “literature in psychoanalysis functions precisely as its ‘unthought’: as the condition of possibility and the self-subversive blind spot of psychoanalytical thought” (10). Felman’s point is not just that psychoanalysis has from the start been involved with literature, but that literature is inside psychoanalysis in ways that psychoanalysis cannot fully grasp. Psychoanalysis can certainly turn its attention to literature, as Freud does with E.T.A. Hoffmann in The Uncanny, but more fundamentally, literary forms of thinking, which are inherently metaphorical, multiple and ambiguous, shape the way psychoanalysis reads its subjects, their dreams, anxieties and desires. Yet despite this, literature remains in some way resistant to psychoanalysis, never wholly reducible to its terms. One name we can give to this dynamic between literature and psychoanalysis, in which each is at once familiar and strange to the other, is the uncanny. Indeed, it is in the encounter between psychoanalysis and literature, and the related question of what cannot be worked through by means of psychoanalysis, that Freud’s sense of the uncanny seems to reside. As later commentators have pointed out, it is precisely his final inability to pin down the meaning and origins of the uncanny that makes The Uncanny one of Freud’s most (perhaps unintentionally) speculative and literary essays.

READING THE UNCANNY The aim of the essay, according to Freud, is to bring psychoanalysis to bear upon the realm of aesthetics by attempting to explain the subclass of frightening phenomena known as the unheimlich, literally the unhomely. He is responding to a 1906 paper by Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen” (“On the Psychology of the Uncanny”), which links this feeling to a confusion 35

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between the living and inanimate. Freud’s discussion proceeds by way of an etymology of the word unheimlich, then a reading of Hoffmann’s “The Sand-Man” (1816), which leads to an association with the castration complex, and then to a discussion of ego-disturbance and the theme of the double, drawing on Otto Rank’s Der Doppelgänger (1914). Freud comes eventually to a theory of the uncanny which sees it as the return of the repressed from early infancy (SE 17: 241), but then is forced to admit that this definition does not explain all uncanny instances, especially in literature (SE 17: 245), bringing him back round to Jentsch’s claims, earlier rejected. Finally, he suggests that maintaining a distinction between fiction and real life might be able to resolve this difficulty. Freud’s initial definition of the uncanny turns on what is in effect a literary observation: the simultaneous opposition and coincidence of the German terms heimlich and unheimlich. Freud explains that “The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar” (SE 17 219), but then observes that “among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich” (SE 17: 223). This gives us one of the simplest definitions of the uncanny: the combination of the familiar (homely) and the unfamiliar (unhomely). Freud here echoes Samuel Johnson’s claim about “the two most engaging powers of an author” (§: 338); that “new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new” (§: 338). In Jacques Derrida’s “rereading” (220, n.32) of Freud’s essay in “The Double Session” (1970), he argues that words like hymen, pharmakon, supplément and différance, to which we can add uncanny and unheimlich, are self-contradictory in ways that make them irreducibly undecidable. While not identical to one another, these terms all “mark the spots of what can never be mediated, mastered, sublated, or dialecticized through any Erinnerung or Aufhebung” (221). The uncanny in this sense is inherently double, it belongs “both to consciousness and to the unconscious” (221). It relies on the conscious recognition of something, but what exactly this is, or why it is disturbing, remains unknown. The uncanny is thus a composite that cuts across the psychic apparatus of the subject, and across language, revealing both our lack of knowledge of ourselves and language’s inability to stabilize signification. It is therefore appropriate that Freud’s definition of the uncanny is itself immediately doubled, when he follows the familiar/unfamiliar dyad with Schelling’s comment that “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (SE 17: 224). One definition is put in doubt by another. This contradiction is later apparently reconciled through the concept of the return of the repressed, in which “something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (SE 17: 240) recurs in an unfamiliar way. In a Derridean manner, though, the satisfaction that seems to be offered by this reconciliation, which emerges through an analytic reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s strange Romantic short story “The Sand-Man,” is undone in the latter part of the essay, where we find evidence of Freud’s “haunting suspicion that the uncanny is precisely that which evades textual archaeology” (Møller: 98). As Lis Møller observes, the essay’s insights result less from a dominance of psychoanalysis over literature than from “the space of encounter of two voices, psychoanalysis and literature” (98). Similarly for Hélène Cixous, the unmasterable presence of the literary is what makes the essay “less a discourse than a strange theoretical novel” (525). This is despite the fact that Freud’s reading of Hoffmann’s tale as an allegory for castration anxiety is itself a castrative one, in which the significance of Olympia, the mechanical woman loved by the protagonist Nathaniel, is denied, meaning that “one half of the text is eliminated” (535). What Freud’s reading of Hoffmann

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represses within literature is therefore its polyvalent meaning, and in a related way the question of the woman who exceeds an Oedipal reading (Cixous: 538). To downplay Olympia is to risk underestimating the conjunction between the living and the inanimate in Hoffmann, and hence the centrality of this conjunction to the uncanny. By contrast, adaptations of Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881), based partly on “The SandMan,” have emphasized the way “epileptic fits and manifestations of insanity reveal automatic, mechanical processes working within the body” (Tambling: 28). To perceive the mechanical not as being outside the subject, but as something internal to it, which makes it strange to itself, is one of the uncanny lessons of Hoffmann’s text. The uncanny in this sense is a modern phenomenon, arising when the mechanical has become a feature of everyday life. Marx’s account of modern capitalism, for instance, registers both the mechanization of the life of the worker and the alienation of the worker’s labour power in the commodity, an inanimate object that seems to have a life of its own. In describing the “enigmatical character” (43) of both worker and commodity, Marx shows us the uncanny structure of capitalist society. From another angle, Freud’s analysis of “The Sand-Man” can be countered by Baudelaire’s reading of Hoffmann as a proponent of the grotesque or “absolute” (157) comic, rather than the simpler “significative” (157) comic. For Baudelaire, Hoffmann “knows what he is doing; but he also knows that the essence of this type of the comic is that it should appear to be unaware of itself ” (165). This makes Hoffmann’s text both knowing and unknowing, conscious and unconscious, recalling Derrida on self-contradiction. There is in this reading no one-to-one correspondence between text and meaning, which is why Freud’s reading of the story as everywhere signifying castration anxiety is insufficient. Rather, the “absolute comic” makes everything grotesque by insisting on a principle of non-identity. It is less about symbolically unfolding the repercussions of a single, albeit powerful, anxiety than about presenting a world where anxiety is distributed and referentiality destabilized. This is symbolized in the culmination of the story, when Nathaniel’s eyes “beg[i]n to roll” (123) as madness takes him over, and almost his last words are “Spin, spin, circle of fire!” (124). This rolling and spinning is the action of Hoffmann’s text as well as Nathaniel’s body, both of which move in a way that is at once grotesque, mechanical and repetitive, and which either is or appears to be outside conscious control. It is for such reasons that Freud’s repression of literary multiplicity cannot stand: “We must be prepared to admit,” he says, “that there are other elements besides those which we have so far laid down as determining the production of uncanny feelings” (SE 17: 246). It is at this point that Freud attempts to separate “the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about” (SE 17: 246); that is, to separate life and literature, and in doing so to stabilize the properly psychoanalytic uncanny while allowing its literary counterpart to remain unstable and unpredictable. But, as Cixous points out, literature always speaks back to real life, and this distinction cannot be maintained. As she puts it, “any analysis of the Unheimliche is in itself an Un, a mark of repression and the dangerous vibration of the Heimliche” (545). Nicholas Royle similarly remarks that Freud’s essay is itself uncanny because it shows us “things about psychoanalysis that perhaps ought to have remained hidden and secret” (15), although we might equally say that the willingness of psychoanalysis to undergo self-interrogation is deeply consistent with its Copernican decentring of the ego. A different approach to reading the uncanny is taken by Anneleen Masschelein, who argues that it is really a late-twentieth century concept, for which Freud is “the founder of discourse” (4) in a

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Foucauldian sense (Foucault: 217). In this reading, Derrida, Todorov and Cixous are the key figures, who “push the uncanny to the fore as a concept and paved the way for its canonization” (Masschelein: 15). For Masschelein, the uncanny is an “unconcept,” one which is “on the verge of no longer being a concept, of dissipating again into chaos or into doxa and emerging from it in unexpected ways” (11). Alongside Royle and Gregory Kohon, discussed below, Masschelien’s book is a third significant account of the topic within the last two decades, though perhaps surprisingly it does not dwell on Jacques Lacan’s engagement with the uncanny in Seminar X (1962–63), which as I argue in the following section, is also a vital coordinate in the history of the uncanny.

READING LITERATURE THROUGH THE UNCANNY In the paragraphs that follow, I utilize some of Kohon and Lacan’s observations to move away from Freud’s original essay and towards a consideration of how we might draw on the uncanny in our literary readings. What, for instance, does an uncanny reading of literature look like, and how might reading through the uncanny reshape our understanding of literature? How, too, might the uncanny help us avoid the temptation to psychoanalyse characters as if they are people, to put “Hamlet on the couch” (95) as Critchley and Webster put it? Can the uncanniness of literature instead help us “put psychoanalysis on the couch and to the test” (95)? While I start with Hamlet (1609), my reading leads towards Frankenstein (1818/1831), described by Mladen Dolar, in one of the most insightful essays on the uncanny, as “perhaps the best example” (1991: 16) of the historical emergence of the uncanny out of the Enlightenment, as a symptom of the dawning of modernity. For Kohon, all genuine aesthetic experience is uncanny. The subject who encounters an artwork or literary text should: be ready and willing to undergo some form of depersonalisation, to experience some sense of unreality; the subject must risk, however briefly, losing the barriers that keep the self safe and sound. This may involve anxiety, the fear of which may inhibit the capacity for aesthetic experience; trepidation and apprehension do away with joy. The subject might suffer a genuine estrangement from the self. —5 This account of the aesthetic draws on Paul Federn’s 1932 concept of estrangement as the creation of a split between participating self and observing self, in which the movement between familiarity and strangeness generates an uncanny surplus of anxiety (Kohon: 9). Lacan refers to Federn on estrangement (using the English term) in his reading of Hamlet, when discussing “those periods of irruption, of subjective disorganization which occur when something in the fantasy wavers and makes the components of the fantasy appear” (“Desire” 22). In such an experience, “the imaginary limits between subject and object change, lead[ing] us to what is called in the strict sense the fantastic dimension [le fantastique]” (22). Lacan’s use of le fantastique to describe the uncanny disorganization of the subject anticipates Todorov, for whom the fantastic is a literary genre defined by uncertainty: “In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world” (25). This leads to uncertainty about whether the event is an illusion or a reality, and the fantastic “occupies the duration of this uncertainty” (25). For Todorov, such

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uncertainty is usually settled by either a logical explanation of the phenomena or an indication that the laws of nature are suspended. Somewhat confusingly, Todorov uses “uncanny” to refer to the former of these outcomes (the latter being the “marvellous”), but it is really the suspension of certainty within the fantastic that comes closest to Freud’s version of the uncanny, even though Freud is at first dissatisfied with Jentsch’s explanation of the uncanny as derived from “intellectual uncertainty” (SE 17: 220). For Lacan, however, the uncanny is not associated primarily with uncertainty about the line between reality and fantasy, or with material erupting from the unconscious, but with the breakdown of fantasy for the subject. In Lacan’s reading of Hamlet, it is Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father (in Act I, Scenes IV and V) that punctures Hamlet’s fantasy, through the revelation that “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown” (I.V.46–47), meaning that his uncle has usurped both the throne and Hamlet’s place in the Oedipal triangle by killing Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother. Hamlet now has to take up a “new and henceforth difficult identification” (“Desire” 21), which we might take to be that with his murdered father, or with his own Oedipal desires, uncannily embodied by his uncle; but in doing so, Ophelia is rendered “completely null and dissolved as a love object” (“Desire” 22). Lacan’s reading shows that the fantasy destroyed here is not something fantastical or magical, but precisely the illusion of a “normal” life; the fantasy that Hamlet can marry Ophelia and that she can fulfil his desires. As Dolar glosses Lacan, the uncanny is “the irruption of the real into ‘homely’, commonly accepted reality” (1991: 6), which shatters “well-known divisions” (6). In his seminar on anxiety, Lacan explains that subjectification always leaves behind a “remainder” (S10: 161) or “lost object” (S10: 161) in the real, which Lacan designates the objet a. Anxiety arises when the real confronts us in one form or another of this lost object, revealing our incompleteness as subjects. To adapt a phrase from Fredric Jameson, the real is what hurts. It shocks or jolts us, and disrupts the smooth functioning of the social worlds we inhabit, or rather shows that such smooth functioning was always a fantasy. Lacan’s most dramatic image of this experience comes via Oedipus, whose plight represents “the impossible sight that threatens you, of your own eyes lying on the ground” (S10: 162). Something similar occurs in Hoffmann, of whom Todorov observes that “symbols of indirect, distorted, subverted vision” (122) are central not just because they offer false vision, but because they are also paradoxically “a quintessence of sight” (123). For Hamlet, then, as later for Victor Frankenstein, it is not the case of a lack of reality, but of too much of it. The loss of self that Hamlet experiences is, following Kohon’s logic, an extreme version of what we must all risk in the aesthetic encounter. The subject who lets go temporarily of secure selfknowledge opens themself up to uncanny experiences, a condition in which unexpected connections can be formed involuntarily when reading literature, watching films or viewing artworks. To enter this subject position is to align oneself with the hysteric, who suffers “mainly from reminiscences” (SE 1: 7) in Freud and Breuer’s famous phrase, since aesthetic objects often activate memories and give them new meaning, as a form of Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred reaction (Kohon: 14). This is the topic of Freud’s first extended literary reading, in “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907), about the 1902 novel inspired by a bas-relief from the Vatican Museum. In the story a young archaeologist named Norbert Hanold becomes obsessed with the statue of a walking girl named Gradiva, which he associates with Pompeii. A living girl whom Norbert takes, in an apparently delusional manner, to be Gradiva turns out to be Zoe Bertgang, a childhood friend. In Freud’s analysis, “the discovery dawns upon us that the young archaeologist’s phantasies about his

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Gradiva may have been an echo of his forgotten childhood memories” (SE 9: 31). Freud even compares Zoe’s actions, as she seeks to bring to light Norbert’s unconscious repressed memories, to the analytic practice introduced by him and Breuer in 1895 (SE 9: 89). With its trope of the man who confuses an artificial girl for a living one, and the topic of repressed childhood memories with a sexual content, Gradiva is strikingly similar to “The Sand-Man,” although it makes the theme of aesthetic encounter more prominent. Jensen in fact uses the term uncanny/unheimlich in the story, referring to Norbert’s “strangely uncanny horror of antique collections” (27) in Rome. An extension of the ideas Freud is working through in the Gradiva essay is the possibility that the uncanny is an early developmental stage which is reactivated by any new uncanny experience, whether in everyday life or in literature. Lacan’s mirror stage, in which the child “assumes [assume] an image” of himself as “ideal-I” (Écrits: 76) through identification with what is outside himself, and therefore turns the unfamiliar (the image) into the familiar (the self), at the cost of losing whatever does not fit with that image (which Lacan variously calls the object, the Thing, the real, or the objet a) would be one reading of this phase. Michel de M’Uzan, an influence on Kohon, argues more directly that: The uncanny commemorates and celebrates a crucial phase in the development of psychic functioning, a moment when the uncanny finds its primordial basis, a moment when the indeterminate nature of identity, the daughter of the naturally uncertain character of the frontiers of being, projects into the future an occasional return, a return that is even more insistent than one would imagine it to be, in the form of troubling or disturbing experiences of uncanniness. — 143 For de M’Uzan, sexual drives, which are disruptive, are always in contest with the “vitalidentitial” (144) order, the self-preservative, non-instinctual dimension of identity. The uncanny lies at the intersection of these two orders. This conflict is usually stable in adulthood, but uncanny phenomena reactivate the primordial instability between the two. This conflict can alternatively be described as that between life (self-preservation, the pleasure principle, the I which forms in the mirror stage) and death (jouissance, the death drive, the lack in the subject which the objet a embodies). A text like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) dramatizes this contest. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella follows Mr Utterson’s attempts to uncover the mystery of Mr Hyde, a monstrous figure associated with violent and debauched behaviour, who seems to have a powerful hold over the respectable Dr Jekyll. It eventually turns out that Hyde is a repressed side of Jekyll, split off from him by a chemical experiment, so that the two men now inhabit one body. If Jekyll stands on the side of life, representing self-preservation and “genial respectability” (56), Hyde represents both jouissance (“leaping pulses and secret pleasures” [60]) and dead matter (“the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices . . . the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned” [65]). Such a reading goes further than taking Hyde as the pleasure principle and Jekyll as the reality principle that limits and defers its goals, which might at first seem to explain the text. If we instead read Hyde as the “beyond” of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), this helps to unravel one of the more uncanny features of the novella: the fact that Hyde is not perceived as lacking or incomplete but as being in some undefinable way too much. Early in the narrative, he exceeds Mr Enfield’s capacity for description: “He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity,

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although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way” (9). As Utterson, the detective figure of the story, puts it, “There must be something else . . . There is something else, if I could find a name for it” (16). This unnameable something is not sufficiently explained by Henry Jekyll’s suggestion that Hyde is repulsive because “alone in the ranks of mankind, he was pure evil” (55). Rather, Hyde should be understood as a figure for what identity cannot encompass, but which nonetheless lies within it. He is the excess jouissance that is both desired and repressed, and which points the way towards the abolition of the subject: “man will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens,” [53] Jekyll predicts. In the manner of the abject for Kristeva, such a figure simultaneously provokes fascinated attraction (Utterson is obsessed with discovering the truth about him) and disgusted rejection. The abject, says Kristeva, generates “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome” (2). Attraction and rejection are here not separable, but two sides of the same response, which splits the subject confronted by Hyde. Hyde is therefore not just Jekyll’s double but a kind of ur-double, the figure of the double as such. He taints the perceiving subject with its own abjectness, as we see in the fate of Dr Lanyon, whose “life is shaken to its roots” (50) when he finds out the truth about Hyde, ultimately leading to Lanyon’s death.

THE UNCANNY ENCOUNTER IN FRANKENSTEIN A similar combination of attraction and rejection is foundational to Frankenstein, and nowhere more so than in the novel’s primal scene, where the former is spectacularly transformed into the latter. In fact there are at least three primal scenes within the novel, as Dolar points out (1991: 20). The first comes when the creature built by Victor Frankenstein from dead body parts first awakens to life (Vol. 1, Ch. 4); the second when the creation of a female mate for the monster on a Scottish island is interrupted, and its still unliving body destroyed by Victor (Vol. 3, Ch. 3); and the third when the creature reappears on Victor’s wedding night to murder his wife, Elizabeth, in revenge for the destruction of his own bride (Vol. 3, Ch. 6). The first of these seems most fundamental, however, not only because it is first, but because it is positioned by Mary Shelley, in her retrospective 1831 account of the origins of the novel, as the galvanizing spark of literary composition. Following a discussion between Byron and Percy Shelley, she says, which touched on “the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated” (195), the following took place: When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark

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of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. — 196 Shelley’s next paragraph begins “I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me” (196), emphasizing the alignment of author and creator, and the significance of eyes in this uncanny vision. Shelley claims the scene came to her “unbidden,” in a dreamlike if not fully sleeping state, suggesting it has emerged from her unconscious. It is tempting, if ultimately misleading, to analyse this passage as Shelley’s dream, following Freud’s method in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In this case it combines the immediate impressions of the day before (the conversation between Shelley and Byron) and her immediate desires (to write a ghost story) with some more fundamental wish, perhaps the wish to return her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, to life. This wish is, however, immediately counteracted by an opposing fear of reproach from her mother, expressed in the creature’s accusatory eyes; on one level this might be reproach for fleeing England with Percy Shelley, but more deeply, perhaps, for having caused her own mother’s death in childbirth. Such a death makes the child the abject, that which must be expelled because it is dangerous to life, and which is disgusting because it causes death. The mother becomes abject too, as a beloved source of life that has turned into dead matter. In the novel, the desire to resuscitate Victor’s dead mother is hinted as the desire behind his wish to create life, when he hopes that “if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (36). Such Freudian games are appealing but deceptive, since they seem to promise a deep explanation for the text via the author that can never, in fact, be fulfilled. What we can say is that this vision, which is repeated in, or preceded by, Volume I Chapter 4 of the novel, is an archetypal uncanny encounter. More than that, it is a metaphorical crystallization of the literary uncanny. In the first place, the scene combines biology and artificiality, life and death, through a being that is “half vital” and may once again “subside into dead matter,” but does not. As Freud remarks, “apparent death and the re-animation of the dead” (SE 17: 246) have been called “the most uncanny themes” (SE 17: 246), but this is not so in fairy tales, where they are taken as part of the natural course of events. Freud suggests that we must add the element of a return of what was submerged, so that the uncanny arises when “something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs” (SE 17: 246–47), including the belief that the dead really can return. In this case, as with Todorov’s fantastic, the uncanny implicitly requires a rationalistic, enlightened framework in order for it to emerge. Paradoxical as it may seem, the uncanny requires something like realism. It is what realism cannot quite contain. It is what haunts it. As Dolar puts it, “there is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity” (1991: 7), symbolized by the fact that “the Gothic novel was being written at the same time as the French Revolution” (7). Hamlet, which has been taken as an important moment in the birth of modern subjectivity, described as “touched by the marks of the gathering modern crisis on whose

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threshold” it stands (Barker: 41; see also Ackerman, Grady: 243–265), can be taken as transitional for the growth of this modern uncanny. On the one hand, Hamlet does not question the reality of the ghost when it first appears, asking not whether it exists but whether it brings “airs from heaven or blasts from hell” (I.IV.45), but on the other hand there is certainly uncanniness in the revelations it brings, and in the many doublings and mirrorings of Hamlet, including Laertes and Horatio (Critchley and Webster, 141–146), his father’s ghost (“I’ll call thee ‘Hamlet,’ ”/“King,” “father,” “Royal Dane” [I.IV.49–50] he greets it) and his uncle, as noted above. In Frankenstein, meanwhile, the creation of the uncanny itself is at the centre of the text, as it is in “The Sand-Man,” where the scene Freud takes to be primal is uncannily similar to Shelley’s vision quoted above. Nathaniel secretly witnesses his father and an accomplice, Coppelius, working on something which later turns out to be a version of the automaton Olympia. Coppelius, echoing the mythical Sand-man, threatens to tear out the young Nathaniel’s eyes. Freud treats this threat as “a substitute for the dread of being castrated” (SE 17: 230). As Sarah Kofman points out, the scene Nathaniel witnesses is “especially unheimlich because it is the spectacle of an attempt to create life from inert matter; a vision capable of castrating whoever witnesses it, because it reveals the indissoluble bond between life and death” (80). The same can be said of the creation of the monster in Frankenstein, except that here both Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein are in the dual position of creator and witness, simultaneously the father/Coppelius and Nathaniel. For Kofman, the uncanny effect is produced by “the coincidence of fantasy with the real” (81; see also Møller 109), but a Lacanian reading can instead frame it as the replacement of fantasy by the real. This is clearest in Frankenstein in the version of the scene that appears in the novel, which emphasizes the opening of the eye as producing a total reversal of Victor’s consciousness: My candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. — 38–39 The moment of uncanny horror is the moment the creature’s eye opens to see his creator. In this instant, Victor’s fantasy collapses into a terrifying reality: “The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (39). In terms of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the beautiful suddenly reverses into the sublime (see Burke; Kant: 35–164). This recalls Harold Bloom’s comment that Freud’s The Uncanny is “the only major contribution that the twentieth century has made to the aesthetics of the sublime” (101). Here, however, it is the sudden replacement of beauty by sublimity that is uncanny; the reversal of the knowable and homely (the beautiful) into the unknowable and unhomely (the sublime). Burke had tried to keep the two apart, arguing that “they are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure” (101), but Frankenstein shows us what happens when this separation spectacularly fails. The

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opening of the eyes is, in Freudian terms, a masochistic revelation, in which an object of pleasure turns out to be the cause of enormous pain. This reversal of fantasy/pleasure/beauty into reality/pain/sublimity is redoubled in Victor’s dream, which closely follows the shock of creation: I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain; I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. — 39 The beauty of Elizabeth (Victor’s intended bride) collapses into the horrifying corpse of the dead mother. Symbolism is heavily overlaid here; not only is desire for Elizabeth shown to be secretly desire for the dead mother, but desire for life is secretly a desire for death. The novel invites us to align Victor’s “beautiful” dream of creating and dominating life with his conventional, but equally illusory, fantasy that Elizabeth can serve as the object of his desire. By contrast, the living creature and the rotting body of the dead mother are both touches of the Lacanian real, which punctures the imaginary and collapses it. At the same time, the scene repeats the moment of creation but inverts it, putting Victor in the position of the monster, as he awakes to look up at its face staring down at him, implicitly undoing his intended mastery of his creation. In both cases the eye is prominent. In Dolar’s Lacanian reading, the gaze of the creature is “the principle source of the uncanniness of the monster” (1991: 20), because it shows the creature to be “the Thing” (20), that impossible object of desire that shows up the lack inherent in the subject, and in the other they desire (here Elizabeth). The Thing [das Ding] promises an excessive jouissance that is traumatic for the subject because it breaks down both the imaginary (Victor’s love for Elizabeth and his family, which are identical in the 1818 version since Elizabeth is his cousin) and the symbolic (the scientific studies Victor has pursued, his position as the masterful father) in favour of a pre-individualized reality (the creature has no name) that we cannot accept without losing all identity. An alternative reading is Halberstam and Peter Brooks’s suggestion that the creature is “forever trapped by his hideous appearance in the imaginary” (Halberstam: 44). Reading him as the Thing, however, is to understand the creature as the hidden, the repressed, or unconscious desire come to light, in Freud’s terms. Rabaté calls the Thing “a center of exteriority within the subject” (84), agreeing with Dolar that “the main function of the Uncanny is to make the Thing appear” (84), although unlike in Frankenstein he finds this “often under the most banal or innocuous guises” (84). Dolar’s twist is to propose that the creature is a sociocultural as well as psychical Thing, so that it represents the Enlightenment’s desire for a missing “link between matter and spirit, nature and culture” (17),

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whose fulfilment turns out to be horrifying. The creature is the realization of both Victor and Enlightenment Man’s deepest wish: to gain total control over life and death, to connect “matter to spirit . . . nature to culture” (18). But this produces a “lack of lack” (18) that turns out to be a nightmare, not least because it does away with the need for women and turns reproduction into a mechanical function, collapsing the distinction between the human and the non-living. Most importantly, for Dolar, the uncanny is “always at stake in ideology – ideology perhaps basically consists of a social attempt to integrate the uncanny, to make it bearable, to assign it a place” (1991: 19). The uncanny as that which punctures ideology is useful to psychoanalysis as a “limit to interpretation” (19), a limit which in Freud’s original essay, as I have mentioned, is literature itself, upon which psychoanalysis runs aground. Dolar returns to the relation between ideology and the uncanny in a recent essay, arguing that the overt display of the obscene in politics and culture in recent years, for which Trump is one major signifier, can be understood as another face of the Freudian uncanny, that which should not be brought to light but is now combined uneasily with the comical. If, in Frankenstein, what we see is in large part an anxious attempt by Victor to keep his own obscenity hidden, to maintain the ideological frame of a normal and respectable life despite the insistent reality of the creature he has built, then today that obscenity is proudly displayed; the creature paraded through the streets, so to speak. Yet this is not the lifting of repression, argues Dolar, but a way in which “the repression itself gets repressed” (2020: 678). If this hiding of repression in plain view is one contemporary turn in the recent history of the uncanny, another is an apparent increase in anxiety, and the attention paid to anxiety, and indeed to anxiety about anxiety. For this latter phenomenon, Lacan provides a key.

THE UNCANNY ANXIETY OF THE THING In Seminar X, Lacan’s stated goal is to reinterpret the uncanny in terms of anxiety, to help us “get a much firmer grip on the conjuncture between anxiety and its uncanny ambiguity” (S10: 311). Anxiety, he says, “very likely designates the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing” (S10: 311). The next sentence repeats his most famous definition of anxiety, “that which doesn’t deceive” (S10: 311). We are not deceived if we are anxious because anxiety points to a fundamental lack in the subject, rather than promising imaginary fulfilment. The creature, indeed, does not deceive Victor; he directly confronts him with his demands (to be cared for, to have a mate). It is Victor’s own misinterpretation of the statement “I shall be with you on your weddingnight” (Shelley: 140) that leads him to expect an attempt on his own life, rather than the creature’s murder of Elizabeth, despite his claim to Walton that “the monster had blinded me to his real intentions” (161). The “lifeless and inanimate” (165) body of Elizabeth should have been anticipated as revenge for the incomplete female creature which Victor “tore to pieces” (139) in a fit of “madness” (139) in the Orkneys, but it is also an uncanny collapsing of the two halves of Oedipal desire. Both the female creature and Elizabeth are potential or phantom mothers, the first because she is imagined as giving birth to “a race of devils” (138) and the second because she takes the place of Victor’s dead mother, caring for the younger children (“you must supply my place to my younger children” (26) Victor’s mother tells Elizabeth as she is dying), turns into the dead mother in Victor’s dream, and is the phantom mother of the creature, as the intended wife of his creator. Victor reads the desires of the creature as Oedipal, imagining that it wishes to kill him (the father) and, presumably, have sex with Elizabeth in place of the female creature he has destroyed. The creature

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instead produces an unfamiliar, uncanny Oedipal fantasy, where the mother/lover is destroyed in place of the father in a violent conjunction of sex and murder. As Halberstam observes of Victor’s earlier act, “the act of reproduction becomes here a bloody mess of dismemberment” (47). Its repetition by the creature means that “the domestic woman and the wild woman are both offered up as sacrificial victims to the masculinist narrative of discovery, invention, and competition” (48). The creature is then both the catalyst and the vehicle of Victor’s achieved but disavowed desire to give birth without a woman and so destroy the reproductive “purpose” of women. This narcissistic desire, which returns in Freud through the Wolf-Man’s “wish to be born of his father” (SE 17: 101), is for a masculine form of parthenogenesis, birth without a sexual relationship. The repetition of this desire in the creature is part of what makes him Victor’s double. The horror associated with the successful act of parthenogenesis in Frankenstein, however, represents the failure of this narcissism in the face of the double, an experience which “strips us of the autonomy and independence originally sought” (Critchley and Webster: 145), as Critchley and Webster observe of Hamlet’s relation to Laertes. We end up with an anxious collapse of the Oedipal scene onto the figure of the dead or monstrous mother. In this way, Frankenstein addresses one of the questions Cixous finds in Freud’s essay on the uncanny: “Why it is that the maternal landscape, the heimisch, and the familiar become so disquieting?” (544). According to Kristeva, too, the mother’s body is archetypally abject, a place where the subject looks for “the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject” (54). For Cixous, the answer is associated with “the obliteration of any separation, the realization of the desire which in itself obliterates a limit” (544). In Shelley’s novel, it is the reduplicated realization of Victor’s desire, its doubling, that is uncannily terrifying, not least because it variously puts him in place of the mother, suggests a sexual relationship with her, and betrays her. First there is the desired creation of the monster, which as mentioned above comes from a desire to resurrect the mother, but also puts Victor in the place of his mother as well as his father (the creature being his double). This monstrous birth is implicitly a betrayal of his mother’s dying wish for a “union” (Shelley: 26) between him and Elizabeth, which alongside her wish that Elizabeth “supply my place” (26) binds Victor into an incestuous family circle. Secondly, the creature acts out the implicitly desired destruction of a family that Victor has already rejected twice over: once to study in Ingolstadt (28) and then again when he undertakes a tour of England for “two years” (127) before committing to marriage with Elizabeth. Part of the horror of the creature then, and its uncanniness, is the way it stands in for both Victor’s desire, including his desire for his mother, and for the resurrection of her dead body, as well as his rejection of that desire. If we take our cue from Frankenstein, then instead of the Oedipal fantasy we might agree with Dolar in placing the uncanny, and hence also anxiety and literature, at the “very core of psychoanalysis” (Dolar: 5). As Vine puts it, “psychoanalysis is not just a theory of the uncanny but itself an uncanny theory” (64). In this case, we undo any claims to mastery the discipline might have. To put it in polemical terms, the psychoanalyst is revealed to be in the position of Victor Frankenstein: after thinking himself to be the master scientist, he awakes to find himself on the couch, subject to inexplicable demands that he does not know how to fulfil. In Shelley’s novel, the birth of the creature inaugurates a state of anxiety for Victor, which runs through the rest of the novel, and which turns him from the knowing, Promethean subject (“what had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world, was now within my grasp” [34]) to one who avoids “with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow-creatures” (143). In this, he

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comes to replicate the experience of the creature. This move from confidence to doubt repeats in dramatic terms the contours of Freud’s original essay, which begins by seeking to provide an explanation for the uncanny, but ends with uncertainty about the capacity of psychoanalysis to understand both literature and the uncanny: “the storyteller has a peculiarly directive power over us,” Freud writes, “by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material” (SE 17: 250). Behind Freud’s “peculiarly” we might read “uncannily.” The uncanniness of literature is here not so much explained as reduplicated at the level of form, since the uncanny is described as an effect that comes from an uncanny power of the author. But what is that power? From what does it derive? There is a gap here which cannot be fully explained, though its contours can be described. This signifying absence, or rather unsettling plenitude, is the place named by the uncanny. If psychoanalysis has described this place, it is literature which allows us to experience it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Alvaro Lopez for drawing my attention to Kohon, and to Bourseul’s essay, cited under Further Reading below.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackerman, Jr, Alan. “Visualizing Hamlet’s Ghost: The Spirit of Modern Subjectivity.” Theatre Journal 53.1 (2001): 119–144. Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. Michigan UP, 1995. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 2nd edn. Trans. and ed. by Jonathan Mayne. Phaidon, 1995. Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford UP, 1982. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford UP, 1990. Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unhemiliche (The ‘uncanny’).” 1972. Trans. Robert Dennomé. New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525–48. Critchley, Simon, and Jamieson Webster. The Hamlet Doctrine. Verso, 2013. de M’Uzan, Michael. “The Uncanny or ‘I am not who you think I am’ (2009).” Trans. Andrew Weller. Death and Identity. Routledge, 2013: 137–146. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans, Barbara Johnson. Athlone, 1981. Dolar, Mladen. “ ‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny.” October 58 (1991): 5–23. Dolar, Mladen. “Lifting the Veil.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 119.4 (2020): 671–680. Felman, Shoshana. “To Open the Question.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. by Shoshana Felman. Johns Hopkins UP. 1982: 5–10. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” 1969. Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology. Edited by James Faubion. The New Press. 1998: 205–222. Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare. Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford UP, 2002. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Jensen, Wilhelm. Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy. 1902. Trans. Helen Downey. Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918. Johnson, Samuel. Life of Pope. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their Works. 1779–81, ed. by Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. Clarendon Press, 2006. Volume 4: 1–93.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. by James Meredith, edited by Nicholas Walker. Oxford UP. 2007. Kofman, Sarah. “The Double is / and the Devil: The Uncanniness of ‘The Sandman’.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: 68–83. Kohon, Gregorio. Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny. Routledge. 2016. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia UP, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: 11–52. Marx, Karl. Capital: A New Abridgement, ed. by David McLellan. Oxford UP, 1995. Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory. SUNY Press, 2011. Møller, Lis. “ ‘The Sandman’: The Uncanny as Problem of Reading.” 1991. Literature and Psychoanalysis: 97–110. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge UP, 2014. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester UP, 2003. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: 1818 Text, ed. by Marilyn Butler. Oxford UP, 2008. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. by Roger Lockhurst. Oxford UP, 2006. Tambling, Jeremy. “On Not Being Able to Sing”: Filming Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 42.1 (2005): 22–37. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Cornell UP, 1975. Vine, Steve. “Introductory Note: Uncanny Literature – Freud and the ‘Uncanny’.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: A Reader, ed. by Steve Vine. Palgrave, 2005.

FURTHER READING Bourseul, Vincent. “The ‘Uncanny’ and the Queer Experience.” Recherches en Psychoanalyse-Research in Psychoanalysis 10 (2010): 242–250. Connon, Daisy. Subjects Not-at-Home: Forms of the Uncanny in the Contemporary French Novel: Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, Eugène Savitzkaya. Rodopi, 2010. Finucci, Valeria, and Regina Schwartz, editors. Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature. Princeton UP, 1994. Huskinson, Lucy, editor. The Urban Uncanny: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies. Routledge, 2016. Kokoli, Alexandra. The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice. Bloomsbury, 2016. Morton, Timothy, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2016. Palmer, Paulina. The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic. University of Wales Press, 2012. Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth. Literature and Psychoanalysis: Intertextual Readings. Palgrave, 2001.

CHAPTER THREE

Artemidorus’ Interpretation of Dreams Foucault, Freud, Derrida PAUL ALLEN MILLER

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is a foundational text for psychoanalysis. It stands at the end of a long history of theoretical speculation on what dreams mean and how they are to be contrasted with waking life. By examining Foucault’s challenge to Freud through his reading of Artemidorus, nearly two thousand years prior to Freud, this essay describes the stakes of that challenge, argues for the continuing relevance of Freud’s text, and outlines its importance to the Foucault and Derrida debate on the status of dreams versus madness in Descartes’ First Meditation. Indeed, it contends that the text of Artemidorus in Foucault’s work presents a kind of puzzle that needs to be interpreted, much like a dream. At the beginning of his chapter on the Dream-Work in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud compares the text of a dream to a rebus: a puzzle that presents words and images in a seemingly random order, which must be deciphered if the message is to be understood. Typically, the immediate import of the depicted objects to one another is unclear. They lack appropriate scale, causal connections, and logical relations. Nonetheless, they can be made to yield a sensible solution. Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. . . . But obviously we can only form a proper judgment of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some other way. — SE 4: 277–78 Freud’s basic assumption regarding the rhetoric of dreams—that the relations between parts and whole, although not logical, are meaningful—has been the predicate of their interpretation from Homer (Od. 19.547-50) to his own Traumdeutung. Neuroscientists may question whether dreams have meaning, seeing them as expressions of purely physical processes. Nonetheless, if we accept 49

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that, whatever their somatic origins, these images are not totally random, that they somehow pertain to us as their dreamers (my dreams are not exchangeable with yours), then we must also assume something like the rhetoric of the rebus to be operative if the relation between dream and dreamer is to be discerned. The key problem is determining not simply the relation between parts and wholes within the dream-text, however, but also that to which they may point. Once we admit of a grammar and a syntax, and beyond that even a rhetoric, by which I mean a series of figures, of both dreams and other oneiric texts, whether artistic or symptomatic, the question of the referent then presents itself and controvery begins. This question, as we shall see, is precisely the point at issue in Foucault’s reading of Artemidorus’ Oneirocriticon in the History of Sexuality and its relation, first, to Freud and, then, to the philosophical tradition. There are two questions posed by the implied juxtaposition of Artemidorus and Freud in the History as well as in his lecture course at the Collège de France. First, how does the historical organization of our erotic life affect the content and significance of our dreams? In a world, where the same sexual acts mean very different things, how do they signify in our dreams? And second, what is the relation between waking and dreaming more generally to the possibility of a discourse that is meaningful and referential? To return to Freud, in the traditional rebus, once commonly found in newspapers, the convention was that each puzzle had a single solution and that the relation between parts and whole was therefore univalent. Such is not the case in Freud’s view of dreams, however. The relation between parts and whole, between dream-work and dream-thoughts, is subject instead to “overdetermination.” As he writes in his examination of the “Dream of the Botanical Monograph”: The elements ‘botanical’ and ‘monograph’ found their way into the content of the dream because they possessed copious contacts with the majority of dream-thoughts, because, that is to say, they constituted ‘nodal-points’ upon which a great number of the dream-thoughts converged, and because they have had several meanings in connection with the interpreation of the dream. The explanation of this fundamental fact can also be put in another way: each of the elements of the dream’s content turns out to have been “overdetermined.” — SE 4: 283 Dreams are for Freud, ultimately, less like puzzles than complex texts whose meaning is beyond final specification, whose rhetorical and hence hermeneutic limitation knows no definite limit. “The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the infinite network of our world of thought” (SE 5: 525); and this, as we shall see, is one of the major differences between Freud’s understanding of the rhetoric of dreams and that of Artemidorus, for whom overdetermination and the “infinite” world of thought play no role. The term “rhetoric” for the dream-work is used advisedly. I am far from the first to observe Freud’s use of terms like “condensation” and “displacement” mimics tropes such as metaphor and metonmy. Freud himself deploys artistic examples throughout his oeuvre, most famously perhaps Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in the Traumdeutung (SE 4: 260–66). There is a rhetoric and poetics to the dream-work that cannot be separated from rhetoric and poetics tout court, from the way signs are deployed in complex fashions to create layers of meaning and resonance. The unconscious, according to Lacan, is structured like a language (Ecrits: 223; S11: 20). This rhetoric is in evidence

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whether we are examining dreams, jokes, or parapraxes: a word or image, which in a quotidian setting might have one signification, through juxtaposition or substitution is revealed to have another, more ramified set of meanings extending throughout the phenomenon in question, knitting together latent associations, drives, and desires, often of a sexual nature. In 1984, Michel Foucault chose to open volume three of his History of Sexuality with, Artemidorus’s Oneirocriticon, a text singled out for mention by Freud (SE 4: 98–99). Volume three opens abruptly. There is one brief paragraph that starts, “I will begin by analyzing a rather singular text” (Foucault, Care of the Self 3), before diving into a thirty-two page reading of Artemidorus. Foucault’s interpretation is austere. The majority of the citations are from the Oneirocriticon itself. The sole modern authority cited is Paul Veyne, Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France and one of his primary informants on the ancient world. Nonetheless, we know from Foucault’s research notes that Arteimdorus’s text had been on his mind since at least 1980 and the text was found on his desk after he died.1 Foucault’s reading contains a few allusions to how Artemidorus’s assumptions about reading sexual dreams—focalization from the masculine perspective, indifference concerning the gender of object choice, a phallic or penetrative erotic model—parallel those found in what he terms “classical” erotics or aphrodisia in volume two. There is little explicit attempt to link Artemidorus’s text logically or genealogically to those of Xenophon, Plato, and the medical writers in volume two or to Pliny, Seneca, and Musonius in volume three. Freud is never mentioned. What is this text doing here? What is the relation of part to whole? To whom or to what does it refer? Foucault’s decision to open the third volume with Artemidorus’s Oneirocriticon is not justified by its historical importance in any conventional sense. It is hardly a mainstay of the classical canon. It did not exert discernible influence on later authors. If you were interested in the history of sexuality as a representative reflection on the types, forms, or categorizations of erotic conduct, there are other sources you might choose before it: inscriptions, erotic poets, wall paintings, Greek novels. Artemidorus’ relationship to what follows in volume three and what preceded it in volume two is emblematic or metonymic rather than explicit. This is not an uncommon device in Foucault. If we think of the Ship of Fools at the beginning of his first major book, History of Madness (8–12), of Borges’s Chinese Encyclopedia and Velasquez’s Las Meninas at the beginning of 1966’s The Order of Things (xv–xxiv, 3–16) or the description of the torture and execution of Damiens at the beginning of 1975’s Discipline and Punish (3–6), each of these is introduced abruptly, not as evidence in a conventional historical argument, not as a logical step in a philosophical argument, but as a moment that gathers into itself a set of associations, images, and ideas that traverse these texts in an overdetermined fashion, revealing layers of meaning that are not immediately apparent nor explicit until the reading is complete and reflection begun. Their rhetorical structure, in fact, is closer to that Freud outlines for the dream than the citation of historical evidence or a philosophical example. The irony is doubtless one Foucault savored. As with any dream-text or poetic image, the more disjunctive it is, the more one must rely on associations being traced beyond the immediate text and into surrounding paratexts—associative patterns, other dreams, symptomatic discourses—to recontextualize it within the larger pattern of signification. In the case of Foucault’s reading of Artemidorus, the first such paratext is the History of Sexuality itself, a project which in many ways aims to historicize psychoanalysis and the discursive

1

I owe this observation to the archival work of Niki Kasumi Clements.

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formations that made it possible. Central to Foucault’s project is the idea that sexuality is not a thing and certainly not natural. It is a discourse, a set of enunciations that provided definition and unity to a disparate group of behaviors, sensations, and biological functions, creating a singular entity (i.e., sex) that was not there before (History of Sexuality: 150–57). There is, in fact, no word in Greek, Latin, or Old French for sex. There is a vast vocabulary for emotions, desires, acts, organs, and positions, but no word that covers the full semantic range of our word “sex” or its articulation as a particular sexuality (homo, hetero, bi, poly). Thus, from a Foucauldian perspective, the History of Sexuality is not the history of sex, gender, or erotic expression, it is the genealogy of a series of enunciations that became—through myriad shifts, adaptations, and displacements—our discourse of sexuality, and he chooses his textual examples accordingly. Without the prior discourse of sexuality, psychoanalysis would not be possible, and the “sexual” meaning of our dreams and other behaviors would be unintelligible (Eribon: 255; Dean: 241–42; Leonard: 88; Miller, “Enjoyment Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 2015). Of course, the History of Sexuality did not unroll in a straightforward fashion with the volumes initially projected issued in rapid succession. Instead, there was an eight-year hiatus between the introductory volume and the appearance of volumes two and three. When they did come out, the time frame had shifted from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to classical Greece and imperial Rome. This shift comes from the recognition, as Foucault writes, that the genealogy of the sexual subject, of the subject who saw his- or herself in terms of the discourse of sexuality, was predicated on a prior determination of the subject as one who desired. “Thus, in order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of a ‘sexuality,’ it was essential first to determine how, for centuries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire” (Foucault, Use of Pleasure: 6). To understand Artemidorus and his particular role in the history of sexuality is thus to understand how the interpretation of dreams and what it means to dream has been central to our concept of the subject, first as one who desires, and then as the subject of sexuality: for the subject of desire, Foucault contends, is a subject who understands his truth as figured in his desire. If, then, instead of a history of sexual behavior, of norms and deviations therefrom, Foucault’s purpose in the History was to produce a genealogy of the sexual subject as the locus of a truth that must be deciphered, and hence to produce a genealogy of both the analyst and analysand, he could do worse than Artemidorus. We are not, however, limited to the History of Sexuality in our attempts to interpret the overdetermined position of the Oneirocriticon in Foucauldian thought. At the time Foucault was writing the History of Sexuality, he was also lecturing at the Collège de France. From 1980 till his death in 1984 these lectures, which have been published, focus on antiquity and how subjects in the ancient world formed themselves as speakers of and in relation to the truth. The lectures are not limited to the history of sexuality but feature broadranging philosophical discussions. In 1982, however, the course’s title was Subjectivity and Truth, and virtually all the material presented found its way into volumes two and three of the History, though often with a different frame. Foucault opens his discussion of Artemidorus in the lectures by posing the following series of questions, which are much more explicit in stating the philosophical stakes of the argument than what is found in the History: Is the truth of the truth true? Might it not be thought that the truth of the truth is not true, that at the root of the truth there is something other than truth itself? And what if the truth were true

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only on the ground [of this] rootedness in something like illusion and dream? And if the truth were ultimately only a moment of something that is only the dream? And then you find again [this theme of the relation between] subjectivity-truth and dream with Freud, when the question raised was: how can we know the truth of the subject himself, what is the situation of the truth of the subject, and might it not be that the subject’s most secret truth is expressed through what is most manifestly illusory in the subject? — Foucault Subjectivity and Truth: 48–49 In what remains of this essay, we will look at three topics derived from a reading of this course: first, Artemidorus as an answer to Freud; second, the dream as a central problem for the subject’s relation to truth, with particular reference to the Foucault-Derrida debate; and third, the structure of meaning and interpretation as presented in Freud and Foucault in relation to the dream.2 For Freud, dreams are first and foremost a means of wish fulfillment (SE 3: 122–23). In simplest form, they are a psychosomatic mechanism to allow sleep to continue. I am thirsty; I dream of water. I need to urinate; I dream I do. We are familiar with sexual dreams that function in the same manner. But, Freud observes, many of our dreams are less easily parsed. Their narratives are fragmented. Parts are missing, one thing is substituted for another. While Freud resists the notion that there is a universal key to all dreams, and this is one of the things for which he criticizes Artemidorus, arguing that each dream must assume its place in the associative chain produced by the analysand (SE 4: 98n1, 241–42, 280–81, SE 5: 522–23), nonetheless, one of the traits common to many of these dreams is that they express desires to which it would be forbidden to give voice in our waking hours.3 Freud argues, however, that many of these desires would be too disturbing in their unvarnished form even for our dreams and would wake us from our slumbers, hence the rhetorical devices of the dream-work (SE 4: 142–44, SE 5: 470–72). Thus, what often appears innocent in dreams can have a sexual content: trains entering tunnels, gentlemen doffing hats, and the famous cigar. And while sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and as Daniel Orrels has shown, Freud almost never uses the term “phallic symbol,” nonetheless it is clear that for Freud the relation of part to whole is often sexual. Artemidorus, however, says just the opposite. Rather than everyday actions referring to sexual acts, in dreams sexual actions refer to the world of property and politics, the chief concerns of the Hellenistic and Roman elite for whom Artemidorus wrote. Thus, where for Freud money often signifies feces (SE 5: 403), for Artemidorus the body, s¯oma, signifies wealth. In every case where there is a rhetorical possibility of a sexual double meaning, Artemidorus interpets the ambiguity in a political and economic sense, whereas Freud moves in the opposite direction. A word such as blab¯e, meaning “damage” or “harm,” can thus function as a semantic key for Artemidorus, allowing rape to signify financial damage or a political loss in passages such as, “to be raped by one’s son means to be harmed (blab¯enai) by the son” (Artemidorus 1.78.75). Likewise in the world of ancient erotics many key terms such as homilia, sunousia, and sumplok¯e can have both a social and a sexual meaning. Where for Freud dreaming of a financial loss might signify castration, for Artemidorus,

The next several paragraphs are based on Miller (Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity). One exception is the dream of the burning child, whose meaning, as Freud admits, is undisguised and is in part designed to wake the father. This dream introduces further speculations on the nature of the psychic apparatus (SE5 509–11). 2 3

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there is no sexual secret that lies at the core of our identity (Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth 55–58, 78). Sexual desires for Artemidorus exist on the same plane as our political and social lives. Rather than a sharp break between the manifest and latent content of our dreams, there is a continuity between our waking and dreaming life. For Foucault, Artemidorus posits a fundamentally different form of self-relation from what he sees in psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic truth of our desire is both our inner essence and what lies hidden from us within the regime of sexuality. It must come into speech to be realized and normalized and to that extent resembles a form of confession. In the modern world, we are constantly solicited to say who we are, to assume our true identity, to express our “real” selves. Psychoanalysis did not create this regime. It is actually one of the most sophisticated and self-aware of many similar technologies of the self that saturate our popular culture, our self-help books, and our educational theory.4 Artemidorus, however, assumes no latent desire that must come to expression. Our dreams reproduce the fundamental social relations of waking life. They do not reveal our hidden desire. Sexual pleasure is not something that is censored or repressed, but an extension and reflection of the basic power dynamics that structure society. These phenomena exist on the same plane (Elden: 142). One reason why Foucault spends so much time with the Oneirocriticon is that it offers a window into a world that is all but designed to contrast with that of psychoanalysis. Artemidorus not only inverts the Freudian paradigm, more profoundly, he demonstrates the possibility of a a self-understanding of the subject’s relation to the oneiric world that is fundamentally different from that of the subject of sexuality. The discourse of classical erotics was characterized by what Foucault calls “isomorphism,” where one’s position in erotic activity was viewed to have the same form as one’s position in society (Foucault, Use of Pleasure: 70–71, 75, 82–83, 215; Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth: 80). The free masculine head of household was envisioned as the dominant partner in all relations, and erotic phenomena that threatened that position, from feminine pleasure to the reversibility of dominant and submissive pederastic positions, were stigmatized (Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth: 81, 91–92; Boehringer: 42). The principle of isomorphism is sometimes reduced to the figure of penetrator and penetrated. But while Foucault on occasion is guilty of this, isomorphism, like any social principle, is not reducible to sexual positions. What it argues and what the texts Foucault adduces show is that sexual relations in the classical world are often conceptualized in terms of dominance of the masculine head of household and his position within the citizen body. More profoundly, as Foucault avers, the example of Artemidorus shows that the problem of the dream subtends much of Western philosophy (Subjectivity and Truth 47–49). The dream poses special difficulties for the subject because it directly challenges whether the subject knows, sees, or experiences what it is knowing, seeing, or experiencing. The problem it poses is similar to madness but more extreme because dreaming is universal and totalizing (it is not a distortion of our world, but a replacement, a simulation). The paranoid schizophrenic may hear voices, may believe there are electrodes in her brain, but she does not inhabit a completely different physical reality from that of a posited normal self. From this perspective, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is less the pinnacle

On sexuality as internal identity, see Foucault (Mal faire 255). On the History of Sexuality as a historicization, not a repudiation of psychoanalysis, see Eribon (234, 257); Dean (241–42); Armstrong (130–31, 184, 269); Ayouch.

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of the discourse of sexuality, which sees the manifest content of our dreams as a cipher for the truth of our identity, than the heir to a philosophical tradition that finds its first full expression in Plato’s myth of the cave: a tradition that asks “what is the truth of my experience?” (Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth: 48). If I am the witness to truth, how do I know that what I see is real, that it is not a dream, that I am not deceived? What is the difference between a waking vision and a dream? What kind of truth resides in each? Thus Plato argues that the man who believes the truth resides in perception is like one who lives in a dream: Socrates: The one who believes in beautiful things on the one hand, but who neither believes in beauty itself nor—should someone lead him to the knowledge of this beauty—would he be able to understand it, does he seem to you to live a dream or be awake? Is dreaming not the following: whenever someone, awake or asleep, believes the like is not the like but the thing itself which it resembles? — Republic 5.476c1–5 Philosophy, then, begins at the moment the truth of the immediate is questioned, at the moment I no longer accept what seems to be the case but ask what is. The world seems flat. My desires seem natural. It seems just to smite my enemies. Is that the case? At the origin of Western thought is the dreamer, the one who poses the question of what does it mean to see/know (idein) the truth and what does it mean to be fundamentally deceived. As Foucault observes, this problematic remains central to philosophy up to the modern era. It is the fundamental problem posed by Descartes in his First Meditation: can we find the truth, even though we may be dreaming or bound by a series of illusions so profound as to alter the most basic regulatory laws of our universe: physics, logic, mathematics (Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth 48)? What is the one thing I cannot doubt? If Artemidorus sees the truth of the dream in the subject’s daily life, and if Freud sees the truth of the subject in her dreams, both participate in a larger matrix of concerns that see the subject’s relation to truth as connected in a fundamental way to the possibility that she is dreaming, to the possibility that the reality she perceives is not real and that in some fundamental way the subject is deceived, and that deception must be relieved by being regrounded in another, more fundamental reality to which our dreams, our perceptions, or our experiences refer (the forms, social reality, the cogito, desire). This problematic, in turn, is the basis for Foucault’s two-decade long debate with Jacques Derrida, and indeed the entire discussion in Subjectivity and Truth is acknowledged by its editor to be one of Foucault’s rejoinders (Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth 70n1). Derrida had argued in his 1963 essay on Foucault’s Histoire de la folie that Descartes’s Meditations showed less madness’s exclusion from reason at the beginning of the seventeenth century, than the necessity, even in the case of the dream, of all such forms of illusion to function as the other of reason, and hence always to be included within it and interpretible by it (Derrida: 75–84). This argument can quickly become quite technical, and Foucault goes deep into the weeds of Descartes’s text in his published responses. But the essence of his reply is this: for Foucault knowledge is a human activity that is both determined by and determinative of its historical context. There is no such thing as reason or sense outside a particular context, outside a certain set of appearances. He therefore places a strong emphasis on Descartes’ Meditation as a meditation, as a series of acts performed by the philosopher in order to know the truth. If we take this seriously, Foucault argues, then the question becomes can a subject

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who dreams meditate? Is this an action they can perform? The answer for Descartes is clearly “yes,” but for the madman, he argues, Descartes would say “no” and hence at this moment reason becomes madness’ other while the dream remains within its ambit. Within the dream, it is possible to exercise systematic doubt and to come to the conclusion that the one thing that cannot be doubted is the activity of doubting. The mad, according to Foucault’s reading of Descartes, have no such ability to engage in systematic doubt nor therefore to come to the conclusion, cogito ergo sum. The dreaming subject thus remains within the domain of reason, while the mad must be excluded. Descartes for Foucault, then, like Artemidorus, through his understanding of the dream, represents an event in thought, a fundamental moment in the history of our understanding both of what it means to be a subject—to think, and to speak the truth—and of how we organize ourselves in relation to reason’s other. For Derrida, however, there is always a certain structurally necessary, minimal essence of reason. There is always a certain level on which thought and discourse either make sense or they do not regardless of historical circumstances. And while what consitutes the outside of reason changes through time, nonetheless, there can be no outside except through its always already included other, through its own incorporated externality (Derrida: 79–80, 86; Penfield: 14): The sentence is in its essence normal. It carries normality in itself, that is to say sense, in every sense of the word, Descartes’s in particular. It carries in itself normality and sense, in whatever state that may be, the sanity or insanity of the one who offers it or through whom it passes, and on whom, in whom it articulates itself. In its syntax, even the most meager, the logos is reason, and reason that is already historic. — Derrida: 83–84 For Foucault, this means that Derrida believes there is nothing exterior or anterior to philosophical reason and therefore he remains enclosed within a certain tradition of thought (Foucault, “My Body”: 553). Derrida would not argue with this characterization, so long as it was understood that philosophical reason was constantly transforming itself through the incorporation of its other through time and that it is only through that incorporation that an outside can even be posited. Foucault asks us to imagine a world in which what we consider thought does not exist, in which truth as we recognize it does not exist. If there is an outside to our concept truth, then it is possible to radically rethink the value we attribute to the subject, to the self, to experience, to dreams, and to truth (Penfield: 19). For Derrida, however, the moment we articulate this vision of our own disappearance or self-transcendence, we step back within the self-overcoming circle of reason and its other that make historicity thinkable (Allen: 132; Evans: 155; Gratton: 254). Where Foucault critically examines historically specific power formations, Derrida is interested in the structure of reason that makes these periodizations possible (Evans: 160; Gratton: 257). The two positions are ultimately irreconcilable—you cannot logically subordinate one to the other—although that does not make them mutually exclusive, i.e., if one is true the other must be false (Penfield: 21). It is in fact possible to imagine a world in which the logos of one era, and hence the structures of subjectivity, power, and truth in it, and that of another differ quite radically and yet retain a certain minimal formal universality in the moment of their constitution, in their transcendental condition of possibility. Artemidorus gives uniquely powerful testimony of this through offering a fundamentally different vision of the relation of the waking subject to its dream life, and hence of the subject to

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truth, from our own and yet one that remains intelligible and so offers to us the possibility of thinking differently about the historical constitution of the subject, its desire, and hence the truth of its waking life and dreams and of its ability to govern itself and others. To return to where we began, the dream is likened by Freud to a rebus, but, as even he recognizes, its rhetoric is in fact more complex. In the classic rebus, each element signifies a single corresponding word or syllable in the solution to the puzzle. This interpretive model in fact closely resembles Artemidorus, who envisions two types of dreams: enypnia and oneroi, which correspond roughly to dreams that are self-explanatory—the lover desires the presence of his beloved, the man who overindulges in food and drink dreams he is vomiting—and revelatory dreams that need decoding (Foucault, Care of the Self 10–14). Within that latter category, however, once one learns to read the code, it is remarkably stable: To dream of sexual intercourse with one’s wife is a favorable sign, because the wife is in a relationship of natural analogy to the dreamer’s craft or possession. . . . To take sexual pleasure in one’s own son, to “spend” one’s semen inside him, is a useless act, a wasteful expenditure by which nothing can be gained, and which therefore portends a considerable loss of money. — Foucault, Care of the Self:18–21 Artemdorus does not just posit a different referent for the dream. It is not simply the case that in the world of isomorphic social and sexual relations in which Artemidorus lives there is no need to posit a hidden sexual content to our dream, although that is in fact the case and thus Foucault forces us to reread Freud through a much more historically expansive lens; but also the rhetoric of dreams in Artemidorus is fundmentally different in ways that Foucault does not explicitly recognize in either the History of Sexuality or Subjectivity and Truth. Freud in the Traumdeutung does not offer simply a manual for the interpretation of dreams but a rhetoric of experience. Whether we are talking about waking life, cultural products, or dreams themselves, the signifying world whereby we render meaningful our relations with the real are characterized by the very “nodal-points” Freud describes in the dream of the Botanical Monograph cited at the beginning of this essay, in which privileged signifiers and images become relays of sense and sensibilty organizing and dispersing our meanings in ways that “branch out in every direction into the infinite network of our world of thought” (SE 5: 525). Iconic images, metaphors, and tropes gather meaning into themselves, create connections, make meanings and specific desires possible, and then disseminate them through the fabric of consciousness. This is the rhetoric Freud did more than any other modern thinker to discover and articulate. Foucault’s use of Artemidorus not only problematizes this rhetoric in terms of its historical specificity and sexual assumptions but also exemplifies its conscious deployment. Foucault at once allows us to see a world beyond sexuality and foregrounds the power of a rhetoric that cannot be limited to simple referentiality. This question of the meaning of our experiences whether waking or asleep has been central to the enirety of the philosophical tradition. When Plato challenges our assumptions on the difference between waking and dreaming life, he is not simply making a claim to higher knowledge, but asking us to imagine what it means for appearances to have meaning, both in terms of their internal coherence and their capacity to refer beyond themselves. This is Freud’s fundamental question in both the Interpretation of Dreams and his work on jokes, parapraxes, and psychosomatic symptoms.

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Finally, to return to Descartes, if the one thing I cannot doubt is that I am doubting, what would it mean only to appear to doubt, to dream that I am doubting? What would it mean for my thoughts not to be my own, for the cogito to be inhabited by the voice of the other, to be structured? This is the fundamental question not only of Freud but also of Foucault and Derrida. The Interpretation of Dreams is not simply about what it means that last night I dreamt Artemidorus was on a train with my mother, wearing a hat and smoking a cigar, but what does it mean that there are sets of appearances, sets of tropes, that are both specific to me and yet come unbidden, that both elude and are subject to reason.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Amy. “The History of Historicity: The Critique of Reason in Foucault (and Derrida).” Between Foucault and Derrida, ed. Yubraj Ayral, Vernon W. Casey, Nicolae Morar, and Christopher Penfield, Edinburgh UP, 2016: 125–37. Armstrong, Richard. A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World, Cornell UP, 2005. Ayouch, Thamy. “De l’herméneutique au stratégique: Sexuations, sexualités, normes et psychanalyse.” Foucault, la sexualité, l’antiquité, ed. Sandra Boehringer and Daniele Lorenzini, Kimé, 2016: 167–86. Boehringer, Sandra. “Refuser les universaux: Une histoire Foucaldienne de la sexualité antique, une histoire au present.” Foucault, la sexualité, l’antiquité, ed. Sandra Boehringer and Daniele Lorenzini. Kimé, 2016: 33–61. Dean, Tim. “Lacan and Queer Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Cambridge UP, 2003: 238–52. Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito et Histoire de la Folie.” L’écriture et la différence, Seuil, 1967, 51–97. Elden, Stuart. Foucault’s Last Decade, Polity, 2016. Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Fayard, 1994. Evans, Fred. “ ‘Murmurs and ‘Calls’: The Significance of Voice in the Reason of Foucault and Derrida.” Between Foucault and Derrida, ed. Yubraj Aryal, Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Christopher Penfield, Edinburgh UP, 2016: 153–68. Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality, Volume 3, trans. Robert Hurley, Random House, 1986. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Pantheon Books, 1977. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Random House, 1978. Foucault, Michel. History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, Routledge, 2006. Foucault, Michel. “My Body, The Paper, This Fire.” History of Madness, edited Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, Routledge, 2006. 550–574. Foucault, Michel. Mal faire, dire vrai: Fonction de l’aveu en justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, University of Chicago P / UCL Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2012. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Vintage, 1970. Foucault, Michel. Subjectivity and Truth. Lectures at Collège de France 1980–81, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, Palgrave, 2017. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley, Random House, 1985. Gratton, Peter. “Philosophy on Trial: The Crisis of Deciding Between Foucault and Derrida.” Between Foucault and Derrida, ed. Yubraj Aryal, Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Christopher Penfield, Edinburgh UP, 2016: 251–62.

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Leonard, Miriam. Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought. Oxford UP, 2005. Miller, Paul Allen. “Enjoyment Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Antigone, Julian of Norwich, and the Use of Pleasures.” The Comparatist 39, 2015: 47–63. Miller, Paul Allen. Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth. Bloomsbury, 2022. Orrells, Daniel. “Freud’s Phallic Symbol.” Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis: Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self, ed. Vanda Zajko and Ellen O’Gorman, Oxford UP, 2015: 39–58. Penfield, Christopher. “Introduction.” Between Foucault and Derrida, ed. Yubraj Aryal, Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Christopher Penfield, Edinburgh UP, 2016: 1–26.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Atomystique of the ‘Purloined Letter’ Debate Lacan and Derrida’s Minor Differences DAVID SIGLER

The divisibility of the letter—this is why I insisted on . . . the atomystique of the letter—is what puts in jeopardy and leads astray, with no guarantee of return, the remnant of anything whatever[.] — Derrida 1975: 106–7 The word ‘atomystique’, coined by Jacques Derrida in ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, is meant to be an accusation and insult: when someone foolishly assumes that a thing has reached its smallest and most basic state and can be divided no further, they are exhibiting atomystique. It is to presume that an ‘atom’, metaphorically speaking, cannot be split. Atomystique is alleged to be a type of false consciousness, a psychological ‘safety bolt’ relied upon by those who wish to avoid ‘what puts in jeopardy and leads astray, with no guarantee of return’ (Derrida 1975: 107). The term was tailor-made to hurl at Jacques Lacan. Lacan had taken an interest in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 short story ‘The Purloined Letter’, finding that the eponymous letter possesses a strange durability: ‘Cut a letter into small pieces, and it remains the letter that it is’ (E: 16). Such an outrageous statement, so anathema to Derrida’s way of thinking, deserved to be designated as its own kind of logical fallacy. Lacan’s statement was the world’s first instance of atomystique, the primal scene of atomystique, and remains perhaps the only case of atomystique on record, though I suppose that the scientific treatment of atoms before the twentieth century would be the implied paradigm. Derrida, I think, is needlessly worried about atomystique in Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s story, as I will try to explain here; I also doubt whether atomystique is really the wickedest of sins to begin with. But Derrida’s allegation of atomystique in Lacan, I will suggest, backhandedly serves as its own kind of ‘safety bolt’ to hide a narcissism of minor differences separating Derrida from Lacan when it comes to ‘The Purloined Letter’. The narcissistic play of minor differences at work in the Poe-Lacan-Derrida exchange has, I will suggest, generated an atomystique of its own, one that operates independently of any assumptions that Lacan was or wasn’t making in the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’. Lacan deliberately placed his ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ as the first full-length essay in Écrits (1966). He had previously discussed Poe’s story in Seminar II, in the sessions of March and 61

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April 1955 (S2: 186–88, 194–205), and, more briefly, in Seminar IV (S4: 124, 157–158). The Écrits essay polishes and expands upon those remarks. Within Écrits, the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ is unique for appearing out of chronological order of its initial composition, making it seem like a deliberate gauntlet thrown down and a recommended pathway into the world of Lacanian interpretation; Lacan describes the essay as ‘an easy entryway into my style’ (E: 4). Because Lacan’s essay was featured in such a prominent way, Poe’s story has come to metonymize the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis from a Lacanian perspective. What wouldn’t ‘The Purloined Letter’ have said! Derrida would offer a detailed rebuttal of the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ in ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, which was published in article form in 1975 and subsequently incorporated into The Post Card (1980), one of his most ambitious books. Derrida was working, it would seem, from a copy of Écrits given to him personally by Lacan and inscribed by the author on the flyleaf, ‘to Jacques Derrida, this homage to take as it may please him’ (Derrida 1998: 51). Despite or because of this tribute, Derrida seems to have taken umbrage both with Lacan’s analysis of the Poe story and with Lacan personally. ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ turns what had been a psychoanalytic conversation about Poe into a bruising methodological debate about letters and their destinations, such that, for Derrida at least, Poe’s story would begin to seem a referendum on Lacanianism or even psychoanalysis in general. Whereas Lacan had argued that ‘a letter always arrives at its destination’, Derrida argued, in a neatly opposite way, that ‘a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and from the moment this possibility belongs to its structure one can say it never truly arrives’, tormented as it is by ‘an internal drifting’ (E: 30; Derrida 1987: 489, emphasis in original). Construed in such a way, the stakes of the debate seem stark and clear – the Lacanian side affirming an anchoring point in the real, that compels a cycle of repetitions around a letter that could never be destroyed; the Derridean side seeing, to the contrary, only endless drift, divisibility, and différance. Jacques-Alain Miller explains that, ‘for the followers of deconstruction, it [i.e. ‘The Purveyor of Truth’] had the effect of making Lacan seem “old-hat”. For the Lacanians, they turned away from reading Derrida’ (J.-A. Miller: 2016 207). The controversy would draw in other prominent commentators, most notably, in 1977, Barbara Johnson, whose rigorous takedown of Derrida’s takedown of Lacan, called ‘The Frame of Reference’, remains the most insightful essay in the entire chain. Some dozen commentaries were then collected in an influential anthology, The Purloined Poe (1988), Ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. The Purloined Poe is a marvellous book, one of the most purposeful and well-constructed edited collections I know. But because its presentation of the debate can seem so definitive, and because today some of its essays can seem a bit dated (which is inevitable after so long in any scholarly enterprise), ‘The Purloined Letter’ can seem a souvenir of the 1970s–80s theory wars, or a fossil captured in Muller and Richardson’s amber. Yet the debate simply continued apace through the 1990s, with key contributions published by Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson among many others (Žižek: 1–32; Jameson), and indeed carries on to this day, with many of the leading Lacanian and Derridean thinkers of our moment having weighed in (Soler; J. H. Miller: 28–54; J.-A. Miller: 2012; Rabaté: 122–49; Major; J.-A. Miller 2016). It has been a scholarly and theoretical morass of unusual duration, extending into its sixth decade now, and unexpected ferocity. One can easily see why the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ would have irked Derrida. Lacan sees in Poe’s text a story that strangely repeats, because the search for the letter always unconsciously reconstructs the original crime without meaning to. The characters rotate into new positions but the positions themselves seem to be fixed in place around the anchoring point of the

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eponymous letter, which functions, basically, as a phallus, feminizing those, including Dupin, who gain possession of it. The ‘Queen’ (that is, whoever is holding the letter) is always in the same place, but her identity ever-changing. In that sense, Lacan’s reading of the story epitomizes the structuralism, phallocentrism, logocentrism, phallogocentrism, phonocentrism, Freudianism, and worship of ‘truth’ that Derrida had long been committed to dismantling. Lacan had ‘articulated, assumed, and linked up, with the greatest consistency and consequence, all the motifs’ that the author of Of Grammatology had sworn to deconstruct (Derrida 1998: 55). Even before ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, Derrida was complaining of Lacan’s ‘aggressions’ and, eventually, of the ‘compulsive violence’ of Lacan’s constantly slighting him, and had been making a special point not to refer to Lacan in his books (Derrida 1981: 107 n.44; Johnson: 219–20; Derrida 1998: 47). Lacan, meanwhile, published an essay in 1971 called ‘Lituraterre’ in an attempt to engage with deconstruction and Derrida’s mishandling (in Lacan’s view) of ‘the letter’ as such. ‘Lituraterre’ re-examines ‘The Purloined Letter’ in the broader context of literature and psychoanalysis, in Lacan’s seeming attempt to present himself as an avant-garde literary writer, in the mould of James Joyce. It is implicitly an encomium to Derrida’s overall approach to literary reading. Yet Derrida’s focus remained locked on the more structuralist reflections found in Écrits, and, as Jacques-Alain Miller explains, ‘the historical importance of . . . [‘The Purveyor of Truth’] cannot be overestimated’ (J.-A. Miller 2016: 207). The ongoing animosity would lead Lacan publicly and inaccurately to suggest, as if as by a ‘compulsive blunder’, that Derrida was undergoing psychoanalysis, and that he was plagiarizing Lacan’s work (Derrida 1987: 202–4; 1998: 67). The hard feelings continue to this day among Derrideans and Lacanians, and there is no guarantee of any return. Miller, who was mentored by Derrida early in his career, feels such resentment over ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ that he declined to respond to Derrida when given the opportunity in the 1990s, and has remained alienated from him for decades because of the issue (J.-A. Miller 2016: 207, 210). ‘The Purloined Letter’ affair has revealed, as René Major phrases it, ‘what psychoanalysis induces in Derrida, and what Derrida induces in psychoanalysis’ (Major: 2) – a very fitting reflection, for a scholarly dialogue that has featured exhaustive commentary, especially from Derrida, on the figure of chiasmus (Derrida 1998: 53–65). Derrida and Lacan, two extremely inventive close readers, tend to interpenetrate their ideas into one another on the textual field that Poe provides. The conversation is marked by frequent hair-splitting and the occasional expression of envy, rather than a meaningful separation of the two main positions: ‘I too deal with people who suffer’, protests Derrida, finding Lacan ‘very careless’ to think otherwise – I, too, activate the transference, he insists (Derrida 1998: 67). But the debate was never primarily about letters or methodologies. The issue of a letter’s internal drifting and divisibility was mainly pretext for a far more personal conflict, which involved Lacan’s ‘playing dead’ at a dinner party and mocking Derrida as ‘the father’ (Derrida 1998: 51). Derrida recounts these and other of Lacan’s slights over the years in his semi-remorseful reflection on the affair, ‘For the Love of Lacan’. There, Derrida treats Lacan’s refusal to reply to ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ as a purloined letter unto itself – a sensitive missing communiqué around which the philosophical debate turns – and seeks, in a kind of implicit tribute to Lacan’s reading of Poe, to contain the controversy within three or four main episodes in which the positioning of Lacan and Derrida, and Lacan ‘with the philosophers’, seems ever-revolving. ‘Message received’, Derrida says, with multi-layered irony, in response to Lacan’s ambiguous slights (Derrida 1998: 51). He takes seriously Lacan’s silence on the matter and considers the difficulty of continuing a

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debate with someone who has died. Yet Lacan’s silence was not total. Lacan discussed ‘The Purloined Letter’ again in Seminar XXIV, conducted a year after ‘The Purveyor of Truth’. And Lacan’s 1971 essay ‘Lituraterre’, which preceded ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ and which Derrida does not acknowledge, Lacan implicitly rebuts Derrida’s assumptions about the signifier and thus casts doubt on deconstruction’s own capacity for tarrying with real waywardness. There, Lacan already laments, seemingly in reference to Derrida, that there have been those who ‘hear my words badly’, and suggests that the fate of literary criticism is itself at stake: ‘if literary criticism could effectively renew itself, it would be because psychoanalysis is there for the texts to measure themselves against it, the enigma being on its side’. A letter is not a signifier, Lacan stresses in ‘Lituraterre’, but is ‘the edge of the hole in knowledge’, a place where the real asserts itself, and those who read Poe otherwise are naïve or misinformed (Lacan 2013: 329). Major has gone so far as to read Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ as a parable about Lacan and his French psychoanalytic circle (Major: 13–14). That circle included Marie Bonaparte, who, in her psychobiographical study of 1934, was the first to connect Poe to psychoanalytic reason, where he has remained ever since. Was Poe destined to be part of the history of psychoanalysis, we might wonder, or did he arrive at this destination by chance? That question is Freud’s exact concern in his laudatory preface to Bonaparte’s study. Poe’s writings, Freud says, were ‘determined by their author’s special nature’ as a matter of ‘destiny’. Yet that destiny came into being, he notes, as a result of contingent ‘painful experiences’ suffered in the author’s childhood (SE 22: 254). Which is to say that Poe’s fiction was bound to be embroiled in theoretical controversies at the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis, and yet it also might not have arrived at this intersection, and therefore has never arrived. One can see, then, how the entire debate between Derrida and Lacan – the discussion of chance, destinations, divisibility, and atomystique – is already very much part of Poe’s thought, long before Derrida and Lacan or even Freud and Bonaparte arrived on the scene. Bonaparte carefully reveals how Poe’s theory of ‘cosmogony’ would seem to describe atomic indivisibility, yet is far more dependent on ‘immeasurable diffusion’ and abstract frames of reference than it may at first seem (Bonaparte: 598, 603–4). Hence Poe already provides a ‘a blueprint of the economy of exchanges underpinning [the] fantasies’ at play in the ‘Purloined Letter’ debate, much as Jean-Michel Rabaté has argued (Rabaté: 140).

MINOR DIFFERENCES The core irony of atomystique, understood as a type of bad faith, is that all accusations of atomystique are necessarily made in bad faith. That’s because Derrida defines atomystique specifically as a misapprehension – it is a type of wrongness, and, by definition, a feeble psychic defence. Consequently, one can suspect someone of atomystique only by begging the question of divisibility; in order for there to be atomystique, the object at hand has to be actually endlessly divisible yet found to be not so. The endlessness of its divisibility is always, then, simply assumed, and any attempt to question that conclusion or offer a different view would be dismissed in advance as atomystique. Such circular logic is the sort of thing that Derrida would normally have delighted in pointing out (see, for instance, Bennington and Derrida: 28), and yet he refrained from noting it in this case. The circularity of the accusation is, I am suggesting, itself a form of atomystique. Derrida and Lacan are not as far apart in their readings of ‘The Purloined Letter’ as it may at first seem, and the animosity, which was very real, may have resulted from their methodological

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proximity rather than differences. Rabaté stresses, for instance, that ‘Derrida and Lacan fundamentally agreed on the idea that there was an “archi-writing” and that it constituted the Unconscious’ (Rabaté: 141). Lacan, elsewhere, aligns his own practice of punning with Derrida’s discussions of polysemy (Lacan 2008: 18). As mentioned above, Lacan became obsessed with the idea that Derrida was plagiarizing from him, which, however baseless the concern, does not suggest that their arguments were especially irreconcilable (Badiou and Roudinesco: 48). In the dispute over ‘The Purloined Letter’, it is not that there are no intellectual differences between the Lacanians and Derrideans, but rather (as Poe would say) it was ‘the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive’ (Poe: 21). The exchange in all of its testiness can best be understood as the result of a ‘narcissism of minor differences’, a concept that Freud develops in ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ and returns to in Group Psychology and Civilization and its Discontents. Freud says that ‘it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them’ (SE 11: 199). Yet such animosity functions, in a reversal of the first operation, to build the illusion of cohesion in a displaced way, where there would not otherwise be any (SE 21: 114). In that sense, a narcissism of minor differences will generate precisely atomystique – it groups divisible items together by pretending, with recourse to a cycle of animosities, that they are inseparable. Lacan calls the phenomenon ‘conformist terror’ (E: 410). Derrida’s critiques of Lacan in ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ were, as Johnson so capably illustrates, blunders that Derrida was also committing himself (Johnson 198), and, I would add, that Lacan wasn’t especially committing in the first place. A Lacanian perspective on purloined letters, I will suggest, is far more open to the pathways of différance than Derrida was ready to acknowledge in 1974. Derrida seems to concede this in ‘For the Love of Lacan’, where he notes that ‘there was an impulse coming from psychoanalysis in general . . . to deconstruct the privilege of presence’, and that Lacan’s work was, of the psychoanalysts’, ‘closest’ to his own (Derrida 1998: 55). Lacan’s concept of ‘ab-sense’, for instance, obliterated any distinction between sense and nonsense, presence and absence, in a way that brought Lacan quite closely into the realm of deconstruction and put him at odds with any metaphysics of presence (Cassin: 93 95). The differences between the two camps seem strangely subtle, the stakes of the disagreement strangely low, and the resentment strangely abiding – all traits associated with the narcissism of minor differences. Even after Lacan’s death, Derrida was demanding further and further ‘microscopic or micrological displacements’ from Lacan regarding the interpretation of Poe (Derrida 1998: 40). Where there were genuine methodological differences, they got mined to the point of their collapse or forfeiture, to create what Johnson sees as a display of ‘one-downsmanship’ throughout the debate (Johnson: 218). Such conformist terror produces an atomystique of its own, as characterized by the formation of two theoretical camps and debates, still ongoing since the 1970s, over a short story. Lacan implies that the purloined letter embodies the phallus, a signifier of lack and the anchor of meaning, which leads ‘writings [to] scatter’ (Es: 19). The phallus is a signifier of lack because it does not point to any signified, but rather anchors the entire signifying chain. Lacan elsewhere finds that the phallus is the quintessential example of a ‘small difference’ that would generate division, and thus lead to the formation of two hostile camps (S19: 8). To draw upon another of Lacan’s discussions of minor differences, we could note that the charge of atomystique functions in this debate as a ‘difference detached from all possible comparison’, in which ‘every narcissistic perspective can be accommodated’ precisely because of the speciousness of the accusation (S9: 132–33).

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I say speciousness because Lacan repeatedly emphasizes the endless divisibility of the letter and the interminability of the consequent dissemination. Derrida fell prey to a seemingly ‘irreversible’ misunderstanding of ‘the letter’ across his many textual engagements with Lacan (J.-A. Miller 2016: 208). As Jacques-Alain Miller and Rabaté have each pointed out, Lacan’s analysis of André Gide’s love letters, the subject of another essay in Écrits (623–44), makes this plain – Lacan definitely does not believe that sensitive letters are indestructible (J.-A. Miller 2016: 208; Rabaté: 122–49). In ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan’s complexly punning essay from 1971 devoted to exploring the connections between literature and psychoanalysis, he says of ‘The Purloined Letter’ that ‘the tale consists in the spiriting away of the message, whose letter voyages without it’ (Lacan 2013: 328). This concept of ‘spiriting away’ – an internal drift that inheres in all letters, enabling them not to necessarily arrive at their destinations – is precisely Derrida’s position in ‘The Purveyor of Truth’. There, Derrida mocks Lacan’s seeming confidence in ‘truth’ as an internally coherent and stable category. But ‘Lituraterre’ makes clear in the context of ‘The Purloined Letter’ that truth is not the same thing as knowledge, because it is forever deferred and displaced: ‘it is their truth that I await. I insist on finding my range with a knowledge in failure [savoir en e’chec]: as one says figure-en-abyme, it is not the failure of knowledge’ (Lacan 2013: 329). Here Lacan is analysing the story’s mise-enabyme as a way of destabilizing the status of ‘truth’, just as Derrida wished he would (Derrida 1975: 105). Methodologically, then, we are talking about a minor difference.

THE PURLOINED POPE AND THE FRAME OF ‘REFERANCE’ One of Derrida’s main concerns in ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ is that Lacan begins with the arrival of the Prefect, which is to say that he disregards the very opening of the Poe story. Lacan is charged with ignoring the frame narration set in Dupin’s library, ‘obscuring this beginning’ and suppressing ‘the ornamental frame of a narrative’. The library space, Derrida suggests, constitutes an economy, a ‘public corporation . . . of capital and desire’, which suggests that the scene of narration has been rented, which suggests in turn that it is inextricably part of the tale (Derrida 1987: 484). Derrida justifies the charge of atomystique against Lacan through the implicit economics of narration. Because the scene of narration has been rented as part of a financial exchange, the letter must be said to be internally divided, which is why ‘a letter does not always arrive at its destination’ and so forth. As a solution to this problem of narrative frames, Derrida asks us to consider not only the scene of narration in ‘The Purloined Letter’, but also its intertextual connection to other similar spaces in Poe’s two other Dupin tales, most of all the library at the beginning of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. But Lacan does discuss the library setting, noting of the purloined letter that: ‘what is hidden is never but what is not in its place, as a call slip says of a volume mislaid in a library’ (E: 17). He extensively analyses the role of the general narrator (E: 12–13, 23–24). He clearly and explicitly discusses the aspects of the story that Derrida faults him for ignoring. If, for Johnson, Derrida commits the same interpretive errors in his reading of Lacan, that he accuses Lacan of in the analysis of Poe, then it should also be noted that Lacan was not even making those supposed errors in the first place. If it is supposed to be devastating that Lacan may have suppressed the ‘ornamental frame’ of ‘The Purloined Letter’, then it bears mentioning that Derrida wrongly treats ‘The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ as if it were the opening of Écrits. He calls it ‘the entry to the Écrits’ (Derrida

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1981: 133 n.44) and considers its place as the first piece in the collection (Derrida 1998: 49). That is simply inaccurate, because it ignores Lacan’s ‘Overture to this Collection’, a short introductory piece that appears just before the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’. Written in October 1966 – and so likewise presented out of chronological order – the ‘Overture’ discusses ‘The Purloined Letter’ in some detail. Lacan there connects ‘The Purloined Letter’ to another anglophone literary classic, Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712). To ignore this ‘frame of reference’ for Lacan’s commentary is no less problematic or inaccurate than to ignore ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in a discussion of ‘The Purloined Letter’. In the ‘Overture’, Lacan asks us to think about Poe and Pope together. The connection makes sense, as Pope’s mock-epic is set in an aristocratic boudoir, and involves, in addition to its tale of fetishized, symbolic sexual violence, the circulation and theft of love letters in a way that causes a woman’s public humiliation. Most notably, Pope’s poem features the incineration of love letters by the perpetrator: ‘With tender Billet-doux he lights the Pyre, / And breathes three am’rous Sighs to raise the Fire’ (Pope ll. 40–41). Alongside Poe and Gide, the reference to Pope gives readers of Écrits a third literary case study in which to test the hypothesis that letters will remain the letter they are, even when destroyed. Lacan’s allusion to Pope foreshadows his commentary on Gide’s letters and suggests that these are relevant corollaries to ‘The Purloined Letter’. Once the pyre has burned, Pope activates a Sylph to ensure that the letters’ remains will forever disperse and become disembodied at the dual levels of sound and sight: ‘The rest, the Winds dispers’d in empty Air,’ Pope says. This is exactly the phenomenon that Lacan will emphasize in Poe as well. In Pope’s case, the dissemination renders impossible any possible division between writing and speech, vision and sound, bodies and clothing: bodies promptly dissolve into ‘Transparent forms’, ‘airy Garments flew’, ‘Light disports’ colour and texture (Pope ll. 46, 53–68). The burning of the billet-doux in Pope, then, here clearly anticipates the Derridean paradigm of dissemination, movement, and endless divisibility; Lacan is urging us to keep it in mind as a frame of reference for ‘The Purloined Letter’. In a complicated intertextual structure, Lacan, in the ‘Overture’, directly asks the reader to take ‘The Purloined Letter’ as a mock epic rather than as a detective story. And Lacan’s own ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ is supposed to be the object of Poe’s Augustan-style satire, in the sense that Lacan asks us to read Poe’s words as a ‘parody of my discourse’ (E: 4). This sort of atemporal mis-en-abyme is both impossible and, Lacan suggests, necessary. Is this not the very substance of a deconstructive approach to ‘The Purloined Letter’? The nineteenth-century literary text is here derivative of the twentieth-century literary criticism upon it, as if the interpretation of the story had created the story; meanwhile, Lacan interprets his own subsequent interpretation of Poe’s story, which, once interpenetrated with an eighteenth-century satirical poem that has distinct echoes of Lacan’s analysis of Gide’s letters, is said to guide the very interpretation of Poe that ‘The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ purports to establish. Lacan’s term for this impossible textual entanglement in the ‘Overture’, crossing three centuries and two languages, and rendering undecidable any distinction between primary and secondary text, is the ‘purloining of the letter’. Purloining, because it is the reader of Écrits, not the psychoanalyst author, who must construct the meaning of the ‘Seminar’, ‘in a context of impertinence’ (E: 334). It is clear from the ‘Overture’ that we are as far away as possible from a pompous or naïve ‘purveyor of truth’ laying down the law of eternal return. Indeed, as Lacan warns, ‘it will be up to this reader to give the letter in question, beyond those to whom it was one day addressed, the very thing he will find as its

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concluding word: its destination’ (E: 4). Which means that the reader of Écrits ‘must pay the price with elbow grease’ and enact the Popeification of Poe (Écrits 5). This paying of the price makes the ‘Overture to this Collection’ itself an economy, a site of labour and exchange, a scene of writing that must (by Derrida’s logic) shape the ‘Seminar’ to follow and be considered part of it; it guarantees (again by Derrida’s logic) that Lacan was aware that love letters always might not arrive at their destination. Lacan would consistently repeat this point across his career when returning to the issue of ‘The Purloined Letter’. As late as Seminar XXIV (1976–77), he says: ‘while what I enunciate, in reestablishing Poe’s text, “The Purloined Letter”, namely, the letter that does not arrive, the letter whose circuit is extended’ (S24: 84). On the topic of ‘truth’ (of which he had been accused of being ‘the purveyor’), Lacan stresses that: ‘Adrift, that is where the true is when the real is what is at stake’ (S24: 14). Lacan, here too, insists that there is something important outside of the story’s immediate frame, and something outside of even that wider frame, beyond even Poe’s ken. He observes that the perspective of the King is strangely missing from ‘The Purloined Letter’, develops a reading according to which the King’s Hegelian-style recognition of the Queen’s precarity allows the circuit to turn, and supposes that there might be another character whose complete absence from the story is essential to its meaning. That is, Alain Didier-Weill made a presentation on ‘The Purloined Letter’ to Lacan’s Seminar on February 8, 1977, in which Weill had invented a character called Bozef who did not appear in Poe’s tale, yet who may have been ‘the emissary of the letter’ (S24: 62). In the following session, Lacan praises Weill’s analysis but objects to Weill’s having given Bozef a name, saying ‘Bozef even though he has been given a name, is not something which deserves to be named. . . . It is not nameable’. Yet Bozef plays a crucial role, Lacan agrees, ‘in the margins of Poe’s tale’ (S24: 84–85). Lacan begins, following Weill, to analyse the now-unnamed Bozef as a silent presence in Poe’s story, as a way of reconsidering the story through the King’s occluded perspective. Lacan thus proves himself eager to think about the destabilizing effects of further and further narrative frames and mounts an implicit critique of metaphysics of presence. Suddenly Lacan is able to glean that the letter might not arrive after all: ‘To commence to know in order not to arrive’, as Lacan says in the following session (S24: 100). All that Derrida takes from Seminar XXIV, though, was Lacan’s public accusation, which was initially suppressed in the records of the seminar, that Derrida was in analysis. Seminar XXIV is not a case of Lacan having come to his senses, having read ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ and now scrambling to save face. Lacan had long been influenced by Derrida’s theory of dissemination and had been consistently ‘highlighting the category of the contingent as no longer contained by the indivisibility of the letter,’ as René Major notes (Major: 11). As early as 1957, Lacan was worrying that his analysis of ‘The Purloined Letter’ would be misunderstood: ‘they imagined that I was denying that there was such a thing as chance’ (S4: 224). The real is Lacan’s figure for this contingent quality in the psyche, a faculty formed in its particularity through the traumatic encounter with highly singular, often random experiences, yet which, once repressed, produces inevitabilities. The real, much like death, renders impossible any distinction between the contingent and inevitable. Lacan directly says in the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ that the letter is not subject to partition because it ‘materializes the instance of death’ (E: 16). For the letter to arrive at its destination, it will have required a ‘symbolic determination’ that would not cancel out the ‘randomness’ beneath it, but rather activate that randomness through feats of overdetermination which jam the symbolic structures that give the itinerary its reference points (E: 45). It is a matter of putting randomness into circulation. It is not that a letter always

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finds its way back to its proper place, but that the real, as metonymized by death, is always in its place (Blake: 39). This is the very point that Derrida, a few decades later, would make central to The Gift of Death: death, says Derrida too, is always anchored in its place, in the sense that death is always irreducibly one’s own, and that it cannot be given away, shared, or divided. ‘Death is very much that which nobody can undergo or confront in my place’, he says: ‘My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, “given”, one can say, by death’ (Derrida 1995: 41). Derrida is here expressing what we might call the atomystique of death: basically, he is making the Lacanian point (E: 16) that one’s death or its signifier will not allow of partition. These comments of Derrida’s, incidentally, arise as part of his response to Jan Patocˇka’s discussion of ‘The Purloined Letter’ and specifically in response to the suggestion that Heidegger was a champion of things hidden in plain sight (Derrida 1995: 39). And so echoes of Poe and the ‘Purloined Letter’ debate reverberate through even Derrida’s own quite Lacanian comments on the irreducibility of death, just as Lacan’s observations about circuits built out of randomness depend upon a firm handle on différance.

WHAT IS A ‘RELEVANT’ TRANSLATION? Atomystique has been a concept hidden in plain sight. Derrida uses the word just once in ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, just as he begins to assert, crucially, that ‘a letter does not always arrive at its destination’ (Derrida 1975: 107; 1987 489). The word appears in the English translation of ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ published in Yale French Studies in 1975, a translation which was the collective work of Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Ron Moshe, and Marie-Rose Logan. Their translation of the ‘atomystique’ passage is as follows: As soon as he makes Dupin give up his letters—and not only to the Queen (the other Queen), the letter is divided, it is no longer atomic (atomism, Epicurean atomism, is also, as we know, one of Dupin’s topics in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’) and thus loses any assurance of destination. The divisibility of the letter—this is why we insisted on this key or theoretical safety bolt [verrou de sureté theorique] of the Seminar: the atomystique of the letter—is what puts in jeopardy and leads astray, with no guarantee of return[.] — Derrida 1975: 106–7 This Domingo translation was superseded, within a decade, by Alan Bass’s more familiar one, which was used for the English edition of Derrida’s The Post Card (1987) and excerpted for Muller and Richardson’s The Purloined Poe. The Bass translation is, overall, a less tentative translation than the Domingo, and is syntactically more efficient throughout, despite its noticeable (and wild) refusal to render the title, ‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’, into English even at all. With Bass, atomystique lost its chance at becoming a famous Derridean neologism. Bass translates the same passage as follows: As soon as the narrator makes Dupin return his letters, and not only to the Queen (the other Queen), the letter divides itself, is no longer atomistic (atomism, Epicurus’s atomism is also one of Dupin’s propositions in The Murders in the Rue Morgue), and therefore loses any certain destination. The divisibility of the letter—this is why we have insisted on this key or theoretical safety lock of the Seminar—is what chances and sets off course, without guarantee of return[.] — Derrida 1987: 488–89

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As you can see, Bass simply eliminates the statement ‘the atomystique of the letter’, offering no replacement or alternative way of expressing the concept; thus, atomystique disappeared from view as a theoretical concept. This, I will stress, is perfectly reasonable and justifiable as a translator’s decision – Bass is simply producing a more free and idiomatic translation than the Domingo had been. I don’t believe that either translator is in the wrong or making poor decisions. But the term consequently disappeared, and since then has been discussed by others, to my knowledge, only in passing (J. H. Miller: 34). Derrida made at least two attempts to rescue ‘atomystique’ from Bass’s erasure of it, as if to help the stolen concept arrive back at its proper destination, as may have been inevitable anyway. In one essay, Derrida quotes the passage in question from his own The Post Card using the Bass translation, but silently restoring the word ‘atomystique’ (Derrida 2002: 359). It appears there spelled as ‘atomystic’, which may be Elizabeth Rottenberg’s anglicized spelling as translator of that essay. There, Derrida says, quoting himself: ‘we have insisted on this key or theoretical safety lock of the Seminar [of Lacan]: the atomystic of the letter – is what chances and sets off course, without guarantee of return’. The citation attributes the quotation simply to Bass’s translation of The Post Card, offering no acknowledgement of the change, as if ‘atomystic’ had been there all along (Derrida 2002: 402n.21). Either Derrida or Rottenberg, or perhaps both in conspiracy, has donned green spectacles and committed a minor sleight of hand by misdirection. Derrida calls attention to atomystique more pointedly in ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, an essay first published in 1988 and reprinted in the first volume of Psyche: Inventions of the Other, which was co-Ed. Rottenberg. There, Derrida says: Here I must refer you to ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ and to what I called there, but in order to call it into question, the ‘atomystique of the letter’: this atomystique supports Lacan’s entire interpretation of ‘The Purloined Letter’, and of its circular, ineluctable, and predetermined return to the point of departure, despite all the apparently random incidents. The letter, Lacan claims, does not tolerate partition. I tried to demonstrate that this axiom was dogmatic and inseparable from a whole philosophy of psychoanalysis. It is what finally makes possible all analytical interpretation but also what assures it of its hermeneutic power over so-called literary writing. . . . Without going back over a published debate, I will quickly say in which direction my present remarks are inclined: it is not to the indivisibility but the divisibility or internal difference of the so-called ultimate element . . . that we are led by the phenomenon of chance, as well as by that of literary fiction, to say nothing of what I call writing or the trace in general. — Derrida 2007: 353–54 Two things catch my attention in this passage. First: Derrida claims not to be ‘going back over a published debate’ even while he says: ‘I must refer you to “The Purveyor of Truth.” ’ I suppose that the statement is, in a highly specific and technical way, true, at least per the English translations, in the sense that Derrida is referring the reader specifically to the phrase that was not published in The Post Card, namely, the one containing ‘atomystique’. (Though for this to hold, he would need to have referred us to the English ‘La Facteur de la Verité’, rather than ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ per se – that is, to the Bass rather than the Domingo). Derrida reminds the reader of his previous coinage of the word ‘atomystique’ so as to introduce the substance of what he calls his ‘present remarks’,

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so-called to differentiate them from the ideas already expressed in the ‘published debate’. The irony is that these ‘present remarks’ distinctly rehash the main arguments from ‘The Purveyor of Truth’: basically, that language, and more specifically writing, and more specifically literary fiction, suffers from an ‘internal difference’ that is endlessly divisible. (This is a phenomenon that Derrida calls ‘différance,’ spelled with an ‘a’ to signal an imperceptible [by ear] difference within difference itself.) Derrida’s ‘present remarks’ are in this case derived from the ‘published debate’, yet announced as if they were a bold new step in the argument. Second, I note that Lacan’s atomystique is purported to be ‘inseparable from a whole’, namely, psychoanalytic reason in general, which is said to sustain his ‘entire’ analysis of Poe’s story. For Derrida, psychoanalysis as a mode of thought is complete and atomistic: cut psychoanalysis into pieces, and it remains the theory that it is. And Lacan’s remarks in ‘The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’ are wrongly supposed to be the extent of his ‘entire’ remarks, as if he had not returned to discuss the story in several other places as well, such as Seminar XXIV, the ‘Overture’, and ‘Lituraterre’.

CONCLUSION Derrida, it would seem, confronts Lacan’s supposed atomystique with an atomystique of his own. The minor difference between their positions gets displaced into a narcissistic fight, still ongoing, between psychoanalysis and deconstruction, in which each side has become entrenched further and further as ‘psychoanalysis’ or ‘deconstruction’. Not only is Lacan’s atomystique supposedly ‘inseparable’ from the logics of psychoanalysis, but it is said to support his ‘entire interpretation’ of Poe’s story – as if the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ itself could not tolerate partition and were not framed by Lacan’s other commentaries on the story. Derrida here returns to the scene of the crime (the crime being atomystique) to repeat it from a new position, all while being plucked in the rear by the ostrich known as repetition automatism. Are the ongoing debates about “The Purloined Letter” evidence of the story’s inexhaustible divisibility, such that it could always accommodate further and further scrutiny in all directions? Or does the chain of commentaries instead suggest that something in this story is anchoring us in place, ensuring that the discussion can never exactly move on, but is doomed to solve and re-solve the mystery of the purloined letter anew, from ever new perspectives in which the participants find themselves having swapped places? The root issue each time is always the autonomous pull of repetition, constituting what Freud had called the death drive; also the blankness and durability of a master signifier in relation to signifying chains; and the capacity of that signifier to spill into wider and wider contexts. The translations of Derrida and the commentaries that they made possible have each repeated the crime again in their own preferred ways, introducing new layers of atomystique into the critical discussion of Lacan’s atomystique.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain, and Élisabeth Roudinesco. Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue. Trans. Jason E. Smith. Columbia UP. 2014. Bennington, Geoffrey, and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago UP. 1993. Blake, Nancy. ‘From the Letter to the Object Petit a: The Evolution of Lacan’s Literary Metaphors’. In The Literary Lacan: From Literature to Lituraterre and Beyond, Ed. Santanu Biswas, 37–50. Seagull Books. 2012. Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation. 1934. Trans. John Rodker. Imago. 1949.

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Cassin, Barbara. Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis. Trans. Michael Syrotinski. Fordham UP. 2019. Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Purveyor of Truth’. Trans. Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ron, and MarieRose Logan. Yale French Studies, no. 52: 31–113. 1975. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. U of Chicago P. 1981. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Le Facteur de La Vérité’. In The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Trans. Alan Bass, 411–96. U of Chicago P. 1987. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. U of Chicago P. 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford UP. 1998. Derrida, Jacques. ‘As If It Were Possible, “Within Such Limits”’. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001. Trans. Benjamin Elwood and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 343–70. Stanford UP. 2002. Derrida, Jacques. ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, 1: 344–76. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford UP. 2007. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter ’. New Left Review, no. 209: 75–109. 1995. Johnson, Barbara. ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’. In The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, Ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, 213–51. Johns Hopkins UP. 1988. Lacan, Jacques. My Teaching. Trans. David Macey. Verso. 2008. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Lituraterre’. Trans. Dany Nobus. Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2): 327–34. 2013. Lacan, Jacques. ‘The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IX: Identification, 1961–1962’. Trans. Cormac Gallagher. n.d. Lacan, Jacques. ‘The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIV: L’insu Que Sait de l’une-Bévue s’aile à Mourre, 1976–77’. Trans. Cormac Gallagher. n.d. Major, René. ‘Derrida’s Psychoanalysis’. Trans. Jared Russell. The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 3: 1–19. 2016. Miller, J. Hillis. For Derrida. Fordham UP. 2009. Miller, Jacques-Alain. ‘Joyce with Lacan’. In The Literary Lacan: From Literature to Lituraterre and Beyond, Ed. Santanu Biswas, Trans. Russell Grigg, 1–7. Seagull Books. 2012. Miller, Jacques-Alain. ‘A Note Threaded Stitch by Stitch’. In The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, by Jacques Lacan, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Trans. A. R. Price, 176–221. Polity. 2016. Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘Text of “The Purloined Letter,” with Notes’. In The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, Ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, 3–27. Johns Hopkins UP. 1988. Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. Ed. Geoffrey Tillotson. 3rd ed. Methuen. 1971. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge UP. 2014. Soler, Colette. ‘The Paradoxes of the Symptom in Psychoanalysis’. In The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, 86–101. Cambridge UP. 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Routledge Classics. Routledge. 2008.

FURTHER READING Derrida, Jacques. ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’, Trans. Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry 27.1 (2001), 174–200. Hurst, Andrea. Derrida vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. Fordham UP. 2008. Laurent, Éric. ‘The Purloined Letter and the Tao of the Psychoanalyst.’ The Later Lacan: An Introduction, SUNY P. 2007, 25–52. Muller, John P. and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Johns Hopkins UP. 1988. Rottenberg, Elizabeth. For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida. Fordham UP. 2019. Wills, David. ‘Post/Card/Match/Book/Envois/Derrida’. SubStance 43 (1984), 19–38.

CHAPTER FIVE

A Rose of Iron Filings Charles Mauron and the Psychoanalytical Critical Turn CATHERINE LANONE

Since the publication of his Ecrits in 1966, Lacan’s approach to language and the unconscious has redefined psychoanalytic studies and French literary theory. Yet as Allentuch puts it, “[i]n the recent swell of enthusiasm for a new French Freud, an old French Freud risks being lost from view” (Allentuch: 55). The critical turn that made psychoanalytic reading a staple feature of literary studies in France owes much to an earlier critic, polymath and pioneer Charles Mauron (1899– 1966). Though the new vision of the psyche had deeply influenced the Surrealists – who sought to tap into the powers of the subconscious through écriture automatique – before Charles Mauron, French critical discourse had failed to fully engage with psychoanalysis. The one exception was Freud’s disciple, the “bold and unflappable Princess Bonaparte” (Rabaté 2014: 131) as Rabaté puts it, who began an analysis with Freud in 1925, and in 1933 published a 700-page study of Poe from a pathological angle. Like Poe, Marie Bonaparte had lost her mother in infancy; she insisted on her direct connection with Freud, and seemed to have closed, as much as opened, the field. With his attempt to devise a scientific method entwining literature and psychoanalysis, Mauron was to have a more visible impact on literary criticism. The connection between literature, critical studies and psychoanalysis has been taken for granted ever since, and the way in which his work, along with Roland Barthes’ structuralism, became embroiled in the bitter New Criticism controversy is a symptom of the importance of his contribution to formalism and critical theory. This bitter feud was led by conservative Sorbonne scholar and specialist of Jean Racine, Raymond Picard (1917– 1975); Picard’s scathing attack on Roland Barthes’ On Racine, and thereby of Lucien Goldmann and Charles Mauron as representatives of New Criticism, was a watershed moment in French theory. Thus Mauron’s approach deserves a closer look as a significant landmark before Lacan’s return to the signifier, which radically altered reading.

SOUTH OF THE ACADEMIC COMPASS In the centralized France of the 1950s, a thinker who had not gone through prestigious secondary schools and higher education institutions like Ecole Normale Supérieure and/or the Sorbonne, was the odd man out. Conservative critics like Raymond Picard spoke from the vantage point of the Sorbonne; even Roland Barthes, whose studies were interrupted by consumption (he never wrote a PhD and refused to play by institutional rules), had actually attended the Sorbonne and written a 73

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memoir on Greek Tragedy. Charles Mauron, on the other hand, came from a village in the south of France, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He did become an outstanding research student at the University of Marseilles in 1919, but it was in the field of chemistry. He had therefore no formal training in literature when he turned to the French Symbolist poet Mallarmé in the 1930s. Only in 1963, three years before his death – after having obtained a first thesis on Racine and the unconscious in 1954 at the university of Aix-en-Provence and after having published a number of books on literary criticism – did he fully join the ranks, so to speak, with a PhD in literature from the Sorbonne on the comic genre read through the lens of psychocriticism – a term coined by Mauron to designate his version of critical reading, based on psychoanalysis. Mauron was an outsider in more ways than one. Unlike Lacan, Mauron had no medical training either, nor did he belong to the Freudian circle that clustered in the 1930s around Freud’s disciple Marie Bonaparte. Instead, it was a serendipitous meeting in 1919 with Roger Fry, the Bloomsbury art critic, that made him shift to the humanities. Fry was drawn to Provence by his love of Cézanne, and as he cycled around, painted and basked in the Southern light, he came across Mauron’s wife Marie, a local schoolmistress and a future writer in her own right (she was to write fiction and nonfiction on Provence, and like her husband, to fight for the Provençal language). She introduced Fry to Charles – who was then working on his PhD in chemistry – and the two men were instantly drawn to each other through their mutual admiration for the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Fry longed to translate. The unlikely encounter turned into a close friendship which lasted until Fry’s death. Fry and Mauron discussed art, literature and psychoanalysis, staple Bloomsbury fare. In 1924, Fry published an essay based on a talk which he had given to the British Psychological Society, The Artist and Psychoanalysis, in which he explored but also nuanced his perception of Freud’s concept of sublimation: for Fry, finding a significant form or artistic shape must involve conscious construction at least as much as unconscious sublimation. Mauron grew more passionate about psychoanalysis than his mentor; at the same time, his eyesight began to fail, forcing him to give up his career as a scientist. Fry was convinced of Mauron’s potential as a literary critic, and he prompted him to deliver lectures on aesthetics at Pontigny in 1925 and in England. He also introduced him to the novels of his Bloomsbury friends, so that Mauron became a renowned translator of modernist texts, including E.M. Forster’s 1924 A Passage to India and the central part of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes”, or D.H. Lawrence’s 1922 Fantasia of the Unconscious, three texts which engage with the unconscious. In Woolf ’s “Time Passes”, the derelict house mirrors the breakdown of the family structure and the devastation brought by the First World War. The French version, “Le temps passe”, was published in 1926, before the novel was completed. The novel as a whole explores the anguish of mourning – Woolf noted that she had achieved what psychoanalysts do for their patients, laying the spectral presences of her parents to rest, through the portrayal of Mr and Mrs Ramsay. The typescript sent to Mauron did not include the square brackets which briefly evoke the fate of the characters in the final version of “Time Passes”; instead, the sweeping waves of darkness, or the breaths of air like feathery fingers prying into the house, were rhythmically rendered by Mauron, perhaps particularly attuned to the text as his eyesight grew dim. Mauron’s translation of “Le Temps passe” is generally thought to have influenced Woolf ’s final version of “Time Passes”. Forster, like Fry, became an intimate, familiar presence in Provence. He paid for Charles’ trip to Italy so that he might, as Fry advised, glut his eyes on beauty before losing his sight, and they

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remained lifelong friends. Although Mauron focused mostly on French writers, he did write brief tributes to Forster in which he gives analytic insights into his work, tracing homoerotic subtexts in elliptic scenes (such as the fight between the Englishman Philip and the Italian Gino in Where Angels Fear to Tread or the strange eerie moment of the murder on the Piazza Signoria in A Room with a View). He also sees a structural chiasmus as “the mother dies in the last two novels, as opposed to the child in the early ones” (Mauron 1977: 9, translation mine). He explains that in A Passage to India, the timeless, bare and uncanny Marabar Caves (where the little flame of the match is reflected by the ancient rock with the “milky iridescence” of “libido”) correspond for Adela to the Imaginary Other Scene of rape, and for Mrs Moore they blend the anxiety of death and the trauma of birth, hence “Mrs Moore’s sense of being smothered—stench—the gag or pad of a naked baby’s skin— abandonment neurosis—the absolute solitude of the universe”. (Mauron 1977: 9, translation mine) Just as Fry had helped Mauron to become a translator by introducing him to Bloomsbury, Mauron in turn helped Fry to translate and comment on Mallarmé, after the suitcase that contained the translations on which he had been working for years was stolen in Paris. Along with Fry, Mauron thus became one of the pioneers of Mallarmé’s exegesis, construing oblique images, deciphering the convoluted syntax of the “formally polished poems whose importance never seems to have been in doubt, but whose meaning emphatically was.” (Mehlman: 61–62) Mauron knew the poems by heart and he was struck by some recurrent images that surfaced in utterly different contexts. He found this mesmerizing, and began to focus on such glimmering signals, phrases that shimmered below the surface of signification, or in Mallarmé’s words, a miroitement en-dessous. This twinkling web of echoes, for Mauron, could only spring from the unconscious. Translating Mallarmé thus led Mauron back to psychoanalysis – indeed he was to publish, in 1950, after Mallarmé l’obscur, his Introduction à la psychanalyse de Mallarmé. In his 1957 landmark study of Jean Racine, the seventeenth-century French playwright and master of classical tragedy, Mauron uses the same phrase to open his exploration of his eight great tragedies and of the enigmas of his life, whether in terms of religious rupture (with the Jansenists of Port Royal) or of his period of artistic silence (the eleven-year gap between Phèdre and Esther): to understand Racine’s obsessional choice of themes and his dazzling creativity, one must peer at the plays as a whole, to discern the glimmering network of subconscious motifs: “the light shimmering beneath the surface comes as a most precious discovery.” (Mauron 1986: 51; translation mine) Mauron then widened his poetic corpus – reaching out from Nerval to Baudelaire or Valéry – and his theatrical corpus, turning from tragedy to Molière and attempting, this time, a psychocritical study of a genre, the comic. Whereas Racine is enough to explore tragedy, when it comes to Molière, Mauron dwells on Greek and Latin comedy. For him, Molière’s comedies abide by the Freudian pleasure principle, based as they are on an Œdipal variation, not the son desiring the mother, but the mean old father craving for a woman young enough to be his daughter – the girl, of course, with whom his son is in love. The struggle between father and son flirts with potential tragedy but ends in elation, as laughter springs from the delight of overcoming obstacles: “he saw comedy’s fantasies of triumph and its hallucinatory (visualized) satisfaction of desire as defence mechanisms of the ego against the depressive position” (Hutcheon: 129). The way in which Freud drew inspiration from art, from Leonardo Da Vinci or William Shakespeare, and the way in which in turn psychoanalysis can highlight the return of the repressed and webs of symptoms of desire or trauma in texts, have become such staple critical fare today that it is hard to measure how much French literary criticism rejected psychoanalysis in the 1920s and

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1930s (as Mauron puts it, burying its head in the sand to avoid the critical encounter with psychoanalysis) or the impact of the shift in the 1950s and 1960s. It is important, nevertheless, to try to ascertain the importance of Mauron’s landmark teaching. In his autobiography entitled Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Towards a Life, Jeffrey Mehlman recalls how his journey towards Derrida and Lacan actually began in Provence. Mauron, he claims, was the one who helped him to shake off the dull dust of Yale and begin to conceptualize freely: Aix-en-Provence 1966. If I was in a position to register the full import of Laplanche’s reading of Freud (behind which, of course, lay Lacan’s own reevaluations), it was because I had read close to the complete works of Freud at the Yale Medical School while a graduate student in French Literature in the late 1960s at New Haven. But my reason for undertaking the Freud project in those years grew out of the year—1965–1966—I spent as a Fulbright Fellow in Aix-en-Provence. — Mehlman: 61 Mehlman considers that his two other epiphanies, in Paris in 1970 and in Boston in 1983, merely came to repeat that first “readerly revelation” when, during his Fulbright year, he attended the lecture of “Charles Mauron, serving, during that last year of his life, in a state of total blindness, as an adjunct professor at the Faculté des lettres of Aix-en-Provence.” (Mehlman: 61). Mehlman’s chiaroscuro (he emerges from his dim undergraduate years at Harvard “into the sunlight of Mauron’s analyses”), harks back to Plato’s myth of the cave, implying that Mauron’s voice dispels the shadows of illusion or barren teaching, giving Mehlman the critical acumen that was to determine his professional path. Mauron, though blind, casts a crisp new light on academia. Similarly, while living in New York and reading Freud, French critical theorist and writer Serge Doubrovsky (1928–2017) wrote and published in 1977 a fragmentary autobiographical novel called Fils (for which he coined the term autofiction, which was to become a new literary genre in its own right). In Fils, he recalls how, as a young academic, he began to teach Racine, the “national monument”, as a tasteless pensum, “mummified for PhDs” and “parroted” for exam, “watered down” in endless ratiocination at the Sorbonne by the likes of Picard, steeped in religious or classical erudition: “Give me your Mornet. I give you my Picard. [. . .] It’s antique, it’s Greek. No it’s Christian, Jansenist.” (Doubrovsky 1977: 69, translation mine) Then suddenly, in comes Mauron, and reading becomes exciting again, a stimulating challenge laying bare the dynamics of subconscious desire. Phèdre bursts into life, horses drag the body of Hippolyte, the stuff of night/mare, or mère and belle-mère, the incestuous stepmother wild with desire, warping the Œdipus complex: “And thus it begins, seriously. Before Mauron, nothing.” (Doubrovsky 1977: 69) Putting only Mauron and Barthes in his satchel, Doubrovsky marvels that the seemingly composed lines of Racine should suddenly be unleashed before the students, as if a scream tore through such fine prosody, letting out whatever was repressed. With an acute critical eye Racine must now be interrogated, cut up, penetrated, as if heard at last: “Cutting through becomes the new critical operation. Laying bare the guts. Mauron has shown the way: ‘The nightmare. Must be deciphered. Like a dream” ’ (Doubrovsky 1977: 70, translation mine). Thus we see two Maurons: the giver of light, the forerunner of structuralism who extracts enticing patterns, and the iconoclastic reader of subconscious forces and desires, the reader of nightmares. This was Mauron’s moment, quickly outlived perhaps but still a definitive input, a magnetic method.

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THE MAGNETIC METHOD Rising from the margins in the 1940s, Mauron was looking for what Michel Serres calls the Northwest Passage between science and literature. Mauron considered that the work of a writer is an organic whole that must be scrutinized through the lens of psychoanalysis, as if conducting a scientific experiment. The critic should not get lost in a palimpsest of sources – since what matters is not erudite exegesis but finding what triggers the choice of a specific source or topic, a choice dictated by the unconscious rather than by deceptive conscious logic. Whereas conventional French studies approached literature through an immutable sequence, dwelling on a writer’s life before proceeding to a thematic or rhetorical analysis (the chronological, formulaic l’homme et l’œuvre), Mauron wished to consider the works of an author all at once, believing that by superimposing texts a new tracing or a map could be glimpsed. For Linda Hutcheon, such a process of superimposition is definitely Freudian: “In a way, Freud’s direct method in ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, then, is the true direct forebear of Mauron’s psychocritique” (Hutcheon: 113). Similarly, Anne Clancier claims that “when Mauron freudianizes Racine, he merely ties psychoanalysis back to its own sources.” (Clancier 1973: 213, translation mine) Transposing Freud’s own images, Mauron uses comparisons to define his method, as if it could only be conceptualized through images that suggest a tension between surface and depth, the seen and the unseen, turning analysis into a literal dis-covery, a hermeneutic process of unveiling. Thus, critical analysis resembles X-rays, stripping the flesh to uncover the psychic structure or skeleton of a writer’s works. It is also akin to Galton’s composite portraits, blending photographs to create a photo-type: the superimposition of plays or poems leads to a composite tracing of subconscious forces. Through the superimposition of all the works of a writer, Mauron believes that recurrent metaphors are bound to emerge, and that through them the critic may discern patterns that lay beyond the grasp of the author’s consciousness, that prove to be obsessive rather than born from design. As befits a chemist, Mauron also uses as a metaphor the visual imprint of magnetic forces, materialized by pouring a powder of tiny iron filings over a sheet of paper coated with a thin layer of wax, while placing magnets underneath. For Mauron, the experiment is both familiar (Michael Faraday’s 1851 discovery has long been a standard experiment for teachers and pupils or students) and a source of wonder: drawn to, and repelled by, the magnets, the filings create striking visual shapes, spikes of clustered iron and regular circles, a pattern which for Mauron recalls a medieval rose window (Mauron 1986: 18). For him, unravelling the relations between the characters, thereby disclosing unconscious magnetic lines of force, leads from the complex flow of words to a programmatic diagram, a process which is as intellectually and aesthetically pleasing as the filings shaping themselves spontaneously into eerie patterns. Mauron thus sought to work by blending close textual reading with a superimposition of all of a writer’s works, only considering biography as a kind of checkpoint, not to dwell on a writer’s neuroses, but to find a significant pattern of loss and trauma that fits in with the obsessional, haunting pattern found in the works, creating what he termed “mythe personnel”, an author’s individual myth. In that sense, psychoanalytic reading ties in with the psychoanalytic cure. The critic is not a physician and the writer is not a patient, so there is no medical diagnosis and no treatment. Instead, reading should entail listening, a free-floating attention; placing the texts side by side creates a melody, the notes of a symphony, together with contrapuntal tensions. In Racine’s tragedies, for instance, Antiquity or the Orient function less as a background than as melodic lines, with major and minor themes, rhythmical lights and shadows: “the method consists therefore in

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plunging below the text, till one loses sight of it. At that moment, one should stop and drift, floating, so to speak, in-between streams or currents” (Mauron 1986: 20, translation mine). Mauron’s method appears syncretic, drawing upon Freud but also Melanie Klein or Otto Rank, and retaining the tang of Bloomsbury, as shown by the belief in musicality, rhythm and pattern, which deeply links his work with Roger Fry’s or E.M. Forster’s 1927 essay Aspects of the Novel. His method also evolved through trial and error, engaging with the moment. This “moment”, of course, may refer to chronological tensions within the works under scrutiny: although superimposition creates a thematic logic that transcends time, Mauron still takes into account the evolution that distinguishes, for instance, Phèdre from Racine’s last plays, Esther and Athalie (commissioned by the King’s pious morganatic wife, Mme de Maintenon, and performed by schoolgirls before a very different audience). Mauron devotes a long analysis to Esther and Athalie, which clearly fascinated him, though they tend to be ignored and are rarely performed today. But this “moment” also corresponds to Mauron’s own evolution. Never one of the “psychoanalytic symbolmongers”, as Hutcheon puts it, “translating every flowerpot into a vagina and every fence post into a phallus” (Hutcheon: 122), Mauron struggled in the late 1940s with Freud’s model of the psyche and sought to invest it with spirituality, drawing upon Eastern philosophy or toying with the vision of the poet’s Orphic self. He drew in L’Homme Triple his own “triple psychic structure, in which the social self, reflected and coordinated the spiritual and animal selves” (Hutcheon: 84) thus positing a lower unconscious (instinctive and animal) and a higher, spiritual, more Platonic unconscious, a reservoir of creativity. War was associated with the “Creon complex” of a stiff social superego fed by unconscious aggression, ready to shatter Antigone, freedom, and the life of the spirit. Linda Hutcheon traces this “Creon complex” back to Maurice Barrès, but such a right-wing connection seems doubtful. I would suggest that the Antigone motif had gained much wider currency during the war, as in Jean Anouilh’s modernized rewriting of Sophocles’ Antigone, which was performed in 1944, managed to avoid censorship and was a covert denunciation of collaboration and a vibrant call for resistance. Mauron too sought ways of engaging with the aftermath of the Second World War and its unthinkable destructiveness, positing the higher, creative, superior unconscious, which man must tap into to avoid the destruction of his own species through folly and war. As Hutcheon points out, as a scientist/writer or thinker whose work called for long retreats, Mauron never cut himself off from social responsibility and the need to engage with the community despite his blindness: “The man who read the mystics carried his “carte du combattant” in the Resistance; the believer in the supreme value of aesthetic contemplation was also the mayor of St. Rémy for fourteen years” (Hutcheon: 81). In the 1950s, Mauron regularly met, through his second wife Alice, analysts in Paris, Lausanne and Geneva and became more widely read in psychoanalysis, while conducting an autoanalysis. (Hutcheon: 123) He distanced himself from thematic critics focusing on imagery in single texts, like Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard. For Mauron, clusters of images weave themselves over the years and perceiving unconscious processes implies taking duration into account. The critic must perceive these constellations across time to grasp what the writer’s psyche is haunted by unawares: Mallarmé “cannot know that glass and mirrors represent for him, deep down, burial stones”; “Baudelaire is not aware that the Bad Glazier still represents the Albatross or the monster of his dreams.” (Mauron 1995: 211) As Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it, “This network of images gave access to a structure generated by archaic dramas; finally, such metaphors condense the ‘personal myth’ by which an author formalizes family conflicts and unconscious wishes.” (Rabaté 2014: 130)

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For instance, he superimposes Mallarmé’s poems, such as “Tryptique”, “Igitur”, “Sonnet in –YX” or “Coup de dés”, so that echoing images of death and a downward, Orphic journey emerge. In “Sonnet in –YX” there is a descent to the Styx, in a web of eponymous eerie rhymes in YX, from the anguished nails of onyx to phoenix or “nixe” (the “ghostly female naked nixe in the mirror” (Mauron 1968: 136), or the nymph with a German name), and the mysterious “ptyx”, a floating signifier of pure sound, as opposed to the “shimmering musical constellation” of gold reflections in the window (Ibid.) As Dennis Duncan points out, “Ptyx” tends to be read either as a Derridean undecidable blank, a touch of nonsense, or as an actual Greek word and therefore as an instance of non-translation, as in Mauron’s 1941 Mallarmé l’obscur: “Meanwhile, Charles Mauron reads ptyx more inwardly as fold, which he takes as a reference to the poem’s rhyme scheme. This gives rise to a satisfying productive reading as the sonnet—originally entitled ‘Sonnet allégorique de lui-même’ does indeed fold in on itself in a number of curious ways.” (Duncan: 40) Looking both in and out of the room, the window and the mirror, with its mysterious, echoing rhyme scheme, the poem, as it were, teases us out of thought. If in Mallarmé l’obscur, the ptyx is a fold, in La Psychanalyse de Mallarmé, the enigmatic term “ptyx” is construed as an empty urn, a boat or a conch, a female signifier (Mauron 1968: 135). The web of images, in the sonnet and in the poems, the play on signifiers and the Orphic journey across the Styx, both disclose and conceal a sense of traumatic loss, which Mauron connects with the death of Mallarmé’s sister when she was thirteen and he was fifteen, a fact to which little attention had been paid so far: “Mallarmé’s ‘personal myth’ will thus be associated with a dead feminine presence haunting his verses” (Rabaté: 131). If Psychocritique du genre comique underlines the crisis of parental authority in Molière’s plays and the study of Mallarmé the persistent grief caused by his sister’s death, Mauron’s most influential book remains perhaps his study of Racine, the critical test-case of the 1950s, the classical icon through which New Criticism sought to dethrone the old school of thought. Mauron’s conceptual superimpositions forged new connections: for instance, in Andromaque, Hermione loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromaque, who mourns Hector in the aftermath of the Trojan war, a pattern which seems to have little in common with the plot of Britannicus, depicting Nero’s sudden and sadistic desire for Junia, the fiancée of Britannicus, and his rejection of his mother Agrippina, who made him an Emperor instead of Britannicus. But Mauron sees a structure, as Nero, like Pyrrhus, seeks to seduce a woman who does not love him and flees a woman (Agrippina/Hermione) who rises from the past to claim her rights over him. Mauron unravels a recurrent structure which he sums up with a diagram. In the first plays, Andromaque, Britannicus, Bérénice, Bajazet, vengeful females (lover/mother) springing from the past, loom over the plot. In the second half (Mithridate, Iphigénie, Phèdre, Athalie), a threatening or castrating father-figure takes over and embodies the threat, all the more so as he returns from the dead in Mithridate (Mithridate is thought to have been killed, but he returns to find his fiancée in love with his son Xipharès). In Iphigénie, Agamemnon’s ruthless decision to sacrifice his daughter is only avoided by a sleight of hands invented by Racine, the substitution of a second Iphigenia (racked by jealousy) for the eponymous character. Mehlman points out that Mauron manages “to choreograph the relations among the characters of eight separate tragedies” (Mehlman: 65) in a stunning way, building a chiasmus hinged on Mithridate, a process which deeply inspired his own work, just as Barthes acknowledges Mauron’s influence upon his own Sur Racine. For Anne Clancier, Mauron’s compelling diagram deeply changed or revolutionized the perception of Racine’s work (Clancier 1973: 206): instead of a haphazard evolution from play to play, obsessional structures repeating themselves were now apparent; each

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new motif may have seemed consciously motivated, but a subconscious logic had now come to light.

THE CRITICAL CLASH Although very much aware that he was trying to break new ground, Charles Mauron must have been utterly baffled by the vicious response that came from Racine scholars in 1965. The Sorbonne suddenly struck back, under the guise of Raymond Picard’s essay, La Nouvelle critique ou la nouvelle imposture. New Criticism was challenged as sham, a trite attempt to usurp authority with highfaluting nonsense. Picard returned to erudition and “l’homme et l’œuvre” with a vengeance, targeting Roland Barthes explicitly, but also those perceived as his satellites, among whom Mauron featured in pride of place. This “true literary querelle in the grand tradition” (Mitchell: 199) reached an unexpected level of agon, spilling into newspapers like the dignified Le Monde. Picard blamed Barthes for his dogmatic impressionism, his “lignes effarantes” (Picard: 73) – “bewildering lines” – and “Extravagante doctrine!” (73) – “delirious doctrine”. Picard equally blamed Mauron for using psychoanalysis, since “Racine died more than two centuries and a half ago” (90), leaving few documents and no love letters; he should therefore be spared a psychoanalytical “autopsy” (93): “What should be done, with the lack of a patient calling for interpretation, with the utter lack of material evidence? Keep silent. Yet literary psychoanalysis will not dream of it [. . .]” (Picard: 91–2, translation mine ) The controversy between Old and New schools of criticism smacks of zeitgeist, prefiguring the social and ideological earthquake of 1968. Roland Barthes responded to the dispute with passionate eloquence, and confirmed his status as the rising star of criticism. Charles Mauron, who died in 1966, did not; and his reputation never quite recovered. Nor did the savage attacks stop. In 1994, a study of Molière’s Tartuffe, published by Picard’s disciple René Pommier (born 1933), throws the gauntlet again, berating what he calls absurd hogwash, and denying desire in Tartuffe: for him, the play is just what it seems to be, an attack on gullibility.

MAURON’S LEGACY Such a debate advocating reactionary reading on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other might be considered as a badge of honour. Indeed, Pommier’s critique has a silver lining: in his 1994 book on Tartuffe, he lumps together Mauron and various contemporary performances, such as the one directed by Roger Planchon in 1962, where Orgon is not simply hoodwinked by Tartuffe’s fake devotion to God, but moved by his strong attractive presence, an interpretation which plays on homoerotic seduction and was deemed scandalous at the time; not budging, Planchon staged Tartuffe again in 1967 in Avignon. Pommier also alludes to the performance directed by Antoine Vitez in Avignon in 1978 (with a nod to Pasolini’s Théorème), by Jean-Paul Roussillon in 1980 (with a handsome Tartuffe performed by Jean-Luc Boutte, chosen for his youth and beauty opposite the stout veteran Jean Le Poulain as Orgon) and by Jacques Lassalle in 1984, with no less than Gérard Depardieu, at the height of his talent, as Tartuffe – a version which Pommier dismisses as utterly stupid. Even those who disagreed with Planchon’s reading and the trend that it started wished that Pommier had opted for a more measured tone, refraining from calling Mauron and such prestigious stage directors crooks and asinine idiots. Pommier holds Charles Mauron responsible for the idea that Tartuffe might be portrayed as younger and more seductive, and for the erotic homosexual

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subtext brought to light by Planchon and accepted by his followers. For all his charge, Pommier pays here the greatest tribute to Mauron, by considering that his psychoanalytic reading unleashed the field force of desire in Racine and Molière. Of course, Mauron simply noticed that Tartuffe reverses the comedic structure of previous plays by Molière like l’Ecole des femmes, where the young lover slips into the house of the lecherous old man and steals the girl. Now Tartuffe is the one who wheedles his way into Orgon’s house and attempts to seduce his wife Elmire. As is wellknown, Tartuffe’s lust, hypocrisy and greed point to the politics of satire. Mauron’s insight consisted in coupling Tartuffe and Don Juan, claiming that the latter is “so very close to Tartuffe”, as the “perverse son who is also a seducer” (Mauron 1964: 16). This was incomprehensible for critics like Picard and Pommier, who saw Tartuffe as stout, ugly and repulsive. It took Planchon to go one step further and to realize that if Tartuffe seduces someone, it can hardly be the wife/mother figure Elmire, who loathes him. It can only be, therefore, Orgon himself, and Planchon considers that both the scene in which Orgon will not come out from under the table to defend his wife, and the famous speech in which he repeatedly enquires about Tartuffe (paying no attention to the tale of his wife’s illness and merely responding with a tender “Poor fellow!” whenever the servant Dorine portrays Tartuffe as round, red and thriving), as one of the great homosexual covert speeches of all time. This interpretation paved the way for a new theatrical era. When Planchon, in the 1980s and as the Iran crisis began, chose to stage joint performances of Molière’s Don Juan and Racine’s Athalie, he probed into the impact of Christianity on private life, reading Joad’s character as a forerunner of Ayatollah Khomeini, of religious extremism and political power; this somehow transposes, in political terms, Mauron’s reading of Joad as aggressive superego, and expands his method of superimposition. Mauron’s work also inspired critical studies, like Dominique Fernandez’s 1972 L’Arbre jusqu’aux racines (Grasset), which pays lip service to Lacan but follows in Mauron’s footsteps by offering a psychobiographical reading of Michelangelo, Mozart and Proust. In Lacan in America, Rabaté notes that Mauron influenced Robert Greer Cohn’s 1949 Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés: an Exegesis, which in turned influenced Derrida. Besides, as we have seen, Jeffrey Mehlman posits Mauron as a key landmark on the path towards Lacan. Mauron’s closest follower was probably Anne Clancier (1913–2014), a psychiatrist with clinical experience and a psychoanalyst and a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, whose work, like her 2006 study of Apollinaire, for instance, draws upon Mauron’s method; using psychobiography to cast light on a writer’s unconscious fantasies and personal myth, she coined the concept of contre-texte, based on countertransference, to explore the way in which readers engage with what they may sense of these unconscious elements the writer weaves into his text. Clancier upheld Mauron’s work, pointing out that he only intended his method to come as a complement to close reading, that he did not mean it to replace a rhetorical or historical study, merely to enrich them. But Mauron’s work has also been regularly challenged, in more subtle ways than by the likes of Picard and Pommier. In the 1970s, Jean Bellemin-Noël posited the notion of textual unconscious, to tone down the use of a writer’s biography. Jean-Michel Rabaté points out contradictions in what he calls Mauron’s X factor (modelled upon Mallarmé’s “sonnet in YX”), which he uses to suggest that something must be added to the unconscious to give birth to beauty and creativity, a remainder of Fry and Forster’s influence which sits uneasily with Freudian psychoanalysis: “To state that any equation in a science that includes the Unconscious will end up stating ‘equals X’ was no doubt the price to pay for the too genteel foundation of ‘psycho-criticism’ ” (Rabaté 2014: 133). The only

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book-length study of Mauron’s psychobiography is Linda Hutcheon’s Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: the Example of Charles Mauron, published by Cambridge University in 1984, re-issued in 2006. Hutcheon’s book is thorough and enlightening but double-edged, reading very much like a kind of working through, annoyed as she is by Mauron’s encroaching subjectivity, yet drawn to his work. Hutcheon’s study functions as the threshold of her own work, dismissing in the end not so much Mauron but all attempts to reach out for subconscious depth in her own critical approach. Her brilliant subsequent readings return to postmodern metafiction, and the use of humour and parody to both legitimize and subvert a text, just as her concept of historiographic metafiction stresses the way in which self-reflexive fictional constructs may reflect upon history. Robert Georgin, in La Structure et le style (1975), is perhaps the critic who best sought to reconcile Mauron, (who for him was, thanks to his connection with Bloomsbury, “thirty years ahead of his time” in greeting Freudian analysis as a critical tool that could be applied to literature) and Lacan, reintroducing echoing signifiers and the mirror stage, and seeking to translate Mauron’s concepts in Lacanian terms. He lays stress on the Lacanian grammar (with the unconscious proceeding through metaphor and metonymy) and claims that, mutatis mutandis, a similar “grammar rules Mauron’s praxis” (Georgin: 24). I would rather suggest, perhaps, that Lacan’s own reading of Racine’s Athalie may owe something to Mauron’s analysis of Athalie, a play which had long been dismissed as a minor play, but which in the 1950s clearly resonated. Mauron’s analysis is vibrant, drawing attention to the complexity of Athalie, who is no simple monster, to the compelling force of her famous dream, and to the part played by Joad, the priest who uses a child to acquire supreme power and restore the rule of religion – the priest whom Mauron construes as a ruthless superego. This is the example chosen by Lacan to define through Joad the quilting point (point de capiton) which temporarily halts the slippage between signified and signifier. As Michel Tort puts it, through the mediation of the fear of God “the Freudian father is going to find himself elevated to the function of a quilting point” (Tort: 165). Both Lacan and Tort’s vision of Joad as a “Freudian father” owes something to Mauron’s stubborn repositioning of Joad as superego, revisited unawares and repurposed by Lacan, in order to coin a new, crucial concept. Be that as it may, there is no denying that, as Hutcheon puts it, Mauron’s perspective as a whole was alien to linguistic methods and Lacanian analysis (Hutcheon: 181) His concepts, such as métaphores obsédantes or mythe personnel have slipped into the critical language, just like certain structures of the comic which he unravelled. But the method as a whole, the psychocriticism which he coined and passionately developed, has not fared so well, by-passed by Lacanian and Derridean readings. Yet he was part of a critical turn, and his method marked a moment which opened the gates to Freudian readings in a country which had hitherto remained deeply reticent to psychoanalysis. As we have seen, he did reaffirm the way in which literature, psychoanalysis and experience can and must overlap, creating a cross-disciplinary approach that established the correspondence and close connection between literature, critical reading and psychoanalysis. The free-floating method, superimposing texts, listening to the music of works to spot subconscious patterns, owes much to Mauron’s own feat, holding texts together within his prodigious memory, dictating his own texts or listening to his wife’s (Marie, then Alice) reading to him the English novels that he translated. His own metaphors tell a secret tale of brave determination, as through groping (“tâtonnements successifs” (Mauron 1986: 31), the critic must gradually catch sight of (“apercevoir”) that which is both concealed and blatant. Psychoanalysis makes us see that which is obvious (“it blasts our eyes” says Mauron), but only once it has been disclosed by critical reading. The French saying (“nous

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crever les yeux” (25) refers to something that is so obvious that it becomes blinding. The critic overcomes blindness and gropes his way towards the light that he can share with others. Mauron’s personal myth, perhaps, turns the critic into a seer. The reactionary backlash reveals, a contrario, just like the tributes of Clancier or Mehlman, the importance of his critical moment, despite, as Georgin stresses, his relative isolation from Parisian institutions. Mauron showed the way ahead, even if the Lacanian impulse was to open new directions. As Hutcheon puts it, “This version of Freud was obviously very much to French literary taste in the years following the introduction of the nouvelle critique. Had Mauron lived to see this abrupt switch from resistance to infatuation, he might have felt less isolated and solitary” (Hutcheon 181), though perhaps bemused by the shift away from all biography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allentuch, Harriet Ray. “Mauron, Corneille, and the Unconscious”. French Forum. vol 4 n°1. Spring 1979. 55–68. Anouilh, Jean. Antigone. Table Ronde. 1946. Barthes, Roland. Sur Racine. Seuil. 1963. Bellemin-Noël, Jean. La Psychanalyse du texte. Nathan. 1996. Bonaparte, Marie. Edgar Poe, sa vie, son œuvre: étude psychanalytique. Denoël et Steele. 1933. Bonzon, A. La Nouvelle critique et Racine. Nizet. 1970. Caws, Mary Ann, Wright, Sarah Bird. Bloomsbury and France. Oxford UP. 1999. Clancier, Anne. Guillaume Apollinaire : les incertitudes de l’identité. L’Harmattan. 2006. Clancier, Anne. Psychanalyse et critique littéraire. Privat. 1973. Cohn, Robert Greer. Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés: an Exegesis. Yale French Studies. 1949. Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Galilée. 1977. Doubrovsky, Serge. Pourquoi la nouvelle critique? Mercure de France. 1966. Duncan, Dennis. “The Protean Ptyx: Nonsense, Non-Translation and Word Magic in Mallarmé’s Sonnet in yx”. Eds Jason Harding, John Nash. Modernism and Non-Translation. Oxford UP. 2019. 34–47. Fernandez, Dominique. L’Arbre jusqu’aux racines: Psychanalyse et création. Grasset. 1972. Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. Penguin. 2005. Forster, E.M. A Room with a View. Penguin. 2000. Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. Penguin. 2005. Forster, E.M. Howards End. Penguin. 2000. Forster, E.M. The Longest Journey. Penguin. 2006. Forster, E.M. Where Angels Fear to Tread. Penguin. 2007. Fry, Roger. The Artist and Psychoanalysis. Hogarth Press. 1924. Georgin, Robert. La Structure et le style. L’Age d’homme. 1975. Hutcheon, Linda. Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetics: the Example of Charles Mauron. Cambridge UP. 1984. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XIII: Les Psychoses. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Seuil. 1981. Lawrence, D.H. Fantasia of the Unconscious. Thomas Seltzer. 1922. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Œuvres complètes. Gallimard. 1945. Mauron, Charles. Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel: Introduction à la Psychocritique. José Corti. 1995. Mauron, Charles. Introduction à la psychanalyse de Mallarmé. Ed. de la Baconnière. 1968. Mauron, Charles. Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Mallarmé. Cambridge UP. 1963. Mauron, Charles L’Homme triple. Robert Laffont. 1947. Mauron, Charles. “La tendance orphique”. Cahiers d’Etudes et de Recherches Victoriennes et Edouardiennes. N° 4–5. 1977. 19–20. Mauron, Charles. L’Inconscient dans l’œuvre et la vie de Racine. 1957. Champion-Slatkine. 1986.

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Mauron, Charles. Mallarmé l’obscur. Denoël. 1941. Mauron, Charles Mallarmé par lui-même. Paris: Seuil. 1966. Mauron, Charles. “Note pour EMF”. Cahiers d’Etudes et de Recherches Victoriennes et Edouardiennes. N° 4–5. 1977. 8–10. Mauron, Charles. Psychocritique du genre comique. José Corti. 1964. Mehlman, Jeffrey. Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Towards a Life. Stanford UP. 2010. Mitchell, Bonner. “The French Quarrel Over Structuralism and a Parallel of Sixty Years Ago”. Books Abroad. vol. 49, no. 2. Spring 1975. 199–204. Molière. Œuvres Complètes. Gallimard. 2010. Picard, René. Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture. Jean-Jacques Pauvert. 1965. Pommier, René. Etudes sur le Tartuffe. S.E.D.E.S. 1994. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). Lacan in America. Other Press. 2000. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge UP. 2014. Racine, Jean. Œuvres Complètes. Vol.1. Gallimard. 1999. Serres, Michel. Le Passage du Nord-Ouest : Hermès V. Minuit. 1980. Tort, Michel. “Lacan’s New Gospel”. in Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). Lacan in America. Other Press. 2000. 153–187. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press. 1927. Woolf, Virginia. Le Temps passe. Trans. Charles Mauron. Bruit du Temps. 2010.

CHAPTER SIX

A Schizoanalytic Walk with Desire Reading the Body Without Organs in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man CELIESE LYPKA

If the title itself doesn’t immediately alert readers, one does not have to read very far into Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari’s (1930–92) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972/83) to discover the authors’ skepticism toward the prominent theoretical applications and process of psychoanalysis. Critiquing the formation of desire in Freud’s famous Oedipus complex, Deleuze and Guattari contest the structuring of identity formation as a result of desire’s signification and subsequent unconscious repression that occurs naturally in childhood development and continues to drive desire into adulthood (see SE 4 and 5). In their pursuit “to de-oedipalize the unconscious” (1983: 81), by rejecting the Freudian structures of the “daddy-mommy-me” holy family, Deleuze and Guattari offer a way of rethinking desire that upends what they observe as the restrictions and regulations of desiring-production in the individual under modern capitalist societies. Instead of taming desire within the limits of the unconscious or systems of language via mechanisms of psychic and social repression, the duo considers the possibilities of creative innovation outside the borders of ideological, social coding. Deleuze and Guattari call this practice for encountering desire schizoanalysis, which “sets out to undo the expressive Oedipal unconscious, always artificial, repressive and repressed, mediated by the family, in order to attain the immediate productive unconscious” (88). Inspired by the schizophrenic process—not to be confused with the schizophrenic patient who exhibits “pathological illness”—that “deliberately scrambles all the codes” (15), schizoanalysis challenges the world of the clinical subject by investigating creative connections and flows of desire. This schizo mode of analysis turns from psychoanalysis, away from deviant diagnoses of the clinical neurotic and the characterization of the unconscious as “capable of nothing but expressing itself,” to release desire as a generative unconscious mode that gives space to the production of difference unregulated by capital codes and their operations (24). Though there is a critical tension in schizoanalysis against psychoanalysis, it’s important to heed Piotrek S´wia˛tkowski’s reminder that “[d]rawing a general conclusion about the whole work of [. . .] Deleuze and Guattari about desire and their relationship with psychoanalysis is [. . .] a difficult, if not an impossible, task. The diversity of the texts, or their degree of complexity, is too extensive to provide a reader with both a clear and nuanced analysis” (13). Indeed, within their schizoanalysis project, which spans several collaborations, Deleuze and Guattari are in constant conversation with 85

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the psychoanalytic process, pushing its limits and addressing their concerns in ways that shift throughout their oeuvre. However, their primary concern generally remains with contesting psychoanalysis’ framing of desire as “a relation of being to lack” (S2: 223), which they attempt to release from under the rigid codes of the Oedipal hermeneutics. Rather than regulating desire to repressed wants—an object, relation, or knowledge that is “lacking” for the individual— schizoanalysis situates desire as an innovative social force (a “productive-machine”) that brings about multiple connections (“assemblages”) and experiences between “bodies,” which for Deleuze and Guattari are any collective of parts that can affect and be affected. They state, If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. [. . .] Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. — 1983: 26 In arguing that the subjectivity privileged by psychoanalytic thought is actually a tool to suppress and control human desire, and thus further support capitalist systems, being anti-Oedipus offers a life of rebellion and destruction that deterritorializes—that is, “a schizoanalytic flick of the finger” that engenders a “coming undone” via creative movements (331–2)—the totalitarian imperatives of societal structures. Several working apparatuses within schizoanalysis combat the Oedipal structure of desire, but the “body without organs” (BwO) is perhaps their most critical concept in opening up spaces that allow for the deterritorialization of the organized subject in the thralls of self-identification. The BwO is, although seeming unreasonably but still entirely sensibly, not of actual bodies or organs— though it might, in fact, be a body that has organs, but not necessarily. The term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), a French artist diagnosed as schizophrenic who was institutionalized and received various medical and psychological treatments throughout his lifetime. In his unaired radio play “To Have Done with the Judgement of God” (1947), Artaud articulated a desire for a body that lived free from the incessant demands of a regulated body: “When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom” (307, emphasis mine). In this section of the play, Artaud articulates those “automatic reactions” as the necessary actions which come about from a body that is labeled, organized, and reduced to the processes of its own “useless” organs (307). Playing off the bodily processes of Artaud’s writing, Deleuze and Guattari describe their philosophical concept of the BwO as an indirect response that interrupts capital and social operations by forming unruly connections when certain desires/production become unbearable: “No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus.” The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For

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desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. — 1983: 6 Connected to Freud’s “death instinct,” the BwO reveals itself to be a point of reference (in whatever materiality it may appear—noting that matter, for Deleuze and Guattari, encompasses not just physical matter but also thoughts and expressions) that dissolves all pre-programmed drives and impulses, disorganizing them into deterritorialized spaces. As such, it is in constant relation with the desiring-machines of production through its own mode of anti-production that seeks “a blessed moment of relief from desire’s incessant demands” (Buchanan 2015: 28). As an unorganized force, the BwO is a smooth surface that cuts against the rigidity of desire’s production “for the sole purpose of rejecting any attempt to impose on it any sort of [Oedipal] triangulation implying that it was produced by parents” (Deleuze and Guattari: 1983: 15). While this collection poses that “psychoanalysis and literature share an impulse towards dissemination and away from ‘closure’; towards dissolving single authoritarian structures,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, psychoanalytic readings are uncreative in their repetitive interpretations that emerge from “the depths of the Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective” (12). In their collaborative work and Deleuze’s solo writings, schizoanalysis, as does psychoanalysis, considers literary productions as spaces for analytical inquiry to confront, diagnose, and develop cultural symptoms and terms. In both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (1980/87), the second volume on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they affirm that reading is not meant to be an act of discovering signification so much as an investigation of difference and literature’s ability to produce connections and assemblages, asking “with what bodies without organs [literature] makes its own converge” (1987: 4). They further remind us that, unlike the literary analysis undertaken in psychoanalysis, “[r]eading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force” (1983: 106). And the BwO, with its refusal of the triangulation of psychoanalytic interpretation and its schizophrenic desire to obliterate codes of internal psychic coding, offers the experience of an unproductive, unregulated, undemanding mode of being/desire. For as much as Deleuze and Guattari employ literary analysis to work through and render their philosophical concepts—turning to the work of Kafka to help explain “minor literature” as a subversion of language by a minority group (1986), Melville for “becoming” as a movement of change and difference (1987), Woolf for “haecceities” as a mode of individuation composed of affect, movement, and rest (1987), as well as many others—they do not provide a sustained reading of the BwO in a literary text. Outside of the set-up from Artaud, there are few further passing literary reflections of the BwO: in Anti-Oedipus they analyse a short passage from Proust’s Search of Lost Time, and in A Thousand Plateaus they read Castaneda’s Tone of Power. The complicated nature of the BwO and its relation to desire and modes of being in the world lends itself to a more detailed close reading of how we might see this concept functioning within a literary text. Thus, I want to turn to Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), which presents an ideal case to consider the BwO as it cuts across notions of psychoanalytic desire. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel presents a prophetic apocalyptic narrative about the end of humanity. While several critics position the novel as an interpretation of the bleak future that lies ahead for humanity if social structures

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and modes of connection do not change, schizoanalysis allows us to read through Shelley’s depictions of desire and the imagination a potentially liberating vision of being for the next stage of the Enlightenment. The Last Man relates the story of Lionel Verney’s life, beginning with his childhood to adulthood that coincides with the fall of the English monarchy and rise of the republic. During the political changes across England, the world is ravaged by a plague that seemingly leaves Verney as the titular last man on earth. Although less popular than her seminal Frankenstein, Shelley’s The Last Man has gained increasing notice, especially by scholars interested in psychoanalysis.1 The novel’s ability to be read through uncanny and Oedipal structures—suggestively, the protagonist refers to himself as Oedipus twice—is particularly useful in this study, as these elements combined with the novel’s underpinning desire to encounter or reimagine the world differently than its present state opens a productive space for a schizoanalytic reading. The Last Man furthers Shelley’s project of working through the structures and possibilities of desire, something that is also central in Frankenstein but which remains contained within unconscious and repressed systems. Through the composition of an apocalyptic plague that destroys capital and social codes, The Last Man interrogates the state of human consciousness and sociopolitical structures while posing an alternative creative mode of being that questions normative conceptions of desire. This chapter reads the plague in Shelley’s novel as a BwO that unfolds an affective drive of “immanence,” an atemporal chaotic space of extension and thought that holds pure perception and affect, unbinding desire as an always already continuous process of “becoming.”

SCHIZOANALYSIS OF DESIRE IN THE LAST MAN The Last Man is constructed in three volumes, and scholars have pointed out the dissonance between the first half of the novel depicting political engagements and romantic unions of the main characters and the second half that introduces an apocalyptic plague that destroys humanity. Most critical analyses attempt to decipher this fracture of the text under selective interpretative readings— for example, as a biographical elegy, roman à clef, apocalyptic prophesy, rejection of Romantic ideals, or under political and religious criticisms—which confine the creative possibilities within the novel. However, following Betty Bennett’s assessment of the novel as a work that actually captures “through imagination [the ability to] re-see the world” (54), this reading of The Last Man implements a schizoanalytic framework to assist in exposing Shelley’s implicit radical underpinnings of deterritorializing systematic structures and composing spaces of unmediated desire. Despite its poignantly tragic portrayal of the end of humanity, there are ways in which Shelley embeds within this future world a positive, creative power that may not be easily recognizable or translatable. In this view, The Last Man might be read as “a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 190). Rhizomes, for Deleuze and Guattari, are the ideal concept for mapping the world through relational connection and interpretations that reach

1

Recent psychoanalytic studies by Evan Gottlieb, Rebecca Richardson, and Olivia Zolciak have, respectively, considered the excessive jouissance produced in utopian/dystopian formations, the ecological or environmental uncanny dimensions, and the anxiety of illness and authorship in the novel.

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outward in multiple directions, as opposed to hierarchal models of arborescent/trees that grow upwards. Before the three-volume story of Lionel Verney begins, readers are given “An Introduction” that complicates the seemingly straightforward dystopian novel by assembling rhizomatic multitemporal lines to construct a future space that rethinks human desire and possibility. The frame narrative opens with a first-person female narrator who finds Sibylline prophetic leaves in a cave in Naples at the onset of the nineteenth century and translates the fragmented pieces into Lionel Verney’s story “of misery and woeful change” that follows (7). This scene provides a precarious structure for the novel since the main narrative of “the last man” can be viewed as a conditional story that reveals one of many possible (mis)readings of the Sibylline leaves. Through the act of discovering and interpreting the Sibylline leaves, the unnamed woman articulates the creative “intensities” (encounters with pure difference that provoke “affect,” the variation beyond emotions and sensations that unfold in-between the spaces of an encounters) that emerge from her discernment of the power of interconnected and multi-temporal imagination: “My labours have cheered long hours of solitude, and taken me out of a world [. . .] to one glowing with imagination and power” (7).2 From this, Shelley structures The Last Man with an awareness of multi-temporal possibilities that dismantle early nineteenth-century society—represented by the English woman, often discussed as a depiction of Shelley herself, and her feelings of being “taken out of a world”—in order to create a future space permeated with “imagination” and “power.” This layering of multi-temporal lines that hold the creative power to shift fate and connections between the characters aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of how bodies and assemblages interact with the world around them. They contend that “assemblages” are composed of a bundle of lines that are constantly intermingling and cutting across one another: “for we are made of lines. [. . .] life lines [. . .] living lines, flesh lines, about which it brings a special revelation” (1987: 195–6). These “life lines” reveal how assemblages are “territorial”—that is, defined by their “content and expression”—but also how they are composed of “lines of deterritorialization that cut across it and carry it away” into unknown or unmarked territories (505). Accordingly, there are three different modes of being and connection: “The line of rigid segmentarity with molar breaks; the line of supple segmentation with molecular cracks; the line of flight or rupture, abstract, deadly and alive, nonsegmentary” (200, emphasis mine). The lines, importantly, are essential for understanding the affective encounters of the BwO as a force that cannot be reduced to classification or organization, which, of course, is the opposite of a territorialized zone. Moreover, the relations of these life lines provide an alternative reading engagement with The Last Man, one that illustrates immanence through destabilizing notions of desire and being. Desire is approached within the novel in ways that also connect with Deleuze and Guattari’s apprehension with the repression of creative impulses that drive desire under a psychoanalytic system. But as much as Shelley details characters driven through desire that upholds social production (such as Raymond, an ambitious politician who aims to restore the British monarchy),

2

This essay does not account for the many ways in which labour and production are emphasized throughout the novel, which is unfortunate given how central conversations with Marx and capital are in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. For a recent study on the theme of production in The Last Man, see Pozoukidis.

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she also experiments with what we might read as schizo modes of desire that offer rebellion toward normative systems of power. We can find these differing modes through the characters’ various life lines, noticing how they move in the world and their responses to the plague as a BwO. Thus, Shelley creates a complex relationship between the “molar” stable strata and “molecular” movements of potentiality within her novel, which interconnect and spark lines of deterritorialization. The first half of the novel, already noted as strikingly different in tone and approach to the second half, illustrates a molar mode where characters inhabit a sociopolitical sphere that supports the fixtures of conventional desires, behaviors, and interactions. As Deleuze and Guattari outline, the molar or “rigid line of segmentarity” resides within the plane of organization—“on which everything seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the passage from one segment to another”—as a mode of aggregated segments that “ensure and control the identity of each agency” (1987: 195). This “life line” is one of consistency—dissimilar from the constant flowing desire of immanence—in which the daily motions of structure and stratification are secure. Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari do not condemn molarity to a negative space of being; it is purely the predominant mode of being under Western political structures. Still, and most importantly for an analysis of schizo desire, “the molar organization deprives desire of its objective being” (1983: 27). Lionel and his relations in the novel’s first half fit comfortably along the line of molar stratification and desire. From the opening of Lionel’s story that depicts his youth, it is revealed that he endeavored to fix and secure things into organized measures, embodying the molar line of being: “When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, [. . .] the earth’s very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable” (9). This sense of knowing the world and his place within it are disrupted by his father, who gambles away the family security and commits suicide, leaving Lionel and his sister to find their own way in the world. Ultimately this shapes Lionel into a young man with a bitter and rebellious view of society until, under the influence of the King’s son Adrian, he returns to an iteration of proper British sensibility. Bennett attests that this movement of Lionel between social systems aims to portray his evolving “education of the imagination [. . .] from aggressive narcissism to a transforming human understanding that enlarges the imagination beyond ordinary limitations and opens new possibilities” (77). However, Lionel appears to be set fundamentally against the imagination as he continuously structures people, and the world more generally. Though there are moments in which Shelley provides Lionel with the opportunity to enter into the realm of the imagination and its power, he purposefully reterritorializes himself into the molar space of organized relations. While searching for Raymond after political dissension and the plague have separated them in volume 2, Lionel sits and contemplates the destruction around him: “For a moment I could yield to the creative power of the imagination, and for a moment was soothed by the sublime fictions it presented to me. The beatings of my human heart drew me back to blank reality” (200). For Lionel, the imagination offers that which is unreal to the chaos that surrounds him in the present moment—but the necessity to keep moving forward and, most importantly, give in to the demands of his body and beating heart cut across the force of imagination. Here Lionel is able to overcome the creative forces that press upon his body and establish his comfortable sense of reality and order; but once the plague spreads further into England, it becomes harder for Lionel and the other characters to ignore the “molecular” impulses brought about by the plagues destabilizing force that interrupt their “molar” rhythms.

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READING THE BODY WITHOUT ORGANS How might we read Shelley’s plague that surfaces in the middle of volume 2? It certainly is a word, and body of microorganisms, that instill great fear in the characters, as it wipes out masses of people swiftly, seemingly spreading as an airborne disease. Robert Snyder claims that “there is no logically adequate way of construing the plague” (436). However, despite his assertion that the plague’s presence is without specific denotation, Snyder also outlines the “unnamable” and “preternatural” plague as a negative force, a “grotesque enigma” that defies rationality through its “demonic possibility” (437). More recently, Young-Ok An characterizes the plague as “the other,” a “decomposing figure” that “rapidly breaks loose various fixed identities or dynamics, unsettling, dislocating, and displacing the existing chain of identities and events” (581–2). Both criticisms give agency to the presence of the plague that resonates with the BwO. The plague moves through the novel like a multiplicity of intensities, with no underlying structures of organized strata, and is a force that “continually dismantl[es] the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4). Considering the effects and affects of the plague, she (as Lionel genders the plague) dismantles humanist considerations of man as universal subject: “For seven years it had had full sway upon earth; she had trod every nook of our spacious globe; she had mingled with the atmosphere, which as a cloak enwraps all our fellow-creatures [. . . All of mankind] had been vanquished and destroyed by her” (426). Admittedly, the novel often refers to the plague in negative terms that reflect Snyder’s assessment of it as saturated with “demonic” possibility; however, it is critical to note that it is Lionel’s voice that casts the plague in negative terms, desperately designating the force that threatens his social stability as “the enemy of the human race” (175). Later in the novel, tension arises between the plague as a negative force and the plague as a potentially positive force to influence a change in humanist desires—one that might be open to the premise that man and his worldly desires are not universal. This specifically happens at the opening of volume 3, where Shelley unfolds an ecopoetic relationship with a world that “no longer struggles” against the plague’s influence (316). Describing the new state of the world, which lives alongside the now naturalized rhythms of the plague, Lionel articulates his strained feelings of the plague’s presence: As the rules of order and pressure of laws were lost, some began with hesitation and wonder to transgress the accustomed uses of society. Palaces were deserted, and the poor man dared at length, unreproved, intrude into the splendid apartments, whose very furniture and decorations were an unknown world to him. [. . .] when the boundaries of private possession were thrown down, the products of human labour at present existing were more, far more, than the thinned generation could possibly consume. To some among the poor this was matter of exultation. [. . .] We were all equal now; but near at hand was an equality still more levelling, a state where beauty and strength, and wisdom, would be as vain as riches and birth. — 317 This passage underscores the truly dismantling presence of the plague as a BwO. Lionel acknowledges how some people started to “transgress” and move beyond the structures of the past society, but, notably, he is outside of this group filled with “wonder” at the new state of the world. He fails to

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see how having undone the “rules of order and pressure of laws” as well as creating a space of equality that “levels” all organisms, the plague establishes a plane of possibility in which, if those who interact with it desire, “molecular” modes of being can unfold. Instead, Lionel addresses the plague as an “awful” presence, despite its leveling out of all sociopolitical issues regarding its redistribution of equality, demonstrating how his “molar” vision keeps him from the possibility of a radical mode of being outside of the established social order. Despite Lionel’s resistance to the plague as a creative mode of possibility, if we read the plague’s movements in the novel as a force of intensities that shifts character’s desires, which are entrenched in the ideological landscape of the novel, then it’s possible to read the plague as an illustration of the “molecular” potentiality of a BwO. Deleuze and Guattari describe the molecular as a movement towards a life line that “is very different from the previous [molar] one; it is a line of molecular or supple segmentation the segments of which are like quanta of deterritorialization” (1987: 196). Molecular lines expose the characters to experiences outside of the molar rigidity of structure, towards a life guided by the unrestricted flows of desire This is where the BwO as plague becomes most interesting in Shelley’s novel: even though the plague decimates entire populations, the novel’s main characters (except for Lionel) never contract or succumb to the plague in their deaths. Though they are all affected by the destabilizing force of the BwO, their deaths occur either as a reterritorialization of their constricted positions in the novel (for example, Raymond’s death in battle serving as “Lord Protector” of England) or as a mode of molecular encounter that takes them down a line of deterritorialization. In an apocalyptic novel, the plague doesn’t kill them; instead, it connects with their desires and influences their differing modes of relations and connections. For Deleuze and Guattari desire, death, and the BwO are intrinsically tied together. Under schizoanalysis, the death of bodies is not coded as negative but rather as a mode of evolution and change, imbuing life with an unruly sense of being unbound from materiality—the BwO itself. In this regard, the deaths of Perdita and Adrian (Lionel’s sister and his friend and benefactor) offer a molecular flow, where “desire itself becomes the death instinct, latency, but it also passes over into these flows that carry the seeds of a new life” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 223). Read in this way, the plague opens up a molecular space of positive potentiality for the characters, an entryway to modes of immanence that they were unable to attain before— what Deleuze and Guattari term a “line of flight.”

MOLECULAR LINES OF FLIGHT If we consider the characterization and role of Perdita in difference to her brother Lionel, we can easily observe how Shelley places her in a position of higher understanding and an elevated sense of connection with the world and life around her. Lionel’s first description of his sister situates her as one inclined towards imaginative desire: “She was a singular being [. . .] Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark, but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance, and to feel that the soul which was their soul, comprehended an universe of thought in its ken” (15). Noting the impenetrable depth of Perdita’s eyes, Lionel places his sister in a space of more profound connection with her soul and imagination. In his view, Perdita “lost herself delightedly in these self-created wanderings, and returned with unwilling spirit to the dull detail of common life” (16). From the onset, her life is guided by molecular desire. However, once Perdita falls in love with Raymond and his desire for power, her position as wife and mother

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appears to put out her “impenetrably deep” connection to the potentiality of being. As Anne Mellor notes, after her union with Raymond, Perdita “becomes the perfect wife and hostess” who “conceives of herself only as a part of her husband: ‘her whole existence was one sacrifice to him’ ” (153). However, despite Mellor’s claim that “not even [Perdita’s] daughter Clara can bind her to life” after she decides to die beside Raymond’s grave (154), it appears that interacting with the plague as a BwO and the loss of her husband—the figure that ties her to a molar territory—unbinds Perdita from the molar world into a mode of molecular excitement that is reminiscent of her earlier visionary self. Initially, the plague proves no alteration or hindrance to Perdita, as “neither plague nor war could prevent [her] from following her lord” (Shelley 175). However, another character’s prophesy that the plague will destroy Raymond leads to the rupture of Perdita’s molar self in favor of a molecular connection with Raymond after his death: “she looked forward to another life; true, the burning spirit of love seemed to her unextinguishable throughout eternity. Yet at this time, with human fondness, she clung to all that her human senses permitted her to see and feel to be a part of Raymond” (207). This moment illustrates the tension in Perdita, brought on by her interaction with the BwO’s dismantling creative force, between the desire of “another [molecular] life” and her “human [molar] senses” that connect her with Raymond’s dead body. After her “voluntary” death, Lionel misreads the situation, unable to read the subtleties of desire and reality, and blames himself for her suicide. He casts Perdita “at last the victim of too much loving, too constant an attachment to the perishable and lost, she, in her pride of beauty and life, had thrown aside the pleasant perception of the apparent world for the unreality of the grave” (216). Lionel dismisses her molecular impulses to take a “line of flight,” which is a state of absolute deterritorialization—where forms and roles no longer reign and desire unbinds. For Lionel, the “unreality of the grave” constitutes his molar impulses that circumvent his sister’s desire to “escape, and come here [Greece]” to reconnect with another mode of life beyond molar rhythms, which Lionel holds as the only reality (210). In many ways, the alteration to Perdita’s sense of being after her initial active choice to stay with Raymond’s body emphasizes her return to a “forgotten vivacity”: “Her features had lost the distortion of grief; her eyes were brightened, her very person seemed dilated” (207).3 Adrian has a similar molecular awareness to Perdita’s mode of being; he appears intrinsically connected to the molecular tenor of life as he “hardly appeared of this world,” seemingly only of “all mind” and soul in his form (26–7). Interestingly, Lionel continuously notes Adrian’s propensity for connection with other modes of life outside of the social order, a quality that he finds admirable in Adrian but disillusioned in his sister. Whenever Lionel considers Adrian’s connection with the world, there appears to be a note of desire for a similar engagement with life: “Adrian felt that he made a part of a great whole. He owned affinity not only with mankind, but all nature was akin to him”; he “felt his life mingle with the universe of existence” (45). In difference to the molar line, the molecular mode is an encounter that disperses connection, allowing for a melding into the other, where defined territories of subjects and objects dissolve—importantly, for Deleuze and Guattari, this is not a matter of an imaginative moment; rather it is a real process change and difference through deterritorialization. Shelley makes explicit Adrian’s molecular approach against

3 For an alternate reading of Perdita’s death as a symptom of hyper-sympathetic femininity under a patriarchal system that leads to self-annihilation, see Jones Square.

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molarity’s desperate desire to re-stratify control and order in two passages. The first is his interaction with Ryland, Raymond’s political rival, who, terrified of his loss of power after the plague outbreak, tries in vain to find refuge to outlast the contagion: “Help!” said Ryland, “there is no help!—great God, who talks of help! All the world has the plague!” “Then to avoid it, we must quit the world,” observed Adrian, with a gentle smile. — 242 This presents a curious reaction from Adrian as to how to avoid the plague. Is this a moment of suicidal thought from a man made mad by despair, or is it possibly a moment of creative desire envisioned for the future? It appears Adrian’s idea to “quit the world” is an affirmation of a positive way to engage with the plague. As Deleuze and Guattari contend, “there is nothing more active than a line of flight” (1987: 204); it is a type of escape, not an escape from roles or responsibilities, but rather an escape of the binary oppositions, an active escape into non-territorialized spaces. Shelley further demonstrates this idea when Adrian contemplates his position against Lionel as the end of humanity grows closer: “As to the likelihood of escaping,” said Adrian, “ten years hence the cold stars may shine on the graves of all of us; but as to my peculiar liability to infection, I could easily prove, both logically and physically, that in the midst of contagion I have a better chance of life than you.” — 255 In this passage, Shelley voices her own questioning of Lionel’s position of “last man” through Adrian’s realization that he has a “better chance” at life than Lionel does. Aware that his precarious health places him in a dangerous position, Adrian in his molecular inclinations positions himself as still more connected with a true line of escape that does not look to supersede the plague and its creative force but instead embraces a dismantling mode toward a new thriving life of molecular relating. After the molecular encounters Perdita and Adrian experience in their engagement with the plague, Lionel is presented with one more spectacle of the dismantling social force that the plague as a BwO offers. Near the end of the novel, while returning home to England, Lionel stumbles upon an unnamed orphan child and her dog, Lion—an ironic twist of the protagonist’s name. We were about to return homewards, when a voice, a human voice, strange now to hear, attracted our attention. It was a child singing a merry, lightsome air; there was no other sound. [. . .] The singing was interrupted by laughing and talking; never was merry ditty so sadly timed, never laughter more akin to tears [. . .] a little girl, was dancing, waltzing, and singing about them, followed by a large Newfoundland dog, who boisterously jumping on her, and interrupting her, made her now scold, now laugh, now throw herself on the carpet to play with him. She was dressed grotesquely, in glittering robes and shawls fit for a woman; she appeared about ten years of age. We stood at the door looking on this strange scene, till the dog perceiving us barked loudly; the child turned and saw us: her face, losing its gaiety, assumed a sullen expression: she slunk back, apparently meditating an escape. — 333

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Here, Shelley outlines Lionel’s discomfort with the young girl’s mode of being; to him, her laughter and play are “sadly timed” and “akin to tears,” rather than a recognition of her “becoming” brought about by the dismantling force of the plague. Having taken a line of escape into the new spaces of her environment, the girl and her dog have experienced a “becoming” that engenders deterritorialized connections. An escape through a line of flight is a movement of difference in becoming something other, not by means of imitation or imagination, but through a real break or rupture. Despite Lionel’s view, Lion is no longer just a “Newfoundland dog” involved in a “grotesque” scene of make-believe; he is a true companion that resembles the girl in every manner: they speak, dance, play, and laugh together on equal terms. In contrast, the image of the dog as companion returns at the end of the novel, where Fuson Wang argues that “Verney manages to find a suitable (albeit quite absurd) companion” in a sheepdog after the death of every other human (245). However, the sheepdog is not a real companion for Lionel compared to the relationship between the unnamed girl and Lion. Lionel distances himself from forming a deeper connection with the dog, which in his account is merely an “attendant” of his pursuits.

RETERRITORIALIZATION: A CONCLUSION In this ending of Lionel Verney as the last man with his animal companion, Shelley’s ironic use of her protagonist becomes apparent: why create a character unwilling to engage with the creative possibilities of being once the plague has eradicated normative societal structures? It is because Lionel’s subjectivity is an illusion of not only the interpretation of the prophetic Sibylline leaves but also as a construct of humanist desire that drives his belief that one day the world will “be repeopled” and that his narrative will provide the new civilization with “a monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man” (Snyder: 466). And because of this, Lionel, who begins the narrative constructing himself as someone “born for something greater than I was—and greater I would become,” becomes a “wretch” wandering the earth in search of other unlikely survivors (19: 447). Despite Snyder’s claim that after “recove[ring] from the mortal disease,” Lionel becomes a man with “keener powers of perception [. . . that] sets him apart and anticipates his survival” (444), he does not transform after his recovery into someone more perceptive of how to survive but rather becomes more adamant in his desires to re-establish strict socio-political systems. Still, Shelley appears to have rejected her protagonist, despite his assurance that he was “born for something greater,” as the only human to contract and survive the plague’s infection. Lionel strives for social order and actively undermines the creative possibilities of the plague in his attempts to re-stratify the world. This trajectory of Lionel’s life line within the novel aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Oedipus and his territorial boundaries: desiring-production is the boundary between the molar organization and the molecular multiplicity of desire; this limit of deterritorialization must now pass into the interior of the molar organization, and it must be applied to a factitious and subjugated territoriality. We are now able to surmise what Oedipus signifies: it displaces the limit [. . .]. Oedipus, the incomparable instrument of gregariousness, is the ultimate private and subjugated territoriality of European man. — 1983: 102

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In explaining the limit of the communication between the lines against the demands of desire as organization or multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari outline those molar assemblages that refuse the chaos of the unfolding molecular desire that arises from an encounter with the BwO. And this is the perfect description of Lionel; especially when we look to the final scene, in which he embarks on a search for other lone survivors—of which, we as readers assume, there are none—to reterritorialize what is left of humanity back into a stable normative society. Although Shelley positions Lionel in such a way that the reader consistently questions his character and particularly his position as the “last man,” in many ways Lionel, with his molar territories and resistance to the radical possibilities of life, must be the last man of a world that no longer functions under normative sociopolitical structures. He must be Oedipus to the plague’s BwO. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the BwO is a return to the work of Freudian psychoanalysis that reframes the central question of dreams: not what do they mean but how do they work—a similar rhetorical thread that they famously use from Spinoza’s “what can a body do” (1987: 256)? As Buchanan points out, “In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, Freud betrays his own genius when he lets himself think the problem with function is at one with the problem with meaning and that solving the problem of the meaning of a dream will unlock it’s function” (2018 80). If the question of the Oedipal is a question of dreams—which is really a question of desire, as to how it functions rather than what it reveals under signification—then the BwO, through its schizophrenic scrabbling of codes and lines of connection, “is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 165). The importance of this concept to the schizophrenic project cannot be understated: This body is the only practical object of schizoanalysis: What is your body without organs? What are your lines? What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price, for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your BwO, merged with that line? [. . .] Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains only to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society. — 203 Instead of idealizing the schizophrenic and their processes of relating to the world, schizoanalysis provides an approach that deals with the differentiation of social-production and desiringproduction within capitalist formations. For as much as it is a project focused on understanding the schizophrenic processes and dismantling unproductive Oedipal desire, it is also a question of the political future: what flows and new lines can lead us into unknown territories? It offers a deterritorialization and unleashes the “virtual”—the plane of immanence, where lines of flight and becomings emerge. In his essay “Life and Literature,” Deleuze states, “[to] write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. [. . .] Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience” (1). This examination of literature’s potential encapsulates Shelley’s work in The Last Man, where she creates a space in which her characters have the potential to go “beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience” to reach further down the line of flight. The BwO

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represented by the plague “succeeds in freeing lines of flight” for select characters, illustrating the potential escape into creative modes of being and revealing the dislocating force of the BwO as a “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 161). Perdita, Adrian, and the unnamed orphan girl engage with the plague’s creative forces that expose them to an indefinite molecular future. It is a line of flight that is “even more strange” than the molar or molecular line: “as if something carries us away, across our segments, but also across our thresholds, towards a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent” (Deleuze and Parnet: 125). Ultimately, Lionel as a molar assemblage must be the last man with his “whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned territories”; however, and most importantly, like all molar beings, he has “a future but no becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 197). Although Shelley ends her novel without fully realizing the revolutionary space she envisions, since Lionel is left as the reader’s only remaining attendant with his territorialized boundaries, she does construct what we can recognize as molecular engagements with creative flows of desire that engenders her readers to consider the potentiality of human consciousness and modes of being outside of normative sociopolitical structures—a schizoanalysis of desire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY An, Young-Ok. “‘Read Your Fall’: The Signs of Plague in The Last Man.” Studies in Romanticism. 44.4 (2005): 581–604. Artaud, Antonin. Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period. Exact Change. 1995. Bennett, Betty. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. John Hopkins UP. 1998. Buchanan, Ian. “Žižek and Deleuze.” Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. Edited by Geoff Boucher et al. Routledge. 2018: 69–88. Buchanan, Ian. “The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body without Organs.” Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature. Edited by Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts, and Aidan Tynan. Bloomsbury Academic. 2015: 25–42. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Michael Greco and Daniel Smith. U of Minnesota P. 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. U of Minnesota P. 1983. Robert Hurley. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Daba Polan. Minnesota UP. 1986. Robert Hurley. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minnesota UP. 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbra Habberjam. Columbia UP. 1987. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principal. Martino Fine Books. 2009. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford UP. 2008. Gottlieb, Evan. “Jouissance, Obscene Undersides, and Utopian/Dystopian Formations in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Lacan and Romanticism. Edited by Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler. SUNY. 2019: 157–67. Jones Square, Shoshannah Bryn. “The ‘victim of too much loving’: Perdita Verney’s Self-Destructive Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Studies in the Literary Imagination. 51.1 (2018): 61–78. Lacan, Jacques. Seminar II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. Norton. 1988. Mellor, Anne. “Blake, the Apocalypse, and Romantic Women Writers.” Romanticism and Millenarianism. Edited by Tim Fulford. Palgrave. 2002: 139–52. Pozoukidis, Konstantinos. “The Survival of Non-Productive Labour in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 33. 3 (2021): 393–412.

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Richardson, Rebecca. “The Environmental Uncanny: Imagining the Anthropocene in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 26.4 (2019): 1062–83. Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Oxford UP. 1994. Snyder, Robert. “Apocalypse and Indeterminacy in Mary Shelley’s ‘The Last Man”’ Studies in Romanticism. 17.4 (1978): 435–52. S´wia˛tkowski, Piotrek. Deleuze and Desire: Analysis of The Logic of Sense. Leuven UP. 2015. Wang, Fuson. “We Must Live Elsewhere: The Social Construction of Natural Immunity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” European Romantic Review. 22.2 (2011): 235–55. Zolciak, Olivia. “Sublimating an Apocalypse: An Exploration of Anxiety, Authorship, and Feminist Theory in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 77. 5 (2018): 1243–76.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sublimation and Symptom Fantasy, Story, Work, Pleasure DANIEL KATZ

The word sublimation, in its broadest uses and its history, designates a certain kind of transformation. The origins of the word lie in chemistry, where it refers to the radical change of a substance into an altogether different state—for example, of a solid into a gas by way of heating. In English (and Freud uses a German cognate) at least as early as the sixteenth century the word was also used in a non-materialist manner to describe the rising up or emergence of intellectual or moral qualities, or the distillation of their quintessence. In psychoanalysis, very broadly speaking, it is the transformation of sexual libido or drives or energy into other forms of activity or expenditure that are not directly sexual, but which in some manner replace the satisfaction obtained by more direct sexual activity. One of the most frequently referred to forms of sublimation, of course, and one of the most pertinent for scholars of literature and culture, is that by which an artist or creator finds the energy, which can be enormous, to produce their works. In the very shortest version, sexual energy is sublimated into, say, writing, or painting, or any artistic activity, or even things like scientific inquiry and research, or the working life generally. Yet this apparently simple conception has proven to be among the most vexed and recalcitrant in the history of psychoanalytic theory when it comes to the precise mapping of what it is that gets transformed and sublimated, the mechanics of this process, and the ultimate relationship of the sublimate to that from which it has emerged. As is fitting for a discussion of transformations, displacements, diversions, and returns, as any discussion of sublimation and symptoms must inevitably be, let us proceed in a roundabout way. In 1922, in her very first psychoanalytic publication, Anna Freud—Sigmund’s youngest child, who would go on to become a leading psychoanalyst in her own right—tells an interesting story. It is a story, in fact, that is itself about stories—where they come from, where they can go, what can be done with them, and what they do both for those who create them and those who read them. “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” is a case-history which begins by discussing the fantasies of a young girl. Between the ages of six and eight, we are told, this girl regularly indulged in beating fantasies consisting of a boy or boys being beaten by a grownup man or grownup men—fantasies entirely in keeping with those described in father Sigmund’s “A Child is Being Beaten” (to which Anna Freud refers as the theoretical backdrop of her own investigation) and which the girl accompanies with masturbatory acts, provoking strong feelings of guilt. As a response, the girl first attempts to enjoy the fantasies but refrain from masturbating to them, but as this proves difficult, the beating fantasies themselves are increasingly prohibited. Around the age of eight or ten, 99

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however, a new element appears: the girl develops a new compulsive fantasy activity consisting of telling herself “nice” stories, empty of punishment, and full of “kind, considerate, and affectionate behaviour” (142). However, as Anna Freud is quick to note, these often elaborately developed and intricate daydream stories, devoid of autoerotic activity or guilt, are in fact themselves a “superstructure built on a masochistic beating fantasy” (143). This is seen in one particular set of narratives that were sparked by a short story set in the Middle Ages that the girl came across in her reading, around the age of 14 or 15, and which provided a framework of incidents and characters she then used to elaborate more complex and extended fantasies, centered on a 15-year-old young nobleman (the same age as herself) and a powerful knight. All the girl’s stories depicting this pair followed the same structure: the knight has total power over the youth, who is his prisoner and perhaps issues from a rival family. The knight threatens, mistreats, and terrifies the youth, or perhaps prepares to torture him, but at the last minute he relents and treats him kindly, bestows favors, or nurses him back to health. All the stories crucially share “a slowly mounting anxiety” which, once the tension is almost unbearable, ends in the “pleasurable climax” consisting of forgiveness and “complete harmony” between the two protagonists (149). The beating fantasies and the “nice stories,” then, are not so different: they are essentially the same on the level of structure, diverging only in their ultimate solution, where the scene of the beating is replaced with its contrary, presumably as the repressed returns under cover of reversal, in stories which also, in an effective compromise-formation1, extend that which they were meant to shout down. With this reasoning, it is easy to view the “nice” stories as simply elaborate disguises of the beating fantasies, and therefore, as symptomatic expressions of the same conflicts. However, that is not the final conclusion which Anna Freud reaches, despite other examples in the “nice” stories where repressed content obviously breaks through. Rather, although the girl in question herself recognizes the relationship between the nice and not nice stories as soon as the structural homology is pointed out (and even admits that in times of psychological pressure, the prohibited beatings were allowed to happen, once again accompanied by sexual gratification), for Anna Freud, something has in fact changed. That is, the “nice” stories are not only a compromiseformation with regard to the repressed beating fantasies, but raise two further issues. First, they represent a regression to the primal meaning of the beating fantasy (before distortion by reversal) as explained by Freud in “A Child is Being Beaten”: my father loves me. And this introduces a new complication, because the “nice” stories, as Anna Freud points out, are nevertheless strikingly different from any of the beating fantasies in that their climax is not accompanied by the urge to sexual gratification and is free from guilt, which should not be the case if they were simply regressive. This brings us to the second crucial element: in the “nice” stories, whatever their origins, the sexual content of the Oedipal situation has been successfully sublimated: “In the beating fantasy the direct sexual drives are satisfied, whereas in the nice stories the aim-inhibited drives, as [Sigmund] Freud calls them, find gratification” in the form of tenderness or a “sublimated affectionate tie” (153). In this way, then, the “nice” stories, which seemed perilously close to being just another sexual

1

Compromise formations refer to symptoms which act as a comprise between repression and the repressed content. To use an example of Freud’s, obsessive handwashing, with its insistence on cleanliness, can be a symptom of the repressed urge to masturbate, a “dirty” act which the washing is meant to counter. As a compromise formation, however, some of the gratification of masturbating will be transferred to the act of rubbing the hands together itself, which will make the need to compensate by washing more urgent, in a vicious cycle that feeds off itself.

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symptom now cast in a meretricious and socially acceptable guise, are pulled from the abyss of regressive, infantile sexuality by the expedient of the concept of sublimation, as in them the “aim” is “inhibited,” that is, no longer sexual. And even more: as a coda to her story, Anna Freud recounts how the young woman in question went on to use the “nice” stories themselves as the basis for short stories she then set about writing in yet another interesting sublimated transformation, because if the written work exploited the settings and characters of the nice stories, it relinquished even the saccharine pleasures of the latter, being very different in theme and event. As literary works, then, the stories were in no way useful to the fantasy life of their author given these transformations by which the “regard for the personal needs of the daydreamer is replaced by regard for the prospective reader” (156). Why does the woman write at all, then? Because the pleasure of the fantasy content proper has been replaced with the different pleasure of obtaining recognition for her artistry. And Anna Freud concludes, “By renouncing her private pleasure in favour of making an impression on others, the author has accomplished an important developmental step: the transformation of an autistic into a social activity. We could say: she has found the road that leads from her fantasy life back to reality” (157). As the young girl in question was almost certainly Anna Freud herself, it is reasonable to suggest that this closing sentence also describes how she saw her own work as a psychoanalyst in relation to her own private desires and the drives motivating them. As her biographer Elizabeth YoungBruehl puts it, “Anna Freud’s paper is both a study of sublimation and an act of sublimation” (107). In this way, her paper stresses two of the recurrent themes of the diverse theories of sublimation, in almost all their guises: 1) the transformation of the sexual into the non-sexual, and 2) the transformation of the private or what Anna Freud calls the “autistic” into the social. Both of these elements are at once highly problematic and also inescapable. The first is such because if an activity merely displaces sexual energy from one activity to another, it really must be considered more a symptom than something else. Neurotic symptoms are nothing but these sorts of displacements, when activities, or parts of the body, or certain thoughts, or thinking itself, are invaded by the sexual and given a sexual charge. The second element, implicitly, explains how the first is even possible, for it would seem in Anna Freud’s account (as well as in many stray remarks of her father) that the subject requires the social recognition obtained for her accomplishments as a recompense for relinquishing the sexual energy that is abandoned. Of course, neither of these ideas are in any way straightforward, and both pose major problems within Freud’s thought and psychoanalysis more widely. Jean Laplanche, one of the major theorists and historians of psychoanalysis of the post-war era, has examined the implications of this schema for Freudian thought in admirable detail, and I can only highlight two of the major problems he stresses here. First is that the distinction between the “sexual” and “non-sexual” is highly vexed in Freud, and changes along with Freud’s own modifications of his theories of the drives. The second problem is related to the above: to argue that sexual drive-related energy is “transformed” into social recognition is to say in effect not so much that it is desexualized as that it is transformed into narcissistic libido, which is not the same thing at all. And yet for Anna Freud, there is no continuum between the symptomatic and the sublimated, but a stark boundary between them (which does not mean that this boundary is impassable, or that regressions cannot occur). This mirrors what Sigmund Freud asserted in his famous study of Leonardo da Vinci—while the symptom is a by-product of the return of the repressed through displacement, in contrast sublimation, by transforming the nature of the energy fueling it, avoids these dynamics more or less completely. But to delve further into these questions

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let us move from an analysis of fiction as a form of sublimation (with all the perils of psychobiography such an approach implies), to a notable fictional representation of an act of sublimation itself. In Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, written and set during the period of legal segregation in the United States, we learn of a very wealthy northern white benefactor to a Black university in the south.2 As Mr. Norton recounts in a somewhat overheated manner to the novel’s unnamed narrator—a student tasked with giving him a tour of the campus and environs—his “fate” henceforth depends on the accomplishments of all the students whose education he has done so much to make possible. And indeed this philanthropic project, which now means more to him than any of the successes which enabled it in the first place, has an added poignancy, as he views his dedication to the good of humanity as above all a “monument” to his regretted beautiful young daughter, taken from him by death in the first blush of womanhood. Norton could not be clearer: his love for his daughter and his rending guilt at not being able to save her from her illness are the source of his interest in the future of those young African-Americans he has deigned to help, and his altruism is meant both to restore meaning to a life largely bereft of it following the loss of a cherished being, and also to publicly mark the intensity of his love, inexpressible by other means. In these respects, Norton’s philanthropy could already be related to the sorts of expiatory rituals directed to the dead which Freud examines in Totem and Taboo, and one might wonder about the social customs linking charitable donations and philanthropy to mourning and memorials more generally. As Freud points out, tributes paid to the dead are frequently expressions of our ambivalence towards them, and expiations for the guilt we might feel at not loving them properly, or perhaps, as in Norton’s case, at loving them improperly.3 More broadly, however, altruistic and humanitarian undertakings—expressions of the “love of humanity” in the abstract—are classic outlets for sublimation, fitting perfectly into one of Freud’s more programmatic definitions of sublimation: “both object and aim are changed, so that what was originally a sexual instinct [Freud uses the German word “Trieb,” more properly translated as “drive”] finds satisfaction in some achievement which is no longer sexual but has a higher social or ethical valuation” (“Two Encyclopaedia Articles,” SE 18: 255). This would seem a good description of Norton’s undertaking, which unfortunately is brought to ruin when his guide accidentally strays from the bounds of the carefully policed campus tour and into the adjacent fields, where they encounter a farmer with the significant name of Trueblood. Trueblood, now a figure of local notoriety, eventually tells them in great detail how, sharing his shack’s only bed with his wife and daughter, in the course of a dream he unwittingly ended up impregnating the latter. Norton listens with horror but also rapt fascination, and after handing Trueblood a one-hundred dollar bill, suffers a nervous collapse. On the surface level, the story is simple. As Freud writes in his study of Leonardo, sublimation only functions if the sublimating activity is cordoned off from the drive which is sublimated. When Trueblood holds up a mirror to the true nature of Norton’s feelings for his daughter, he causes the psychic economy to collapse. While the young student doesn’t see the ultimate consequences of this, the university’s president, Bledsoe, certainly does, and expels the

2 Invisible Man, first published in 1952, is widely considered one of the most important US novels of the twentieth century. While the central trope of the invisibility of the African-American clearly derives from W. E. B. DuBois, the novel is highly informed by psychoanalytic theory in many places, and seems to dialogue above all with Freud’s Totem and Taboo in subtle and intricate ways. 3 The chapter “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence” in Totem and Taboo discusses rituals of mourning extensively. See especially Section 3c, “The Taboo upon the Dead”.

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student from the school to salvage the relationship with Norton, despite the latter’s assurances that all is well. Bledsoe understands what the hapless narrator does not: that any element associated with the taboo topic will itself become taboo and must be purged for the taboo structure to be reinstated, and this is crucial for Bledsoe as without the interdiction there will be no sublimation, and without sublimation, there will be no money.4 In this way, the episode also reveals something about the deeper structure of philanthropic sublimation itself. Note that Norton both “gives” to the school—a gesture which is the very emblem of philanthropic purity, of the white-washing of his desires through the medium of black bodies— and pays Trueblood for telling his tale, the tale that incarnates the desires from which Norton is using the black bodies to escape. The point is that in both cases, he “buys” something useful or gratifying to his psychic economy from members of the African-American community to whom he condescends. That is, if Norton’s philanthropy feels like sublimation given, for example, how he uses the rhetoric of “fertility” to describe the “fruits” he hopes his financial offerings will produce in the African-American community (41), his gift to Trueblood rather seems payment for the vicarious enjoyment he has gained from Trueblood’s tale, even if this enjoyment is also intolerable. But the symmetry between how he treats what might seem contraries— the pure vehicles of his redemption on the one hand and the man who has committed the unforgivable “sin” by which he is himself obsessed on the other— of course reveals a deeper truth: that in both cases, a dehumanized AfricanAmerican community are reduced to functioning as only the instruments of his own intrapsychic drama, so that even his apparent acts of kindness are nothing but self-interested and narcissistic. As an object of charity, to use the novel’s trope, the narrator is just as “invisible” as when he functions as a generic object of abjection and disdain. Meanwhile, Trueblood’s dream gives yet another valence to his name, as in its symbolism it systematically over-writes the incest taboo onto the prohibition regarding “miscegenation” (the dream represents his daughter as a forbidden white woman at one point). And this of course suggests that the white obsession with “racial purity” is itself a complicated displacement of incestuous attachments—a violent protest against exogamy in general.5 As for Norton, can we really claim that what had been a successful sublimation is brought to ruin, or would it not be more accurate to suggest that his charitable acts were never more than an unstable symptomatic displacement in the first place, and, whatever actual “good” they might have done to their beneficiaries, were never free from unconscious conflicts? This question takes us to the heart of psychoanalytic theoretical disagreements about the very concept of sublimation, raising a problem that all students of the subject address. In trying to define the difference between sublimation and symptom, Didier Anzieu, for example, suggests that one could summarize Freud’s view in these terms: “repression is the illusion of a renunciation, and sublimation, renunciation without disillusionment” (19; my translation). The difference would be clear: a symptomatic displacement lets nothing go but only pretends to, whereas a true sublimation really does. From this optic, as Anzieu recognizes, sublimation then needs to be considered in the context of the problematics of mourning, as in the Kleinian clinic.6 And for Anzieu it follows that it is wholly

4

Many of these points have also been noted by Caffilene Allen, in her excellent “The World as Possibility: The Significance of Totem and Taboo in Ellison’s Invisible Man”. 5 Again, see Totem and Taboo for a long discussion of exogamy. 6 For a compelling account of the role of sublimation with regard to the psychic re-organization occasioned by the trauma of bereavement or mourning, see Valdrè, (55–57). As she notes, mourning, when not overcome by melancholia, tends to entail a substantive release of energies that seek new objects and investments, which sublimation can help to direct.

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necessary for a practitioner to differentiate between symptom and sublimation, because the former must absolutely be subjected to further analytic work in the course of the cure, while the latter can quite simply be left out of consideration. Laplanche, for his part, stresses how difficult establishing this difference actually is in practice, as what appear to be sublimations can be extremely useful vehicles for smuggling the symptomatic right back in. So if Anzieu concludes that once an analyst has determined that a patient’s new activity or interest is an “authentic” sublimation—one which will allow the analysand to realize previously inhibited possibilities and find a “non-neurotic mode of satisfaction”—the analyst must simply leave this sublimation “outside all interpretative work” (16; my translation), Laplanche casts doubt on the possibility of deciding the question so neatly. He draws his analogy from warfare—as the rules of war prohibit targeting hospitals and ambulances, these become ideal sites for an unlawful combatant to stash soldiers and arms. According to Laplanche, the Unconscious is just such a combatant, and if the analyst accepts that a certain aspect of the analysand’s life must be left out of the fray, it is certain that the Unconscious will take refuge there. For Laplanche, there is even the risk that sublimation can become an “anti-analytic” concept (Problématiques: 120; my translation), used to establish certain “high” ideals as safe from the critical powers of psychoanalysis, and re-establishing the forms of idealism which psychoanalysis sees its task as interrogating. Reasons such as this impel a widespread theoretical hesitancy to starkly differentiate sublimation from symptom, which is possibly pushed farthest in Lacanian thought, where, as Colette Soler suggests, “the last teachings of Lacan collapse the distinction between symptom and sublimation” (91) to subsume them both under the problematics of “jouissance” and the “sinthome.” But where, one might ask, does that leave us with regard to Ellison’s Norton? Perhaps, back in the place literary scholars should never leave more than provisionally: that is, the place where we remember that Norton sublimated nothing and had no symptoms, because he was not a real person at all. At which point the question becomes not what is the structure of Norton’s psyche, as it doesn’t exist, but what does the parable of Norton, as part of the fantasy of the entire novel, which we as readers choose to share, do to and for us? At this point, scholars of literature and narrative forms might do well to remember the not exclusive but nevertheless privileged role of stories and therefore fantasy in relation to artistic sublimation. Anna Freud’s article is tellingly titled “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,” and it traces the way in which a fantasy which is already a narrative is taken up by daydreams, which themselves are ultimately sublimated into “literature.” In other words, at the origin of this process is not only the “drive” but also the drive’s initial symbolization as a beating fantasy. Freud, in his study of Leonardo—his most extended consideration of the role of sublimation in the work of an individual artist—also takes a fantasy as his starting point. This is Leonardo’s childhood “memory” of a bird entering his cradle, opening his mouth with its tail, and repeatedly striking his lips with it (Freud, relying on an erroneous German translation, refers to the bird as a vulture; a proper translation of the Italian original would be “kite”). In a complex analysis whose details cannot be reproduced here, Freud first reads this screen memory in terms of fellatio, before extending this to the fantasy of the maternal phallus, and finally to the very young Leonardo’s relationship to his mother, which is at the core of the subsequent development of his libido, and therefore of his future as artist and scientist. Crucial for Freud is that if Leonardo will ultimately settle into a preponderantly homosexual subject position with regard to object choice, at the origin of this is an overly strong and precocious sexual fixation on his mother, which is solved through identification with her. This identification means she is now abandoned as libidinal object in favor of narcissistically based

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ones—Leonardo’s mature objects will be modeled on boys like himself, as he was when loved by her (now him). This original complex produces libidinal energy which according to Freud is subsequently expressed by two different fields of activity for Leonardo, which play very distinct roles in his life: the artistic and the scientific. As John Fletcher has pointed out in an excellent recent study of Freud’s Leonardo, these are in fact “rival sublimations” (182) which interfere and compete with each other, each calling on Leonardo’s energy to different degrees at different points in his life; most notably, for Freud scientific research especially seems to impinge on and diminish Leonardo’s undertakings as an artist at certain key moments. But if art and science end up rivaling each other in these ways, it is precisely because each of these activities is also unstable with regard to its status as a “sublimation” or a “symptom.” That is to say, in Freud’s story Leonardo’s activity as a painter becomes increasingly symptomatic over time, and prey to neurotic inhibitions and parapraxes (such as his habit of leaving works unfinished, or working so slowly that fresco painting becomes unviable), with the result that his energy shifts to scientific investigation, which is more perfectly sublimated, though Freud adds that even here these activities are marked by “the activity of unconscious instincts [Triebe]” with their characteristics of “insatiability, unyielding rigidity . . .” (SE 11:132). However, as Freud tells it, Leonardo’s greatest artistic achievements have not yet been produced at the moment in his adulthood when science seems to displace painting. What is striking is that Freud describes this new, even greater artistic production achieved by Leonardo in his fifties less as a new sublimation than as a “further regression” (SE 11: 133) which enables him to recover the primal, seductive mother, with her enigmatic smile, who reappears in the “Mona Lisa” and other paintings, and whose repression had earlier been crucial for Leonardo’s development. The story of Leonardo’s adult life seems to be as follows: it is only because artistic sublimation as such begins to fail for Leonardo that he undergoes a “process” like that of “regressions in neurotics” (SE 11: 132) which leads him back to a more primal sublimation, that pertaining to the sexual curiosity of his early childhood, which now expresses itself as scientific research. It is when this sublimation too begins to edge closer to the symptomatic that in a kind of felix culpa he regresses yet again, to the earliest maternal relationship, which allows him to produce his masterpieces. Yet the varying destinies of Leonardo’s drives, which both power and inhibit his activities as artist and scientist, all are unlocked by Freud via the key of the early screen memory, which encodes them all: it is “as if the key to all his achievements and misfortunes lay hidden in the childhood phantasy of the vulture” (SE 11: 135). In Freud’s analysis, at least, Leonardo doesn’t daydream. Rather than wistfully mull over his memory of the kite in idle thoughts and musings, Leonardo makes things and observes them intently with unmatched attention to detail (the act of sketching is the link between the artist and the scientist, and both Freud and Laplanche stress that Leonardo’s scientific work is chiefly as an observer and recorder, more than as a theorist), and incredible energy, which in no way impedes distraction, digression, and incompletion with regard to what he produces. If Leonardo himself posits this early memory as an explanation for his scientific interest in the flight of birds—something Freud is careful to note—its relationship to his artistic or scientific undertakings is no way active in his preconscious in a manner analogous to the beating fantasies in Anna Freud’s study. But Leonardo was not a writer. According to Freud, however, daydreaming is precisely what creative writers do. His short piece “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming” stands behind Anna Freud’s article almost as much as “A Child is Being Beaten” does (though Anna’s implicit argument differs from her father’s in important

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ways). For his part, Freud the elder establishes a sort of chain—from the written work to the daydream, and from the daydream to the night dream proper. If the night dream is the disguised fulfillment of a wish, the daydream too is a wish, though more transparently: as the daydream is conscious by its very nature it will not address and therefore disguise the heavily repressed material the way the night dream will, the latter taking advantage of the decreased vigilance of consciousness in sleep. On the contrary, for Freud, daydreams typically take the rather transparent form of pleasant musings over fantasy scenes of professional, narcissistic, and erotic success. That said, Freud stresses the deep homology between night dreams and daydreams, remarking that languages are right to use the word “dream” in both instances (SE 9: 147). This is not only due to their common character as wish-fulfilments, but also because in Freud’s view they both draw strongly on childhood wishes and desires. Yet adult fantasying, when it takes the form of creative writing, has another, different link to childhood: it is an extension of kinds of playing that are typical of childhood, and which are, like artistic activity, extremely serious. As Freud pithily puts it, “the opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real” (SE 9: 143). In some ways, then, the creative writer brings the “play” of childhood directly into the “real” world of adult life—what Anna Freud recognized with such acuity is that this can be seen as a parallel to how sublimation brings the energy of the “autistic” (Anna Freud’s word) drives into a space of social exchange in which their products are recognized as socially valuable. Indeed, while Freud never uses the word “sublimation” in this article, we do find the following proposition regarding what happens to the adult, inevitably forced to abandon childhood’s pleasurable play: “. . . hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate” (SE 9: 144). These terms, we should remember, are almost exactly those by which Anzieu attempts to delineate the difference between sublimation and symptom. For Freud in this article, of course, it is fantasy that takes the place of “play” as part of a series of substitutes and surrogates where, again, the difference between symptom and sublimation is not entirely clear. Early in the piece, for example, Freud insists that only “unsatisfied” people and never “happy” ones fantasize in the manner he has in mind (SE 9: 145), and he later states that if phantasies become “over-luxuriant” or too powerful they can lay the groundwork for neurosis or psychosis, as well as serving as “immediate mental precursors” of “distressing symptoms” (presumably hysterical) (SE 9: 147). If Freud does not use the term “sublimation” in this article, it is perhaps because the primal origin of fantasy he posits here is not drive, but “wish.” Is the implication that once drive has become “wish,” it is already “too late” for sublimation proper to take place? We should remember that despite Freud’s definitions of dreams and daydreams as “fulfilments” of wishes, that is not all they are: they are complex negotiations with them also. Freud’s article ends with the same question that occupied his daughter Anna—how does the “private” fantasy become the public work of literature? Freud’s answer, in some ways, can be seen as almost the almost opposite of his daughter’s, for rather than showing an advance from private to public and social, Freud comes close to suggesting that it is the other way around: the writer draws the readers into narcissistic fantasies of their own. Freud bases this argument explicitly on less “pretentious” popular literature, which is typically based around the figure of a single hero who is the center of interest, without whom nothing happens, and in whose absence or death the story literally cannot continue. The simple fact of the categorical indispensability of the hero to the narrative reveals for Freud what this hero represents: “His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and every story” (SE 9: 149).

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For Freud, the fiction of the Ego is therefore to some extent the privileged content of fiction itself— narrative fiction exists to be the vehicle of the Ego’s own fantasy of itself as master in its own house, and center of its own universe. This is true for Freud even in more sophisticated works, which preserve this function either through means of exclusive focalization through one central character, or by splitting the ego into “part-egos” which find themselves “personified” by different characters (SE 9: 149). This leads us to Freud’s final question: why do the egoistic fantasies of others, which leave us either indifferent or repelled in our daily lives, delight us so in literature? Part of the explanation of this for Freud is down to technique—the aesthetic qualities of effective writing which constitute an “incentive bonus or fore-pleasure” (SE 9: 152) which functions as a seductive lure into the work, and circumvents the defenses that might prohibit us from the deeper, more determining pleasure at reading’s core. And this is, Freud posits, the pleasure of enjoying “our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame” (SE 9: 152). If “sublimation” is all too often regarded as the simple transformation and raising up of what is base (a formulation Freud rejected when it dismissed the “base” as in some way inconsequential for the end product) Freud’s model of creative work in this essay is very different. And again, the crucial questions revolve around models of displacement, transformation, but also, and crucially, regression and repetition. In his last extended investigation of the problem of sublimation, Jean Laplanche defines it as no less than “the normal process of acculturation” (Entre seduction: 321)—that is, the manner by which the subject fully enters the human community. The full implications of Laplanche’s assertions cannot be understood without also examining his complex rethinking of the Freudian life and death drives in terms of a larger problematic of binding and unbinding, something we cannot do here.7 But in his situating of sublimation between the “symptom” on one hand and what he calls “inspiration” on the other, he is careful to note that the symptom, too, creates a “modification and partial desexualisation of aims”— by way of compromise, it does not do entirely dissimilar work (323). However, for those of us who are not practitioners and cannot ground our theories on firsthand analytic experience but rather on first-hand exposure to cultural constructions, it might be wise to base our thinking about acculturation and the “culture” it implies from the inside out. Rather than move backwards from the work to its subjective origins, situated in an empirical biological entity we are unlikely to know—a real person or persons—we might instead organize our thinking from the opposite perspective. Let us remember that cultural products are in some ways themselves the originary context in which any particular acculturation of any particular “artistic genius” can happen—something Laplanche’s theory of originary seduction, with its “enigmatic message” sent to the infant from the adult world also implies. From this perspective, “sublimation” is not only what makes a particular work of art possible from the perspective of an individual creator, but more interestingly, what the work of art will have made possible for the community from which the work emanates, and within which the creator creates.

7

Laplanche addresses this in many places, but one of his clearest short accounts is in his late article, “La soi-disant pulsion de mort : une pulsion sexuelle” (“The So-Called Death Drive: a Sexual drive”) found in Entre séduction et inspiration : l’homme. There he argues that the opposition between Eros and the “death drive” should not be seen in the biologizing terms Freud uses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but rather as two different structures of fantasy, corresponding to secondary processes of binding and primary “unbound” processes, respectively. Or as Laplanche puts it: “two principles: the principle of binding, which would regulate the sexual life drives, and the principle of unbinding, which is the authority for the sexual death drives” (190; my translation).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Caffilene. “The World as Possibility: The Significance of Totem and Taboo in Ellison’s Invisible Man”. Literature and Psychoanalysis 14 (1995): 1–17. Anzieu, Didier. “Préface,” in La Sublimation: Les sentiers de la création, Ed. by Didier Anzieu. Editions Tchou, 1979. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Penguin, 1965. Fletcher, John. Freud and the Scene of Trauma. Fordham UP, 2014. Freud, Anna. “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,” in The Writings of Anna Freud, vol.1, 1922–35. Hogarth Press, 1974. Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in The Penguin Freud Library, volume 14: Art and Literature. Penguin, 1985. Freud, Sigmund. “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,” in The Penguin Freud Library, volume 14: Art and Literature. Penguin, 1985. Freud, Sigmund. “Two Encyclopaedia Articles” in SE Volume 18. Laplanche, Jean. Entre séduction et inspiration: l’homme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Translated into English as Between Seduction and Inspiration: Man, Ed. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: The Unconscious in Translation, 2015. Laplanche, Jean. Problématiques III: La sublimation. Presses Universitaires de France, 2008. Soler, Colette. “The Paradoxes of the Symptom in Psychoanalysis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan, Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Valdrè, Rossella. On Sublimation: A Path to the Destiny of Desire, Theory, and Treatment. Trans. Flora Capostagno and Caroline Williamson. London: Karnac Books, 2014. Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. Anna Freud: A Biography (2nd Edition). New Haven: Yale UP, 2008.

FURTHER READING Anzieu, Didier (ed.). La Sublimation: Les sentiers de la création. Paris: Editions Tchou, 1979. Freud, Anna. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Routledge, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. Civilisation and its Discontents. SE 21. Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” SE 14. Goebel, Eckart. Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan. Continuum, 2014. Green, André. The Work of the Negative. Trans. Andrew Weller. Free Association Books, 1999. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Seminar 7. Routledge, 2007. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Routledge, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. Routledge, 1992.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Psychoanalysis’s China Freud, Lacan, and the Chinese Script ANDREA BACHNER

Sigmund Freud’s 1927 essay “Fetischismus” (“On Fetishism”) closes with an example from Chinese culture: The Chinese practice of footbinding, which Freud sees as a “variant (Variante), but also as an ethno-psychological parallel (völkerpsychologische Parallele) to fetishism” (GW 14: 316/SE 21: 157, translation slightly altered). Here, Freud compares the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then worshiping it in the form of a fetish to an individual psychopathology observed in his (European) patients: the sexual fixation on an object that, according to Freud, signifies as a stand-in for the penis. For Freud, fetishism staves off male anxiety about the reality of castration, disavowing the visual realization that women are castrated (have no penis) by symbolically endowing them with a phallic replacement, for instance the foot, that henceforth accrues erotic meaning for the male subject. When Freud compares individual (Western) foot fetishes to the social custom of another culture—officially prohibited since 1912 in China, but still practiced well into the twentieth century (see Ko: 1–6)—the structure of fetishism is doubled: the potential penile replacement, the foot, here becomes itself mutilated (symbolically castrated), thus, effectively, nullifying its alleged purpose. The bound foot (although resembling a penis more closely, perhaps?) no longer veils or displaces castration, but rather unveils and, indeed, repeats it. Freud somewhat lamely conjectures that “[it] seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated” and leaves it at that. Instead of elaborating more on this “variant,” he closes his essay with the equally famous and infuriating statement “that the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis, just as the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small penis, the clitoris” (GW 14: 316/SE 21: 157). Methodologically and rhetorically, the Chinese example in “On Fetishism” falls squarely within Freud’s standard operating procedure: Freud often selects his examples for their suggestive appeal rather than with a view to logical integration; he aggregates examples in a comparative thrust driven frequently by (superficial, rather than conceptual) similarity. “On Fetishism,” in fact, is unusually poor in examples, due, no doubt, to the sensitive nature of the cases (see GW 14: 311/SE 21: 152). Chinese footbinding thus also stands in (like a fetish?) for all the juicy details of sexual fetishes that Freud cannot (or will not) divulge in the essay. The slippage from a (Western) individual’s psychic life to the social custom of a whole culture, which might raise a contemporary reader’s concern, is unproblematic for Freud, as well as for most of his contemporaries. For Freud, non-Western cultures, such as the “primitive” cultures of Totem and Taboo or the pre-Jewish tribes 109

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of Moses and Monotheism, provide insights into individual psychic etiology precisely because of their supposedly less developed state, much as, for Freud, children provide privileged insights into the development of the human psyche. But while the Chinese reference in Freud’s “On Fetishism” is typical of much of his treatment of other cultures, it is not characteristic of the place of China within his work. In fact, Chinese culture by no means counts among Freud’s most important cultural repositories. Rather, it appears only in select places. With very few exceptions—such as Freud’s example of Chinese fetishism or other, minor references to China (see Blowers: 263 and 265–266)—Freud’s China references concern one area of Chinese culture in particular: the Chinese language. As Freud explains in the part dedicated to dreams in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen über die Psychoanalyse, 1916)—a return to his 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) intended now for a more general audience—, his interest in Chinese culture is strategic, based not on expert knowledge, but rather driven by the hope of finding similarities to his theories about dreams: “You must not suppose that I at all understand it (etwas von ihr verstehe); I only obtained some information about it (ich habe mich nur über sie instruiert) because I hoped to find analogies in it to the indefiniteness of dreams. Nor has my expectation been disappointed.” (GW 11: 236/SE 15: 230). Clearly, we must take Freud’s knowledge about the Chinese language and his motives concerning its use with more than just a grain of salt. In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams references to the Chinese language remain mainly latent. We can glimpse them as echoes in the text, especially given the cultural context: the interest in nonEuropean writing systems at the time, especially in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters that were then frequently read as ideographs, as overwhelmingly visual (or even pictorial) scripts, much as their phonetic components were downplayed. Such “old” writing systems that retained their aura of incomprehensibility and mystery could become ciphers themselves for the difficult, archeological work of psychoanalytical dream analysis—despite the fact that Chinese characters were never mysterious to a native Chinese reader and that Egyptian hieroglyphs had been deciphered after Jean-François Champollion’s discovery of the phonetic nature of the script in 1882. Freud rejects the idea that we can understand dreams as a type of “cryptography” (“Geheimschrift”) (GW 2: 101/SE 4: 97) and decipher it according to a key in which we can map one symbol onto one particular meaning. Instead, Freud represents the relationship between the dream-thoughts, the hidden, unconscious content of the dream (Traumgedanke), and the manifest dream-content (Trauminhalt) that replaces it as that of “original” and “translation” (“Übersetzung”), as “two different languages,” or rather, as a “transcript” (“Übertragung”) into “another mode of expression” (“andere Ausdrucksweise”) (GW 2: 283/SE 4: 277). But the “language” of dreams uses images rather than words, much like a “pictographic script” (“Bilderschrift”) (GW 2: 283/SE 4: 277). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explains this with the help of the rebus or picture-puzzle (“Rebus” or “Bilderrätsel”): its components are not to be understood as images. Instead, each has to be replaced by a word, or a syllable, or its modification for the whole to make sense. And Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters, understood as linguistic systems that combine a multitude of elements (often read as image-like) in complex ways provided a fitting analogy here. One that Freud would make explicit with regard to Egyptian hieroglyphs in a later, related text, “The Claim of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest” (Das Interesse an der Psychoanalyse, 1913): “we shall see that it is even more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with a language. In fact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglyphs” (GW 8: 404/SE 15: 177).

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In the Lectures, the reference to the Chinese script becomes more specific and a little more elaborated. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud had mentioned one trait of Chinese of particular interest for the analysis of dreams, namely the fact that dream-symbols “frequently have more than one or even several meanings, and, as with Chinese script, the correct interpretation can only be arrived at on each occasion from the context” (GW 2: 362/SE 5: 357). In the Lectures, Freud builds on this mention, honing in on two connected characteristics that make the Chinese language useful as a vehicle for understanding the dreamwork: its grammatical (as well as sonic) indeterminacy and thus its material character, which also ensures its complete fungibility: It is even more interesting from the point of view of our comparison to learn that this language has practically no grammar. It is impossible to tell of any of the monosyllabic words whether it is a noun or a verb or an adjective; and there are no verbal inflections by which one could recognize gender, number, termination, tense or mood. Thus the language consists, one might say, solely of the raw material (Rohmaterial), just as our thought-language is resolved by the dream-work into its raw material, and any expression of relations is omitted. In Chinese the decision in all cases of indefiniteness is left to the hearer’s understanding and this is guided by the context. — GW 11: 237/SE 15: 231 Here, Freud subscribes to the Western prejudice that Chinese has no grammar, since it does not conjugate verbs or decline nouns like Indo-European languages. Consequently, for Freud Chinese words (assuming that each Chinese character corresponds to a word, which is mostly true for classical Chinese, but not for the Chinese generally used when Freud was writing this), were building blocks that could flexibly take on different functions precisely because they themselves were (grammatically) unmarked and unmodified. Chinese, then, is seen as being like dreams because of the visual qualities of its script, because of its linguistic materiality, akin to the thing-character of images and words within dreams, and because meaning-making depends largely on context, much as the psychoanalyst strives to understand dreams with and through other information provided by the analysand. Apart from illustrating these different aspects of the dreamwork, Chinese also probably resonated with Freud’s audience, investing dreams (and their analysis) with the mantle of scientific authority. If dreams are like a language, psychoanalysis, like linguistics, is a science. At the same time, this keeps some of the aura of otherness and mystery attached to dreams (and the psyche) intact: Chinese is a language, but it also represents a foreign, inscrutable culture. Freud’s process of “instructing himself ” about the Chinese language, as cited above, turns out to have consisted in a rather cursory overview. In 1929, Zhang Shizhao ㄐ༛䠇, the famous Chinese intellectual, editor, educator, and politician—Zhang had been a radical reformer and revolutionary in the 1910s but had turned against the rejection of traditional Chinese culture and the embrace of Western knowledge championed by many of his contemporary intellectuals in the 1920s—who was then traveling in Germany, contacted Freud by letter. In his answer letter, Freud disclosed the source of his references to the Chinese language in the Lectures: the subsection on language in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry about “China.” And in fact, the entry puts particular emphasis on some of the traits of Chinese that are taken up by Freud. From Freud’s answer (Zhang’s letter to Freud has not been found), preserved and published by his correspondent, we can assume that Zhang inquired about Freud’s information about the Chinese language as well as about opportunities

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for intellectual dialogue and collaboration. Freud’s answer, although brief, sounds encouraging, seeing opportunities for collaboration in Zhang’s dissemination of psychoanalytical knowledge in China and inviting him to contribute articles to Freud’s journal Imago “in which you would judge against your own language (am material Ihrer Sprache messen) our conjectures about the nature of archaic modes of expression” (cited in Blowers: 264). While Freud invites Zhang to use his cultural knowledge to test Freud’s conjectures (responding, potentially, to a critique voiced in Zhang’s letter), the space sketched for the intervention of his Chinese interlocutor also strikes me as quite narrow: The article is imagined as a response to Freud on the particular subject of “archaic forms of expression” (reiterating the interest in China’s past, not present) and limits Zhang to the position of a native informer rather than treating him as a fellow intellectual able to hold forth on a freely chosen topic related to psychoanalysis from a position of authority and knowledge. Freud’s Chinese correspondent did translate Freud’s autobiography into Chinese; but he never published an article in Imago. Most likely, circumstances did not permit him to do so. But we could also conjecture that the invitation with its biased expectations and scripted scope did not hold much appeal either. In spite of this brief personal connection by correspondence, Freud’s China avatars were, for the most part, references to a cultural tradition of the past. Freud’s analogies of the dreamwork and the Chinese language were based on classical Chinese (and of biased views of classical Chinese at that), at a time when the Chinese language itself was undergoing profound changes. “On Fetishism” comes up with an example of a Chinese custom on its way out at a time when Chinese intellectuals were starting to read, translate, and introduce Freud’s work to a Chinese audience, first in essays on psychoanalysis from the early 1920s onward, then in translations of Freud’s work itself, for instance Gao Juefu’s 儈㿹ᮧ translations of Freud’s Lectures in the 1930s (see Wang Ning: 4–7) or that of Freud’s autobiography by his Chinese correspondent Zhang Shizhao. The focus on another culture’s past for the West’s delectation is a typical Orientalist phenomenon, one, no doubt, underlined by widely accepted views at the time that China was a timeless (read also: stagnant) culture. In spite of its pervasiveness, this systemic temporal gap in Western reflections on other cultures still bears pointing out. At a time when the West framed cultures such as that of China as insufficiently modern, it was actually often the West that had not cared to bring its own knowledge about other parts of the world up to date. But I am not dwelling on Freud’s (and psychoanalysis’s) use of China here to conclude yet again that Freud (and the West) got it wrong. That is, after all, as easy to prove as it is unproductive. I am also not merely interested in showing how Freud’s errors contribute to a pattern of Western bias, although Freud is a particularly irksome example of not only not getting it (quite) right, but of being unwaveringly convinced of getting it right, relying only on his intellect and on a rather cursory study of the subject. So much so that he assumed that a Chinese contribution to Imago would only ever confirm what he himself had assumed to be true about the Chinese language, even if that assumption rested on the rather flimsy basis of one encyclopedia article about China. But getting it right or wrong is not entirely the point here—not for Freud and not for my chapter. Or, at the very least, we must think more in depth about the form (and not only the content) of Freud’s China. After all, it is clear that Freud was not primarily concerned with getting the facts right, but rather with finding material that would help him advance his theories in a convincing and compelling manner. Let us take a closer look at the form of Freud’s most important references to Chinese cultures as discussed in this chapter so far: Whereas, for Freud, footbinding was a “variant” of fetishism—

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albeit one that expressed not an individual’s psychopathology, but the social psychology of a whole culture, and thus a “parallel”—for Freud’s work on dreams the Chinese language has the status of an analogy. Footbinding belongs to the category of fetishism. As one example among others even in its variation it forms part of the whole and bolsters it. In contrast, the Chinese language and the “language” of dreams do not belong to the same category. Chinese is merely a vehicle for understanding, and, more importantly, for explaining the dreamwork. However, despite the difference in form and logic, in the end, both references serve a similar purpose: vehicles for illustrating Freud’s theories as well as for endowing these theories with a wider scope and significance. As typical for Freud, similarity serves as cement. Chinese footbinding appears in “On Fetishism” because it erotically invests the female foot, thus making it comparable to individual foot fetishes; the Chinese language appears in Freud’s reflections on dreams because some of its traits resemble certain features of the dream. Of course, the similarity at work here depends on the eyes of the beholder or the purpose of the theorist. Freud never claims expertise on China. in fact, in a typical preemptive gesture, he prefaces his Chinese reference in the Lectures by telling us exactly that. China is not an object, but primarily a medium for Freud. Should we fault Freud here, then, not for getting the facts wrong, but rather for converting Chinese culture into an instrument, a mere means to an end? In fact, these references are not merely instrumental, though. Rather, they implicitly extend the scope of Freud’s theories beyond his own cultural context. For instance, to treat Chinese footbinding as a “variant” of fetishism as analyzed by Freud implies a wider (universal) projection and applicability of the concept. And while we might ask what the fact that, for Freud, the Chinese language works (in some respects) like the “language” of dreams might mean for analyzing the dreams of Chinese speakers, nowhere does Freud indicate that his analogy can be reversed in such a way: The Chinese analogy is always subsumed under the theorem, extending, rather than restricting the applicability of the theories it illustrates. Freud’s China functions much like a fetish: it signifies not as itself but as a stand-in for something else (such as fetishism or the dream “language”). Reading it as a fetish also means weakening the status and applicability of Freud’s theories. If we want to understand the significance of Freud’s references to China fully, we must pay attention at different levels: We must study the concrete content, form, and use of these references themselves. In addition, we must also understand them comparatively to grasp Freud’s strategic use of other cultures more generally and to scrutinize the specific status of Chinese culture. But we also must give thought to the model character of Freud for the legacy of psychoanalytical work and its use of other cultural traditions. So far, my chapter has mainly attended to the first level: the form and function of Freud’s China references. While the scope of this essay does not allow me to fully develop the second, comparative perspective, I would like to offer some overall thoughts here. In Freud and the Non-European, Edward Said sums up Freud’s use of other cultures: “Like most of his contemporaries, Freud knew that other, noteworthy cultures existed and deserved recognition. He referred to those of India and China, for instance, but only in passing and only when, say, the practice of dream interpretation there might be of comparative interest to the European investigator of the subject.” (Said: 14). The same goes for so-called primitive cultures, where “Freud’s ethnographic curiosity hardly goes beyond looking at and citing aspects of these cultures (sometimes with a numbing repetitiveness) as supporting evidence for his [own] argument” (15). This sounds familiar. And indeed, as we have seen, much of the form and use of references to China in Freud’s work resonates with those of references from other cultures, even though Freud’s knowledge about

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China was rather more limited than that about other cultures. But most importantly, Freud’s China is, above all, a textual space. Of course, most of Freud’s knowledge about other cultures was via texts—and those texts were produced, for the most part, by other Western writers and intellectuals. But Freud’s China is mainly equivalent to the Chinese language, especially to its writing system. This emphasis on textuality becomes more marked when we look at the third level: the question of a Freudian legacy. One of the most interesting cases here—both for his self-declared continuation of Freud’s work and his knowledge of Chinese—is Jacques Lacan. Lacan not only continues the legacy of Freud’s work as such. He also treads in Freud’s “Chinese” footsteps. In the 1953 essay “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (“Fonction et champs de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse”), Lacan calls for a return to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, at the same time making Freud’s analogy of the dream language with Chinese characters (and Egyptian hieroglyphs) explicit: We must thus take up Freud’s work again starting with the Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] to remind ourselves that a dream has the structure of a sentence or, rather, to keep to the letter (à la lettre) of the work, of a rebus—that is, of a form of writing (écriture), of which children’s dreams are supposed to represent the primordial ideography, and which reproduces, in adults’ dreams, the simultaneously phonetic and symbolic use of signifying elements found in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and in the characters still used in China. — E: 267/221 While Lacan here invokes Freud, he formulates an analogy with the help of the Chinese script and Egyptian hieroglyphs that does not appear in Freud’s text at the passage alluded to (that on the rebus) nor in this form. And Lacan introduces additional nuance by positing a “primordial ideography” of the child that develops into an adult’s phonetic and symbolic use of signifying elements. Lacan here implicitly suggests a parallel between the development of a language system and that of the individual: The Chinese script and hieroglyphs are complex signifying systems, although they might have developed from earlier pictographic and ideographic forms. Lacan’s more nuanced understanding of the Chinese script here, as well as his reference to the Chinese system of divination elsewhere in the same essay (see also Serrano: 98–102), coincides with a more sustained interest in the Chinese language and culture. Rather than, as Freud, taking his information from a very limited set of sources, Lacan studied Chinese and obtained a degree from the School of Oriental Languages (Ecoles des langues orientales) during the Nazi occupation of France (see Roudinesco 1990: 147). In the late 1960s, Lacan’s investment in Chinese resurfaced, due, no doubt, to the interest of French intellectuals at the time in Mao’s China. François Cheng, a French writer and intellectual of Chinese origin, became one of Lacan’s main interlocutors and teachers regarding Chinese culture (see Cheng 1991 and 2000). But whereas many of Lacan’s fellow intellectuals—such as Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes—tried to reconcile their interest in China’s past and its Maoist present (often rather precariously, for instance, in Kristeva’s Of Chinese Women [Des chinoises, 1974]), Lacan focused on the study of traditional Chinese philosophy, especially Confucian and Daoist texts. As recounted by Roudinesco, when Lacan met Chinese government representatives during an arranged dinner in Paris, Lacan started to wax eloquent about Confucianism (complete with citations in Chinese), rather than quoting Mao-Zedongthought (Roudinesco 1993: 458). When China was trying to divest itself of centuries’ worth of

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knowledge and culture to embark upon the future, Lacan attempted to connect to Chinese culture precisely through a knowledge of its past achievements. Not surprisingly, Lacan ended up not joining fellow intellectuals Kristeva, Barthes, and others (more aligned with contemporary politics) on their famous trip to China in 1974, right during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. References to Chinese language and culture appear throughout all of Lacan’s work (see Flecher), with such references thickening in the late 1960s (when Lacan started to study with Cheng) and early 1970s. While Lacan’s use of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (delivered 1964) has received the most attention in Lacan criticism— especially because of Slavoj Žižek’s reading in The Sublime Object of Ideology—I will focus on Lacan’s Seminar XVIII (delivered in 1971) instead. This also merits a reflection as it speaks to contemporary politics around psychonanalysis’s China. While some of the lack of attention is no doubt due to the delayed French publications and English translations of the seminars in which Lacan’s Chinese references become pervasive (for instance, Seminar XVIII was published in French in 2007 and no official English translation has been released as I am writing this in 2021). But these references are also, no doubt, more daunting to a reader unfamiliar with the Chinese language and culture. Lacan’s Seminar XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, delivered in 1971, is all about references to Chinese culture, especially Confucian philosophy, especially to Mencius (Mengzi ᆏᆀ). In fact, these references become so pervasive that my discussion here is a somewhat selective showcasing rather than an exhaustive discussion. Seminar XVIII shows Jacques Lacan’s expertise of the Chinese language and culture at its (most complex) best as Lacan reflects on the links between the unconscious, language, and pleasure (jouissance) with the help of Chinese characters. Much as his use of mathematical equations, schemata, and graphs in other seminars, these were written on the board during his lectures, and, as part of another linguistic system and cultural tradition, must have been enigmatic to most of his listeners. Consequently, they add complexity to Lacan’s reflections instead of providing (as is the case for Freud’s Chinese references) convenient illustrations. The title of Seminar XVIII, Of a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance—a seminar dedicated to exploring the status of language and writing—foregrounds the question of semblance, of appearance and resemblance, in signification. In tune with Lacan’s theory, the semblant of the title is no more than a lure: discourse for Lacan is not of the order of semblance, and Lacan’s own discourse is about non-(re)semblance. If, as Lacan proposes, “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1968: 333), then signification is inevitably a process of indirection, if not misdirection. Much as “I” is never there where the “I” says “I,” the referent in language never is the “real” referent. Or, in other words, the referent is “real” (in the Lacanian sense of the word) precisely in that language cannot directly express it. Throughout Lacan’s discussion, Chinese signs become prime examples of the indirection of referentiality. For example, Lacan highlights the double meaning of the character “⛪” (wei) as it is used in classical Chinese both as “to act” and as a conjunction that signals a metaphor, “like” or “as.” “⛪” thus becomes the perfect expression of the nonreferential character of language. “⛪” (meaning either “to act” or “like”) introduces difference precisely at a point of similarity, that of the likeness of a comparison or metaphor that supposedly creates an equation and equivalence between two terms. By the same token, Lacan ridicules another myth of similarity: the pictographic myth that wants to see in Chinese characters shorthand pictures of their referents, driven by a mimetic fantasy of language (at least of the other language), namely that there is a motivated rather than

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arbitrary relation between referent, signified, and signifier. For his critique, Lacan draws on theories that read Chinese writing as a system with direct links between the referent and the written signifier, both from the West and from China. For instance, he refers to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thoughts on the Chinese language, who sought in Chinese characters a model for a universal philosophical sign system, with universal validity guaranteed by a one-on-one correlation between signs and referents (see Bachner 2013), as well as to Xu Shen’s 䁡᝾ Explanation of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuowen jiezi 䃚᮷䀓ᆇ), an early Chinese dictionary that subscribes partially to a pictographic idea of Chinese characters. This detailed attention to both European and Chinese traditions sets Lacan apart from many of his contemporaries with a marked interest in the Chinese script, for instance from Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie, 1967) or Julia Kristeva’s La traversée des signes (1975, “Crossing Signs”). Lacan illustrates the absurdity of positing a resemblance between (some) Chinese characters and their reference with the help of the Chinese character “Ӫ” (ren), the character for “man” or “human being,” discrediting any pictographic reading as hallucinatory. First, Lacan playfully points out his own association when looking at the character: “That is evidently a man for you. What is represented there? How is this the image of a man? There are the head and the legs. Fine, and why not? There are always dreamers. Me, I rather see it as a crotch. Why not?” (S18: 87, my translation). Then, by referring to the different forms of the character “Ӫ” throughout its history, Lacan further underscores the relativity and fallacy of a mimetic reading. While the published text edited by Jacques-Alain Miller does not provide detailed information about how Lacan illustrated this on the board, we can conjecture from the argument in the text that he must have written different earlier (for instance seal script) forms of this character on the board, pointing to their differences. Taking a character that really emerged as a pictograph— one of only a small number of all Chinese characters to be generated from abstracted images of their referents—to disclaim the connection between referent and written signifier (in this case probably erroneously, or rather, facetiously) shows the great lengths to which Lacan goes in his crusade against (re)semblance. This rejection of resemblance and motivation in language (the Chinese language, any language, really), is key for Lacan because of the way he thinks the structure of language and of the unconscious together. Evidence of a linguistic structure stabilized by resemblance, instead of one based on difference and signifying instability, would also destabilize the structure of a subject characterized by misrecognition and lack. The constant fixation on Chinese characters in the guise of sexual references (for instance also in Lacan’s tongue-in-cheek reading of “Ӫ”) reveals another use to which Chinese characters are put here. On the one hand, for Lacan, the Chinese script has to function like any language, hinging on difference, not mimetic likeness. On the other, however, Lacan succumbs to the temptation of erecting a specific Chinese character, “䲭” yang, the masculine principle of the yin-yang couple, into a master-signifier of sorts. “䲭” is the first Chinese character to appear in Seminar XVIII. It serves Lacan as “the example for referents that cannot be found” (46). As a written sign, “䲭” thus stands in for an absence, an absent reference. But in the case of “䲭,” the absence it expresses is that of the symbolic Phallus that neither the penis as organ nor “䲭” can sufficiently make present. Signification is predicated upon misdirection, much as, for Lacan, there is no sexual relation. For signification as well as for sexuality the desired other (the referent, the object a, the Phallus, woman) is always deferred, never there where we seek it. This constant delay is not an accident, but rather the necessary basis of desire, as well as of signification. Here, Lacan rewrites Freud by making fetishism the norm (rather than simply an individual, psychopathological exception)—after all,

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both with regard to signification and sexuality we see, use, and take pleasure from what is not quite there, from what is simply a stand-in, but also, ultimately from the distance between this fetish and the supposed real that it replaces. What does this mean for Lacan’s use of Chinese writing here? In Seminar XVIII, Chinese characters help express the fetish-like structure of signification. And yet, Chinese characters in general, as well as specific ones (such as “䲭” and “Ӫ”) are precisely the signs best suited to signify lack. Here the other sign—much like, in other instances, mathematical graphs or word play—emerges as a master-signifier. And as such it takes on the form of a fetish: at once a prime example of the non-semblance of signification and the embodiment of the fetish of signification (see Bachner 2014: 30–33). For Lacan, Chinese writing is only one way among many others of rethinking signification and reference in psychoanalytical theory. And yet, Chinese writing is not only one of many equivalent and thus interchangeable examples. Instead, Lacan marks its specificity—for instance by requiring his audience to come face to face with Chinese characters themselves and understand some of their functioning. He also reflects on the logic of difference at work when Western thinkers use Asian cultures and their languages and scripts strategically, for instance by drawing on Leibniz in Seminar XVIII, or by critiquing the rather stereotypical reflections on Japan that Roland Barthes proffered in Empire of Signs (L’émpire des signes, 1970): In his introduction to the Japanese edition of the Ecrits (1972), Lacan promises his Japanese readers that he will not contribute to their annoyance by passing on Barthes’s work, unless to a reader in the know (suggesting someone who recognizes its tendentious presentation of Japan). Lacan here treats the translation of his work into Japanese not as a given (in contrast to Freud expecting his work to circulate in China), but instead has a rather guarded view of Japan’s need for Lacanian thought. Extending a comment in another essay, “Lituraterre” (1971b: 19), Lacan here comments on the place of Chinese in the Japanese language: both in the form of Kanji, an importation and adaptation of the Chinese script, and as one possibility for voicing characters (onyomi). In fact, for Lacan, when the Japanese speak, read, and write their language, the gap in signification that is so fundamental to Lacanian thought already occurs visibly in the form of the other language’s (Chinese) presence in one’s own language: “Not everyone has the good fortune of speaking Chinese in his language [. . .], nor above all—a stronger point—of having taken a writing system (écriture) into their language so foreign (si étrangère) that this renders tangible at each instant the distance of thought, that is, of the unconscious, from speech.” (1971a: 498). What is important for Lacan here is a layered, nuanced difference: not the absolute difference of the cultural other to the European self, but rather the alterity at the heart of one specific linguistic tradition, that of Japan. Of course, Lacan reads the structure of the Japanese language and script through the lens of his theory. But the role of Japanese here is not that of an analogy. Japanese is not merely a vehicle for explaining the structure of the unconscious. Instead, Lacan conjectures that the universal distance between thought and utterance manifests differently in different contexts and languages. This makes Japanese not a variant (in contrast to Freud’s claim of Chinese footbinding’s relation to fetishism). Instead, it might mean that Japanese culture does not need Lacanian thought. Paradoxically, this does not question the validity of Lacan’s theory in the least. Instead, it proves it in another form as the Japanese language (through Lacan’s eyes) activates (not within psychoanalytical theory, but within one culture’s everyday language) Lacan’s findings. Even in this form, Lacan’s China still has the structure of a fetish: multiply (and fruitfully) displaced from one linguistic tradition and discipline to another, most useful there where it is also most problematic or elusive. *

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In this entry, I have sketched some approaches to what I have called psychoanalysis’s China. I analyzed the ways in which two key psychoanalytical thinkers, Freud and Lacan, have used references to Chinese culture in their works. “China” in the context of this chapter refers less to a real referent than to the shape it assumes to become a medium for psychoanalysis. Both in my own reflections and in those by Freud and Lacan analyzed here “China” presents a trope, a reference that is multiply refracted as it moves from text to text. The rich history of the reception and practice of psychoanalysis in China (see Zhang), as well as the possibility of thinking psychoanalysis differently through its Chinese history of practice (see the contributions to the 2021 special issue of Psychoanalysis and History “Sinopsychoanalysis”) lie outside of the scope of this chapter. But is this “China,” as I have suggested in slightly different ways for both Freud and Lacan, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a fetish? And, more importantly, what does it mean to treat psychoanalysis’s China as if it had the structure of a fetish? Firstly, treating psychoanalysis’s China as a fetish makes manifest that the “China” there is not the object it replaces. Instead, this “China” is only a very limited part of all the ideas and texts that make up China. Secondly, the structure of the fetish underlines its productivity: Much as the female foot is not the penis, psychoanalysis’s China is not China. And yet, it does important work (for a male subject in overcoming castration anxiety, for psychoanalysis in imagining itself as an authoritative, world-open discipline). Focusing on what “China” does for psychoanalysis does not mean to withhold a critique of its Orientalist politics. But it does mean to hold this side by side with the insights produced by psychoanalysis with the help of that “China.” After all, calling psychoanalysis’s China a fetish only works whenever psychoanalysis’s concepts (such as that of the fetish) are accepted as useful to us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bachner, Andrea. Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture. Columbia UP, 2014. Bachner, Andrea. “What Original? Origin Stories, Script Teratologies, and Leibniz’s Hexagrammatology.” Comparative Literature 65.1 (Winter 2013): 26–35. Blowers, G. H. “Freud’s China Connection.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 14.4 (1993): 263–273. Cheng, François. “Le docteur Lacan au quotidien.” L’Âne 48 (Dec. 1991). http://www.lacanchine.com/L_ Cheng-Lacan3.html (accessed July 22, 2021). Cheng, François. “Lacan et la pensée chinoise.” Lacan, l’écrit, l’image. Flammarion, 2000. 135–153. “China.” Encyclopedia Britannica (1911). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_ Britannica/China (accessed July 21, 2021). Flecher, Guy. “Références et allusions de Lacan au monde chinois.” http://www.lacanchine.com/L_ References_0.html (accessed July 22, 2021). Ko, Dorothy. Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. U of California P, 2005. Lacan, Jacques. “Fonction et champs de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse.” Écrits. 237–321; “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, 197–268. Lacan, Jacques. “Avis au lecteur japonais” (1971a). Autres Écrits. Seuil, 2001. 497–499. Lacan, Jacques. “Lituraterre” (1971b). Autres écrits. 11–20. Lacan, Jacques. “La méprise du sujet supposé savoir ” (1968). Autres écrits. 329–339. Lacan, Jacques. Séminaire XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Seuil, 2007. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée. Fayard, 1993. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925–1985. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. U of Chicago P, 1990. Serrano, Richard. “Lacan’s Oriental Language of the Unconscious.” SubStance 84 (1997): 90–106.

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Said, Edward W. Freud and the Non-European. New York and London: Verso, 2003. “Sinopsychoanalysis.” Special Issue of Psychoanalysis and History 23.2 (2021). Wang Ning. “Freudianism and Twentieth-Century Literature.” The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China. Ed. Tao Jiang and Philip J. Ivanhoe. Routledge, 2013. 3–23.

FURTHER READING Flecher, Guy. “Lacan et le monde chinois.” http://www.lacanchine.com/Accueil.html Jiang Tao and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds. The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China. Routledge: 2013. “Sinopsychoanalysis.” Special Issue of Psychoanalysis and History 23.2 (2021). Zhang Jingyuan. “Psychoanalysis.” The Making of the Human Sciences in China: Historical and Conceptual Foundations. Ed. Howard Chiang. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 510–531.

PART TWO

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CHAPTER NINE

The First Gift Freud, David Copperfield, and the Sisters Bernays PETER L. RUDNYTSKY

SCENES FROM A COURTSHIP On June 11, 1882, nine days after their first conversation and six days before they became secretly engaged, Martha Bernays wrote her first letter to Sigmund Freud. In it she described how he had made her at once “embarrassed, surprised, and immensely delighted” by having given her “such a rich, splendid, and yet meaningful gift” (Fichtner et al., Sei mein: 83) of Charles Dickens’ novel, David Copperfield, with illustrations by Frederick Barnard, published ten years earlier by Chapman and Hall in London. This treasure, now in the possession of the Freud Museum in Vienna, is signed “Martha B” and “1882” on the upper-right corner of the title page and bears an inscription in German to Anton Kris: “My dear Tony, I am sending you this book, which I received as my first gift from my fiancé at the time, London, 1 Sept. 1947” (84). Not only does David Copperfield set the stage for the more than 1,500 letters that Freud and Martha exchanged during their four-and-a-quarter-year engagement, but no fewer than twenty references to it appear in the four (out of a projected five) published volumes of their correspondence. Clearly, David Copperfield was a work with deep personal meaning for Freud. Ernest Jones described the novel as Freud’s “favorite Dickens” (174), and he quotes Freud’s comparison of his father to the character of Micawber, “always hopefully expecting something to turn up” (2). On August 5, 1882, Freud tells his betrothed how thoughts of her keep distracting him from his scientific work: “it happens to me just as it does to poor Mr. Dick with King Charles I in Dickens’ Copperfield” (Fichtner et al., Sei mein: 254). Not only were both Freud and David Copperfield born in a caul—an omen of good fortune associated in the novel specifically with protection from drowning—but just as Jacob Freud was forty when he married the not-yet-twenty-year-old Amalia Nathansohn, so, too, David imparts that his late father “was double my mother’s age when he married” (ch. 1: 15). Like much else that we have previously understood about Freud, however, his choice of a first gift for his future wife appears in a very different light once we have become persuaded that, eighteen years later, he entered into a clandestine love affair with her younger sister, Minna Bernays.1 Knowing how Freud’s marriage to Martha turned out, things that once seemed innocent 1 I set forth what I believe to be the overwhelming evidence for Freud’s affair in a work in progress, but in the meantime see the cogent synthesis in chapters 31 and 32 of Crews.

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become equivocal and even ominous. In admitting that she initially had no idea that he was interested in her romantically, Martha recounted to Sigmund on July 6 how she had told her sister with surprise: “Only think, he asked me about this and that; what do you say to that, child?. How kind that the Doctor takes such an interest in us” (Fichtner et al., Sei mein: 156).2 Had Freud and Minna never transgressed the bounds of propriety, Martha’s words would strike us as merely lighthearted self-deprecation. But since we now know that Freud and Minna later traveled together as husband and wife, and in all likelihood not only consummated their illicit passion but even conceived a child together, Martha’s remark takes on an oracular quality and intimates that Freud was from the beginning attracted not only to one but to both of the sisters Bernays. By the same token, Freud’s choice of David Copperfield as his first gift to Martha can be seen retrospectively to have been unconsciously motivated and an ironic prophecy of future events. It is noteworthy that Dickens’ Bildungsroman is structured by a double consciousness analogous to that which now informs our comprehension of Freud’s marital history. On the one hand, within the fictional frame of the novel, David both lives and tells the story of his life without knowing what the future will bring; but, on the other, the novel purports to be an autobiography written by the David Copperfield who has become a famous author and is recounting his “personal history” with an awareness of how everything has turned out. This double perspective corresponds to the contrast between the experience of a first-time reader who avidly turns the pages to see what will befall David next and that of someone rereading the novel who can savor all the ironies and foreshadowings. For a study of Freud’s relationships to Martha and Minna Bernays, it cannot be inconsequential that the central irony is David Copperfield’s belated realization that the infatuation that led to his marriage to Dora Spenlow was a catastrophic error and that the true love of his life was the initially overlooked sister-figure who became his second wife, Agnes Wickfield. Freud’s courtship of Martha Bernays strikingly parallels David’s mooning over Dora. No sooner does David meet the daughter of the attorney to whom he has been articled than he is “swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant” (ch. 26: 397). “She was a Fairy, a Sylph,” he exults. “I was wandering in a garden of Eden all the while, with Dora” (400). As Jones reports, Freud’s “first compliment” to Martha was “to liken her to the fairy princess from whose lips fell roses and petals” (103). On August 14, 1882, after having visited Martha in Wandsbek, a suburb of Hamburg, Freud ecstatically compared a walk they had taken together to an earlier one in Vienna on which they were accompanied by his sisters and her mother: “Oh, yes, the Prater is a paradise, only the Wandsbek wood is still more beautiful, because we were alone there like Adam and Eve” (Fichtner et al., Sei mein: 282). Freud and Martha’s concealment of their engagement from her mother finds a precedent in David and Dora’s resolution “to keep our secret from Mr. Spenlow” (ch. 33: 494). Both affianced men corresponded with their sweethearts through intermediaries; and David, like Freud, chose a book as his first gift—though, to be sure, it was not a novel but a cookbook. These multiple correspondences led Samuel Rosenberg to propose that Freud’s gift of David Copperfield to his fiancée shows him to be caught up in a “reenactment syndrome” (11). In other words, Freud’s choice of a gift grows out of an identification with Dickens’ hero, and in his courtship of Martha Freud lives out crucial aspects of David Copperfield’s experience. But like Martha’s

2 Due to a misinterpretation by Jones (104), it has traditionally been believed that the second sentence was spoken by Minna, but the editors of the Brautbriefe make it clear that the entire utterance is Martha’s.

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comment to Minna about Freud’s kindness in taking an interest in both of them, Freud’s alighting on David Copperfield as the symbolic expression of his love for his future bride foreshadows his subsequent disillusionment with Martha and his replacement of her in his affections with her sister. In view of how closely Freud’s romantic history recapitulates David’s, it becomes especially poignant that Martha should have written (quoting from Dickens in English) in a letter of October 1882, “I want to be an Agnes to you and not a Dora, not a ‘child-wife’ ” (Fichtner et al., Sei mein: 382). For an understanding of Freud’s character, it is vital to appreciate how unstable and insecure he was during the years of his engagement to Martha Bernays, which coincided with his most intense personal and professional involvement with cocaine. Freud’s penchant for falling head over heels in love was, however, first evinced in the summer of 1872 when, as a sixteen-year-old, he revisited his birthplace of Freiberg and stayed in the home of a family friend, the prosperous textile manufacturer Ignaz Fluss, and became smitten with his twelve-year-old daughter Gisela (as well as her mother Eleonore). Three years later, following his return from a trip to Manchester, where he had visited his two older half-brothers, Freud composed a mocking epithalamium about a different young woman he termed “Ichthyosaura” in which he feigned his despair at the prospect of beholding “the faithful bride, in the arms of another . . . / Enjoying all happiness and the bliss of happy love” (Boehlich: 187), and contemplated various means of suicide.3 Although Freud’s outpouring of hexameters at “Ichthyosaura’s” marriage in October 1875 to one Rosenzweig, “Who in Germany studies the art of acquiring money” (Boehlich: 175), is sheer hyperbole, it was for Gisela Fluss that he felt what he termed in “Screen Memories” “my first calflove and sufficiently intense” (313); and the same obsessive love was triggered in Freud by Martha Bernays, especially in 1882, when he was consumed by jealousy over a perceived romantic rival, Fritz Wahle, an artist from Prague. A glimpse of Freud’s state of mind is provided by his letter on January 7, 1885, in which he looked back at the torments he had undergone at the outset of their relationship: “If my love had not come at that time so irrefutably to my consciousness through the height of my misery, in the many heavy hours that you inflicted on me two years ago and since, I would now . . . not be able to gain a conviction of it” (Fichtner et al., Spuren: 192). As a schoolboy at Dr. Strong’s in Canterbury, David Copperfield first loses his head over a Miss Shepherd, who prefers Master Jones, “a boy of no merit whatever” (ch. 18: 276), and then, at the age of seventeen, experiences a passion “beyond all bounds” (278) for the thirty-year-old Miss Larkins, complete with a fantasy in which he rescues her from a fire, only to be crushed to learn of her engagement to a hop-grower named Chestle. He projects his feelings of jealousy onto a young butcher, by whom he is knocked unconscious in a fight after his first romantic disappointment, but vanquishes in a return bout after the second. David Copperfield’s masochism reaches its apogee when he instantaneously becomes “a captive and a slave” (ch. 26: 397) of Dora, which causes him to be “jealous of everybody” (399), including a great-grandfather whom he observes talking to her. He

3

Led astray chiefly by Walter Boehlich, editor of Freud’s letters to his Rumanian school chum Eduard Silberstein, many scholars presume “Ichthyosaura” to have been Gisela Fluss (xv–xvi). As demonstrated by Heim, however, “Ichthyosaura” must refer to someone else, probably a few years older than Gisela, whom both Freud and Silberstein had met when they spent the summer of 1871 in Freiberg. The most memorable piece of evidence that Gisela is not “Ichthyosaura” is Freud’s letter of August 17, 1872, in which he tells Silberstein that he had asked Emil Fluss, Gisela’s brother, “if he still hankered after Ichth” (Boehlich: 11), which would mean that “Emil Fluss was even more into brother/sister incest than Sigi” (Richard Skues, personal communication; see also Heim: 887)..

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regards all other males as his “mortal foes,” particularly Red Whisker, a revenant of the butcher about whom he feels that “fate had pitted me against this man, and one of us must fall” (ch. 33: 489). Thus, when the no less volatile and self-tormenting Freud presented Martha with her copy of David Copperfield, he saw himself as the young David, in love at first sight with the woman of his dreams. That this identification was conscious on one level, however, does not mean that its deeper roots were not unconscious or that its ultimate meaning did not turn out to be an unwitting declaration that he should have married Minna rather than Martha. Once we have grasped this irony, we are able to see how the perspective of the adult narrator of Dickens’ novel serves as a commentary on Freud’s dissatisfaction with his marriage to Martha, who took no interest in her husband’s work and in her later years likened psychoanalysis to “a form of pornography” (Laforgue: 342). In Copperfield’s words, “it would have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more, and shared the thoughts in which I had no partner; and that this might have been, I knew” (ch. 48: 703). Just as David cannot help thinking of Agnes even as he senses that his marriage is not turning out the way he had hoped, so, too, Freud referred to Minna in 1894 as his “closest confidante” (Masson: 73) other than the Berlin otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess. Indeed, in a further profound parallel to David Copperfield, Fliess may be regarded as Freud’s Steerforth. Despite being heterosexual, Freud and David both form their closest emotional bonds with men and their initial idealizations suffer a grievous blow which they attempt to disavow. After Fliess’s notorious botched surgery on the nose of Emma Eckstein, the pivotal patient in Freud’s initial espousal and subsequent abandonment of the “seduction theory,” Freud wrote to him on March 8, 1895, “Of course, no one is blaming you, nor would I know why they should” (Masson: 118), while David responds upon learning that Steerforth has run off with little Emily: “In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him” (ch. 32: 461). In the same way that not only the death of Dora but also the shattering of his image of Steerforth is a prerequisite for David’s union with Agnes, Freud’s consummation of his love for Minna in August of 1900 was preceded both by his detachment from Martha and by his rupture with Fliess when they met for the final time earlier that same month at Lake Achen. Dickens renders with extraordinary delicacy the dawning of David’s disillusionment with Dora: “I loved my wife dearly, and I was happy; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting” (ch. 48: 703). A phrase used by Annie Strong with reference to Jack Maldon echoes in David’s mind: “The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart” (704). Had his own heart not been “undisciplined when it first loved Dora,” he recognizes, “it never could have felt when we were married, what it had felt in its secret experience.” Freud, too, must have had to confront the discrepancy between his romantic fantasies about Martha and his “secret experience” of their marriage before commencing his affair with Minna. As David forlornly repeats to himself, “There can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of mind and purpose” (704). Although the temptation of adultery lurks in David’s sense that there was “always something wanting” in his union with Dora, the artistic design of David Copperfield hinges on its being inconceivable that he should break his marriage vow. Indeed, it is because David does not consciously realize his love for Agnes—let alone commence a sexual relationship with her—until long after Dora’s death that Dickens is able to cast the novel into a comic form in which the somber undertones are absorbed and transmuted into an exuberant affirmation of life that we recognize as quintessentially Dickensian.

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Nonetheless, the plot of Dickens’ novel undermines in its depths the difference that it enforces on the surface by insinuating that there may not be a clear-cut psychological distinction between being married to two people at the same time and marrying them one after the other. In the second chapter, the fatherless boy asks the servant who is his second mother, “You mayn’t marry more than one person at a time, may you, Peggotty?” (ch. 2: 29). When his caretaker responds, “Certainly not,” the precocious anthropologist continues: “But if you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may marry another person, mayn’t you, Peggotty?” (29). David’s interrogation of Peggotty stems from his inchoate awareness that a rival for his mother’s affections has appeared on the scene in the form of Mr. Murdstone, an initially prepossessing but in reality sadistic man who had escorted them home from church the previous Sunday, whom she will accept as her second husband and thereby make into his stepfather; but David’s question foreshadows the trajectory of his own marital history, in which he will marry Agnes following the death of Dora. David is rescued from his hopeless situation thanks to the same contrivance by which Dickens prevents his novel from falling into the abyss of adultery—Dora’s expiration from a mysterious malady, apparently brought on by a miscarriage, a calamity for which David is not responsible (other than by presumably having had sex with her), but which sets him free from the wrong wife so that he may be given a chance to rectify his youthful blindness by marrying the right one. Indeed, Dora even sanctifies David’s replacement of her by Agnes. Not only does she assure David on her death bed, “It is much better as it is!” (ch. 53: 773), but following their marriage, Agnes informs him that Dora’s last request of her had been “That only I would occupy this vacant place” (ch. 62: 871). Considered psychoanalytically, David Copperfield may be summed up as a wish-fulfillment fantasy that allows the protagonist to get rid of a wife he has ceased to desire so as to be free to unite with the forbidden woman he has unconsciously always loved, while absolving himself of any guilt for this concatenation of events. The result is a combination of unsparing psychological realism and emotional bad faith. On the side of realism, after winning Dora’s hand, David acknowledges himself to be “more sorry and downcast . . . than I could ever have supposed possible so soon after the fulfillment of my brightest hopes”; and when he scolds his “child-wife” for her improvident housekeeping, David “had the conscience of an assassin, and was haunted by a vague sense of enormous wickedness” (ch. 44: 644). As Dora lies dying, David finds himself “thinking with a blind remorse of all those secret feelings I have nourished since my marriage” (ch. 53: 773). But despite these oblique confessions of his depression and death wishes, David never comes to terms with the depth of his frustration and hatred of his wife. Herein lies the bad faith of the novel, since even the woman he has symbolically murdered agrees it is better she should die so that she will not be a greater disappointment to him in the future, and David ends up being rewarded rather than punished for his fantasies of uxoricide. It is only from Uriah Heep and Steerforth, both fatherless boys who embody split-off projections of the aggressive and sexual facets of David’s psyche but who end up imprisoned and dead, respectively, that the novel exacts retribution for the repressed impulses by which David remains unscathed. Conversely, the orphans Tommy Traddles and Ham Peggotty embody in complementary fashion David’s consciously held ideal of selfabnegating virtue, the unwavering loyalty of the former being crowned with domestic bliss and the latter losing his life heroically attempting to rescue the villain who robbed him of his love. An analogous dynamic is evident earlier when David, who is sent away to school at Salem House after his mother marries Murdstone, receives the news that she has died along with the infant son to whom she had recently given birth. Given David’s jealousy of his stepfather, one might expect

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that he would also feel enmity toward the half-brother who is the most recent—and likely the most dangerous—rival for his mother’s love. But when both the mother and baby die, and are buried together, David sees his sibling not as someone who has deprived him of his mother, but as a younger version of himself forever reunited with the primordial object of his affections: “The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom” (ch. 9: 144). If one tries to imagine how David Copperfield resonated in Freud’s imagination, the death of David’s brother would surely have struck a chord because his own earliest sibling rival, his brother Julius, also died at less than one year of age. At the apogee of his self-analysis in October 1897, Freud wrote to Fliess that Julius’s birth had filled him with “ill-wishes and real childhood jealousy,” and he was consequently left with the “germ of reproaches” (Masson: 268) after Julius’s death because he wanted to get rid of the intruder. But whereas Freud acknowledges his unconscious fratricidal impulses, no trace of these darker emotions finds its way into Dickens’ sentimentalized rendering of a strikingly similar psychological configuration. Once one commences the thought experiment of reading David Copperfield as a dreamscape for Freud, the vistas that open up are astonishing. In the same letter to Fliess, Freud couples Julius with his half-nephew John, the son of the elder of his two half-brothers, as the sources of “what is neurotic, but also what is intense, in all my friendships” (Masson: 268). But when Freud revisits the influence of John, his primordial childhood playmate, on his later life in the “non vixit” dream in The Interpretation of Dreams, he omits any explicit reference to Julius from his published narrative, although this baby brother who “did not live” looms as a spectral presence in the recurring allusions to the Brutus–Caesar relationship and to the name Julius Caesar in Freud’s dream. Just as Freud was enthralled by Julius Caesar as well as Hamlet—where the distinction between lawful remarriage, adultery, and sibling incest is no less blurred than it is in David Copperfield— both Shakespeare plays haunt Dickens’ novel, with its psychologically motivated coincidences and proliferation of father and brother figures. Like Hamlet, David is “privileged to see ghosts and spirits” (ch.1: 13), and he is born as the clock strikes midnight, in the same way that Hamlet was born on the same day his father slew the elder Fortinbras and the Gravedigger began his work. It is at a performance of Julius Caesar that David again meets up with Steerforth in London, following which he has a dream “of ancient Rome, Steerforth, and friendship, until the early morning coaches, rumbling out of the archway underneath, made me dream of thunder and the gods” (ch. 13: 298). Inasmuch as the thunder in this dream anticipates the “roar of cannonading” (ch. 55: 797) in David’s dream in “The Tempest,” the climactic chapter in which David attempts to restrain Ham from swimming out to Steerforth, imploring him “not to do murder” (799), there are ample grounds for inferring that David harbors “the conscience of an assassin” not only toward Dora but also toward Steerforth, who—as Fliess did for Freud—stood as a revenant of his deceased brother, and that he was enacting with Steerforth his own version of the Brutus–Caesar relationship. Conversely, Ham’s last words to David, as he leaps into the sea in a doomed attempt not to slay but to save Steerforth, “if my time is come, ’tis come. If ’tan’t, I’ll bide it. Lord above bless you, and bless all!. Mates, make me ready! I’m a going off!” (799), closely echo those of Hamlet as he undertakes his doomed duel with Laertes in the final scene: “If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all” (5.2.167–69). To return to the love lives of Freud and David Copperfield, not only can Dora (notwithstanding her childlessness and incompetence in managing domestic affairs) be equated with Martha Bernays

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and Agnes with Minna Bernays, but Dora and Agnes are adult counterparts to the two mothers of David’s childhood—his beautiful but flighty biological mother and the down-to-earth Peggotty, to both of whom Dickens gives the first name Clara to underscore their doubling. Freud, too, had two mothers during his first three years in Freiberg, his biological mother Amalia and his Catholic Czech nursemaid (probably named Theresa “Resi” Wittek), who form the prototypes of Martha and Minna in his erotic destiny. Thus, if one reads David Copperfield as an allegory of Freud’s “personal history” with the sisters Bernays, Dickens lays bare how the polarization of Freud’s desire between two women was rooted in the circumstance that he, like the literary hero with whom he identified, also had a caretaker who was his second mother in his earliest childhood.

SIBLINGS AND SPOUSES David Copperfield was not only Freud’s “favorite Dickens”; it was also, as Dickens wrote in his 1867 preface—long after the novel had appeared in monthly installments from May 1849 to November 1850—his own “favourite child” (xi–xii). John Forster, Dickens’ closest friend and first biographer, reports that when Dickens was trying to settle on a name for his protagonist, it never occurred to him that “the initials were but his own reversed; but he was much startled when I pointed this out” (2: 433). Beneath the veil of David’s ordeal as a “little labouring hind” at the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby’s, Dickens risked his only fictional depiction of “the secret agony of my soul” (ch. 11: 165–66) when, as a boy of twelve, he was compelled after his father’s bankruptcy to toil as a drudge at Warren’s Blacking, a manufacturer of shoe polish. Prompted by a question from Forster, Dickens had divulged this formative trauma of his childhood in an 1847 autobiographical fragment—not published by Forster until after Dickens’ death in 1870—portions of which Dickens then incorporated either verbatim or with minimal alterations into this most personal of his masterpieces. As Martha commented upon reading George Augustus Sala’s memoir of Dickens, “he really seems to have woven a piece of his youthful history into Copperfield” (Fichtner et al., Warten: 53). With respect to her sources in Dickens’ life, the character of Dora Spenlow is a composite figure. As an object of romantic adoration, she represents Maria Beadnell, the banker’s daughter whom Dickens had wooed unsuccessfully as an impecunious parliamentary stenographer between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. But as an incompatible helpmeet, Dora Spenlow represents Catherine Hogarth, Dickens’ wife and the mother of his ten children. In thus combining Maria and Catherine, Dora encapsulates the bifurcated narrative consciousness of the novel, in which David’s adventures are simultaneously recorded in the present through the starry eyes of his youth and recounted retrospectively from the vantage point of his adult self. As Edgar Johnson has observed, Dickens at once “assays the strong unlikelihood that he and Maria Beadnell could ever have been happy in marriage” while also giving voice to “all the unspoken feelings that lurked below the surface of his relationship to Kate” (2: 689). In singling out David Copperfield for praise as an “incomparable work,” far greater than Dickens’ other novels such as Bleak House because “the characters are more individualized, they are sinful without being detestable: little Emily, Rosa Dartle, Steerforth are human beings and not some weak-headed angels,” Freud shares with Martha a sudden inspiration: “But, my little woman, do you know what occurs to me?. Agnes is none other than his wife, from whom he was later divorced!. So we would rather love each other humanly and hold out together until the last breath” (Fichtner et al., Unser: 311–12).

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Freud here at once interprets David Copperfield biographically and connects the plot of the novel to his own life. In point of fact, Dickens never divorced Catherine, although he did separate from her in 1857, one year before he commenced his affair with the actress Ellen Ternan, twentyseven years his junior. More importantly, Freud has it backwards when he equates Agnes rather than Dora with Catherine. When he was writing David Copperfield, Dickens had not yet broken his marriage vow and the optimistic tenor of the novel can be attributed to the circumstance that he could still maintain publicly, and likely also in a dissociated region of his psyche, the façade of his domestic bliss, which allowed him to continue to function as the preeminent spokesman for Victorian ideology. But, as Johnson recognized, it is Dickens himself who laments through the mask of David that “there can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of mind and purpose” (704), and Dickens foreshadows his abandonment of Kate in the fantasies of uxoricide that cause Dora to die off for no reason other than that David has ceased to love her. Just as Dora, as a married woman, is modeled on Catherine Hogarth, George H. Ford has called attention to the corollary that in “the idealization of Agnes as a sister and a wife . . . Dickens was betraying a preference for his sister-in-law over his wife” (xi). Indeed, Agnes was inspired by Kate’s sister Georgina, ten years her junior, in whom Dickens came to manifest a greater interest than he was able to sustain in his wife. The parallels to Freud are uncanny. In 1842, when Catherine was twenty-five and Dickens himself had reached thirty, the fifteen-year-old Georgina joined the Dickens household and looked after the growing brood of children. Similarly, “Tante Minna”—nine years Freud’s junior and four years younger than Martha—became a fixture in the Freud household in 1896, a decade after the death of her fiancé, Ignaz Schoenberg, and helped to raise the six children Freud had with her sister. When Dickens separated from Catherine, it was rumored that he had embarked on an affair with Georgina, to which Thackery snorted, “No such thing, it’s with an actress” (Johnson, 2: 922). By moving into Dickens’ home and winning his affections, Georgina was occupying the “vacant place” left by her sister, Mary, three years younger than Kate, who had herself come to live with her sister and Dickens in 1836, during the first year of their marriage, and who expired in Dickens’ arms the following year, when she was only seventeen. Jane Smiley has captured the intensity of Dickens’ fixation on Mary Hogarth: “He wore one of her rings on his finger for the rest of his life and kept a lock of her hair and her clothes”; and “when, five years later, one of her brothers died and was buried with her, Dickens wrote that ‘the thought of being excluded from her dust’ was like ‘losing her a second time’ ” (7). In 1843, Dickens wrote to the girls’ mother, also named Georgina Hogarth, that he discerned a “strong resemblance” between his two sisters-in-law: “The perfect likeness of what she was,” he said of Mary, “will never be again, but so much of her spirit shines out” in the younger Georgina “that the old time comes back again at some seasons, and I can hardly separate it from the present” (Johnson, 1: 438). When Dickens cast off Catherine, Georgina sided with him rather than with her sister, and she remained in charge of his household. To complete the circle begun by Mary’s death, it was reportedly Georgina who was with Dickens when he died in 1870.4

4 Drawing on Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ellen Ternan, Smiley notes an alternative account of Dickens’ death, according to which he spoke “his last words to Ellen, not Georgina,” who then transported him in a carriage to his residence at Gad’s Hill, where the two women “agreed on a more seemly story for relatives and friends” (206).

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If Georgina Hogarth is the proximate model for Agnes Wickfield, beneath whom lies Dickens’ memory of Mary Hogarth, this pattern of substitution can be traced back still further to Dickens’ sister Fanny, his elder by two years, to whom he became closely attached during childhood when his mother turned her attention to a succession of younger siblings. The first of these, Alfred, was born in 1813, one year after Charles. In another twist of fate, Alfred Dickens, like Julius Freud, died before he reached his first birthday and thereby furnishes the prototype for David Copperfield’s half-brother. Fanny was torn from Dickens when, despite the family’s plunge into poverty, she was permitted to enroll at the Royal Academy of Music, while Charles was abandoned at Warren’s Blacking. When Fanny died of consumption in 1848, at the age of thirty-eight, she became fused in Dickens’ mind with Mary Hogarth, and he embarked on his autobiographical novel the following year. Although Dickens committed adultery not with either of these sisters-in-law but with Ellen Ternan, the core fantasy of David Copperfield is one of an incestuous union with a sister. When Steerforth brings David home to meet his mother and her mysterious companion, Rosa Dartle, for the first time, David asks about the woman who turns out to be Steerforth’s discarded sexual conquest, “And I have no doubt she loves you like a brother?” (ch. 20: 304). Conversely, when the diminutive cosmetologist Miss Mowcher, trying to work out “by the rule of Secrets” what mischief Steerforth and David are up to in Yarmouth, asks David about Emily, “A sister of yours, Mr Copperfield?,” Steerforth succeeds in throwing Mowcher off the scent of his own scheme of seduction by responding, “Nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Mr Copperfield used—or I am much mistaken—to have a great admiration for her” (ch. 22: 340–41). That the woman whom Steerforth steals from Ham, but also from David since little Emily was his first love, is here teasingly imagined by Miss Mowcher to be David’s sister is anticipated earlier in the novel when, as a new boy at Salem House, David first meets Steerforth, whom he describes as “a person of great power in my eyes” (ch. 6: 99). “You haven’t got a sister, have you?,” Steerforth asks his protégé at Mr. Creakle’s school, who proceeds to have a dream in which “there was no shadow of [Steerforth’s] footsteps” in the garden in which he is walking with (as Dickens’ manuscript makes explicit) little Emily.5 The insistent conflation of Steerforth’s conquests with sister figures shows him to be acting out the incestuous fantasy that lies beneath David’s obliviousness—as implausible on the surface as the death of Dora—to any stirrings of desire for Agnes, as Dickens must have repressed his sexual feelings toward the sister-in-law who had been living under his roof for seven years. Since the doubly orphaned Emily and Ham are raised together as the children of Mr. Peggotty, Ham’s shattered dream of being married to Emily would itself have been a union of siblings by adoption, although there is again no hint of sexual attraction on either side, nor are Ham and Emily biologically related, the former being the son of Mr. Peggotty’s drowned brother and the latter the daughter of his drowned brother-in-law. Steerforth’s compulsive fascination with David’s fantasmatic “sister,” furthermore, is superimposed on his feminization of David himself, whom he nicknames “Daisy,” which brings out the homoerotic substrate of their rivalry over women, just as Freud’s emotional dependence on Fliess places him in a feminine position in their relationship. This pattern is reenacted in David’s hate–love bond with Heep, another fatherless boy, whose designs on

5

See p. 948, n. 3 in Tambling’s edition.

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Agnes grotesquely mirror the true state of David’s affections, to which he is—as his great-aunt Betsey Trotwood keeps reminding him—hopelessly blind. In his dream of “ancient Rome” after meeting Steerforth at a performance of Julius Caesar, David hears thunder that, as Jeremy Tambling points out in his notes, “heralds the assassination of the ruler” (957) in Shakespeare’s play. The following morning, David sees a monument of “King Charles on horseback” (ch. 20: 299) from the window of his inn. As Tambling has further commented, “perhaps there is an unconscious linkage between Julius Caesar, Charles I and Steerforth” (957), to which must be added Hamlet, another play about murdered patriarchs (where the two royal sons have, like David, the same name as their fathers) with the added feature of a remarried mother and an oppressive stepfather. As we have seen, Freud likened himself to Mr. Dick and his obsession with the head of King Charles I in the way that thoughts of Martha keep interfering with his own scientific work, and he named their second son after Oliver Cromwell. It is thus clear that for Freud, no less than for Dickens, the decapitated monarch occupies a prominent niche alongside Hamlet and Julius Caesar in his psychic landscape. Like David Copperfield, Mr. Dick is engaged in writing what David rightly supposes to be “a Memorial about his own history” (ch. 14: 215); and since the collocation of the names “Charles” and “Dick,” no less than the initials “D.C.,” inevitably conjures up an association to Dickens himself, David’s demented double must likewise be a surrogate at two removes for Dickens himself, who is doing the same thing on a “meta” level in The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger. Since Mr. Dick’s memorial is a fictional autobiography within a fictional autobiography, it cannot be overlooked that he fell into madness, according to Betsey Trotwood, because “a favourite sister . . . took a husband” who “made her wretched,” and this upheaval “threw him into a fever” (ch. 14: 215). Like a dream within a dream, Mr. Dick’s story contains another iteration of the core fantasy of the novel, and Betsey explains that he finds an “allegorical way of expressing” the “great disturbance and agitation” arising from his personal trauma of the loss of a sister to a male rival through being tormented by thoughts of the historical trauma of regicide. Mr. Dick’s abandonment by his sister for a husband who “made her wretched” is mirrored by the trauma inflicted on Miss Betsey by being bilked and betrayed by the husband who made her wretched and who literally haunts her through much of the story. In their domestic partnership, Mr. Dick and Miss Betsey, who become genuinely loving surrogate parents to David, find in each other substitutes for the sibling or spouse by whom they have been deserted. Miss Betsey discloses to David that they have lived together “for these last ten years or upwards—in fact, ever since your sister, Betsey Trotwood, disappointed me” (214) because David turned out to be a boy rather than the girl on whom she had been counting to avenge the wrongs wreaked on her by the wretch who represents for her the male sex. Even before his birth, David is inhabited by the ghost of a sister whose presence is sensed both by Steerforth and Miss Mowcher; and when Aunt Betsey takes her nephew’s child under her wing she, too, again feminizes David by bestowing on him her maiden name of “Trotwood.” It is this embryonic twin who returns to David in the flesh in his rapturous merger with Agnes. Because of their clandestine love affairs, both Dickens and Freud were men with secrets that had to be kept at all costs from the world. This was imperative because Dickens, like Freud, as Claire Tomalin has observed, “wished to be, and was, generally worshiped . . . as a man of unblemished integrity” (4), particularly in the domestic sphere. As Tomalin notes in The Invisible Woman, Ellen Ternan was “wholly excluded” from Forster’s biography, and “no letter to her from Dickens, or from her to Dickens, appears to have survived” (3). Freud, for his part, does not mention Minna

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Bernays in any of his published writings—a silence that speaks volumes about the importance of this “invisible woman” in his life; and not a single letter between them from 1898 to 1902 has been preserved, even though Minna was at a sanatorium in the Tyrolean resort town of Meran (Merano) following her travels with Freud in the summer of 1900, when all the evidence suggests that their affair was consummated and it is inconceivable that they would not have corresponded when Minna’s health was in jeopardy.6 Given the likelihood that Minna Bernays was in Meran in order to procure an abortion at Freud’s expense, it cannot be overlooked that Dickens’ children who would have been in the best position to know the truth, Henry Fielding Dickens and Kate Perugini— and who, as Tomalin emphasizes, “had no reason whatsoever for fabricating a story about their father”—both affirmed that Dickens and Ellen had “a son, who died in infancy” (143), though no documentary evidence to corroborate this testimony has been found. As Dickens’ calling his eighth child after the author of Tom Jones attests, he looked upon the naming of his offspring as a symbolic act. The boys almost invariably honored Dickens’ literary heroes, while the girls commemorated people closer to home. His first daughter, Mary, born in 1838, was named after Mary Hogarth, who had died the previous year. Dickens’ ninth child and last daughter, who was born in August 1850 and died eight months later, was called Dora, after the “child-wife” of David Copperfield, who had already been killed off by the time her namesake was christened, though the novel was still in progress. It is a testimony to Dora Spenlow’s importance to Dickens’ imagination that she should have been his only literary creation whose name he bestowed on one of his biological children. Freud, too, followed the pattern of naming his boys after figures whom he admired from a professional or historical distance, and his girls after the wives or daughters of men to whom he was attached in his private life. It is also probable that one of the determinants for Freud’s choice of Dora as the pseudonym for Ida Bauer, when he made her analysis the subject of his first major case history, was his memory of the novel he had presented to his fiancée nearly two decades earlier.7 According to Steven Marcus, the influence of Dickens on Freud’s choice of a name for his recalcitrant young patient attests that his “counter-transference was not entirely negative” (309). This would imply that Freud was equating Dora with Martha Bernays at the time of their courtship, when he was desperately in love with her. But he is also betraying by this association his disillusionment with Martha as his wife since he wrote up the case in the fall of 1900, in the immediate aftermath of the consummation of his affair with Minna. Freud’s suggestion to Dora that “the only possible solution for all the parties concerned” (Fragment: 108) would have been for her to marry Herr K. so that her father could continue his adulterous liaison with Frau K.—which effaces Dora’s mother from the picture—becomes more comprehensible, if not less repugnant, when one recognizes that Freud, like both husbands in the narrative, had been “getting nothing” from his wife sexually for years, and had consequently felt himself entitled to seek his satisfaction in a less socially acceptable quarter.8

6 As Peter J. Swales has pointed out in a private communication, it is beyond dispute that these letters were destroyed, whether by Freud himself, by Anna Freud, or by someone else who went through the entire file and numbered its contents after her death in 1982. 7 In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud explained his choice as an association to a nursemaid in the household of his sister Rosa, who went by “Dora” because she could not use her own name since it was the same as her employer’s (241), thereby relegating his patient to the status of a servant. 8 On August 20, 1893, Freud informed Fliess that he and Martha “now live in abstinence,” while on October 31, 1897 he lamented, “sexual excitement, too, is of no further use for someone such as I” (Masson, 54, 276).

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When Freud made his spectacular error of comparing not Dora Spenlow but Agnes Wickfield to Dickens’ wife “from whom he was later divorced,” he predicted in oracular fashion how his own union with Martha “until the last breath” would be shadowed by his adulterous and indeed incestuous love for her sister. Contrary to her most cherished wish, Martha was always Dora while Minna became Agnes in her brother-in-law’s life. In an addendum to Minna’s first letter to Freud, dated November 2, 1882, Martha once again refers to David Copperfield when she self-deprecatingly contrasts herself with her sister and Freud: “Also a heartfelt greeting from the unenergetic one. The two of you really seem to me like the Murdstones with David’s mother” (Hirschmüller: 40). In identifying herself with Clara Copperfield, Martha casts Freud and Minna as the Murdstones, a brother–sister pair who tyrannize over Clara, as they do again over Dora before her father’s death. The Murdstones are emotionally wedded to each other, whereas Mr. Murdstone’s legally sanctioned tie to David’s mother is no more than an empty shell. Thus, the tragic irony of Freud’s gift, and of his identification with David Copperfield in love, finds its complement in Martha’s acceptance of her role as Clara, who, like Dora, was fated to be married to a man who preferred his literal or figurative sister to his wife.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boehlich, Walter, ed. 1990. The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. Harvard UP. Crews, Frederick. 2017. Freud: The Making of an Illusion. Metropolitan Books. Dickens, Charles. 1850. David Copperfield. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. Rev. ed. Penguin, 2004. Fichtner, Gerhard, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, and Albrecht Hirschmüller, eds. 2011. Sigmund Freud/Martha Bernays, Die Brautbriefe Band 1. Sei mein, wie ich mir’s denke, Juni 1882-Juli 1883. S. Fischer. Fichtner, Gerhard, et al., eds. 2013. Sigmund Freud/Martha Bernays, Die Brautbriefe Band 2. Unser Roman in Fortsetzungen, Juli 1883-Dezember 1883. S. Fischer. Fichtner, Gerhard, et al., eds. 2015. Sigmund Freud/Martha Bernays, Die Brautbriefe Band 3. Warten in Ruhe und Ergebung, Warten in Kampf und Erregung, Januar 1884-September 1884. S. Fischer. Fichtner, Gerhard, et al., eds. 2019. Sigmund Freud/Martha Bernays, Die Brautbriefe Band 4. Spuren von unserer komplizierten Existenz, September 1884-August 1885. S. Fischer. Ford, George H. 1958. Introduction to David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. Houghton Mifflin. Forster, John. 1874. The Life of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall. Freud, Sigmund. 1901. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S.E.). 24 vols. Ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. Hogarth Press, 1953–1974. Vol. 6. Freud, Sigmund. 1905. Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. S.E., 7:7–122. Heim, Cornélius. 1992. Questions de “principes”. Gisela Fluss et Ichthyosaura. En marge des Lettres de jeunesse de Freud. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 56: 885–89. Hirschmüller, Albrecht, ed. 2005. Sigmund Freud/Minna Bernays Briefwechsel, 1882–1938. Edition diskord. Johnson, Edgar. 1952. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. Simon and Schuster. Jones, Ernest. 1953. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: Vol. 1, The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856–1900. Basic Books. Laforgue, René. 1956. Personal Memories of Freud. In Freud as We Knew Him. Ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek. Wayne State UP, 1973: 341–49. Marcus, Steven. 1974. Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History. In Representations: Essays on Literature and Society. Random House, 1975: 247–310. Masson, Jeffrey M., ed. and trans. 1985. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887– 1904. Harvard UP.

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Rosenberg, Samuel. 1978. Why Freud Fainted. Bobbs Merrill. Shakespeare, William. 1600. Hamlet. Ed. G. R. Hibbard. Oxford UP, 1998. Smiley, Jane. 2002. Charles Dickens. Viking Penguin. Tomalin, Claire. 1991. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Knopf.

FURTHER READING Rudnytsky, Peter L. 1987. Freud and Oedipus. Columbia UP. Rudnytsky, Peter L., ed. 1993. Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott. Columbia UP. Rudnytsky, Peter L. 2002. Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck. Cornell UP. Rudnytsky, Peter L. 2011. Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision. Karnac Books. Rudnytsky, Peter L. 2019. Formulated Experiences: Hidden Realities and Emergent Meanings from Shakespeare to Fromm. Routledge.

CHAPTER TEN

Beyond the Pleasure Principle Antigone’s “No” and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis PAUL ALLEN MILLER

Lacan notes in his Seventh Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis that the Antigone has long been at the center of our reflection on ethics: from Hegel’s reading in the Phenomenology to Simone Weil’s reflections during the war, to Anouilh’s rendition, embraced by the Nazis and Allies alike (S7: 235–36, 284). While Freud concentrated on the Oedipus for its dramatization of our unconscious attachment to the maternal function and our hostility to paternal law, the Antigone is in many ways the ultimate psychoanalytic text: for it poses a question only psychoanalysis can answer. Why does Antigone refuse to accede to Creon’s decree forbidding the burial of Polynices? Why does she knowingly and willingly embrace death? There is no conventional rational or economic answer. She receives no reward and avoids no punishment in doing so, just the opposite. She does not even try to claim that Polynices’ behavior was virtuous, and hence worthy of honor and recognition, but appeals to unwritten laws that trump Creon’s paternal order. The calculations of cognitive science or game theory—our everyday bargaining between the pleasure and the reality principles—can neither account for her action nor its continuing appeal. She is beyond the pleasure principle. This essay will read Antigone as an object lesson in Lacanian psychoanalysis. It will then look at the play’s ethico-political significance for Žižek, its call to refigure kinship ties in Butler, and finally its inability to be assimilated to a Foucauldian utopia of bodies and pleasures. Foucault responds to Lacan’s Eighth Seminar, which is cast as a continuation of the Seventh (Miller, Postmodern: 100–8), with a reading of Plato’s Symposium. Nonetheless, while Foucault offers many challenges to traditional psychoanalytic thought, the Antigone’s call for an ethics beyond the law underlines the continuing necessity of the psychoanalytic, even in the face of his often-salient critique. Antigone is the third of three by Sophocles on Oedipus and his family. They were composed at different times and did not form a trilogy in antiquity. At the play’s beginning, Oedipus is dead, and Creon acts as regent. Antigone’s two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles also lie dead. They were to share rule of Thebes, but this arrangement soon collapsed. Eteocles expelled Polynices from Thebes, who then recruited the sons of the Argive heroes with their associated armies, the fabled Seven Against Thebes, who laid siege to the city. After a bloody and inconclusive conflict, the two brothers meet before the city gates in single combat, each slaying the other. Creon, in an attempt to reassert the powers of the sovereign and the polis, has Eteocles’ body given a proper funeral and burial. Polynices’ corpse, however, is left moldering on the ground. 137

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When the play opens, Antigone confronts her sister Ismene with the news that Creon has decreed their brother’s body is to be left unburied: Oh, common wombmate, dear head of Ismene, Do you know what if any of the evils from Oedipus Zeus has yet to accomplish for the two of us still living? For there is nothing painful nor without ate¯ Nor shame nor dishonor such as I have not seen in your evils and mine. — 1–6 The Greek is very dense. The third word, autadelphon, is a kinship term, which here appears in its lengthened form rather than the more normal adelphos. Autadelphon literally refers to people who have shared the same womb or delphus. It gestures to one of the play’s central themes, the incestuous family. Antigone refers to herself as one who does reverence to those who have shared the same entrails (511). The less common lengthened form, auta-delphon, evokes an image of one flesh, inseparable in the womb and beyond. This self-enclosed world is precisely what opposes Antigone’s obligations to her family to the ordered realm of civic law that Creon seeks to inaugurate by forbidding the burial of Polynices. In fact, words that begin with the auto- (“self/same”) prefix have a peculiar prominence throughout the play (Wohl: 129–30). Not only does autadelphos occur twice more (503 and 696) where it refers unambiguously to Polynices, but also, and perhaps most famously, Antigone herself is later referred to as autonomos (824) a reference to her being a law unto herself, a self-enclosed, selflegislating unity, who rejects the otherness of the paternal law of the polis (Loraux: 165–67; Allen: 92–93). She is in Hölderlin’s memorable translation gesezlos, “outside the law” (Augst: 105) or, as Heidegger observes in his reading of the first choral ode, Antigone is one of those who “rising high in history” becomes “apolis, without a city and site, lonesome, un-canny” (163). In this opening speech, Antigone and Ismene are conceived as a unit: not separate individuals, but one substance from a common womb, the womb that is the origin of Oedipus’s evils (Wohl: 128–29). This unity is emphasized by the frequent use of the grammatical dual throughout the play, a Greek form that falls between the singular and the plural (Segal: 183; Tyrrell and Bennett: 44–45, 78; Goldhill: 152). It is Antigone’s desire to assert and maintain these failed unities—two brothers, two sisters, parents paired with siblings—to return to the oneness of the flesh and lie with her brother in the grave that fuels the central conflict of the play. Antigone is the autogno¯tos (875) the “self-resolved,” the autonomos, who cannot admit the other except as the autadelphon, the samewombed, as a member of a self-reflecting dual. The experiential reality of that dual, however, is characterized by the constant presence of at¯e defined paratactically in lines 4–5 as “pain,” “shame,” and “dishonor,” that is by the experience of a shared transgression of the Symbolic law. The connection of the grammatical dual to the incestuous story that lies at the heart of the Oedipus tale, to the ate¯ of Laius and his descendants, is made explicit in Ismene’s speech: Alas, consider, oh my sister by birth, how the father to the two of us died hated and notorious, for self-revealed crimes having torn out

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his two eyes himself with his own self-working hand. Then the mother and wife, a double name, Destroys her life with knotted ropes. Third, two brothers on one day The wretched pair by killing themselves Accomplish a common fate with each other’s two hands. — 49–57 Throughout these closely packed lines, tragic fate is embodied by one flesh whose division into selfreflexive twos (two of us, two brothers, wretched pair) resists the intervention of the third represented by Creon’s notion of communally defined goods and law. These incestuous duels collapse into a self-reflecting identity indistinguishable from death itself: “Third, two brothers on one day.” Antigone defends a view of kinship as inextricably linked to an essential oneness, in which legal and Symbolic identity is secondary to a primal oneness of being (S7: 247–48). For her the philoi or the “dear” are those who share the bonds of the flesh. Thus, she says she will lie phil¯e with philos in Polynices’ grave, not because his cause was just, but because he is who he is. For me, it is a beautiful thing to die doing this. Dear to him I will lie with this dear one, Having committed holy crimes. — 72–75 A husband, she says, or even a son, can be replaced but, with both parents in the grave, a brother is irreplaceable (909–912). That tear in the oneness of the flesh cannot be mended. There is no possible exchange or substitution, no way to fill this gap within the domains sanctioned by the pleasure and the reality principles, by Creon’s law (Augst: 107). As Lacan observes, Antigone’s choosing to die for Polynices, not for any of his qualities, not for what he has done, but simply for who he is, is choosing to die as an affirmation of the moment when language intervenes to establish the life of the individual and simultaneously its relation to a beyond. Antigone’s act defends both the limit that establishes the facticity of our desire and that desire’s relation to a form of enjoyment that lies beyond and before the paternal law, and thus beyond and before our individual existence (S7: 277–80). It is, in fact, Polynice’s incestuous relationship to Antigone that makes him doubly irreplaceable (Guyomard: 42n7). In her choice of death, Antigone affirms the unique nature of her desire and, through death, rejoins the incestuous beyond that submerges individuality, a region whose economy cannot be measured by the calculus of the pleasure principle. It is an act chosen not for its reward, but as an affirmation of her being, her ¯e thos, as Antigone, as a daughter of Oedipus. For Lacan, Antigone makes us see the aim of her desire in that part of her character that is most disconcerting, her status as willing victim. “We know very well that over and beyond the dialogue, over and beyond the question of family and country, over and beyond the moralizing arguments, it is Antigone herself who fascinates us. Antigone in her unbearable splendor” (S7: 247). She incarnates an aesthetics whose beauty is founded on pure desire, on a choice of death that is at the same time the founding negation of being human (Leonard, Athens in Paris: 113–14; Julien: 112). One cannot

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imagine a being outside the Symbolic, outside the norms of signification that make sociality possible, making a similar choice. It is only within the paternal law that her gesture has meaning, that it gains its beauty, even as it affirms the absolute beyond of that law. In her splendor, the cut, the “no” that makes meaning possible, is affirmed in its most naked form, even as her death represents the annihilation of that cut and a return to the undifferentiated world of being (Oudemans and Lardinois: 232; Pollock: 97). Antigone’s pure desire is a form of suicidal self-affirmation (Guyomard: 52). Lacan draws our attention to her words to Ismene in lines 559–560, “Be brave. You live; but my soul has long since died, so that it may serve the dead” (S7: 290). One of Lacan’s more acute observations is the centrality of the term at¯e in Sophocles’ text. At¯e is variously translated as “devastation,” “disaster,” “curse,” “ruin,” and “madness” (Oudemans and Lardinois: 135). It appears fourteen times within the play, making it what Lacan terms “an irreplaceable word” (S7: 262). It names Antigone’s sublime choice of death before the decrees of Creon. As the chorus itself sings, “There is nothing outstanding in the life of mortals outside at¯e ” (lines 613–14). At¯e marks the border or limit between pleasure and the lost sublime object Lacan terms das Ding, the Thing, the ineffable lost object-cause of desire: the maternal realm, before the Law, of which all true ethical action must partake if it is not to be a simple reproduction of existing relations of domination (S7: 263–64 300; Žižek, Looking Awry: 25). At¯e , as Lacan observes, hewing close to Heidegger’s reading, represents a kind of inhuman desire that causes one to misrecognize good and evil, to misrecognize pleasure, it represents a border upon whose crossing greatness is predicated, but beyond which one cannot live: Far-ranging hope is a source of pleasure for many, for others the trickery of nimble desire creeps up on the man knowing nothing, before he should burn his foot on the hot fire. From this, in wisdom, a small saying appears: “the bad then seems good to one whose entrails the god turns toward at¯e .” He acts only a very short time beyond at¯e . — 615–25 Antigone directs herself “towards at¯e ” because she desires something outside, ektos, the limits of the human (S7: 270, 276–77; cf. Heidegger: 162). The chorus here represents the realm of common sense and prudence. Our desires must be moderate. We must operate within limits and the law. Otherwise, we risk being burned. This, as Lacan notes, is Creon’s realm, the realm of calculation, of Kantian practical reason (S7: 160, 259). Creon’s position is to seek the good for the community. He honors Eteocles and demands Polynices be left unburied, not because of his own desire, nor even for the inherent virtue of one brother over the other, but because Polynices attacked the city. If Creon is to re-establish the community as a group governed by law, there must be a limit, there must be an inside and an outside, and his decision to divide the fate of the two brothers, in their self-reflecting duality, is the moment that re-establishes the law. Creon’s tragic actions are characterized by hamartia rather than at¯e . His hubris is to believe that his incarnation of the law is not to be questioned, and he fails to recognize that the limits he draws are not absolute, that they are in the end incapable of banishing their own beyond. Thus, when Antigone refuses to recognize his law and he is forced to seal her within the tomb, still living, it is his own son, her betrothed, he kills as well. He may be a tyrant and even an executioner, but he is human, all too human. This is the tragic error of which Aristotle speaks in the Poetics, the hamartia,

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like an arrow that misses its target, a fatal miscalculation (S7: 277). His error is very different from Antigone’s self-chosen death. “Believe me, the day when the martyrs are victorious will be the day of universal conflagration” (S7: 267). The ethics Lacan derives from the Antigone is in no sense prudential. It does not seek to maximize utility or to minimize discomfort. It emphasizes the creation of an ¯e thos, a self, as a creative act designed to clothe and shape the lack at the core of our being, a lack instituted by the paternal law that separates us from the all-consuming maternal Thing, making prudence and practical reason possible (S8: 5). This self creates and gives shape to our desire and sustains it through the metonymy of objects (objets a) that gives that desire, and thus our lives, a form (Zupancˇicˇ: 184). For Lacan, a truly ethical action introduces something fundamentally new into the Real. It does not simply repeat or choose between the things that are already given (data); it does simply accept the world decreed by the paternal law. It creates a place for our existence. Analysis is therefore the prelude to ethical action as the process through which we come to assume our desire (S7: 21). This is an ethics beyond good and evil, beyond adjudicating between options that have been pre-determined. For Lacan the good (le bien) is always a commodified set of goods, always articulated at the level of exchange value. It presumes the possibility of substitution, the existence of an acceptable range of equivalents, expressible in universal forms. It also, as the case of Creon underlines, presumes the ability not only to pursue and dispose of one’s own goods—money, power, possessions, sexual satisfaction—but to appropriate those of others, to exercise power within a bounded realm of law, to expropriate the surplus value, the surplus enjoyment of others (S7: 229–34). This is the sense in which we must understand Lacan’s famous dictum from the end of the seminar that the only thing one can be guilty of is ceding on one’s desire (S7: 319). He does not say on the object of desire. Rather, guilt arises precisely from the accommodations made within the field defined by those pre-existing objects, from the compromises we make in accepting the given as opposed to the radical creation of one’s own relation to the lack at our core, as opposed to our literal selfcreation ex nihilo. We accept self-betrayal, and we accept the betrayal of others, because in the end “neither of us is worth that much, and especially me, so we should just return to the common path” (S7: 321). Ethical progress comes not from serving the established good or goods but through a personal conversion, through the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself (Copjec: 44). Here, then, we find the crucial difference between Oedipus and Antigone. Oedipus gives ground on his desire. “Oedipus sacrifices himself for the service of goods, the well-being of the city; he abdicates and exiles himself. Antigone traverses the limits of her own comfort and others’ ” (Braunstein: 264). Oedipus, while completely unconscious of his deeds at the moment he commits them, nonetheless assumes his guilt. He seeks to live within the law and accepts it punishments, even as the chorus seems ready to forgive. Oedipus: What is there to be seen by me that is able to be loved or addressed and still to hear with pleasure, my friends? Drive me from this place as swiftly as possible, drive me away, oh my friends, the one greatly undone, the accursed one, and the one of mortals who, even so, is most hateful to the gods. Chorus: Wretched equally for your state of mind and your misfortune! I would have wished you never know it. — OT: 1337–48

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Oedipus’s acceptance is very different from Antigone’s defiance. There is, as Lacan notes, a splendor to her death that is lacking in Oedipus at the end of the Oedipus Tyrannus. He has assumed his castration, acceded to the realm of goods, and so must accept the terms on which they are offered. It is only in that recognition, only once he enters into the complete destitution of being the blind beggar in exile, that he can assume his desire. He gives up the very thing that captivated him. In fact, he has been duped, tricked because he achieved happiness. Beyond the sphere of the service of goods and in spite of the complete success of this service, he enters the zone in which he pursues his desire. — S7: 304 Ironically, it was in acceding to the happiness of ruling Thebes and bedding the slain king’s spouse that he had ceded on his desire, that he had accepted both the realm of the given and the guilt that goes therewith. It is only once he is stripped of all this, in the Oedipus at Colonus, that he can assume his desire and his analysis reach its end (S2: 250). Among Lacan’s followers, Antigone has perhaps been most important for Žižek, and he has returned to her on numerous occasions. For Žižek, the ethics of psychoanalysis are necessarily political. Antigone’s suicidal refusal to recognize Creon’s law, he argues, represents an attempted escape from Symbolic alienation, a flight from the subjection of our experience to the Other. Her modern incarnation is not the domesticated protester who plays within the rules but those who refuse the terms of the social pact: the freedom fighter, the terrorist, the hunger striker: Antigone is “free” after she has been excommunicated from the community. In our time, such acts seem almost unthinkable: their pendants are usually disqualified as “terrorism,” like the gesture of Gudrun Ensslin, leader of the “Red Army Faction,” a Maoist “terrorist” organization, who killed herself in the maximum-security prison in 1978. . . . Today, when Antigone is as a rule “domesticated,” made into a pathetic guardian of community against tyrannical state power, it is all the more necessary to insist on the scandalous character of her “No!” to Creon: those who do not want to talk about the “terrorist” Gudrun, should keep quiet about Antigone. — Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: 77–78; cf. Sublime Object: 117 This is not the place to debate the Red Army Faction’s fate or their choice of targets like Hans Martin Schleyer, an industrialist and former SS officer. Žižek’s larger position is there can be no radical break with the given outside a moment of terror, that is, without an acknowledgment of the death drive and a traversing of the veil of at¯e . Any ethics that seeks not simply to reproduce existing structures of domination, permitted pleasures and sanctions, property and violence, must reckon with this moment (Žižek “From Antigone to Joan of Arc,”: 54; Zupancˇicˇ:179; Mellard: 206, 249). If George Floyd or a bystander had had a gun, as he lay dying with the policeman’s knee on his neck, what should he have done? It is, at the very least, an uncomfortable question, a scandalous desire. You cannot long act beyond the veil of at¯e , as the chorus tells us, but can you live within it? This radical politics is not, Alenka Zupancˇicˇ argues, a later graft by Žižek onto Lacan’s original edifice. Rather as Lacan himself says, “There is absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantor of the bourgeois dream” (Zupancˇicˇ: 175, citing Lacan S7: 303). The question then becomes: if we rend the fabric of that dream, however, what form should our action take and is that

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form itself livable? There is a splendor to Antigone, but how would one organize a society, an army, or even a brigade of Antigones? What are the possibilities of a social life once we break with subservience to the realm of goods? If with Žižek we return to the period in which the Red Army Faction arose, in the late 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, amidst economic, racial, and sexual oppression, a period in which it had become increasingly clear that the terms of the social pact were both intolerable and seemingly impossible to change from within the system, what could be done? There were at the time, Žižek argues, three primary responses, three forms of jouissance that enacted either a withdrawal from or a move beyond the sanctioned calculus of pleasure and reality: the first was aesthetic, experimental art, films, music, and drugs; the second was spiritual, various forms of mysticism, fundamentalism, various assertions of a Law above and beyond the law; and the third, political direct action, from the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades to the Oklahoma City bombing and Al Qaïda. “What all three [of these options] share is a withdrawal from concrete social political engagement” in favor of “direct contact with the Real” (Žižek, Parallax View: 31). But the Real, it should never be forgotten, is the realm of psychosis, of acting out beyond Symbolic law. It is the moment of unintelligibility in the discourse of the dream, the hard kernel, knot that undoes the subject as a normative function of the Law. It is a moment of trauma and enjoyment (S11: 55, 80; S20: 93; Žižek, Looking Awry: 36, 43; Julien: 128, 143, 211). A Lacanian ethics, in the end, is the acceptance and hence forming of one’s desire, the refusal of the given, but it is also the refusal of desire’s sublimation into another instance of the Law (racism, fundamentalism, ultraleftist terror) that purports to fill the gap, to take the place of our desire, to become the Thing. Lacanian ethics implies a revolutionary politics but subjects that politics to a consistent and searching critique lest the contact with the Real that it demands become just another instance of the Law, in a new, more brutal form. Žižek’s argument is ultimately ontological. Human beings are constitutionally maladapted to their environment. Were it not so, Antigone could not exist. Our ability to choose things that are not to our advantage, that do not maximize our utility or ensure our survival, is the necessary predicate for our ability to go off-script, to imagine and enact worlds not already determined, and hence to exercise real ethical choice (Žižek, Parallax View: 231). A free act by definition cannot be schematized, cannot be predicted, and hence can only be viewed as deviant in relation to the “normal” (Žižek, Parallax View: 92). Antigone from the perspective of Creon is not a hero: she does not embody splendor or beauty. She is pathological, a threat to the good order of the polis. Like Oedipus, she should accept her guilt and obey the law. She should display a conformity which, taken to its logical extreme, admits of neither ethics, nor justice, nor law itself. Žižek’s position, at the end of the day, is not that of a fundamentalist sublimation of desire into higher law nor of a liberal tolerance that accepts the bounds of the given and seeks to operate within them, but of a ruthless materialist criticism that seeks to keep open the possibility of ethics itself (Žižek, Parallax View: 359). Judith Butler, like Lacan and Žižek, reads Antigone’s act as pointing to a beyond of the Symbolic. She, however, wants to contextualize that act within a specific sexual and gender politics, arguing that Antigone’s love for Polynices calls into question the interdictions and structures of kinship that constitute the family as traditionally understood by the Oedipal incest taboo (Butler: 53). As she notes, throughout the modern history of the reading of the play, critics from Hegel to Steiner to Nussbaum have gone out of their way to deny the possibility of there being an incestuous attachment

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between Antigone and Polynices—itself a profoundly symptomatic gesture. Nonetheless, as we have seen, from Antigone’s desire to lie “dear with dear” in the grave of Polynices to the use of the dual, to the emphasis on the rejoining of a unity beyond the Creon’s paternal law and the veil of at¯e , the incestuous family romance remains a looming specter that these critics must continually conjure away (Butler: 17, 60). “Can we assume that Antigone has no confusion about who is her brother, and who is her father, that Antigone is not, as it were, living the equivocations that unravel the purity and universality of those structuralist rules?” (Butler: 18). For Butler then, Antigone stands as the image of a love beyond the structures of the traditional, natalist family, the possibility of attachments that in Freud’s formulation would be polymorphous and perverse (SE 15: 29). As previous generations of scholars have recognized, Antigone’s name means, she who is “opposed to” or “instead of generation.” Where a traditional family is envisioned as a succession of self-contained, exogamous units—parents and children, who in turn marry outside the family and become parents and have children—with Oedipus there is a confusion of generations. “Succession is replaced by togetherness,” permitting Antigone to imagine “their copresence in Hades (73–76)” (Benardete: 9). Where before there was orderly succession, confusion intervenes. The succession ends. Antigone refuses to leave her family and join that of her intended, Haemon, the son of Creon. She will remain with Polynices (Oudemans and Lardinois: 112–13; Leonard, “Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond” 130). In Telò’s memorable formulation: Dying before her encounter with Haemon, before intercourse that would have assimilated her into the logic of reproduction a priori rejected by her name . . . Antigone is the image of the archival object, that while becoming visible and tangible, eludes incorporation. — 248 For the offspring of Oedipus, the interdiction to which he gives his name cannot but be called into question, and the possibility of new forms of attachment, new forms of dearness, envisioned beyond the succession of generations ruled by patriarchal law, arises: other forms of love, other forms of enjoyment, new kinds of families in which the laws of succession are suspended or reformed (Butler: 22). This is where Butler issues her fundamental challenge to Lacan’s interpretation, which she nonetheless builds upon: is it possible for Antigone to signify a beyond of the Symbolic except as death? Are there not conceivably multiple possible Symbolics, multiple structures of law, or Symbolics that contain within themselves multiplicities, without that very multiplicity signifying the collapse of community itself, a retreat to psychosis and a reign of terror, but rather the copresence of different and polymorphous games of love, kinship, and truth (Butler: 44)? Beyond a strict logic of same and other, which must lead either to exclusion or dialectical sublation, Antigone allows us to imagine “a logic of differential degrees of likeness,” one that “provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency” (Engelstein: 41). The unwritten laws Antigone claims to follow in lieu of Creon’s decrees are, as Butler notes, what Hegel identifies as the law of the feminine. They come without a clear authorial and paternal origin (Butler: 40–41), offering instead, what Griselda Pollock has labeled a structure of “matrixial feminine severality” (111). Butler’s post-Lacanian feminist reading of the Antigone is post-Foucauldian as well. It moves us to a position in which, via the resources of genealogy and gender performativity, the discourse of normative sexuality has become an artifact rather than an iron law of our actuality. As Foucault writes at the end of Volume One of the History of Sexuality:

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We need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps in a quite different economy of bodies and pleausures, people will no longer understand how the ruse of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest confessions from a shadow. — 159 Foucault never addresses the Antigone or Lacan’s seminar on it, But the year after the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan concentrated on Plato’s Symposium in the seminar on Transference, and this text was very much Foucault’s concern in volume two of the History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasures (Miller “Enjoyment”). The inclusion of the Symposium and the neglect of the Antigone is no accident. It points to a lacuna in Foucault’s history that only psychoanalysis can address. The fundamental problem Foucault poses in The History of Sexuality is whence came the subject to be figured as one who desires (Foucault, Use of Pleasure: 6)? At what point and how did the self ’s relation to itself become an erotic mystery in need of a hermeneutic? How did that self-relation come to define a truth that was both internal to the subject and yet opaque? These questions assume the problematic of desire as defined by psychoanalysis and yet posit a time when the subject could be defined differently, when the way it problematized its relation to itself and the object of desire were fundamentally different, and when the pleasures of Ero¯s were to be used, managed, and cultivated rather than deciphered, interpreted, and plumbed. The Platonic texts occupy a crucial position in this genealogy. Foucault’s reading of the Symposium is not that dissimilar to Lacan’s (Leonard, Athens in Paris: 171–72). His emphasis is on the permeability and substitutability of roles in Plato’s understanding of “true love.” Foucault is interested in those roles’ capacity to develop into networks of reciprocity centered on the figure of Socrates and their potential thereby to undermine the inherent dissymmetry of the classical pederastic relation. Prior to the Platonic theorization of love’s relation to truth, according to Foucault, erotic relations were primarily reflected on in terms of when, how, and to whom an adolescent boy should submit. As he documents, this was a relationship fraught with peril for the young man. On the one hand, pederasty was an established practice with a set of rules that functioned to introduce the young man into society, teach him acceptable norms of behavior, and establish affective ties with older males of the same class. On the other, if that young man was later to assume a dominant role in society as the head of a household, his role as the penetrated submissive would threaten to undermine him. Hence, there was a constant question of whether and to whom a youth should submit, and a high value placed on spiritual ties and friendship, all in an erotically charged atmosphere (Foucault, Use of Pleasure: 63–93, 185–223, 230). In the Platonic texts, what had been a series of practices centered on the proper use of pleasure was replaced by a reciprocal practice of self-reflection through the other, which is undertaken in the common pursuit of love’s truth, a situation not unlike analysis (Foucault, Use of Pleasure: 243–44). From a genealogical perspective, the Symposium and the Phaedrus mark a decisive turning point in the history of the desiring subject and lay the groundwork for its eventual transformation into the subject of sexuality (Foucault, Use of Pleasure: 244–45). Foucault’s response to Lacan is not to offer a refutation of the analytic reading of Plato’s text, but to show how the Symposium makes that reading possible and thereby situates it within a certain historical frame. The psychoanalytic explanation of the text and the authorization of a certain therapeutic practice based on that reading are shown to be effects rather than accounts of that text.

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There is a kind of breathtaking intellectual jujitsu on display in The Use of Pleasures when Foucault claims to explain the master discourse that purports to decipher his desire. Tracing the genealogy, and hence contingency, of that discourse, he posits in its stead an alternative universe of bodies and pleasures, a discourse not focused on deciphering the inner truth of our desire, but on the use, management, and enjoyment of reciprocal pleasures. The crucial question, then, is not whether Foucault is “opposed” to psychoanalysis, but whether there are phenomena described by analytic discourse that The Use of Pleasures cannot explain. I would argue there are, and they are precisely those that are beyond the economy of exchange that constitutes the pleasure principle. What Foucault cannot explain is precisely Antigone. Cognitive science, behaviorism, Foucault’s project of a positive description of a regime of bodies and pleasures, all envision a realm of rational choice, assume that people make choices based on what gives them pleasure or reward, without making judgments about what constitutes that pleasure. What those regimes cannot make sense of, however, is Antigone’s “no,” her refusal of the bounded world of pleasure and reality. There is a possible sense, then, in which Butler’s positing of the existence of a multiplicity of Symbolics and Foucault’s historicization of the Symbolic threaten to lead us to the same place: a world that under the guise of moving beyond the Law, reinstitutes it all the more decisively; a world in which, under the guise of freedom, we adopt Creon’s service of the good, the accumulation of goods, and hence of pleasures. Freud posed the question: why does Oedipus Tyrannus resonate with us more than 2,000 years after its first performance? In response, he proposed that the desires it articulates—parricide and incest—are universal and unavowable (SE 4: 261–64). Oedipus represents the institution of the law by envisioning its transgression. Lacan asks a similar question with the Antigone: why for the last two and a half millennia has this self-willed young woman occupied the center of our ethical reflection? His answer: her pure desire—a desire extending beyond the law, beyond substitution, and beyond the pleasure principle—is the predicate of an ethical act. Such an act, in its transgression, produces a moment of terror, but only with the possibility of that terror does life, as more than the accumulation of goods, become possible, and only psychoanalysis can explain this.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Danielle S. The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens, Princeton UP, 2000. Augst, Theresa. Tragic Effects: Ethics and Tragedy in the Age of Translation, Ohio State UP, 2012. Benardete, Seth. Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, St. Augustine’s P, 1999. Braunstein, Nestor. Jouissance: A Lacanian Concept. Trans. Silvia Rosman, SUNY P, 2020. Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Columbia UP, 2000. Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, MIT P, 2002. Engelstein, Stefani. “Sibling Logic; or, Antigone Again.” PMLA, 126, 2011: 38–54. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley, Random House, 1978. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure. Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley, Random House, 1986. Goldhill, Simon. “Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood.” Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, Ed. Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard, Oxford UP, 2006: 141–61. Guyomard, Patrick. La jouissance du tragique: Antigone, Lacan et le désir de l’analyste, Aubier, 1992. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale UP, 2000. Julien, Phillipe. Pour Lire Jacques Lacan. 2nd ed. Paris: E. P. E. L. 1990.

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Leonard, Miriam. Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought, Oxford UP, 2005. Leonard, Miriam. “Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond: Antigones and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.” Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, Ed. Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard. Oxford UP, 2006: 121–40. Loraux, Nicole. “La main d’Antigone.” Mêtis 1, 1987: 165–96. Mellard, John M. Beyond Lacan, SUNY P, 2006. Miller, Paul Allen. Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, Ohio State UP, 2007. Miller, Paul Allen. “Enjoyment Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Antigone, Julian of Norwich, and the Use of Pleasures,” The Comparatist 39, 2015: 47–63. Oudemans, Th. C. W. and A. P. M. H. Lardinois. Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Sophocles’ Antigone, Brill, 1987. Pollock, Griselda. “Beyond Oedipus: Feminist Thought, Psychoanalysis and Mythical Figurations of the Feminine.” Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, Ed. Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard. Oxford UP, 2006: 67–119. Segal, Charles. “Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus,” Modern Critical Views: Sophocles, Ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1990: 161–206. Telò, Mario. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Ohio State UP, 2020. Tyrrell, William Blake and Larry J. Bennett. Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone, Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Wohl, Victoria. “Sexual Difference and the Aporia of Justice in Sophocles’ Antigone.” Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis, Ed. Denise Eileen McCoskey and Emily Zakin, SUNY P, 2009: 119–48. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, Routledge, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. “From Antigone to Joan of Arc,” Helios 31, 2004, pp. 51–62. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, MIT P, 1991. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View, MIT P, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989. Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka. “Ethics and Tragedy in Lacan.” Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Cambridge UP, 2003: 173–90.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Alice Books: Carroll’s Wonder An Opening on the Subject of the Unconscious SOPHIE MARRETT-MALEVAL

Stuck in the Rabbit’s house, Alice starts feeling impatient with her weird adventures. She thinks: “I do wonder what can have happened to me!”, adding: “When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!” (Carroll 1865: 58–59). In the heart of the realist era, the young protagonist remarks that the interest of a book lies in what resists explanation, not so much as the promise of an answer (her question points that objective or narrative facts about the reasons of her fall and size changes will not be enough to make sense of what happens to her), but as a window on the impossible, following Lacan’s approach of the real at the time, which is the true incentive to read. The “great tradition” (Leavis: 1948) indeed questioned reality as much as it aimed at depicting it (if it was ever its purpose), questioning what is wrong or odd in the social bond. The fairy tale sometimes is even not so far from the realist novel if we think of Great Expectations, and Alice does not really specify what type of book should be written about her. Indeed, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not fit with any canon. The “book” which now qualifies as Nonsense, questions sense. “Neither story, nor plot appeal to any resonance of signification that could be called profound” (Lacan 1966: 10), as Lacan remarks about the Alice Books and Sylvie and Bruno, it rather gives access to “the impossible become suddenly familiar” (Lacan 1966: 10). Far from post-Freudian readings such as Schilder’s (Schilder: 1938), Lacan takes the work seriously (Schilder was an Austrian psychoanalyst (1886–1940), one of the first theorists of egopsychology). He asserts: “Through his work, Lewis Carroll illustrates and even proves all sorts of truths; truths which are certain although not obvious.” (Lacan 1966: 9). The truths in question concern the unconscious, the truth that Oedipus wanted to know, that which cannot be known through the means of science. The subject of the unconscious logically follows on from the advent of science, as what it structurally rejects to become operative. Lacan underlines that the Alice Books are the product of the scientific era. They celebrate it through fiction and question it at the same time. Carroll’s language mathematizes itself, consistently with his modern attempts to mathematize logic. But the games of language rather highlight the impossible to formalize, the Real. Nonsense points towards some knowledge beyond rationality, going further beyond the author’s conservative Aristotelian position as regards logic. 149

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Strangely enough, Alice evokes fairy tales in a moment when the unlikely rather borders on nightmare. In his “Hommage to Lewis Carroll” (Lacan 1966), Lacan states that the import of the work is due to its paradoxical effects: “One sees that without taking the form of any disorder one can produce uneasiness, but that from this uneasiness he derives a singular enjoyment” (Lacan 1966: 9). The French word for “uneasiness” is “malaise”, echoing with Freud’s Malaise dans la civilisation (Civilization and its Discontent). Wonderland’s unheimlich concerns the structural disorder brought about by the drive, by jouissance. But Lacan also takes Lewis Carroll’s work as “an elected place to demonstrate the true nature of sublimation in the work of art, the recuperation of a certain object” (Lacan 1966: 12) – the object a, the loss of which causes desire – that accounts for the singular enjoyment provided by its reading. Far from being simple stories for children, the Alice Books bear the marks of the mathematician’s questions, which he will try to solve in an Aristotelian perspective later on. However, the uncontrolled narrative opens on some knowledge of the subject of the unconscious that contradicts Carroll’s own theses. The text borders on the limits of rationality. The power of the work thus lies in the way it puts into play intuitions about the unconscious, about language and the object, i.e. on its structural import more than on the imaginary dimension of the text upon which psychoanalytical studies usually focus (Empson: 1971).

I WONDER The fall down the rabbit hole initiates a series of questions for Alice: “I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?”, (Carroll 1865: 27), “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth!” (Carroll 1865: 28). Anxious questions are soon followed by a renewed desire to know when Alice’s knowledge proves unable to account for what is happening to her: “But do cats eat bats I wonder”, (Carroll 1865: 28). Again, these questions are followed by more sceptical, perplexed and anxious interrogations: “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night” (Carroll 1865: 37), “Oh my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!” (Carroll 1865: 53), “I wonder what they’ll do next”, (Carroll 1865: 61), “How is that to be done, I wonder” (Carroll 1865: 77), “’does the boots and shoes!’ she repeated in a wondering tone” (Carroll 1865: 136), “I do wonder what can have happened to me!” (Carroll 1865: 58–59). Wonderland appears as a place where one wonders without finding any answer, rather than “An imaginary realm of wonder and faery”, or “A country, realm, or domain which is full of wonders or marvels”, following the definitions of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The verb “to wonder” is often used by Alice in the second sense of the dictionary: “To ask oneself in wonderment; to feel some doubt or curiosity; to be desirous to know or learn”. The noun “wonder” only appears in the form: “no wonder she felt unhappy” (Carroll 1865: 58) or “the great wonder is, that there’s anyone left alive!” (Carroll 1865: 112), and there is only one occurrence of the adjective “wonderful” at the end of the tale when Alice wakes up: “So Alice got up and ran off, thinking [. . .] what a wonderful dream it had been”, (Carroll 1865: 162), i.e. when the end of the dream, the return to reality tends to erase in a rather mawkish way, the ambiguities of the tale. Wonderland rather borders on the uncanny. That is why some post-Freudians, such as Schilder, judged that the work should not be put in everyone’s hands, because it is founded on a “primary aggressivity” (Schilder 1938: 167). According to him, Carroll is a “particularly destructive writer”. His psycho-biographical approach led him to decipher in the work traces of the supposed schizophrenia of the author. Such was not Lacan’s

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opinion, treating Schilder’s position with spite to underline, in the reverse that “Lewis Carroll is certainly divided, if that is what you’re after, but the two are necessary for the production of the work” (Lacan 1966: 11). He refutes the diagnosis of schizophrenia and reproaches Schilder for his reading the work in the light of a supposed pathology of the author. Schilder was not the only one to support this diagnosis, sometimes on the basis on Carroll’s being both a mathematician and a writer of fiction. Lacan preferred to hold that both the poet and the mathematician were necessary to the success and effect of the work: “it is really from the conjunction of these two positions that there arises this marvellous object, still indecipherable and still dazzling: his work” (Lacan 1966: 11). The import of the work rather lies, as Lacan underlines, in the division between conservatism and invention, or celebration of the rule and subversion, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle showed (Lecercle 1994), pointing to the lack within language that ruins the logician’s ontological claims. The conjunction of the spirit of the scientist and of the poet, leads to question the limits of science and of language, and to foreshadow an intuition of the subject of the unconscious. The ambiguity of the work is such that it gave rise to radically opposed readings. Some point its support of the rule (Blake 1974), its religious dimension (Renaud 2002), its formative aspect (Gattégno 1970), others its subversive side (Rackin 1991), or its intuition of the limits of rationality (Deleuze 1969). Jean-Jacques Lecercle showed that it supports the rule while subverting it at the same time (Lecercle 1994). I hold that the Alice Books and The Hunting of the Snark, written without the control of an intention to carry a message, summon the issues which the logician will try to solve later in his mathematical work in a conservative perspective as he wished to save Aristotle. His literary work rather unveils an intuition of the limits of his ontological position that he will nevertheless try to defend later. By playing with the structure of language, the nonsensical text shapes the structure of the subject. Carroll invented the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland during a boat trip, on requirement of little girls, as they went along, and he completed it by waking up at night, he proceeded in the same way for Through the Looking Glass that prolongs the first volume’s interrogations with major issues as regards the signifier, anticipating on Saussure. The Hunting of the Snark was written in the reverse, starting with the last sentence (“for the Snark was a Boojum, you see”) that came to his mind during a walk, Carroll said that he did not know what he meant with this tale (Marret 1993). Writing proceeds from free association and is akin to a formation of the unconscious, hence the knowledge that surfaces in the text.

MATHEMATIZING LANGUAGE The efficiency of the work however, does not lie in imaginary formations. It is rooted in the age of the triumph of science, and marked by the concerns of the logician. “What seems to me the most efficient correlation to situate Lewis Carroll is the epic side of the scientific era” (my translation), says Lacan (Lacan 1966: 12). Indeed, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, taught mathematics at Oxford, and wrote no less than a dozen manuals on algebra, geometry and above all logic. Anticipating Hilbert’s axiomatization of logic, he set himself the task of organizing Euclid’s propositions logically while conceiving a symbolic language with which it was possible to avoid, through the use of algebra and logic, the ambiguities of natural languages. His work on logic, notably Symbolic Logic was written long after the Alice Books, in 1896. It was marked for its modernity, introducing diagrammatical and indexical method for solving syllogism. It participated

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in the movement of mathematization of Logic, which led Venn, with his diagrams, to invalidate some of the fundamental rules of logic and to ruin its ontological import. Logic was increasingly founded on syntax and no longer on semantics, since natural languages, because of the fundamental and ineliminable equivocal nature of signs (as shown by contemporary logicians and linguists), appeared to be improper logical tools (Marret 1995). The movement led to the logicization of mathematics brought about by Frege. Although Carroll’s work, contemporary of Venn’s, seems to take part in that movement (he was also noted for anticipating Wittgenstein’s truth tables), it remains fundamentally conservative, trying to save Aristotle’s ontology, from its contemporaries. Symbolic Logic was “a work for God” (Carroll 1979: 1100); clear reasoning was meant to lead towards ultimate wisdom and truth. Lewis Carroll’s symbolic system was designed to correspond strictly to words, while he tried to think of ways to make natural language unequivocal. The dialogues of the Alice Books, are made out of the logician’s nightmare. Misunderstanding is the rule, because of the ambiguity of language. The Mouse tries to dry the participants of the caucus Race with a dry story (Carroll 1865: 46), The Duck interrupts The Mouse’s narrative: “Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable – ” “Found what?” said the Duck. “Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means” “I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck, “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?” — Carroll 1865: 46–47 Jean-Jacques Lecercle showed however that the linguistic disorder of the nonsensical dialogues rather stood in favour of the elimination of ambiguities to perfect language and facilitate communication (Lecercle 1995: 240), and that on the other hand, Nonsense produces its own rules: it relies on a literal use of words, in order to impede the production of metaphor (Lecercle 1994: 63–68). The proliferation of significations opened by the play on words (often wilfully bad) finds itself reduced to a number of limited and strictly controlled possibilities. Lacan noted in the same way that “Word-play in Carroll is always without equivocation” (Lacan 1966: 10), in the sense that it favours a “pure play of combination” (Lacan 2002: 10) of the elements of the structure (the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary). The games of language thus give access to the Real rather than producing new meanings: “Out of images a pure play of combination is made, but what effects of vertigo cannot be obtained from them? With combinations, all sorts of virtual dimensions can be fitted out, but these are those that deliver access to what, in the last analysis, is the most assured reality, that of the impossible become suddenly familiar.” (Lacan 1966: 10). For example, since they are based on well-known Nursery rhymes, the “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” chapter or Alice’s meeting with Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass (Carroll 1872), do not bring any new narrative motives. What is added, is not so much sense as the ruining of certainties as regards sense: Tweedledee and Tweedledum question Alice’s reality, as she might only be a character in the dream of the Red King, they put doubt upon the Walrus’s and the Carpenter’s motives beyond their apparent sorrow for the Oysters, the fight for a rattle turns serious human issues into a futile game with absurd rules, subverting ordinary use of objects, until

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the link between name and signified betrays its arbitrary nature (“He called it a helmet, Alice remarks, though it certainly looked much more like a saucepan” (Carroll 1872: 242)), the dialogues prevent communication, either because they are based on a literal interpretation of what the other says or because each of the characters follows his own thread, careless of the other’s preoccupations. “Selfish things!” Alice thinks, and indeed, no one really pays attention to her, or to her questions. She asks: “Do you think it is going to rain?” Tweedledum answers: “No I don’t think it is [. . .] at least not under here, nohow” (Carroll 1872: 240). He lays the accent on what he thinks rather than on the subject brought about by Alice: the rain. The question is rather common, nearly a dead metaphor, as the question is not so much about whether one thinks it might rain as about the locutor’s ability to interpret meteorological signs, if not only a simple way of entering a conversation (and the meaning is of little import). But Tweedledum’s literal interpretation of “think” breaks the conversational link to focus on his self, leaving Alice’s question unanswered. It underlines the emptiness of these ordinary conversational commonplaces, but also how much sense relies on interpretation, how much one interprets with one’s own fantasy. Alice insists, “But it may rain outside”, “It may – if it chooses”, answers Tweedledee. “We’ve no objection. Contrariwise” (Carroll 1872: 240). Here, it is the modal auxiliary (“may”) that is misinterpreted. The accent is not led upon semantics, sense, but on syntax, pointing out that modality has to do with a position of enunciation (Cf. notably Adamczewski and Delmas 1982). Tweedledee interprets “may” not as the expression of a possibility (following Adamczewski’s theory of grammar, Alice’s question links subject and predicate marking that the possibility is not inherent to the grammatical subject), but as a question on being authorized by the interlocutor, (since the propriety is not inherent to the grammatical subject, the use of “may” can leave the way open to the interlocutor to pronounce himself upon that link, to give permission). Here the displacement from semantics to syntax blocks sense, and the stress laid on the part played by enunciation in language (long before the age of linguistics), even on the level of grammar, contributes to highlight how much the subject’s fantasy can contravene to any rational exchange. Carrollian fiction does not really open on new realms, it does not carry a message, produces sense, but it creates a feeling of “dizziness” to take up Lacan’s word, about the symbolic foundations of our own, it destabilizes the logician’s rational ideals concerning language and sense. The chapter ends up with the nightmarish but expected arrival of the black crow, which puts an end to the fight, and to the episode – they all run away. The dark indistinct creature flying down upon the protagonists is somewhat like the real object upon which language comes up against. The combinations between the Symbolic and the Real open a window on the Real. The Imaginary is reduced to what Lacan will later call its “consistency”, as images are not worth for their creative power but as a dimension that combines with the other two, contributing to have a glimpse on the structure of the subject. Nonsense seems to unveil, in a rather nightmarish way, the contemporary issues that followed the movement of mathematization of logic, hence its modernity, while Jean-Jacques Lecercle points out that relying on the literal, and blocking metaphor was an attempt at creating order (Lecercle 1994: 63–68). However, this was obviously done by putting one’s step on the path of formalism, against which Carroll himself, in his work on logic tried to go, since the ontological cost was too great for him who placed his hope in rational thinking as a way towards God. Nonsense thus stands closer to the movement of the mathematization of Logic started by Carroll’s contemporaries, notably Venn and de Morgan (Marret 1995). It opens on a formalist approach of logic and language.

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SENSE, SYNTAX AND THE S1 In the dialogue with the Mouse and the Duck quoted previously (Carroll 1865: 46–47), the play on the grammatical use of “it” that erases its function of designation testifies to this. The dizziness produced by the play on words is due to the accent placed on the syntax, rather than semantics. “It” becomes some kind of variable in the mathematical sense, an “empty square”, to evoke Deleuze (Deleuze 1969), pointing out to what extent the word is “the murder of the thing” as Lacan points out following Hegel (Lacan 1953: 319), to the emptiness of reference. The logicization of mathematics will only be possible by leaving aside semantics and natural languages, and therefore ontology, meaning and truth, operating with a strictly syntactical language, where semantic elements are reduced to variables. In that sense, Nonsense is more modern than Carroll’s own Logic, since his work on logic tried to save Aristotle’s syllogistics, a logic based on semantics and truth. In spite of a few modern attempts at renewing logic with the contribution of mathematics, Carroll’s work on logic remained a work of the past. The Alice Books, on the contrary, were celebrated by his contemporaries, as well as logicians and linguists of the twentieth century, for their modern anticipations and intuitions. The games of language unveil how much natural languages are improper tools for logic, although Lewis Carroll later tried to keep them at the heart of logical reasoning. He could not consent to the ontological cost implied by the mathematization of logic, since it implied that natural languages could not be the tool of reason, or lead towards the knowledge of God, that logic stood at odds with ethical and moral issues, it could not extend its empire over human affairs, and make truth certain. In Symbolic Logic, Lewis Carroll was careful to define what a definition is. For him, to define the meaning of a word, means to define the thing it designates. Definition must correspond to the nature of the thing (Carroll 1896: 6). The function of the word is to present, to designate, being. However, the literary work, written a few years before, denounces any rationalist pretence as regards language. It anticipates Saussure’s demonstration of the arbitrary nature of signs, marking the rupture between words and things, and unveils the lack at the heart of the signifier. A famous conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty testifies to Carroll’s anticipation. Humpty Dumpty makes “glory” mean “a nice knockdown argument” (Carroll 1872: 269). Alice replies “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knockdown argument’ ”. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty replies “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more, nor less”. Jacques Lacan underlined the supreme liberty of Humpty Dumpty when he reminds Alice “that he is, after all, master of the signifier, even if he is not master of the signified from which his being derived its shape” (Lacan 1953: 242). The nominalist position of the protagonist was saluted by many contemporary linguists, as anticipating on modern linguistics. The tea party episode also highlights that word is “the murder of the thing” (Lacan 1953: 319). “Have some wine”, the March Hare offers Alice “in an encouraging tone”, “I don’t see any wine” Alice remarks, “There isn’t any” the March Hare replies (Carroll 1865: 93–94). The formalist anticipation can also be noted with the nonsensical poem Jabberwocky which Alice finds in the Looking-glass house (Carroll 1872: 191–197). When Alice reads the poem for the first time, she exclaims: “It seems very pretty,” [. . .] “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head

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with ideas, only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate . . . — Carroll, 1872: 197 The poem makes sense for her, although its meaning, i.e. its signification, escapes her. R.D. Sutherland underlined that her idea that it makes sense comes from the syntactical regularity of the poem: ’Twas ___, and the ___y ___s Did ___ and ___ in the ___: All ___y were the ___s And the ___ ___s ___. — Sutherland 1970: 208 Carroll makes sense depend on syntax, semantics will “realize” sense, i.e. enable to explain what that means. Lacan shows that sense depends on the S1, the signifier that commands the signifying chain but also that represents the subject as one in the field of language, as a pure mark of existence, on which sense depends. He underlines that enigma is the height of sense (Lacan 1973: 2) and links enigma and enunciation (Lacan 1975–76: 18, 67, 154). Carroll seems to have intuitively approached this in the sense that Alice supposes a subject to the poem, an author, an intention to mean, upon which sense depends. Here, syntax is the vehicle of this impression, not semantics. Syntactical markers mark the way words are linked, they order them. Some contemporary linguists have also focused on grammar as an act of enunciation, notable underlining how modality in English involves enunciation (Cullioli, Adamczewski). Alice’s attitude to the poem puts the reader on the way. While Carroll as logician aimed at saving a logical science where semantics would be of primary importance, he had the intuition that syntax was the locus, the vehicle of sense, anticipating formalism. But it is also manifest that by laying the stress on the function of the subject, to which sense is related, Carroll points the limits of Logic. Sense is no longer a pure matter of competence or performance (as Chomsky will later develop) but it is indefectibly related to the way the subject is structured by language.

ARTAUD AGAINST CARROLL Indeed, Antonin Artaud, in his “L’arve et l’aume, tentative antigrammaticale contre Lewis Carroll”, was not mistaken when he reproaches Carroll’s neologisms for “being related to nothing” (Artaud 1945: 140) (all quotes from Artaud are my translation). Although he notices his proximity with Carroll (he has the feeling that he himself, wrote Jabberwocky), he expresses his dislike of the poem for lacking soul and heart “there is no soul in Jabberwocky” he says (Artaud 1945: 166). Artaud holds that Lewis Carroll is “a sort of born-rioter against perception and language [. . .] that riot which his work calls for is a riot against the self and the ordinary conditions of the self ” (Artaud 1945: 130). He wrote Henri Parisot: “Carroll saw his self as in a mirror, but in truth, he did not believe in this self ” (Artaud 1945: 130). Artaud understands that Carroll points out the illusions of the self and his work bears an intuition of the subject of the unconscious. He condemns Carroll for

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“spreading out his conscience and science of loss” (Artaud 1945: 169). In opposition to Carroll, Artaud tried to found language on the depth of the body, trying to reach some inexpressible meaning, the essence of being, with words. Syntax was only surface rules, he was interested in the “soul” of words (Artaud 1945: 170). Gilles Deleuze held that Carroll’s games of language converge towards the “empty square” that ensures sense, whereas Artaud’s language aims at the destruction of surfaces, the ideological locus of sense, to aim at the depth of the body (Deleuze 1969). Indeed, Artaud tried to make language fully express being, while Carroll reduces the subject to the S1, the signifier that designates him as one in a unary perspective, a purely referential trait which leaves ontology aside. Humpty Dumpty, believes he is master of words, and therefore of his destiny (since he is the character of a Nursery rhyme, an egg who falls from a wall and cannot be put back in his place). When he claims: “When I use a word, [. . .] it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (Carroll 1872: 269), Alice remarks “The question is, [. . .] whether you can make words mean so many different things,” Humpty Dumpty answers: “The question is, [. . .] which is to be master – that’s all” (Carroll 1872: 269). But his attempt at mastering words is denounced by the fact that he is subjected by language, alienated to it. Besides, he cannot count and his literal interpretations and logical requirements become an obstacle to communication. His interpretations of the neologisms of Jabberwocky fail to give meaning to the poem. They betray the process of free association upon which they rely, and Alice starts producing her own associations. Their imagination reveals the arbitrary nature of signs, the emptiness of the signifier. Carroll’s text thus bears the intuition that the name that designates the subject is deprived of meaning, it is a-semantic, marking the subject with some radical nonsense. In reverse of his delirious wish for full mastery, Humpty Dumpty’s name appears as an empty form. When Alice meets him, the narrator reports: “She saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself ” (Carroll 1872: 261). She recognizes him by his imaginary form conditioned by the nursery rhyme. But the utterance sounds like a tautology. Humpty Dumpty remains a pure signifier, as underlined for the reader by the capital letters. Artaud translated that chapter, including the neologisms of Humpty Dumpty in his “anti-grammatical attempt against Lewis Carroll” (Artaud 1945). By modifying a few elements of the original text, he invalidates the foundations of Carroll’s text to substitute his ontological claims. He supports the mastery of Humpty Dumpty and cancels the irony that strikes his words and destiny. He peppers his translation with “MOI” (“I”) written in capital letters, trying to express the completeness of being. Artaud appropriates his discourse to project himself in the character, trying to inscribe his own self within the text. He translates “Humpty Dumpty” as “Dodu Mafflu” (“dodu” means “plum”, “Mafflu” is a coined word that is meant to sound as a proper name). Humpty Dumpty indeed explains that his name evokes his form. Humpty might evoke a hump, although the transformation of the common name in a proper name erases meaning. Artaud on the contrary highlights meaning, the common name “Dodu” is meant to really express the form of the protagonist. Artaud rather turns the proper name into a common name. The proper name has the characteristics of being deprived of signification and of working on a purely referential level; with Dodu, the focus of the name is on its meaning. When Dodu Maflu holds the sheet in the wrong way, betraying that he cannot read, for Artaud this becomes the expression of his reversed and revolutionary nature. His own translation of Jabberwocky abolishes grammar, the surface, to found neologism on the depth of sense, beyond meaning, on nearly unpronounceable sounds that have to be torn from the depths of the throat, in accordance with his attempt to found language on the body:

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NEANT OMO NOTAR NEMO “Jurigastri – Solargulri Gabar Uli – Barangoumti Oltar Ufi – Sarangmumpti Sofar Ami – Tantar Upti Momar Uni – Septfar Esti Gonpar Arak – Alak Eli*.” — Artaud 1945: 140 While Artaud calls for a language that would express being, Carroll shows that language is at odds with ontology. He points at the emptiness constitutive of the subject of language.

THE SUBJECT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS Soon after her fall down the rabbit hole, Alice is the prey of questions as regards her identity. “ ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”, Alice wonders after she has begun changing size (Carroll 1865: 37). The Caterpillar asks: “Who are you?”, Alice replies “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then”. “What do you mean by that?” asks the Caterpillar. “Explain yourself!”. Alice answers: “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid Sir [. . .] because I’m not myself, you see.” To the Caterpillar’s remark “I don’t see,” Alice replies: “I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly, [. . .] for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing” (Carroll 1865: 67). The issue of identity is closely linked to language and interpretation. Alice interprets as an existential question, what was a common way of starting a conversation “who are you?”. The most ordinary utterances become likely to be interpreted diversely, not for lack of competence, but because of the subjective charge of the question for Alice at that moment. She thus unveils that this common question is a dead metaphor, thus possibly equivocal. Her conversation with the Caterpillar turns into a verbal joust (the founding principle of nonsensical dialogue as Jean-Jacques Lecercle showed) in which are opposed the Caterpillar’s desire struggling to remain on the register of common sense (metamorphosis awaits him and it seems that he does not want to know anything about that) and the more existential register of Alice who wants to find an answer to her question on being. Misunderstanding creates dizziness as the issue of the subject surfaces. When the Caterpillar incites her to explain her feeling of being different, she also answers: “I can’t remember things as I used to – and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!” “Can’t remember what things,” he says. “Well, I’ve tried to say ‘how doth the little busy bee,’ but it all came different!” (Carroll 1865: 69). Alice only puts this down to her size changes in second place. She rather insists on the fact that “it speaks” more then she speaks, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle put it. Alice somehow experiences subjective division as she no longer masters what she says. Words that she did not mean to say came to her mouth. Her experience reminds of Carroll’s when he wrote the tales, including The Hunting of the Snark. Nonsense opens to an intuition of the subject of the unconscious. With such reversals, Carroll’s narratives ruin the hope of making natural languages the perfect tool for logic and rationality or for the knowledge of being. The only answer Alice finds in

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Wonderland is “I am I” (Carroll 1865: 125). Besides, she produces this assertion by herself, right from the beginning of her adventures. The sentence underlines the difference to oneself, the second I, in a grammatical position of object, is not the same as the first (in position of subject). As Saussure underlined, a signifier cannot signify itself. Besides, the pronoun betrays that the signifier that represents the subject is a pure mark deprived of meaning. In Through the Looking Glass, in the wood where things have no name, Alice is again the prey of the interrogation “Who am I?”, when she leaves the wood, after sadly parting from the fawn who names her “a human child” and runs away, she remembers: “However, I know my name now [. . .] that’s some comfort. Alice – Alice – I won’t forget it again” (Carroll 1872: 227). The question about who she is, clearly remains unanswered, but she is satisfied with her first name, which has the advantage, over “human child”, of not being deprived of meaning, therefore not labelling her (reducing her to an object), but only functioning as a rigid designator. The only satisfactory answer to being is a name that ensures being identified in the field of language of the Other. The function of the first name points towards the S1, the a-semantic and repressed signifier that represents the subject and commands the signifying chain. Lacan, besides, points out how Alice has become a name on jouissance: Alice operates in the text as the signifier of desire, the phallus, that point towards the lost object of jouissance that causes desire. It contributes to underline, the fundamental lack constitutive of identification (Lacan 1965), the phallus being “no other than the pointing of a lack within the subject” (Lacan 1965: 19). In his “Hommage to Lewis Carroll” (Lacan 1966: 9), Lacan also underlines that “only psychoanalysis can clarify the import of the absolute object that the little girl can become, it is because she incarnates a negative entity, which bears a name that I will not pronounce here, so as not to throw my listeners into the usual confusions. Lewis Carroll makes himself into the little girl’s servant, she is the object that he designates, she is the ear he wants to reach; she is the one who he is aiming at among all of us.” Alice embodies the phallus, (the negative entity, that casts a veil on the lost object) and thus designates the object of desire. Alice indeed does not see her image in the looking-glass but is present as a gaze on what cannot be seen beyond the mirror, beyond the image. The figure of Alice points towards the mirage of identity, towards the object a (Marret 1998). Ontological issues are finally made fun of, through the Duchess: “. . . ‘Be what you would seem to be’ – or, if you’d like it put more simply – ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise’.” — Carroll 1865: 72 The sentence is nearly impossible to understand. The advice that sounds so modern (“be what you would seem to be”) turns into nonsense (the auxiliary “would” contributes to a sense of strangeness) as sense is lost in the embedding of so many subordinate propositions. No knowledge on being can be gathered from Wonderland’s or the Looking-Glass’s philosophers. The mirror only sends back the illusions of the self.

CONCLUSION Instead of comforting the logician’s rational and conservative ideals, the mathematization of language in the Alice Books ends up in their subversion. By pointing to the lack at the heart of the

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signifier, they contribute to ruin ontological claims and unveil an intuition of the subject of the unconscious. Fantasy and drive govern the creatures of Wonderland and of Looking Glass land. “It’s all her fancy that: they never executes nobody, you know”, says the Gryphon to Alice about the Queen of Hearts (Carroll 1865: 74). Size changes are governed by what Alice eats, and her moves are usually produced by what she sees or hears. If Mathematics needs a language that rejects the subject and sense to be operative, Nonsense rather points towards knowledge of the structure of the subject between signifier and object. Jacques-Alain Miller underlines that Mathematics and literature differ in their relation to jouissance; while science dismisses jouissance, to operate, and the letter aims at writing the real, in literature, “jouissance is not dismissed, but recuperated in the exercise of the letter itself ” (Miller 1988: 103). The letter, in the Lacanian sense, is a property of writing, the edge between the Symbolic and the Real (see Lacan 1971, Marret-Maleval 2020). Lacan concludes his “Hommage rendu à Lewis Carroll” that way: For a psychoanalyst, that work is an elected place to demonstrate the true nature of sublimation in the work of art”, proceeding from the “recuperation of a certain object” (Lacan 1966: 12). The Alice Books, demonstrate the real as the impossible, they unveil the structure of the subject and its relation to the object of jouissance (the object a). But the uneasiness of the reader turns into enjoyment, because the object is recuperated in the guise of fiction. The impossible becomes a source of game for the reader. Alice’s adventures give access to the core of our humanity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adamczewski, Henri, & Delmas, Claude, Grammaire linguistique de l’anglais. Armand Colin, 1982. Artaud, Antonin, “L’arve et l’aume, tentative antigrammaticale contre Lewis Carroll”, “Lettre à H. Parisot du 20 Sept. 1945”, in “Lettres de Rodez” 1945; “Lettre à H. Parisot du 20 Sept. 1945”, in “Lettres complémentaires à H. Parisot”, 1945; “Variation à propos d’un thème” in “Cinq adaptations de textes anglais” 1945; in Œuvres complètes T. 9, Paris: Gallimard (1971), 1979. Blake Kathleen, Play, Games and Sports, The literary Works of Lewis Carroll, Ithaca and Cornell UP, 1974. Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London, Macmillan, 1865), in The Annotated Alice, ed. M. Gardner, Penguin, 1970. Carroll, Lewis, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (London, Macmillan, 1872), in The Annotated Alice ed. M. Gardner, Penguin (1965), 1970. Carroll, Lewis, The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits (London: Macmillan, 1867), in The Annotated Snark, ed. M. Gardner, Harmondsworth, Penguin, (1967), 1974. Carroll, Lewis, Symbolic Logic (London: Macmillan, 1896), Dover Publications, 1958. Carroll, Lewis, The letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. M. N. Cohen, New York, OUP, 1979, 2 vols. Deleuze, Gilles, Logique du sens, Paris, éditions de Minuit, 1969. Empson, William, “Alice au pays des merveilles ou La pastorale de l’enfance”, Lewis Carroll, Cahers de l’Herne 17 (1971), 1987, in English “The child as swain”, in R. Philips ed., Aspects of Alice, Penguin, (1971), 1981 : 400–433. Gattégno, Jean, Lewis Carroll, Corti, 1970. Greenacre, Phyllis “Charles Lutwidge Dodgson et Lewis Carroll : reconstitution et interprétation d’une évolution”, Lewis Carroll, Cahers de l’Herne 17 (1971), 1987. Lacan, Jacques, “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953) in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, London: Norton, 2006, 237–268. Lacan, Jacques, “Hommage rendu à Lewis Carroll”, Ornicar? 50 2002, 9–12. Originally broadcast as part of the radio programme: “Lewis Carroll: maître d’école buissonnière.” France Culture. Paris. 31 Dec. 1966. (Most of the quotes are issued from Phil Dravers’s translation of Sophie Marret-Maleval “Lacan sur Lewis Carroll ou ‘tandis qu’il lourmait de suffèches pensées’ ”, Ornicar? 50: 335–359).

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Lacan, Jacques, “l’objet de la psychanalyse”, séminaire inédit, conférence du 15 décembre 1965. Lacan Jacques, “Lituraterre” (1971), Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001 : 11–20. Lacan, Jacques, “les non-dupes errent”, unpublished seminar, 1973. Lacan, Jacques, Le séminaire livre XXIII, Le sinthome (1975–76), texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller, Seuil, 2005. Leavis, F.R., The Great Tradition (London, Chatto and Windus,1948), rpt. Penguin, 1983. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, Philosophy of Nonsense, Routledge, 1994. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, Le dictionnaire et le cri, Paris, Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1995. Marret, Sophie, “The Boojum unveiled: a reading of The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll”, REAL, Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 9, Tübingen : Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993: 99, 109. Marret, Sophie, Lewis Carroll : de l’autre côté de la logique, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1995. Marret, Sophie, “Impossible Alice”, participation à l’ouvrage collectif Alice, sous la direction de Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Paris, Autrement, collection “Figures mythiques”, 1998: 49, 66. Marret, Sophie, Gasquet, Laurence, Renaud, Pascale (ed.) Lewis Carroll et les mythologies de l’enfance, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, col. Interférences, 2005. Marret-Maleval, Sophie, “And, as in uffish thought he stood”, in Culture/Clinic, n°1, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and Maire Janus, Minnesota UP, May 2013. Marret-Maleval Sophie, Purloined Letters, (“The purloined Picture”, “Transference reveals the Truth of Love”, “The littoral Condition: A Reading of Lituraterre”), Special issue of the London Notebooks, Issue 35, Journal of the London Circle of the New Lacanian School, London, June 2020, and Kindle Books, Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1916157629/?pldnSite=1 Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Remarques et questions”, Lacan et la chose japonaise, Navarin, col. analytica, 1988. Rackin, Donald, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Nonsense, Sense and Meaning, Twayne Publishers, 1991. Renaud, Pascale, “Sylvie et Bruno : l’œuvre oubliée de Lewis Carroll”, thèse soutenue le 12 janvier 2002 à l’université Rennes 2, unpublished. Schilder, Paul, “Psychoanalytical Remarks on Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll”, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, LXXXVII, 1938. Sutherland, Ronald D., Language and Lewis Carroll, Mouton, 1970.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Psychoanalysis and Crime Fiction The Singing Detective SIM Ã O VALENTE

The purpose of this chapter is to explore links between psychoanalysis and crime fiction, in literature and in film. In order to do this, I will look at a case study: Dennis Potter’s TV serial The Singing Detective (1986), directed by Jon Amiel. My main argument is that Potter’s work is nearly encyclopedic in the way it engages with different traditions of crime fiction and psychoanalytic thought. The relative lack of recent studies on Potter, especially from a comparative approach, motivate to an extent the need to revisit his work, but his complex interweaving of psychoanalytic concepts and crime fiction tropes also allows for a reconsideration of the fruitful criticism that has been pursued in this interdisciplinary field during the twentieth century and up to the present day. In this respect, my first purpose is to reassess on how different critics engaged with Potter’s exploration of psychoanalytic themes as a way to reflect on wider debates on the relationship between psychoanalysis and crime fiction. This will take the form of laying the groundwork for future readings that may be pursued regarding The Singing Detective. This second point is articulated in two different aspects or periods of Anglo-American crime fiction: firstly, the cultural-historical common cradle of classical detective fiction and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, leading up to the genre’s Golden Age, as theorized by Howard Haycraft (1941). The activity of interpreting signs, or clues, in order to uncover an underlying truth is a unifying characteristic between the two fields that I will probe in The Singing Detective, paying special attention to what occurs when the spoken and written word combine with the televised image in order to create meaning. Secondly, issues of sex and gender in Potter’s narrative are of special interest not only in the way they can elicit psychoanalytic readings, but also because they are of central importance to the subgenre of crime fiction at the heart of the series: the hardboiled literary school of the 1930s and 1940s and its cinematic counterpart, film noir, themselves centerpieces of psychoanalytical criticism. The Singing Detective playfully parodies these genres while playing tribute to them, by resorting to the stereotypical figure of the amoral, hyper-masculine detective, like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. Given the work’s complex interweaving of plots, a short synopsis will be useful. 161

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THE SINGING DETECTIVE: PLOT SUMMARY The Singing Detective can be summarized, very reductively, as an account of the process of mental and physical healing of Philip Marlow, a writer of detective novels, played by Michael Gambon. The character’s name itself already signals the indebtedness to the hardboiled style, as well as the playful tribute Potter is paying to the genre: it is the name of Chandler’s most famous character, minus the –e. We begin by seeing Marlow in the hospital with a skin condition, psoriatic arthritis, a condition which also afflicted Dennis Potter himself, an issue which informed the initial reception of the series (Cook: 239–246), especially considering Potter’s practice of using autobiographical material, as well as the metafictional aspects of the show which we will briefly see. The cause for Marlow’s disease, we discover, is rooted in childhood trauma. This, and Philip’s reaction to it, is intimately tied with his creative process as a writer. The development of this plot takes place across three main narrative levels: in the first one we follow Philip’s present day stay in a hospital ward, his interactions with other patients, staff, his wife’s visits, and crucially his consultations with Dr. Gibbon, a psychotherapist. In a second level we access Marlow’s childhood memories in post-World War Two England, split between a mining community in the Forest of Dean and London. Two central incidents that occur in this level are Philip’s witnessing his mother having sex with a villager in the woods, thus cheating on his father, and a schoolroom incident in which Philip falsely accuses the son of his mother’s lover of having defecated on the teacher’s table, an act for which Philip himself is responsible. Following his parents’ separation, Philip goes to London with his mother, and during an argument on an underground platform he reveals to her his knowledge of her infidelity. Afterwards, his mother throws herself in the Thames and drowns. In the third level we are shown a dramatization of a novel Marlow has written in the past, called precisely The Singing Detective, and that Philip is recalling and reimagining as he lies in hospital. The plot of this level is haphazard and seemingly secondary: it involves Soviet agents battling British spies who are facilitating the escape of Nazi scientists from Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. The fact that this part of the plot is concerned with the adaptation of a hardboiled novel to film, scenes of which we are shown throughout the series as part of itself, is one of the many ways in which Potter practices reflexivity in his show, in this case concerning the literary heritage of film noir. Early critics of the show remarked upon the relation of this narrative structure to psychoanalysis: The viewer is placed in the role of detective, the quintessential voyeur, putting together shards of evidence, clues that slowly start making sense. It is as though Freud had met Columbo in a psychological thriller, their purpose to reveal the monad of Philip’s identity. Potter carefully manipulates us into this position of detective and keeps us guessing. And like good detectives, or like psychotherapists, we maintain a certain distance. Every clue emanates from within Philip’s mind; the detective story, then, becomes an allegory for the therapeutic experience, and the film work becomes equivalent to the dream work—a working through, a rite of passage, a journey toward an integrated self. — Lichtenstein: 171 The superimposition of reader and detective, as we shall briefly see, is a staple of crime fiction criticism, but since The Singing Detective is especially concerned with themes and

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theories in the field of psychoanalysis, a new role is added to this mise-en-abîme of interpretive functions.

DETECTIVES AND PSYCHOANALYSTS Carlo Ginzburg (1980) provides an account of the common cultural heritage of psychoanalysis, crime fiction and art history which has recently been recovered by Heta Pyrhönen (2020) to discuss points similar to the one I am making here. Ginzburg’s main argument is that there is shared concern in Conan Doyle, Freud and the doctor and art historian Giovanni Morelli, who Freud read in his youth, with the decipherment of signs as a way to arrive to a truth beyond them. The detective has to interpret clues in order to discover who committed a crime, as the psychoanalyst can interpret involuntary movements and wordings as relating to underlying psychological suffering. To this pairing is added the art historian, who, in Morelli’s method, can identify a painting’s author by studying details that are consistently repeated across different works, especially ears, feet and fingers. Ginzburg also highlights the centrality of medical training for the three authors—one should never forget that Conan Doyle was also a physician. A semiotic concern with sign as symptom is one of the consequences of this training. The issue of the repetition of details in paintings is especially useful to analyse The Singing Detective, in that it is concerned with images, and the detection of a pattern in the repetition of sections of a painting points to a viewer as interpreter. As we shall see, the identification of the reader of a crime narrative with the detective himself (traditionally male, and here gender issues will be crucial for my reading) is pivotal in The Singing Detective’s enmeshing of psychoanalytical and literary processes of doubling and identification. In what pertains Sherlock Holmes in particular, a point may be added regarding more specific shared concerns between crime fiction and late nineteenth-century nascent mind sciences. This can be observed, for instance, in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty”, where the “brain fever” that Holmes’s friend Phelps succumbs to for nine weeks following the theft of important documents that were in his possession is integral to the solution of the crime. Phelps recovers from his breakdown in his brother-in law’s bedroom, where the treaty is hidden, since the brother-in-law is also the thief. The prolonged illness makes it impossible for the documents to be sold, and this delay catches Holmes’s attention. Thus, Phelps’s traumatic grief is instrumental in apprehending the culprit, and his psychological recovery is tied with the solution to the mystery. We shall see something similar occurring in Potter’s series. It is also of note that this plot largely follows Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, which I will discuss briefly in this chapter and is discussed at greater length elsewhere in this volume. Further evidence can be mustered to support Ginzburg’s argument regarding a turn-of-thecentury cultural continuum between crime fiction and psychoanalysis. On the edges of Europe, another author working on a similar vein, albeit a little later, is Fernando Pessoa, better known as the preeminent Portuguese Modernist poet but also a budding writing of detective fiction. His unfinished stories, which have yet to be translated into English (although some are available in Spanish and French), feature detective Abílio Quaresma, a semi-retired doctor who solves crimes mostly by analysing clients and suspects in light of psychological theories, with issues of sexuality playing central roles in most stories. In respect to Ginzburg’s notion of hidden narratives that have to be uncovered, Todorov made similar points in “The typology of detective fiction” (1977). Todorov writes of the archetypal detective story as consisting of two narratives: at a superficial level

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that of the investigation of a crime, and at an underlying level, that of its committing. Those two stories coincide at the moment when the “superficial” level solves the mystery at its heart (who committed the crime being investigated), typically by the end of the narrative, leading to a moment of retrospection that includes the entirety of the underlying, deeper story of murderer and murdered. In The Singing Detective the use of the conventions of crime fiction follows a similar line, for throughout the series we are provided with clues as to a crime (Mrs. Marlow’s death) and a perpetrator (her son), although, as we shall see, the link between the two is constructed by Philip Marlow’s conscience in terms of the guilt he feels for having possibly contributed to that act: the last conversation he has with his mother consists of his confession to having seen her having sex with her lover, after which Mrs. Marlow commits suicide. We do have a corpse of sorts in the beginning of the show: Marlow’s ill, immobile body in the hospital ward, bearing the psychosomatic consequences of his guilt. Other bodies occur, too, the first one being the stabbed beggar/mysterious agent in the bar closet, a red herring in terms of where it may lead but placed right at the beginning of the narrative level belonging to the crime novel/film noir, where it belongs. The scene that we are repetitively shown in the detective novel narrative level where a female, naked body is fished from the river plays a critical function in establishing Philip’s guilt as the source of his creativity as well. That woman’s identity is first shown as the prostitute Sonya, then her colleague Amanda, but in a second iteration it becomes Philip’s wife Nicola, and in a fourth one, Philip’s mother. There is no indication he witnessed the scene as a boy, so throughout the series we are watching an adult man’s obsessive reimagining of the deadly consequences of his actions as a child who was unable to understand why his mother would be having sex with a man other than his idolized father. Potter’s spin on the crime genre has more ambitions than Todorov’s reading of one narrative depending on the discovery of another: Potter is also concerned with the dramatization of the psychological processes that go into composing narratives, especially in their connection with the narrative of one’s own life. In The Singing Detective, the secret at the heart of Philip’s trouble, the root of his misogyny, failed marriage, and ultimately physical health issues is his guilt for having indirectly caused his mother’s death. Ginzburg can be particularly helpful to read Dennis Potter, since the show enmeshes the conventions of crime fiction and a psychoanalytical plot through the audiovisual medium of television. The casting of the same actors playing different roles in the different narrative levels, is a prime example of this, leaving the audience playing the decipherer’s part in trying to understand what that repetition of faces and bodies can mean: “Images are constantly superimposed, frequently reiterated, or repeated with variations, so that identity is fluid and ambiguous.” (Bell 1993: 202) The actor Patrick Malahide, for instance, plays the villain Mark Binney in the detective story narrative level, but we will later find him also playing the role of Raymond Binney, Philip’s mother’s lover, as well as Mark Finney, Nicola’s lover in adult Marlow’s feverish imagination. Thus, the audience has to interpret what that reiteration of the same bodily screen presence can mean, outside of the naturalist conventions of casting and television storytelling. The suggestion is that Marlow relives his childhood trauma by reimagining his mother’s lover as the villain in his crime fiction, as well as in his fantasies of jealousy. In this way, and as remarked by Thomas (1997), the audience is placed in the role of an analyst, deciphering the words and imagery of Marlow as patient, primarily through its placement in the position of the detective.

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This is in keeping with studies of crime fiction that develop Todorov’s arguments as laid out in the introduction to this chapter, such as Porter (1981) or Priestman (1991). They suggest that the interpretive function of the act of reading is akin to the detective in a story, following the steps of an investigator in a novel as they try to unravel a mystery; or conversely, that since the detective deciphers signs much as a reader does, crime fiction is a literary genre especially concerned with narrative structure and narratology more broadly (Hühn: 1987). The Singing Detective’s singular use of these devices, however, occurs by tying them to a plot deeply concerned with overcoming trauma by transforming it into artistic creation.

FREUD, KLEIN, JUNG, AND FREUD AGAIN At this juncture, the repeated use of triangular relationships, childhood trauma linked to the discovery of parental sexuality, and a generally Freudian framework to The Singing Detective is patent to the viewer. The centrality that the sex scene occupies in the narrative structure is first fully played out during a moment of feverish hallucination in the hospital. Dalrymple argues strongly for the importance of the Freudian concept of primal scene in trying to describe it (16). He follows the path of Pederson-Krag (1949), for whom the issue of mystery and the reader’s curiosity of establishing a truth behind it, in the entire genre of detective fiction, is linked to a child’s obsession with the primal scene. In a similar vein, Creeber highlights the misogynistic streak underlying the representation of women in Potter’s work in general, where male protagonists display “a profound and acute fear of both women and sex, and that such a fear is almost always linked with repressed and unconscious feelings originating in early childhood.” (Creeber: 158) Arguably, this is the central issue being explored in The Singing Detective: how a man who harbors deep negative feelings towards sex, and a reductive view of women that either exalts or debases them, is able to confront those parts of his psyche and overcome them. This process of working through those feelings is chiefly played out in Marlow’s consultations with the psychotherapist, Dr. Gibbon. Upon Marlow’s first visit to Gibbon’s office, a copy of Marlow’s novel, The Singing Detective, lays on the doctor’s desk. A passage from it informs Gibbon’s assessment, which provides a helpful key with which the audience can interpret what they see: Mouth sucking wet and slack at mouth, tongue chafing against tongue, limb thrusting upon limb, skin rubbing at skin. Faces contort and stretch into a helpless leer, organs spurt out smelly stains and sticky betrayals. This is the sweaty farce out of which we are brought into being. We are implicated without choice in the slippery catastrophe of the copulations which spatter us into existence. We are spat out of fevered loins. We are the by-blows of grunts and pantings in a rumpled and creaking bed. Welcome. — Potter: 58 The reading is interspersed with Marlow’s jeering “oinks”. Gibbon says he is reading the novel searching for clues, which takes us back to Ginzburg’s arguments regarding connections between Holmes and Freud. Other analyses of the show have resorted to different strands of psychoanalytical thought. David Bell refines this Kleinian psychoanalysis and the concept of depressive position to qualify Marlow’s psychic state as a consequence of these events. The character’s inability to

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overcome the pain brought by the premature knowledge that his mother is simultaneously a loved and hated object, and the guilt he feels for having unwittingly contributed to her death, impede Marlow’s development. Philip’s adult trajectory, and especially his reimagining of himself as the singing detective, is an attempt to escape that place, although “through his identification with the cold heartless figures of his inner world, which mock all human vulnerability, he perpetuates the sources of his own unbearable guilt and shame” (Bell 1999: 70). Marlow’s mental rewriting of his novel while in hospital would then be, “the story of its own making – it both bears witness to his confrontation with the pain of his inner world, particularly the unbearable persecuting guilt, and represents his attempt to transcend it” (77). More recently, the Jungian category of ‘synchronicity’ has also been brought to bear on an analysis of The Singing Detective, specifically as a way to understand the repetition of images and sound (Prys: 132). While in Jung the concept in question points to a universal interconnectedness of events or imagery only superficially random, in Potter’s work, Prys suggests, the use of repetitiveness is a way of suggesting a narrative holism that encompasses Marlow’s entire consciousness. While this argument seeks to complement more traditional Freudian interpretations of the series, it is hard to escape the fact that many of such repetitions rely heavily on Freudian theories, such as the equivalence between feces and gold, or more generally money, starting with “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908), or even more generally the entwinement of Freudian eros and thanatos. This is featured in a word association game Dr. Gibbon plays with Marlow: Gibbon – Woman. Marlow – Fuck. Gibbon – Fuck. Marlow – Dirt. Gibbon – Dirt Marlow – Death — Potter: 177 The links between money-sex-feces-dirt-death also appear when the prostitute Sonya, in the novel narrative level, states “money is shit”, as Binney offers her pay and she proceeds to chew and spit the bill. Similarly, in one of the scenes with Philip up in the trees he states “I cannot abide dirt”, after his mother tells Binney that he has to take care not to get dirt all over her as they have intercourse. The father–son relationship is also an important part of this story. Michael Gambon plays both Philip Marlow, the author, and Philip Marlow the singing detective, who is suave, aggressive and dominant. His side-job as a big band crooner in the 1940s is arguably a more dazzling version of Marlow’s father, a miner who enjoyed success (at least in Marlow’s childhood memories) singing in his local community. Conversely, young Philip falsely accuses Mark Binney’s son of his own crime, exacting revenge for the boy’s father’s actions. Young Mark Binney’s wrongful punishment deeply upsets Philip, to the extent that he will use his name, attached to Raymond Binney’s face, as the villain in his novel. It is when confronting his false accusation and the pain he caused to innocent “real” Mark, in conversation with Dr. Gibbon, that adult Marlow has the biggest breakthrough in his psychotherapy sessions. In the script, which deviates at times from what made it to the screen, this is made even more obvious. In the last episode, Marlow is trying to interpret a dream he had the night before, featuring

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a living scarecrow that we have seen several times during the show, its origin being an actual scarecrow Philip saw in a field, outside the train that took him and his mother to London after his parents’ separation. Marlow realizes that in his dream the distorted face he saw was that of his primary school teacher, who punished Raymond Binney’s son for Philip’s misdeed. This realization is interspersed with Gibbon’s attempts to link Marlow’s trouble with the guilt he feels over his mother’s suicide: “You have a young woman fished out of the river in your detective story” (Potter: 210), but Marlow goes back to the one he feels over Mark Binney’s fate: the two boys’ classmates end up confirming Philip’s accusation, to the extent that Mark himself comes to believe he was in fact guilty of the deed. He ends up in psychiatric hospital, years later. In Gibbon’s office, Marlow has an emotional breakdown, cries profusely, but then Gibbon convinces him to try to stand up by himself, and he succeeds, for the first time in the series. He returns happy and triumphant to the ward, but Gibbon’s words about his mother’s death come back to haunt him in voice over, thus implying that a nerve was struck there. The following scene, which I will comment further below, takes place in Marlow’s jealous imagining of his wife, where we will see more of his admission of guilt, which further clears the path to his ultimate healing.

SINGING, HALLUCINATIONS AND DREAMS The musical numbers to which the title of the series alludes feature Potter’s signature technique of having his actors lip-synch popular 1940s songs, whose titles and lyrics relate to the traumatic events of Marlow’s childhood and their consequences. This is the case with The Mills Brothers’ “Paper Doll” (“I’m gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own/A doll that other fellows cannot steal”), or Henry Hall’s “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic” (If you go down in the woods today/You’re sure of a big surprise/If you go down in the woods today/You’d better go in disguise!”). Sometimes these songs are sung by characters in the hospital ward, other times in memory or imagination. In the latter two cases, it is most frequently his father and himself as singing detective that perform them, which cements the oedipal relation. The fact the sound is present through lip-synching contributes to an effect of estrangement, calling attention to the aural rather than visual aspects of the series. If we focus on the element of disjunction between image and sound which disturbs the more realist conventions of the hospital ward and historical drama segments of the show, we could interpret this effect in terms of Freud’s uncanny (SE 17: 217–252), since it infuses the familiarity of the character’s surroundings and our expectations as to the relationship between sound and image with strangeness. An alternative track may be pursued following Lacan’s remarks on making oneself be seen or heard: “In the field of the unconscious the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed. Whereas making oneself seen is indicated by an arrow that really comes back towards the subject, making oneself heard goes towards the other.” (S11: 195). Considering the importance of seeing and been seen in The Singing Detective, the songs take special importance considering that Marlow’s father’s singing is the ultimate source of his son’s lifelong appreciation for 1940s music. Furthermore, the first musical sequence occurs when adult Marlow fails to fully articulate his mental anguish to a committee of doctors that visit him in the hospital ward. “Listen. Please listen to me. Will you please — please — listen to me.” (Potter: 27), he pleads, only to confess the pain he feels, without being able to pinpoint its origin. The doctors respond by simply uttering the names of pharmacological solutions, a staccato debate that morphs into a hallucination where the medical staff sings and

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dances Dry Bones (1947) by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. Unable to express his trauma, rooted in having seen what he should not have, Marlowe takes solace in the passive position of being a listener. One sequence in particular has deserved especial attention from psychoanalytic readings: when we are first shown Raymond and Mrs. Marlow having sex in the woods, Marlow’s fever gives it a dream-like, hallucinatory quality, the logic of which is that of his unconscious. Another dreamsequence of especial importance occurs towards the end of the last episode, when two mysterious men from the film noir narrative level, whose names or roles in the story are never fully explained, come to the hospital ward and torture their author in an attempt to clarify their status as literary characters. This form of meta-fictionality, reminiscent of the Modernist tradition, occurs in other moments of the show, such as the visit to Gibbon’s office mentioned above, or the revelation that the book that one of Marlow’s ward mates, Reginald, a working-class youth, had been reading throughout the show is indeed The Singing Detective. The scene where the characters interrogate their author, however, is of distinctive significance, since it also features Marlow-as-singing-detective, who fends off the attackers, killing one of them, only to shoot his own creator, Marlow-the-writer, after which the detective turns to the camera and proclaims his emancipation: “I suppose you could say we’d been partners, him and me. Like Laurel and Hardy or Fortnum and Mason. But, hell, this was one sick fellow, from way back when. And I reckon I’m man enough to tie my own shoe-laces now.” (Potter: 248). This is the culminating point of Marlow’s healing process, the death of his mentally and physically ill self signals the possibility of a new, healthy Marlow, which we will indeed see in the following scene: for the first time in the hospital ward narrative—present day “reality”—he is dressed in street clothes, and he leaves the hospital accompanied by his wife Nicola, played by Janet Suzman, to the sound of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again”. The independence of the creation as to its creator is asserted as necessary for this to occur, and in this it gains a status beyond therapeutic practicality, but only once the process, or the case, is closed: Marlow has killed the person that he held responsible for his mother’s death.

LACANIAN POSSIBILITIES: THE PURLOINED MANUSCRIPT This hallucinatory plot has the further distinction of tying in with another centerpiece of crime fiction meeting psychoanalysis: Lacan’s “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” (1955). Marlow’s fear that the manuscript of the film adaptation of his novel—which he also wrote— might have been stolen in order to be passed off as another’s work is akin to how Lacan reads the succession of thefts of a written text in Poe’s short story, to the extent that the act of thieving and the possession of the manuscript deprives the original owner of his sense of self, tied to the performance of a certain type of active masculinity. The parallel goes in different directions, however, if we consider that the manuscript in question is Marlow’s attempt to deal with his childhood trauma and its consequences through literary creation, which we follow as filmic creation, as film noir sections in the series. Marlow’s jealousy invents a lover for his wife as the culprit for that theft. Tellingly, he gives this figment the face of his mother’s lover, Raymond, whom he dubs Mark Finney, just one letter separating him from the villains and victims in Marlow’s memory and literary imagination, much in the same way as the letter that differentiates him from Chandler’s famous detective. This strongly suggests how his deep-seated fears still hold him captive at that stage in the narrative. In a decisive moment, Nicola starts insulting Finney as he succeeds in selling the script to The Singing Detective

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to American producers and nonchalantly drops her from the cast the second he is offered a more glamorous alternative. As she piles on the torrent of well-deserved abuse, she turns to the camera, which cuts to Marlow in the ward. The printed script makes what is happening even clearer: NICOLA: (. . .) you’re a killer! My God, you’re a killer! You smash up people’s lives. In the ward, the sickly inventing Marlow has the signs of a man who shows that he is suddenly not making all of it up. Nicola’s words have been said somewhere, sometime, before – and they have been said to him. (Voice over) – you’re rotten with your own bile! You think you’re smart but really you’re very very sad, because you use your illness as weapon against other people and as an excuse for not being properly human – ach! — Potter: 218 Potter’s stage directions complement what the audience sees and are clear as to the way word and image combine in describing the enmeshing of memory and creative process in this series. Marlow’s sickly invention, fed by his jealousy, seizes on recollections shaped by the feelings elicited by words that were spoken in the past. When Nicola turns to the camera she is addressing Marlow, who is spying on her and Finney, as before young Philip did on his mother and Raymond, but she is also looking directly at the audience, who then takes the role of Marlow as voyeur. Issues of voyeurism in cinema and links to psychoanalysis were especially strong in the 1970s in the works of Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey (1975), and indeed The Singing Detective relates to the latter’s most fruitful theory, that of the male gaze of the camera in classical Hollywood and especially film noir, constructed through shots that display and emphasize female bodies for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. The pastiche of film noir into which the viewer is immediately thrown in the first scenes of the detective story narrative level (lighting that emphasizes shadows and oblique camera angles reminiscent of The Third Man) is overshadowed by the series’ critique of the consequences of male, patriarchal sexuality for the masculine subject. Nicola’s insults are geared towards the camera, and the viewer’s identification with Marlow in that moment is an indictment of the misogyny at the heart of this narrative and Marlow’s character.

RELIGIOUS AND SEXUAL GUILT I have been mentioning guilt as a key concept in The Singing Detective, on the psychoanalytical side attached to the experiences of sex, death and their impact on an individual’s identity. In the structure of the detective narrative, guilt too is an issue of identity, namely establishing who is the guilty party, who committed the usual murder under investigation. There are two further points that should be made about this, which are relevant to understand Potter’s work as well as to posit further questions about the links between psychoanalysis and crime fiction. The first is the religious dimension that such guilt can take; the second is how it can shape the experience of the reader as he identifies with the detective, and, through him, with the criminal. W.H. Auden addresses these issues in “The Guilty Vicarage”, establishing links between the detective novel and Greek tragedy (here, again, the Freudian link) by way of the purging of guilty feelings in the reader:

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The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law. The driving force behind this daydream is the feeling of guilt, the cause of which is unknown to the dreamer. The phantasy of escape is the same, whether one explains the guilt in Christian, Freudian, or any other terms. — Auden: 412 Although it is outside the scope of this chapter to explore the close links between psychoanalysis and religious thought, specifically in Christianity, Auden’s comment suffices to call our attention to the central importance of the concept of guilt for these two interpretive frameworks, let alone the resonances of tragedy in the equation. The links between detective fiction and religion, especially Catholicism, have long been a feature of criticism of the genre; as early as 1928, Siegfried Kracauer compared the role of the detective in a secular society to that of the priest in a religious community: both devoting their lives to serving a higher power—respectively, reason and God—the key difference being that the detective novel uncovers “the secret of a society bereft of reality” (Kracauer: 175), wholly subordinated to the abstract reason of machinery and capitalism. In order to achieve their goals, priest and detective stand apart from the complications of sexuality, and indeed a characteristic of detectives of the classical tradition is their celibacy, their detachment from sexual or romantic entanglements (think Dupin, Holmes, Poirot). In the hardboiled genre and film noir the male detective may well engage in sexual relations, but they are problematic insofar as feelings of fear or disgust are attached to them (think Marlowe or Spade). The Singing Detective, Marlow, both as writer and as protagonist of his own novel-fantasy is an iteration of these masculine figures. In both types of detective, but especially in the hardboiled form and in film noir, considering their interest in moral choices, the issue of repressed male sexuality and the condemnation of female sexuality in the figure of the femme fatale, are of central importance. Philip’s mother is even portrayed as a stereotypical femme fatale in film noir in the novel narrative level, dying in the singing detective’s arms, who will go on to avenge her by killing himself-as-author, as we have seen. Frank Krutnik relates the emergence of these concerns with a crisis in masculinity resulting from the upheavals of the Second World War, concomitant with the popularization of psychoanalysis in the United States in the post war period (1945–1946). This, too, fundaments the aesthetic and thematic options in The Singing Detective, for Marlow’s decisive childhood events take place in the final days of the war, as becomes obvious during a classroom scene where the teacher talks of Soviet troops nearly marching on Berlin or the presence of uniformed soldiers in the same train compartment as Philip and his mother on the way to London. Although previously I focused on the issue of voyeurism as a link between psychoanalysis and film noir, the literature on this field is vast, but some texts may be of special importance in dealing with questions regarding the quasi-religious role of the detective. Lacan writes about “a corridor of communication between psycho-analysis and the religious register” (S11: 7–8), and Lacanian readings of film noir have become a solid trend of criticism of the genre as surveyed by Ben Tyrer’s Out of the Past (2016) Returning to the topic of religion and guilt, critics have long remarked on the use of religious imagery in The Singing Detective. Cook, in the first monograph devoted to Potter’s work, reads the sex scene in the woods as a fall from grace, a loss of innocence that expels Philip from the Garden of Eden of the Forest of Dean onto exile in London (Cook: 229). Another example is the prayer

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scene in which the teacher calls upon God to denounce the guilty boy, interspersed with one of the hallucinatory musical numbers in which Marlow shows his disdain for a ward visit by an evangelical group promoted by one of the doctors. Marlow’s self-comparison with Job at the moment when he finally accepts his need for psychological help (“Talk about the Book of – the Book of Job I’m a prisoner in my oooh own skin and and bones – ” (Potter: 28)) has elicited a reading of the show in light of Hélène Cixous’s engagement with religious thought and its links with the concept of the unconscious, specifically regarding concepts of spiritual healing, or cure (Reek: 2015). Vickers (2006) has also called our attention to the importance of references to religion in the series: the vengeful God in the schoolroom, the playful lyrics of the songs in the dream-hallucination scenes (with references to Ezekiel, Jonah, Noah), or in Marlow’s brief, seemingly candid admission of wishing he would write “to praise a loving God and all his loving creation” (Potter: 57). As I have been arguing, since the path to Marlow’s psychic healing (we may call it “redemption”) occurs through his creative powers, and since his novel provides decisive “clues”, as Dr. Gibbon himself puts it, for the therapeutic process, the choice of religious imagery to describe the sort of writing Marlow wished he could do should not be underplayed. This dimension of references to religion render what we have seen in Auden (who focuses on the reader) and Kracauer (who focuses on society) more closely tied with the experience of a particular author of detective stories, who happens to have a personal connection to religious experience. Potter’s use of the conventions of 1940s crime fiction to portray Marlow’s lifelong crisis certainly build on the psychosexual dimensions of that genre, especially through Freud, and there too exist links with Christianity, but ultimately The Singing Detective’s main concern is with one individual consciousness and the interplay of memory and imagination.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Auden, W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the detective novel by an addict.” Harper’s Magazine 1946. http://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/ Bell, David. “The Singing Detective: A Place in the Mind.” Psychoanalysis And Culture: A Kleinian Perspective. Karnac, 1999: 64–85. Bell, Robert H. “Implicated Without Choice: The Double Vision of The Singing Detective.” Literature/Film Quarterly. 21 (1993): 200–208. Cook, John R. Dennis Potter: A Life On Screen. Manchester UP, 1995. Creeber, Glen. Dennis Potter Between Two Worlds: A Critical Reassessment. St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Dalrymple, James. “Playing the sleuth: drama, re-enactment and revelation in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.” The Renewal of the Crime Play on the Contemporary Anglophone Stage. Eds. Susan Blattès, Aloysia Rousseau. Groupe de Recherches sur les Arts Dramatiques Anglophones Contemporains, Coup de Théâtre, 2018. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” Trans. Anna Davin. History Workshop 9, 1980: 5–36. Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: the Life and Times of the Detective Story. Appleton-Century, 1941. Hühn, Peter. “The detective as reader: narrativity and reading concepts in detective fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies, 33(3), 1987. 451–466. Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Hotel Lobby.” The Mass Ornament, Weimar Essays. Thomas Y. Levin. Harvard UP, 1995: 173–188. Krutnik, Frank. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. Routledge, 1991. Lichtenstein, Therese. “Syncopated Thriller: Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective.” ArtForum International 28.9, 1990: 168–172. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3, 1975: 6–18.

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Pederson-Krag, Geraldine. “Detective Stories and the Primal Scene.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 18.2, 1949: 207–214. Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit Of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. Yale UP, 1981. Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. Faber, 1986. Priestman, Martin. Detective Fiction And Literature: The Figure On The Carpet. Palgrave, 1991. Prys, Catrin. “Don’t Fence Me In: The Singing Detective and The Synchronicity Of Indeterminacy.” Experimental British Television. Eds. Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton. Manchester University Press, 2007: 120–135. Pyrhönen, Heta. “Psychoanalysis.” The Routledge Companion To Crime Fiction. Eds. Janice Allan et al. Routledge, 2021: 129–137. Reek, Jennifer. “ ‘But Now My Eye Sees You’: Reading Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective” and The Book Of Job with Hélène Cixous.” Literature and Theology, 29.2 (June 2015). 199–215. Thomas, Jeffrey. “Audience as Analyst: Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.” Psychoanalytical Review 84.3 (1997): 437–452. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” The Poetics of Prose. Cornell University Press, 1977: 42–52. Tyrer, Ben. Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir. Routledge, 2016. Vickers, Neil. “Religious Irony and Freudian Rationalism in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986).” Literature & Theology 20.4, 2006: 411–423.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and King Lear JEREMY TAMBLING

Freud’s approach to Shakespeare was personal, revolutionary, and conservative. He knew Shakespeare’s English well enough to use his puns in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905): Hamlet, Henry IV Part 2, Macbeth (SE 8: 36–37), Julius Caesar (73), King Lear (76), and Love’s Labour’s Lost (144). He comments on Falstaff ’s wit (231). He used the Danish critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927) for biographical information, for example, about the time of Shakespeare’s father’s death, and the death of his son, Hamnet ‘at an early age’ (SE 4: 205–206). This did not stop him from later considering the Earl of Oxford as the author of the plays (SE 20: 63–64, 21: 211, 23:192). He introduces A Midsummer Night’s Dream into discussion of ‘the uncanny’ (SE 17: 230), and the uncanny has been a fruitful way to discuss Shakespeare, as in Marjorie Garber’s work (1987). The personal model shows with Hamlet, during Freud’s self-analysis discussed with Fliess (15 October 1997), about love for his mother and jealousy of his father. He discusses Oedipus Rex and Grillparzer’s play Die Ahnfrau (1817), and Hamlet ‘the hysteric’ – hysteria appearing in Hamlet’s conversation with Ophelia. Then, says Freud: in the same marvellous way as my hysterical patients, [he brings] down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival. — Fliess: 272–273 This argument post-dated Freud moving away from his ‘seduction’ theory of hysteria (letter of 21 September 1897, Fliess: 264–267) when hysteria resulted from the sexual violations of the young practiced by the ‘perverse’ father (‘hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual shock’ 15 October 1895, Fliess: 144). After the death of his father, Jacob (23 October 1896), Freud changes emphasis: in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse – the realisation of the unexpected frequency of hysteria. with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable. This rationalization came only months after saying that ‘my father was one of those perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those 173

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of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder’ (8 February 1897, Fliess: 230–231). After September 1897, childhood fantasies are said to produce hysteria. Freud identifies with Hamlet: Shakespeare’s ‘unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero’; Hamlet ‘suffer[ing] from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed [of murder] against his father out of passion for his mother’ (273). Building on that, in 1910, in ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’, he discusses the ‘Oedipus complex’ (SE 11: 171, compare SE 16: 335). Oedipus is a ‘tragedy of destiny’; Hamlet ‘a tragedy of character’ (SE 20: 63). Destiny is sketched out through Oedipus (SE 4: 260–266), but ‘repressed’ by those who do not murder their fathers nor have intercourse with their mothers (263). In Oedipus’s case the desire is revealed in dreams. But with Hamlet, repression, making the play ‘modern’, produces neurosis, and the hysteria with which Hamlet rejects Ophelia, a hatred seen at its ultimate in Timon of Athens. Nonetheless: ‘all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single interpretation’ (266). This interpretation of Hamlet informs the interpretation of dreams, since Freud finds Hamlet’s madness simulated, a trick, like the language of dreams which, revealing and concealing, are ‘most profound when they seem most crazy’ (SE 5: 444). Abandoning the seduction theory, however, remains problematic: there is also evidence that protecting the father involves repression, a point brought out by Marianne Krüll and Marie Balmary, the latter finding a fault in Freud’s father (born 1815) having a brief marriage to a Rebekah, before marrying Amalie Nathanson, (1835–1930), Freud’s mother, 21 when he was born. (Jacob Freud had had a first marriage, to Sally Kanner, who died.) Perhaps the Hamlet argument conceals something of the father’s guilt. That there is a preceding narrative involving the father was the basis of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1986) in their work on ‘cryptonomy’; for example, in the idea that the father of the ‘Wolf Man’ was responsible for the seduction of the daughter; here, repression in one generation is of the secrets of the previous generation, encrypted in the new generation’s – the Wolf Man’s – very language, in what that says and keeps and conceals. Around 1905, Freud reverted to Hamlet. An unpublished paper, ‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’, defined the ‘psychopathic’, saying that ‘the pleasure’ the audience derives is from ‘no longer a conflict between two almost equally conscious impulses [as it would be in a psychological drama of character] but between a conscious impulse and a repressed one’ (SE 7: 308). Such drama could only give pleasure to neurotics, but ‘in neurotics the repression is on the brink of failing’; hence: only in neurotics can a struggle occur which can be made the subject of a drama; but even in them the dramatist will provoke not merely an enjoyment of a liberation but a resistance to it as well. — 309 Naming the first of these modern dramas Hamlet, he responds to the idea of a new contemporary drama: Ibsen is relevant here, as hinted in The Interpretation of Dreams (SE 4: 257, 296). In Hamlet the audience can see their own repression (of the Oedipal compulsion) ‘shaken up by the situation in the play’; we are susceptible to the same conflict as Hamlet, since, quoting Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, ‘a person who does not lose his reason under certain conditions can have no reason to lose’ (309). Freud implicitly separates himself from classical or neo-classical drama, which keeps emotions

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at bay, and argues that the conditions of modern art are such as to threaten sanity in the spectator – ironically underlining what Hamlet seeks to do in putting on a play to ‘catch the conscience of the King’. The dramatist is bound to induce the same neurosis in the audience: nothing could be more different from the idea of escaping from emotion as T.S Eliot argues in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), and in his distaste, discussing Hamlet for ‘an emotion which is unexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear (Eliot 1951: 145). Drama approaches psychoanalysis; repression, which did not mark Oedipus, defines the modern state. Hence Freud asserts that he has found what opens up the mystery of the play’s impact (compare SE 13: 212– 213). Freud re-invokes Hamlet in ‘A Case of Obsessive [i.e. ‘coercive’] Neurosis’ (Zwangsneurose, 1909), where the Rat Man seems an avatar of Hamlet. He is marked by love and hatred in equal degree; the hatred producing hysteria, and paranoia. This compulsive neurosis is an equivalent of hysteria. That affects the body, while neurosis affects the mind by way of a repeating idea or word. It creates a perpetual doubt ‘which, in consequence of the inhibition of his love by his hatred, takes possession of him in the face of every intended action . . . a man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing’ (SE 10: 241). In evidence Freud quotes Hamlet as the Cartesian doubter – ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire / Doubt that the sun doth move / Doubt truth to be a liar / But never doubt I love’. And he returns to the Oedipal in ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ and The Brothers Karamazov (1928). Here the Oedipal in Hamlet is indirect: the hero does not commit the crime himself, it is carried out by someone else [Claudius] for whom it is not parricide. [Freud is silent on the nature of fratricide]. The forbidden motive of sexual rivalry for the woman [Gertrude] does not need, therefore, to be disguised. Moreover, we see the hero’s Oedipus complex, as it were, in a reflected light, by learning the effect upon him of the other’s crime. He ought to avenge the crime, but finds himself, strangely enough, incapable of doing so. We know that it is his sense of guilt that is paralysing him; but in a manner entirely in keeping with neurotic processes, the sense of guilt is displaced on to the perception of his inadequacy for fulfilling his task. There are signs that the hero feels this guilt as a superindividual one. He despises others no less than himself. ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping’. — SE 21: 188–189

MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA Hamlet generates ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), one of Freud’s most moving and influential essays, with implications colouring much twentieth-century theory. Benjamin, Klein (and the ‘depressive position’), Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida give obvious instances. The Oedipal hero’s neurosis is connected with mourning; from Freud’s first iteration of the Oedipal (letter to Fliess of 31 May 1897, Fliess: 250), melancholia comes about from identification with the dead parent. The patient may be aware of their melancholia, ‘but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost, but not what he has lost in him’ (SE 14: 245). Hence the ‘lost object’, so basic for Lacan. But ‘the shadow of the object fell upon the ego’ (SE 14: 249), a statement perhaps derived from considering the Ghost’s impact on Hamlet. When the ego is thus impacted upon, an ‘object-loss’ is transformed

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into an ‘ego-loss’; the ego being marked by ‘identification’ with what has been lost. Freud enlarges on this in terms taken from Karl Abraham on a desire of the ego to ‘incorporate’ the object into itself, something called ‘cannibalistic’, ‘devouring’ (see footnotes SE 14: 249–250). Mourning did not mark Oedipus. Perhaps such melancholia accompanies the emergence of the modern subject in Renaissance and Baroque texts, beyond Medieval literature. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ cites Hamlet’s words (SE 14: 246); in a context wherein Freud’s definition of the terms is memorable: ‘in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself ’ (SE 14: 246). Hence Hamlet’s anger, sexual disgust, and self-examination (Barker 1984). Freud’s reading, though Freud himself is not mentioned, ghosts Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928). Benjamin identifies mourning and melancholia as a new baroque concept, and as grotesque, to which word Benjamin attaches the idea of the hidden, the hollowed out, that which may relate to repression (Benjamin: 180): Mourning (Trauer) is the disposition in which feeling, as though as masked, reanimates the emptied-out world so as to have an enigmatic satisfaction at the sight of it. — Benjamin: 141 Hamlet’s mourning takes the form of contemplating the death’s head, a baroque image characterizing Benjamin’s study (see 174, 237, for the corpse, and 254, including the specific reference to Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’). The skull is the emptied-out world; Lacan discusses it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (S11: 88–89). The ‘enigmatic’ pleasure suggests allegory as a mode of perception which works by riddles. It was the gift of the baroque poet, de-idealising, as T.S Eliot saw in Shakespeare’s contemporary: ‘Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin’ (Eliot 2015: 1. 47). The enigmatic evokes the riddle, and so Oedipus; psychoanalysis undoes riddles, posed in jokes and dreams, being allegorical in going beneath surfaces, reading images symptomatically. If the Hamlet reading comes from Freud’s need to confront and face down the father’s guilt, psychoanalysis becomes a brilliant theory based on an autobiographical compulsion, emphasizing – overemphasizing? – guilt in Hamlet, in a way not representative of Shakespeare. Is Hamlet the central play to which everything else in Shakespeare tends, and does it illuminate all the plays? Relatedly, is guilt the most important problem in the development of civilisation (SE 21: 134)? That passage in which this appears also cites Hamlet’s line quoted in ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, which elevates guilt – as earlier, in the letters to Fliess.

CHARACTER-CRITICISM Freud’s approach to literature shows him interested in character, as when he approaches those who seem orderly, parsimonious, and obstinate, in the essay ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ (1908, SE 9:169). It marks, too, his approach to authorship, feeling that ‘their personalities [he is thinking of Goethe] will be just as fine and admirable as those works of art of theirs which we possess’ (SE 21: 231). Thus ‘Some Character-types met with in Psychoanalytic Work’ (1916) relies for examples less on people analysed than figures from drama. The first essay is on those regarding themselves as ‘exceptions’ to the need to adapt to the reality principle. It quotes Richard the Third’s opening soliloquy, as saying, beneath the ‘appearance of frivolity’:

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Nature has done me a grievous wrong in denying me the beauty of form which wins human love. Life owes me reparation for this, and I will see that I get it. I have a right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held back. I may do wrong myself, since wrong has been done to me. — SE 14: 314–315 Freud finds a ‘subtle economy of art’ in the indirection with which this appears; hence Richard can still be identified with. Yet that ‘subtle economy’ oversimplifies; the frivolity is a sublimation of sexual anger plus ressentiment – Nietzsche’s term in The Genealogy of Morals – for Richard’s sense of masculine deficiency. That would be a loosely psychoanalytic reading of Shakespeare’s Richard, but it is too ‘realist’, too character-based. The ‘frivolity’ marks a grotesque inexplicable heterogeneity; indeed Benjamin (249) sees Richard as the Vice, the Devil, linking him more to folk-traditions, and to comedy, where he is the ‘the odd one in’. We shall return to this. He then ponders ‘Those Wrecked by Success’ – a provocative title, if success is more anxiety creating than failure. Here, Lady Macbeth is ‘ready to sacrifice even her womanliness to her murderous intention’ (SE 14: 318). Noting that the play might have related to the accession of James the First, and therefore to the continuance of the crown through the existence of children, he argues that both the Macbeths feel the pressure of childlessness. Frustrated by the speed with which the play takes place, leaving no time for the implications of childlessness to sink in, he complicates that argument, saying that Shakespeare splits a character into two. Macbeth: husband and wife transfer to each other the qualities they have before and after the murder of Duncan; ‘together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from a single prototype’ (324). Perhaps this feeds the gender-ambiguity of Lady Macbeth asking to be ‘unsexed’ by the ‘spirits that tend on mortal thoughts’, who should be women, but are bearded, but Freud does not pursue, directly, the gender-issues related to this doubling, in particular the stress on manhood that is impelled on Macbeth (see Harding 1969), but it has become crucial in post-Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. They feel childlessness differently; its impact ranging forwards and backwards. Macbeth kills Duncan quasi-parricidally (Lady Macbeth identified Duncan with her sleeping father – 2.2.12–13). But Duncan’s sons escape. Macbeth kills Banquo but his son Fleance escapes. He kills Macduff ’s family, including his son, but is killed by Macduff as father (see SE 4: 321). That the family relationship attacks from both behind (chronologically) and before (in the future) shows too with Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, where Rebecca West’s relation to children, which would mark her ‘success’, is impossible because of her past incestuous relationship with Dr West who may be her father: hence her guilt (329) which produces her suicide. Freud generalizes from Rebecca’s case at Rosmersholm, the family home, to consider women entering households as servants, companions, or governesses (the essentials appear in Jane Eyre, or The Turn of the Screw); governesses ‘weave a daydream which derives from the Oedipus complex, of the mistress of the house disappearing and the master taking the newcomer as his wife in her place’. Rosmersholm becomes a tragic drama since ‘the heroine’s daydream had been preceded in her childhood by a precisely corresponding reality’ (331), The Oedipal again becomes the paradigm of guilt. Hence the third essay, ‘Criminals from a sense of Guilt’, which uses Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra to

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illustrate confused (Oedipal) guilt which is felt in the body, and requires punishment, becoming murderous to get it. Interest in parricide in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, both giving ‘the tragic drama of the primal father’ – SE 23: 135), and in regicide activates Julius Caesar, which is remembered after recounting a dream containing ‘the convergence of a hostile and an affectionate current of feeling towards my friend P’, whose expression produces a ‘special cadence’ – perhaps implicit in the antithesis within this statement about his ambiguous feelings towards P. The cadences within this antithesis sound in Brutus’s self-justificatory speech: As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but as he was ambitious, I slew him. — Julius Caesar 3.2.20–23 The cadence within this memory of Brutus makes Freud realize he was playing Brutus in his dream. The antitheses are declarations of a rationality which lets opposing sides of personality stand opposed to each other, but they contain their own contradiction – ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him’ – does that mean in proportion to how much Caesar loved me I weep for him? If so, the weeping is calculated, not weeping at all. If ‘as’ means ‘because’, the calculation lessens, but a gap remains between the halves of the statement, only explained by the end: I killed him. The gap in the smooth-sounding statement reveals the contradiction: I killed him, and I wept for him. The antithetical mode of argument apparently censors the contradiction. Brutus does not say that he loved Caesar, and Freud only uses the word ‘affectionate’ about his relationship, as if preserving his self-identification with Brutus and his language which he has internalized: literature here creates an identity, but one already split. Freud adds that ‘strange to say’, he had, aged fourteen, played Brutus, opposite his nephew, John, who was, strangely older, fifteen (SE 5: 424 – son of Emanuel, eldest son of Jakob Freud’s marriage to Sally Kanner). Later, Freud says that this nephew (Caesar), was a friend and enemy simultaneously (SE 4: 485). And acting Brutus means playing Hamlet, because of the alignment of the killing of Polonius / Caesar by Hamlet (Brutus – see Hamlet 3.2.90–96). Interestingly Freud does not make anything of Plutarch’s point that Brutus was Caesar’s illegitimate son – as Shakespeare knew (2 Henry VI 4.1.136–137). Everything curls back to an overdetermination constructing subject-identity. Within this narrative of rivalry, professional / familial, which could make the nephew a son killing Freud, and Freud a son killing his father, is another detail of unconscious parricidalism: ‘Prince Hal could not, even at his father’s sick-bed, resist the temptation of trying on the crown’ (SE 5.484 – referencing Henry IV Part 2). The ‘strange’-ness, uncanniness, makes everything simultaneously chance (unconscious) and meaningful, destinal; making Shakespeare authorize psychoanalysis. ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913, SE 12: 291–301), deriving from the Belmont scenes in The Merchant of Venice, argues that a man must choose between three women – a traditional motif – which Freud interweaves with King Lear and his three daughters, where Cordelia’s silence recalls the third of the caskets: the leaden one, which is taken as an analogue of death. Adding in Lacan’s terms, these three women answer to the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, the last that which cannot be spoken about (Lupton: 145–162). In a ‘reaction formation’, whereby necessity is turned, in the way it is narrativized into its opposite, ‘a choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion, and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of

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women’ (129). The women comprise the mother, the wife, and death, the last being the Real. The leaden casket suggests the earth in which the body is received. Freud’s essay repeats a dream he had of three women, one his mother (SE 4: 204–206). Sarah Kofman (103–104), discussing ‘Gradiva’ (1907), thinks Freud’s reference in that essay to King Lear (SE 9: 43) intentional. Since the statue Gradiva, who in the novel’s ‘real’ life is a sublimation of Zoe (= ‘life’) was one of three, the Horae, i.e. goddesses of vegetation (SE 9: 95), a cross-reference is implicit to the women of the three caskets. Freud writes: ‘The great Mothergoddesses of the oriental peoples . . . seem to have been both goddesses of life and fertility, and goddesses of death’ (SE 12: 299). Until he finds Zoe / Gradiva, Norbert in Jensen’s novel which Freud is commenting on, is in a living death, like Lear throughout much of his play. Norbert, the repressed lover in ‘Gradiva’ must submit to love. The third casket is not Zoe: necessity means that Lear must submit to death. That suggests that Lear’s madness, which until he is captured by Cordelia’s soldiers, keeps him running, relates to a fear of women (Rudnytsky 1999: 291–311: see below). If Freud meant Anna Freud to be his Cordelia, the third woman, so making himself Lear, his reading of Shakespeare becomes personal, and involves him speaking – comparatively rarely – of the significance of the mother (Sprengnether 122–123) who is now also the daughter, Anna. If this seems over-neat, in ‘My Chances / Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies’ (1984), Derrida engages with King Lear via The ‘Three Caskets’ essay, while meditating on the place of chance in psychoanalysis, part of an argument he persists in having with Lacan over ‘The Purloined Letter’, arguing that Lacan gives no place to chance, as perhaps like Freud here. Derrida questions whether Freud can say: ‘ I believe in external (real) chance it is true, but not in internal (psychical) accidental events. With the superstitious person it is the other way round. — Derrida 368, quoting SE 6: 257 This shows Freud as the scientist maintaining causality in terms of psychic events, but Derrida does not accept this inside/outside, psychical/physical distinction; he sees either way of thinking as involving a fictional projection from one to the other side of the distinction. Quoting Freud on Leonardo saying that ‘La natura è piena d’infinite ragioni che non furono mai in insperienza’ (‘Nature is full of countless causes that never enter into experience’ – and aligning it with ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (Hamlet 1.5.174–175), he thinks that literature both supports chance, in its indeterminacy, and resists it: ‘it reappropriates chance as necessity or inevitableness’ (Derrida 374). Literature and psychoanalysis are too similar; playing down chance, making everything relevant; hence literature cannot quite be a critique of a determinism within psychoanalysis. Derrida then gives a dazzling series of quotations from King Lear aligning ‘nature’ with ‘fortune’ (= chance), and letters which do not go astray however they may be diverted in a destinerrance (i.e. destiny means going astray). All demonstrates that the ‘Three Caskets’ essay does not permit Bassanio to ‘choose’, it is inevitable that he will choose the leaden casket, and so death and Portia at once. Derrida’s essay implicitly questions what we learn from either literature or psychoanalysis. They are not lessons either think they are teaching; they lack the authority they claim; if we learn from either or both this is different from the assurance they assume; both challenge the authority of anything we say we know.

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FEMINIST PSYCHOANALYSIS – OBJECT-RELATIONS That Shakespeare’s plays contain ‘real’ people rather than being structures – fragments of poems – built out of language where images and poetic preoccupations pass seamlessly from character to character – has dominated Shakespearian criticism, notoriously with A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearian Tragedy (1904). Older forms of psychoanalytic treatment which considered Hamlet an identifiable character with his own unconscious seem similarly conservative in being character-based, not responding to the play as text, creating the ambiguity wherein psychoanalytic criticism approaches Shakespearian situations as if they were real life. That assists the authority that psychoanalysis claims: Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear seem like case-histories. So it is too for some feminist psychoanalytical readings which we should now examine. In Representing Shakespeare (Schwartz and Kahn 1980), psychoanalytical essays on the plays (not the Sonnets), and contemporaneous with the turn to theory beginning in the late 1960s, Murray Schwartz discusses D.W. Winnicott on ‘potential space’, ‘the space of relationship and interplay’ which must take place in the relationship between the young child and the mother. This space, allowing spontaneity and development to the child, is ‘sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living’ while ‘exploitation of this area leads to a pathological condition in which the individual is cluttered up with persecutory elements of which he has no means of ridding himself ’ (Winnicott, Playing and Reality: 103 quoted Schwartz in Schwartz and Kahn: 24). This leads Schwartz towards King Lear which gives: Lear’s refusal to mourn the loss of maternal provision, a refusal that leads him into a persecutory universe within which the breakdown of psychic and social boundaries reaches its most devastatingly powerful Shakespearian form. — Schwartz and Kahn: 27 Schwartz finds in the figures of tragedy a common theme: ‘Shakespeare’s mistrust of femininity within and without, that results, for these tragic heroes, either in their denial of separateness from others or their violent rejection of dependency’, and the fear ‘that all the symbolic, illusory, shared interplay of creative living will be destroyed, like Lady Macbeth’s child’ (Schwartz and Kahn: 29). In contrast, Antony and Cleopatra shows Antony’s ‘emergent acceptance of the feminine aspect of himself, from which the Roman armour defended him’ (30). Cleopatra represents that feminine aspect. Hamlet however ‘cannot unite the feminine and masculine aspects of himself, cannot integrate speech and action. To speak is to be like a whore, to be silent is to court disaster at the hands of men; to act without speech is to deny his feminine self ’ (27). Joel Fineman’s ‘Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles’ reads the splitting between doubles and brothers in Kleinian terms, recalling her distinction between the ‘paranoid schizoid’ and the ‘depressive’ positions, which are ‘characteristic of the earliest stages of boundary formation, and of self and object discrimination’ (Schwartz and Kahn: 73). On this basis, in the comedies, attempts to heal splitting produces a comic androgyny, while ‘clearly defined sex roles evoke tragedy, because their definition, being unstable, must be supported by violence’ (79). Fineman reads fratricide, deriving this rivalrous relationship from René Girard, as a road both to and from the mother, ‘a violence of desire that confirms the experience of the self ” and a ‘homosexuality that founders on its own narcissism’ (104). Fineman’s readings are better served by later work (1988),

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as in a colloquium on Lacan’s Television, where, discussing Othello, he sees Shakespeare creating a ‘literary subject’ ‘compact of its own loss’, that is, marked by a sense of absence, language failing to do other than make the subject an effect of it, nothing more substantial. He sees Othello’s name as implying ‘desire’ from the Greek thelo, and the Os which wrap around the name markers of the Lacanian real, and of absence and loss, emptied out by Iago, who is the ‘inside’ of Othello, making him ‘a “one” inhabited by “none” ’ (Fineman: 88). Representing Shakespeare sees the plays in terms of character and the actions these generate. Hence their interest is in how characters develop, following from Erik Erikson. Development is relation to the family-unit (three essays have ‘family’ in the title). In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the feminine is pushed out, though retrieved and accepted in Antony and Cleopatra. So Richard Wheeler argues, using the Hungarian psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler (1897–1985), student of Ferenczi, and significant for Klaus Theweleit’s volumes Male Fantasies, an analysis of the Fascism within the Freikorps, the generation of the 1890s whose successors were the Nazis. (For some of the controversies these books have engendered, see Niethammer.) Theweleit reviews the diaries, popular images, and the literature of these Fascists as they emerged at the end of the First World War, murdering the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. Theweleit addresses the appeal of Fascism in addition through Wilhelm Reich, and Deleuze and Guattari. Their hatred was directed specifically at women, Jews, homosexuals and communists, identified with liquid flows: mud, water, semen, urine. Mahler, like Michael Balint (1896–1970), and Klein, puts stress on the mother, and Theweleit sees toilet-training in this period as driving the child away from pleasure in its own peripheries. Liquid substances (save, in males, blood, and sweat, and alcohol) are rejected. Toilet-training is seen as ‘drying up the blood and instilling guilt-feelings’ (Theweleit 1.413). These males were in Mahler’s terms, not fully born (2.212); they never entered into objectrelations; they were ‘psychotic’ children. Their issue is pre-Oedipal; there has been no formation of the bodily ego, no libidinal sense formed at the boundaries (2.216). Mahler speaks of ‘deanimation’, and ‘dedifferentiation’, forms of rejecting complex stimuli from outside. ‘The child may either perform a destructive act that . . . “takes life” . . . or may simply perceive what is living as what is dead’ (2.218). That includes excitations from within; the self kills itself. Theweleit sees a continuity between this and the masculine fascist soldier who rejects or idealizes the woman, denying her ‘otherness’. Wheeler uses Mahler on how too early separation from the mother leads to a violent assertion of a tendentially fascist individualism. He quotes Mahler on the life-cycle depending on ‘the process of distancing from and introjection of the lost symbiotic mother’ (quoted Wheeler in Schwartz and Kahn 1980: 154). This relates to Winnicott in Playing and Reality on ‘object-relations’: This ‘capacity to use objects’ includes the capability of relating to others in a manner that acknowledges their full, independent existence. In locating others in a world outside the realm of mere projection and exploitation, Winnicott argues: ‘It is the destructive drive that creates the quality of externality’. The object can be ‘used’ in a world recognised as external to the self only if it is first destroyed in a psychic world not yet differentiated from the world beyond it: . . . Winnicott points to the importance of the mother . . . as ‘the first person to take the baby through this first version of the many that will be encountered, of attack that is survived’. — Schwartz and Kahn: 163

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The destructive drive pushes the object into the external world, in a fantasy of omnipotent control. The object survives attempts at destruction, this being the basis of reintegration, and the restoration of a ‘play space’ (Wheeler in Schwartz and Kahn: 169). The provocations expand in Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers (1992), which finds in the tragedies, especially after Hamlet, rejection of the woman (Gertrude), just as Coppélia Kahn thinks the tragedies show fear of ‘engulfment’ by the mother (Kahn: 11). Such fear shows in Coriolanus’ desire to be as though he was ‘author of himself, and knew no other kin’ (Coriolanus 5.2.35–36). The violent rejection of the woman, specifically the mother, and the accusations against her are both dramatic in character, and relate to an imbalance in Shakespeare which also attacks the woman, as with Volumnia in Coriolanus. In an emphasis which is Kleinian and from Winnicott, there is a pre-Oedipal rage and sense of betrayal which has to do with the pangs of becoming individual (Adelman 1992: 125–126: 310 note 56); Adelman exploits every textual hint, and responds to hints in Freud, as when he links birth with the birth of anxiety, which means that ‘Macduff . . . who was not born of his mother but ripped from her womb, was for that reason unacquainted with anxiety’ (SE 11: 173 – contrast SE 16: 397). Freud must have in mind Macduff ’s lack of anxiety in leaving his family to be massacred by Macbeth, his lack of what Lady Macduff calls ‘the natural touch’. Fantasies of motherhood – even making Duncan motherlike – have been developed in David Willbern’s ‘Phantasmagoric Macbeth’ (Willbern: 520–549). With King Lear, Adelman stresses Lear’s lines of anxious fury: O how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow . . . — 2.4.54–55, compare 2.4.121 The ‘mother’ is hysteria: ‘in Renaissance medicine vapours from the abdomen were thought to rise up through the body, and in women, the uterus itself to wander about” (note to the Norton edition). The Greek husteron meant ‘the womb’. Only here does Lear mention the mother of his children (line 128), seeing them as part of his own flesh (219–223). Adelman reads this access, and for Lear excess, of womanhood within him, which undoubtedly compromises his masculinity, as everything does in this scene even more strongly: it is a ‘femaleness within himself ’ (104): Like Richard III, Lear discovers his origin in the suffocating maternal womb and traces his vulnerability to it: if he was once inside it, it is now inside him, and his suffocating emotions are its sign. Thus naming his pain, Lear localises in himself the nightmare that Poor Tom will later evoke in the storm [3.4.111]: finding her within and calling her ‘mother’, he traces his internal femaleness to her presence within him, the presence that now rises up to choke him . . . Shakespeare shows us the place of the repressed: her organ the epitome of the woman who refuses to stay in her proper places, she turns up at the very centre of masculine authority, in the king’s own body . . . — Adelman: 114: for Richard III, see Adelman: 3–4 I have indicated my unease with Freud’s reading of Richard, but that reading appears here in Adelman. Edgar / Poor Tom’s fantasy of the ‘nightmare’ occurs within a fascinating mad song which expresses a male fantasy ending in cursing a witch; it is part of his playacting, and also, unattributable

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to any specific voice. It is unnecessary to think that the mother here anticipates the ‘nightmare’. Adelman’s footnote relates the ‘nightmare’ to the misogyny within Lear’s words in 4.6.115–127; specifically to the ‘Centaur’. This is part of an associative logic towards which several comments may be ventured: one, granting and admiring the tenor of the argument; the second, to feel that this points up the strengths and limitations that a reading of texts which claims psychoanalytic authority may lead to, that everything can be included in a reading making everything symptomatic, not needing to distinguish major and minor points, for the minor point may be the repressed one. Hence Adelman writes that Shakespeare begins with ‘Lear’s fantasy of resting on Cordelia’s kind nursery’ (123, see 1.1 123–124). The minor replaces the major: the political issues which indicate that Albany and Cornwall’s rivalry is another factor in the division of the kingdoms, and that the Edmund / Edgar rivalry comments on the sisters’ rivalry, including their rivalry for Edmund, fade in the light of a play which Adelman’s feminism shows as reactive masculinity working against the woman, and the mother, this being the agency by which individuation happens. Edmund’s killing of Cordelia is occasioned by a ‘threat to masculinity’ she and Lear pose (127), and Adelman sees Shakespeare as complicit in it (129). Psychoanalysis is seen as unable to deal with female subjectivity save in relation to motherhood, and ‘Shakespeare’s works often seem a preview to the works of Freud’ (Traub: 473) as if implying an affinity between Shakespeare and a sexism in Freudian psychoanalysis, which feminist psychoanalysis can hardly retrieve. In another feminist, Jewish, and Winnicottian study, Adelman approaches The Merchant of Venice (1596–1598), the play which raises questions about the anti-Semitism which Freud and his father knew (SE 4: 196–197). Sander Gilman has shown the tensions that Freud had to negotiate in making psychoanalysis seem fully applicable outside Judaism: how, for example, even walking straight could be seen as an anxiety creating issue for Jews, and affecting the analyses of Oedipus and ‘Gradiva’ (Gilman: 113–168). Adelman, using ‘New Historicist’ techniques – which study new, or ignored archival evidence – works from her thesis that ‘masculine identity in Shakespeare is compromised by its female origins’ to an analogous argument, that ‘all Christians can in effect be read as converts from an originary Judaism they must disavow’ (Adelman 2008: 39); for ‘disavowal’ (Verleugnung – see SE 21: 153). She notes, from the play, that this is different, however, for the case of Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, who converts to Christianity: nonetheless she can never quite be identified as Christian either. The trace of the ‘other’ remains in how she is perceived. Adelman is aware of Freud’s alliance of Jewish circumcision to castration-fears (SE 23: 91–92), and therefore to feminization: the father-position of Judaism is compromised by this apparently originary castration, even if circumcision is an apotropaic against castration. And the merchant, Antonio calls himself ‘a tainted wether of the flock’ (4.1.113) which implies castration, and Adelman sees him as masochistically ‘run[ning] to meet the Jew’s knife’ (113), as if for circumcision. Masochism is an aspect of his attraction to Bassanio (116), about which the play remains silent, though there is a tendency in this criticism to be too determinate and insistent about Antonio’s characteristic sadness, and to call it a name (Daniel 2010), to make it both homosexual and masochistic. Derrida’s warning might be remembered here: if the issues of the play are so resolved by the critic, in a process of what Freud would call in relation to dream interpretation ‘secondary revision’ – i.e. editing the gaps and problems in the way the dream is remembered and told – the play becomes a consistent argument which lacks chance, and psychoanalytic interpretation can find its answers to problems confirmed. But self-confirmation is always dangerous.

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Adelman’s argument, however, is always interesting. Portia’s intervention, speaking from a strange status (neither woman, maid, nor wife – see Measure for Measure 5.1.177 for this division) resolves the Antonio / Bassanio connection: there is an irony that both acts of cross-dressing in the play: Jessica, who reinforces by doing so, the fantasy that Jewish males are really females, and Portia, with her maid, Nerissa, are women becoming men to deceive Shylock. Adelman concludes by returning to the disavowal in the play, arguing that the play is not aware of its own tensions, a point definitional for a psychoanalytical reading: the play cannot know its own fear and guilt about Christianity’s relation to the Jews – its ancestry in a Judaism it has disavowed, its bloody persecution of the Jewish remnant, its continual need to find a justifying difference from the Jew – and so it creates the figure of the monstrous Jew to seal off that knowledge. — Adelman 2008: 133 Three points may qualify this argument. First, we do not know why Antonio is so sad. He says he does not know, and the argument which finds it a homosexuality in him may be attractive, but it is guesswork. A Marxist argument, aware of psychoanalysis, argues that Antonio may not know his desires (the sadness being part of those) but nonetheless he is successful in securing through Bassanio both a territory and a future; ‘the capitalist becomes a patriarch, but he fathers without sex’ (Hall: 65). The neatness of that prompts comparison with Victor Frankenstein, who also fathers without sex – and in that case, produces the monster. In Antonio’s case, that capitalist spirit which works abstractly, and which is systematically anti-Semitic, means that he must repress knowledge of his own engagement with the other: ‘he, or rather the triumphant discourse which speaks through him must have a Shylock as an alien “other” to misrecognise and to condemn’ (70): he produces Shylock as the monster. Lacan invokes The Merchant of Venice in a way recalling his approach to literature: he does not isolate it, it appears without introduction, not separated from other parts of his text as another discourse. The seminar ‘Anxiety’ – an apt alternative title for the play – makes the pound of flesh the objet petit a (S10: 124), in the context of discussing circumcision which Lacan says creates desire (207). His discussion includes the thought that what is excised remains, however phantasmatically (213, citing Jeremiah 9. 24, 25), outside a precise economy of here/not here, outside an exchange economy. Shylock and Antonio’s bond has nothing to do with the exchange of women or the exchange of goods; it comprises the pound of flesh; the Jew speaks for the Hebraic Bible where ‘the debt always has to be settled in the flesh’ and where what that stands for is ‘the remainder . . . the waste object’, which in Christianity is Christ’s crucified body. The foreskin implies the object a as that which does not enter into calculability or the symbolic order. It is a reminder of the real, as present and not present in the body of the one who is desired. Shylock must have the pound of flesh as part the objet a as part of his wounded narcissism; Hall recalls his: passionate, wasteful sexual desire for the unprofitable fair flesh of Antonio. . . . Shylock is an explosion of repressed appetite, where revenge, consumption, and consummation coalesce. Both Freud and Lévi-Strauss observe that cannibalism is libidinal and aimed at incorporation. — 64

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But in this play, things are always in addition, troubling symmetries: the skull and the figure of the fool in the gold and silver caskets, are odd recalls of what is below the surface. The rings of Portia and Nerissa, which can never quite find a satisfactory finger, make symmetries impossible. So too the pound of flesh is the reminder that the capitalist’s dream may repress, but still cannot ignore the body.

HAMLET To turn from feminist-psychoanalytic readings of Shakespeare to Lacan’s reading of Hamlet, which is fully discussed elsewhere in this volume, involves reflecting on the play as it was taken up in modernism. Misook Kang looks at D.H. Lawrence’s account of the play in Twilight in Italy, and at Lawrence’s comparison of Hamlet and Orestes, in his Study of Thomas Hardy. The comparison was also made by Gilbert Murray in 1914, and noted by Leavis (135–165) while criticising Eliot’s essay on the play. It raises the question which is neither Leavis’s nor Lawrence’s, but which is prompted by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and asked by Richard Armstrong while demonstrating the importance of Nietzsche to Freud: ‘why there is such a silence on the topic of matricide in Freud’s works, given its foundational status in Athenian myth?’ (278). It is a question made more pertinent by the feminist criticism discussed (see also Klein on The Oresteia) (275–299). Freud notes how Aeschylus in The Oresteia spares Orestes for the killing of Clytemnestra, marking how ‘the matriarchal order was succeeded by the patriarchal . . . [which] points . . . to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality – that is an advance in civilisation, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premise’ (SE 23: 113–114). Freud may have Strindberg’s The Father in mind here, though that play undoes the power of the ‘Captain’ who relies on the power of his rationality and uses that to attempt to control his wife who uses the point that paternity cannot be proved to drive him towards madness. Hamlet thinks of matricide when going to visit his mother, in a rhetoric which depends on Seneca (3.2.388–399). But the rhetoric indicates something Lacan points out, that Hamlet is always caught by an Other; his language here is not his own. And after berating his mother for her readiness to pass from one brother to another (the old king Hamlet to Claudius), insisting on the absolute worth of his father, he loses out when the Queen asks him what she should do (S6: 286), and he concedes to her desire, which is clearly sexual, and aimed at Claudius. The Ghost of the old king has appeared and she has not seen him. Lacan argues that the scene shows the collapse of the father’s will in the face of the mother’s desire. Hamlet would carry out the will of the father, but it seems to miss the point; and it is not at all clear that the Queen is wrong, or that the play in any sense blames her. Another point may stem from this when Lacan says that there is ‘no Other of the Other’ (S6: 298), by which may be understood the point that there is no meta-language stabilizing the values of the Other, giving it authority; if God is dead, the father is dead. The subject finds itself in a dialogue about desire with the Other (S6: 294), but that is because if desire is desire of the Other, it is not clear that either the subject or the Other is marked by knowledge, or by anything else than lack. This is, of course, material which Žižek has used: the absence in the ‘Big Other’, the symbolic institutions of society. What Hamlet praised in his dead father cuts no ice in the present moment; what has to be learned is the absence in the father; an impotence which is confirmed by his death. As Lacan says, he is ‘a castrated father inasmuch as he is a real father’ (S6: 343); castration being

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the lack of a signifier which gives access to completeness. The father’s failure survives in the son, so that Hamlet is always held by the other’s desire. Unlike Oedipus, where, Lacan stresses, Oedipus never knows what he is doing (S6: 342), in Hamlet, father and son both know. The old king knows his own failure; he has been ‘cut off in the blossoms of my sin’, as he says; and Lacan finds a nice irony in the bed of flowers on which it is specified that the king in the play-within-the-play rests, when he is poisoned (S6: 342–343). It is as if he is being mocked. Oedipus had no Oedipus complex because he knew nothing, and needed not to repress anything. In Hamlet, however, there is overmuch knowledge. Lacan quotes Otto Rank saying of the play scene that in the structure of watching it, ‘there is something that evokes the child’s first observation of parental intercourse’ (S6: 263), which if at all true, suggests how guilt runs between father and son, and which confirms Hamlet’s inability to act. Ernest Jones’s 1949 book on Hamlet also cites Rank: the emotionally charged play scene, where a nephew kills his uncle (!) and where there is no talk of adultery or incest, is in Hamlet’s imagination an equivalent for fulfilling his task. It is easier to kill the King when there is no ulterior motive behind it, no talk of mother or incest. When the play is over he is carried away in exultation as if he had really killed the King himself . . . . — Jones 89 These points for what is said and unsaid in the play-within-the-play confirm a sense that overmuch knowledge, equivalent to guilt, possesses Hamlet, making modern tragedy begin from there; increasing in proportion as it can be said that the father, like God, is dead, because that necessitates mourning. In ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, which has points of contact with the Hamlet seminars, the question is asked, ‘What is a Father?’, the answer being ‘It is the dead Father’. Lacan adds ‘the Oedipal show cannot run indefinitely in forms of society that are losing the sense of tragedy to an ever greater extent’ (E: 688). Loss of tragedy may be inseparable from the weakening of the Oedipal, but could mean that the conservative forms which pin paralysis to guilt, and relate this to the past are receding. This if true might generate revolutionary possibilities in society, but the obstacles against this – the continuance of guilt and the conservatism it causes – remain problematic; as noted in Civilisation and its Discontents. There may be two ways forward, one via the revaluations of gender and masculinity which feminist-psychoanalytic criticism points towards; another, questioning the role of comedy. In Lacan’s Seminar 15: ‘Life is not tragic. It is comic. This is however, why it is so curious that Freud would not find something better than the Oedipus complex, a tragedy, to discuss it, as if that was what it was all about . . . He could have taken a shortcut – comedy’ (quoted Gherovici and Steinkoler: 6–7). Comedy would laugh guilt, self-consciousness, and morality out of court (one of Richard III’s functions). Bakhtin’s carnival, expressing a Marxist sense of how communal life might lift the subject from Hamlet-like self-consciousness, prey to doubt and hostile to the body, gives the hint. Laughter may allow an alternative to Bakhtin’s sense of Macbeth as ‘self-asserting and thus hostile to change and renewal’. Macbeth is caught in a ‘suprajuridical crime’ (that is, a crime not recognized in law) which imposes fear of the other and vulnerability requiring usurpation and defence of personal rights, these being threatened by apparent political forces that necessitate fear and ‘self-coronation’. ‘And this is the profound tragedy of individual life itself, condemned to birth and death’ (quoted Hirschkop: 287). Macbeth must go on murdering; this is an aspect of his childlessness (it seems inadequate to call his childlessness an image of ‘his unfinished, not fully

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individual, manly identity’ – Kahn: 184). Murders show his self-assertion. Freud analyses that individual life, finding it created in the very conditions of the family’s secrets. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy sees that individuality blown away in the Dionysiac state. But Bakhtin asks for it to be relativized by the possibility of carnival, popular festivity contesting an official culture, beyond paranoia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minnesota UP. 1986. Abraham, Nicolas, ‘The Phantom of Hamlet or the Sixth Act: Preceded by the Intermission of “Truth” ’. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Diacritics. 18 (1988). 2–19. Adelman, Janet, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. London: Routledge. 1992. Adelman, Janet, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2008. Armstrong, Richard H. A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud in the Ancient World. Cornell UP 2005. Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body: Essay on Abjection. Methuen. 1984. Belmary, Marie, Psychoanalysing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father. Trans. Ned Lukacher. Johns Hopkins UP. 1982. Benjamin, Walter. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Trans. Howard Eiland. Harvard UP. 2009. Derrida, Jacques, Psyche: Inventions of the Other vol 1. Ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford UP. 2007. Daniel, Drew, ‘ “Let me have Judgment and the Jew his Will”: Melancholy Epistemology and Masochistic Fantasy in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010). 206–234. Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. Faber. 1951. Eliot, T.S. The Poems of T.S. Eliot 2 vols. Ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. Faber. 2015. Fineman, Joel. ‘The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire’. October 45 (1988): 76–96. Garber, Marjorie B. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. London: Methuen. 1987. Gherovici, Patricia, and Manya Steinkoler (eds.). Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy. Cambridge UP. 2006. Gilman, Sander. The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle. Johns Hopkins UP. 1993. Girard, René, A Theatre of Envy. Oxford UP. 1991. Hall, Jonathan, Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearian Comedy and the Nation State. Madison: Associated University Presses. 1995. Harding. D.W. ‘Women’s Fantasy of Manhood: A Shakespearian Theme’. Shakespeare Quarterly. 20 (1969), 245–253. Hillman, David. ‘Freud’s Shylock’. American Imago. 70 (2013). 1–50. Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford UP. 1999. Holland, Norman N. ‘Freud on Shakespeare’. PMLA. 75 (1960), 163–173. Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. London: Victor Gollancz. 1949. Kang, Misook. ‘Lawrence and Lacan on the Transformation of Hamlet’, D.H. Lawrence Review 41 (2016), 145–159. Khan, Coppélia. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. California UP. 1981. Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. Vintage. 1997. Kofman, Sarah. Freud and Fiction. Trans. Sarah Wykes. Polity Press. 1991. Krüll, Marianne. Freud and his Father. W.W. Norton. 1986. Leavis, F.R. English Literature in Our Time and the University. Chatto and Windus. 1969. Lupton, Julia Reinhard, and Kenneth Reinhard. After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis. Cornell UP. 1993. Murray, Gilbert, ‘Hamlet and Orestes’ in Stanley Edgar Hyman (ed.), The Critical Performance. New York: Vintage. 1956: 19–45.

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Niethammer, Lutz. ‘Male Fantasies: An Argument for and with an Important New Study in History and Psychoanalysis’. History Workshop 7 (1979): 176–186. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford UP. 2006. Rudnytsky, Peter L. ‘ “The Darke and Vicious Place”: The Dread of the Vagina in King Lear’. Modern Philology 96 (1999): 291–311. Schwartz, Murray M. and Kahn, Coppélia, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 1980. Sprengnether, Madelon. The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Cornell UP. 1990. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies: vol 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History; vol 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalysing the White Terror. Trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1987 and 1989. Traub, Valerie, ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body ’. Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 456–474. Willbern, David. ‘Phantasmagoric Macbeth’. English Literary Renaissance. 16 (1986): 420–549. Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. MIT Press. 2008.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Reading Hamlet with Lacan The Joint of Symptoms, Desire and Time NICOLAS PIERRE BOILEAU

This paper looks at Jacques Lacan’s reading of Hamlet and the implications of his demonstration for his overall clinical approach to neurosis and desire. There is no denying that writing a chapter on Hamlet is an intimidating enterprise, unlikely to succeed in giving an exhaustive overview of the play, especially if we are to believe Shakespearean scholars when they say it is the most commented play in the English language (Cottegnies and Venet: 1,417). This is acknowledged by Lacan himself, as can be seen in his recurrent references to other commentators in and out of the psychoanalytic field (Lacan: 300)1, and his knowledge of the symbolic status the role of Hamlet gives to any actor who is given to play it on stage, especially in the UK (Lacan: 305). However, what Lacan stresses most throughout his lectures (called ‘classes’ by Bruce Fink) on the play is the work done by Freud and Ella Sharpe. As I am not a specialist of Shakespeare, I would like to start by situating my own contribution within the field of the interconnection between psychoanalysis and literature, and more particularly as a reflection on the interpretation of symptoms as key elements of Lacanian theory, which will help us avoid turning characters into psychological, credible or truthful objects, naturalistic spokespersons for real human beings. I intend to delineate some aspects of Lacan’s work so as to put it to the test of more contemporary theatre productions. For obvious reasons of space, this chapter will not be able to link Lacan’s analysis of the ghost for example to pre-twentieth century comments that the relationship between Hamlet and the ghost should be read as an allegory of ideal son and ideal father relationships (Cottegnies and Venet: 1,422). Nor will it be possible to discuss whether or not Hamlet is the main focalizer in Shakespeare’s strategy (Cottegnies and Venet: 1,428). Some have shaped Hamlet into a representation of obsessional paralysis while others have intended him to be seen as a ‘Christ-figure’, as Jenkins critically says (Jenkins: 302, n232). What this chapter will do instead is discuss Lacan’s own reading of the play in order to emphasize the originality and uniqueness of his approach, manoeuvring as he does between literary analysis and clinical practice, between theory and close readings of the text, between English and French, so as to make us hear something as yet unheard before, namely that Ophelia’s madness is perhaps

1 Since this chapter is mostly based on Lacan’s seven lectures in Seminar 6, references to this will simply be noted (Lacan, page number). If a reference is used from another of Lacan’s seminars or texts, this will be specified within brackets and the year of publication added. All translations are mine. Similarly, the play itself will be quoted directly with the Act number, the scene number and the lines, rather than page numbers.

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less enlightening than Hamlet’s pretending to be mad. This is an argument of utmost interest to the analyst who wants to know more about the distinguishing line between the normal and the pathological, but it is equally worthwhile to the literary critic who seeks to make sense of theatre – notions of performance, incarnation and the relevance of stage acting. In order to do so, I will look at the intricacies of Lacan’s dialogue with Freud’s own interpretation of Hamlet, before I follow in the footsteps of Lacan’s reading of Hamlet’s neurotic symptom as connected to death and time. In the conclusion, I will look at the possible prolongation of Lacan’s analysis of the character in a more contemporary re-readings of Hamlet (Stoppard). Lacan dedicates more lectures of his seminar to Hamlet than he does to other works of art, or heroes such as Oedipus, for example, despite the latter character being regarded as the paradigm of psychoanalytic theory. At the end of the 1950s, during his seminar on ‘Desire and its Interpretation’, only fully published in 2013 in France, and 2019 in English2, Jacques Lacan devoted seven sessions to the play, the exploration of some of its interpreters’ work, the interpretation of the play and the gradual rounding up of his argument towards the idea that Hamlet’s knowledge is what distinguishes him from other tragic heroes and other neurotic characters. His interest in the play shows that he read into it something whose significance for his elaboration of his theory is akin to clinical cases inherited from Freud or his own. ‘His intent is . . . not so much to interpret the play as to learn from it.’ (Fink: 182) In that respect, it must be noted that Lacan straightaway seems to take a few sidesteps away from Freud and the latter’s own interpretation of Hamlet. His goal is to lay the ground for his upcoming breach with the then orthodox Freudian school, which to a certain extent has remained a long-lasting reference in English and American scholarship3. There are many ways in which these seven lectures, delivered with Lacan’s usual bravado, challenging rhetoric, and with a rich frame of reference, can be summarized. Fink, for example, chooses to read Lacan’s Hamlet as a way of introducing Lacan’s concept of desire, by showing how desire differs from demand and is related to fantasy. Fink’s article was written when the lectures had only been published in various issues of Ornicar? (1981–3). Fink therefore situates Hamlet within the general context of Lacan defining desire as resulting from the operation of language, by which demand fails to be entirely communicated and returns to the subject in the form of a lack. The seminar in which these lectures on Hamlet fit develops a theory of desire as linked to fantasy (that which links the subject to object a). For a discussion of this, Fink’s articles are still valuable. I, on the other hand, would like to stress what I see as a perhaps partial but at least straightforward conclusion in Lacan’s final comparison between Oedipus and Hamlet, and not dwell as much on the theory of desire in relation to the function of lack inherent in the Other (Fink: 191–3). My own approach will be to highlight how time is turned into a symptom (this is what I argue) for Hamlet, which enables Lacan to show how literature produces singular and specific articulations of unconscious processes. Suffice it to say for now that in the late 1950s, the ‘symptom’ is presented by Lacan as still linked to the subject’s complaint – the symptom is that which you ask the analyst to interpret for you and possibly to free you from – but, I argue, the lectures already show signs that

2

The seminar was translated by Bruce Fink and published by Wiley in 2019, with a re-edition in 2021. The predominance of Freud as the main, and often sole, theorist in the psychoanalytic school is most visible in the histories of madness and psychiatric treatment, some of which do not even mention Lacan, despite the French psychoanalyst’s strong schools, such as AMP, ECF, Forum, Champ Lacanien and many others. See for example of critical analyses of Freud’s work, Shorter, Tither, or to a certain extent, Elaine Showalter. 3

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Lacan is envisaging another meaning, or rather another usage of the symptom in therapy, by which the symptom would be the very idiosyncratic response of a subject to their own subjective relation to the jouissance they are subjected to. This is central to Lacan’s seminar on Joyce and leads to the idea that the symptom is to be elaborated in therapy, instead of being made redundant.

INTRODUCING LACAN’S MAIN ARGUMENTS What Lacan first stresses is the difference between Hamlet and other tragic heroes and this difference is based on what he perceives as Hamlet’s knowledge. Hamlet, unlike Oedipus, knows that desire always misses its target. Hamlet knows that there is no other of the Other – that the law, like language, is no ultimate guarantee. This phrase could be explained like this: since the subject is divided (i.e. there is a part of the subject made inaccessible by the operation of language), it could be logical to think that others/ the Other in which language is constituted is, in contrast, whole, but Lacan suggests the Other is equally incomplete, albeit in a different way. Furthermore, Hamlet knows that he is meant to accomplish an act that is structurally Oedipal – the ghost tells him so: the word ‘incest’ (I, 5, 83) insists both on the illegitimate, if not unlawful, nature of the union, and mostly stresses the family ties between both spouses which, in turn, leads the audience on to the Oedipal interpretation. In brief, Hamlet is in the know of the unconscious that alienates him in the same time as it enables him to emerge as a subject, positioned in the world and in relation to others. According to Lacan, Hamlet’s unconscious knowledge is the cause of his symptomatic relation to the world and others. His actions are not accomplishments leading to an awareness of something as yet unknown, a revelation about something that was silenced and unarticulated, but an act that is already interpreted. As a subject, he knows that he is ‘displaced’, without an ensured and stable place or location in langue (Žižek: 22). This shift explains why the character is left with no other option but to perform madness, acting like a madman but also enacting madness in a way that will be interpreted as such by both the other characters and the audience. This performance is perceived as an indirect response to a situation Hamlet recognizes as one that should have been unknown. This is a conclusion that in turn comes to interrogate stage performance – hence Lacan’s reiterated interest in the play within the play throughout the seminar (Lacan: 301), in English in the French text, a very literary artefact which one may not expect a psychoanalyst to be using as such, given how self-conscious Shakespeare would have been of the function of such device. The popular response Hamlet gets grants him a unique place in the anglophone world and Lacan’s thesis is that this canonical status is the result of the play’s showing the neurotic structure at play. This needs stressing because it would be a mistake to assume that because this chapter deals with psychoanalysis and Hamlet, it necessarily follows that it deals with madness, understood as a diagnosis of psychosis for example. At the early stage of his sixth seminar, a period that is now regarded as ‘classic Lacan’ (Hellebois), Lacan strains to show the validity of psychoanalysis to deal with ‘madness’, which, as a person trained in psychiatry, he associates with psychosis. This was a time when differential diagnosis was essential to make sense of the psychoanalytic contribution to psychopathology. By saying right from his introduction to his seminar on psychosis, ‘You cannot choose to go crazy’ (‘Ne devient pas fou qui veut’(Lacan, 1981: 3)), Lacan suggests that madness is due to something which imposes upon the subject and cannot be controlled. Seminar 3 is essential because it contributed to fashioning a long-lasting distinction between neurosis (in which Lacan places most cases of hysteria, including the ones that had fascinated Freud) and psychosis. At the

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time, in 1955, the latter is politically important because it is at the origin of most institutionalizations, but it is also interesting from a diagnostic point of view because psychotic subjects are defined by being overwhelmed with unconscious manifestations (voices, hallucinations, etc.). However neurotic subjects still need attention, because they are overwhelmed with symptoms, which manifest the existence of the unconscious and for which an interpretation must be offered. The clinical diagnosis matters for what it teaches us of unconscious elaborations and how it may affect therapy. This distinction between neurosis and psychosis was crucial throughout the 1950s and it is no wonder that Lacan’s lectures on Hamlet were published in Ornicar? in the same years as the seminar on Psychosis (roughly at the beginning of the 1980s). Since then, and following in the footsteps of Lacan’s later seminars, this differential diagnosis has given way to a less structural approach and Miller’s invention of ‘ordinary psychosis’ (Miller 2018), which reveals a greater malleability between the various clinical structures, is now what analysts of the Freudian field will advocate (Maleval). However, the major contribution by Lacan in the field of diagnosis remains that there is a difference between neurosis and psychosis in terms of the unconscious elaborations they are derived from: the former is founded on a process of ‘castration’ by which an element is removed from the subject’s ownership and now is missing – the phallus, a symbolic signifier. The latter is defined by the very absence of the act of removal which, therefore, because the element missing has never been there in the first place, cannot be alleviated or substituted: this is a process called foreclosure. Thus, if the play does touch on madness at times, it does so only tangentially and never in the traditional sense of a complete erasure of the sense of reality. Hamlet is thought to be acting like a madman but his clinical structure makes him fall into the category of neurosis. The acting out of madness is a sign of his subjective position and response to unconscious processes. This is a challenging aspect to note because psychoanalysis, and in particular Lacanian psychoanalysis, is very often reduced to its approach to psychosis, leading some to a certain forgetting of Lacan’s contribution to the clinic of neurosis, which in turn perpetuates the enduring notion that psychosis is the opposite of normality, that madness is in other words the pathological: the play calls into question a simple division between the normal (neurosis) and the pathological (psychosis). Behind the play’s obsession with madness lies a possibility to delineate the kind of madness that is a stake. Others of course did stress the predominating concern with madness in the play. Lidz for example invites us to remark that the words ‘mad’ and ‘madness’ are used at least forty times while ‘ecstasy’ appears four times: ‘In addition, there are some fifty indirect expressions concerned with loss of reason, loss of self-control.’ (Lidz: 28) The statistics gives us very little food for thought as to what the nature of this madness is, at a time that favoured humour theory and questions of balance and harmony (Gilman: 5 and references to the works by P. Doob and J.S. Neaman 1968). Moreover, the accusation of madness often is mentioned as a question other characters raise, hopeful that this could provide a comforting answer to a situation that remains enigmatic. Lacan’s vision of Hamlet’s madness, inviting us to identify his structure as neurotic, enables critics to avoid the pitfalls of seeing madness as a clinical result and to embrace it as a gateway towards the unconscious processes at stake.

PAYING HOMAGE TO FREUD AND OTHER PSYCHOANALYSTS Before elaborating his own interpretation and analysis of Hamlet, Lacan pays tribute to Freud and his interpretation of the character and the play. In his introduction to his lectures on the play, Lacan

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gives pride of place to Freud, whose note on Hamlet is quoted extensively (Lacan: 283). Freud starts from the consensual understanding of the play, which is said to portray a character whose main (psychological, although the term is anachronic) symptom is inhibition – a psychoanalytic term meaning that a subject renounces to act. The relevance of this symptom, both in the sense of being that which Hamlet complains of and that which seems to mean something about the nature of Hamlet’s character, contaminates the play’s structure, as seen in the fact that it is Shakespeare’s longest play (Assoun: 88). Both Freud and Lacan oppose this vision, which fails to distinguish between inhibition (the label), its various forms – abulia, incapacity to act, the pretence of madness – and the object of said inhibition, which varies greatly throughout the play. Lacan thus recalls Goethe’s and Coleridge’s interpretations that Hamlet would be the exploration of an act paralysed by thought, in order to challenge this vision (Lacan: 301, translation mine). It is true that Hamlet complains of obsessive symptoms, as can be observed in the following quote: Ham. Denmark’s a prison. Ros. Then is the world one. Ham. A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’th’ worst. Ros. We think not so, my lord. Ham. Why, then ‘tis none to you: for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. — II, 2, 249–51 Psychoanalysts nonetheless follow Freud’s remarks in order to note that this obsession should not blind us to the fact that Hamlet is not afflicted by procrastination in general: there is only one act which Hamlet keeps postponing while he is seen performing a certain number of acts: the difference must lie in the nature of the act itself. This is Freud’s first major contribution, because the distinction enables him to think about the nature of the action Hamlet finds difficult to perform and to analyse the function of this inhibition in relation to what seems to cause it most (Assoun: 91). Furthermore, Freud’s definition of these obsessive objects enables critics to discriminate between various affects. Lacan takes a step further because in interrogating the consensus about Hamlet’s symptom, which continues to inform many readings of the play (Assoun: 88), he shows that critics and analysts have so far failed to interpret the unconscious structure which generates it. In psychoanalysis, the symptom is that which the subject complains of, often wanting its erasure because it hinders their capacity to act (as in the case of phobias for example, in which subjects want to be able to fly, or to stop being afraid of certain animals); it can refer to the sign, known or unknown to the subject themselves, of a trauma or unconscious anxiety that needs to be interpreted in order to be articulated into consciousness; or it can refer to Lacan’s notion of sinthome, which, roughly speaking, means a creation of the subject to knot together different planes of experiences into a structure that holds and does not run the risk of crumbling down. I will return to the concept of ‘symptom’ further on this chapter. In true Freudian fashion, Hamlet was first perceived as expressing repressed desires in psychoanalytical circles; this is still the point of view of someone like Pierre-Laurent Assoun, who continues to offer Freudian analyses of literature. Lacan starts by recalling the link between Hamlet and Oedipus that Freud takes as the starting point of his own reflection: Hamlet’s inhibition, his

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capacity to renunciate and the iterative aspect of his paralysis, is then thought to stem from the fact that he has to accomplish an act in which he will kill not only a father figure, but a symbolic father, someone who has replaced him in the Oedipal structure of language: King. To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried From the first corpse till he that died today, ‘This must be so.’ We pray you throw to earth This unprevailing woe, and think of us As a father; . . . — I, 2, 106–108 The status of Claudius as father needs a performative, linguistic act which fails to be properly inscribed in Hamlet’s own language: Hamlet never calls him that way and will trust a ghost more. Lacan lays particular emphasis on Freud’s idea that Claudius has performed what Hamlet must have fantasized doing when he was a young boy. In other words, Hamlet is thought to have been forced to acknowledge the presence of another, symbolic father to kill, even after the first one was assassinated. The symbolic nature of this assassination must be obvious to all since it takes a verbal /visual hallucination, with the visitation of the ghost, for the death to be interpreted as a murder. Its reality is then no longer questioned, just as it did not seem to have been articulated before the apparition. The Oedipal structure of a father becoming a rival for the son is in fact made dysfunctional by Claudius’s replacement of the father in the symbolic order, while the real father returns. This shows that Claudius is not just like a father, but he is confused as father because of the inscription of this function in the Symbolic order. P.L. Assoun, a French Freudian psychoanalyst, wonders why everyone seems to have been ‘preoccupied’ by Hamlet without being able to understand this simple parallel between his story and Oedipus’: his response is that Hamlet’s ‘secret’ concerns ‘human desire, whose Oedipal structure must remain covered, by essence’ (Assoun: 86). Here again, we see how this interpretation partakes of Freud’s initial breakthrough with the concept of repression: both Hamlet and its interpreters are unaware of, or have repressed, desires which the play shows them. Lacan only pays lip service to Freud however, and rapidly diverts our attention away from the notion of repression – which, as early as 1959 and in his later teaching, he was going to stop referring to –, and insists instead on a side-comment by Freud: Lacan chooses to highlight the role played by Ophelia, and more particularly Hamlet’s horror of her, in giving us a key to interpreting the play beyond the Oedipus complex that is so obvious. For Lacan, what Hamlet reveals is the uneven trajectory of desire, resulting from the mediation of unarticulated demand through language. Before the lectures on the play, Lacan’s seminar has been focused on exploring the graph of desire he sets up, and deconstructing it so as to guide his audience step by step away from his initial elaborations about desire – which he had first conceived as being Oedipian and had articulated to the Symbolic father. Placing the subject in relation to the other, the signifier in relation to the signified, Lacan shows how the subject’s demand is transformed into desire through its trajectory in language and the many occasions in which the initial demand is transformed and shaped by the trajectory between the signifiers of language, and ultimately how this desire is marked by a lack, a subtraction which cannot be conveyed and which he will call the object a (Lacan: 11–35).

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Lacan’s idea at the end of the 1950s is that desire always misses its target and that other people’s desires similarly hit the subject in a way that makes them respond to it in equivocation, leading to an understanding of desire as marked by a lack. In hindsight, it could be said that this initial elaboration of desire will eventually pave the way for his theory of jouissance and the Real, in which absence of functional communication, lack of meaning and signification will become central motifs to understand the unconscious (Miller 1999). It is also at this moment that Lacan starts to think that the paternal metaphor is not sufficient, that there is a dimension beyond the Oedipus pattern that is worth exploring. Desire therefore becomes the starting point of Lacan’s exploration of the play and he delves into the potential ambiguity of the French genitive to insinuate the idea that Hamlet’s desire is jeopardized by his failure to place it in relation to his mother’s desire and his desire for his mother, both senses being heard in the single French phrase (le désir de la mère). His mother’s desire could be summarized by the theoretical, perhaps slightly naïve question assumed to be the infant’s initial demand: ‘what does she want?’, which is both something the infant themselves cannot fully fulfil and which is unfathomable. Hamlet’s desire for his mother could be exemplified by his relentless return to his mother, as if she was the one he wanted above all, as seen in his decision to break up with Ophelia to satisfy his mother’s demand. Or perhaps as if his mother was associated with the object missing in his own desire. Hamlet is supposed to act according to his father’s desire, but it is his mother’s desire which he is obsessed with, according to Lacan. Lacan interprets the paradox of Hamlet’s paralysis and his sudden, urgent acts thus: ‘Considering where it is located in the play, it is desire, not the desire for his mother, but the desire of his mother’. (Lacan: 332) What Lacan means here is that Hamlet’s incapacity to act and the sublimation of his action (by which he postpones the act itself) in the play scene reveals the place of his desire, and his own struggle with it, only to unveil that his problem is that he cannot access his own desire, which has unconsciously been replaced by his mother’s desire, following a logic of place in discourse rather than a logic of sense. What is uncovered here is that Hamlet, the character, has a value in the symbolic order, in language, even without having a meaning: there is a plane of existence in which subjects hold first and foremost a structural place in language, in which what matters is not what they mean (which would be the answer to ‘who am I?’) but how they are spoken of, what place they are given, if any. Even the ghost’s apparition can be read as resulting in Hamlet’s wondering about his mother’s desire in lieu of his own (Lacan: 309): ‘I shall in all my best obey you, madam’ (I, 2, 120). Freud’s reading, as other psychoanalysts have shown, was already influenced by such interpretation but it hadn’t guided his analysis and had only been noted without leading to further conclusions. Lidz, for example, says Hamlet is not mourning his father but the loss of his mother in her hasty marriage (Lidz: 198) and he quotes Hamlet’s first soliloquy to illustrate this: . . .; and yet within a month– Let me not think on’t–Frailty, thy name is woman– A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow’d my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears–why, she– O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourn’d longer – married with my uncle,

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My father’s brother– but more like my father Than I to Hercules. Within a month — I, 2, 145–153 This part of the soliloquy certainly serves various purposes: it gives us some elements of the story prior to the opening of the play; it shows us that Hamlet’s response to the loss of his Father is contaminated or influenced by his mother’s mourning; it reveals that Hamlet gives worth and credit to the idea that mourning takes time and he is resentful that it did not for his mother. It might be no wonder that a character whose procrastination and willingness to postpone action should be shocked at the speed of other people’s acts. However, Lacan’s use of Hamlet’s mother’s desire enables him to take a step further in tying it to the notion of time. Lacan knots together desire, the place of the other and time in a way that makes sense of Hamlet’s symptomatic procrastination, which now becomes not only a symptom to be erased but a symptom to manoeuvre away from.

HAMLET AND THE OTHER’S TIME What is striking in these lectures on Hamlet is how meticulous Lacan is in his reviewing of the scholarly writings on Hamlet, the great pains he seems to take in establishing a sort of state-of-theart which he is unaccustomed to, at least in this open and explicit manner. Lacan’s initial lectures on Hamlet consist in an exegesis of what other people before him have already said, in particular the autobiographical dimensions of the very character for Shakespeare himself (Lacan: 284–85; 300–302; 329–330). If Lacan keeps returning to these dimensions, what he wishes to do is strip every past argument of its substance, to make sure Hamlet is seen not in a credible fashion, as a character whose relevance would be naturalistic; but he wishes Hamlet to reveal a logic regarding the subject’s position with regards to the unconscious in the symbolic order. This is necessary for him in order to work towards establishing a structural diagnosis that leaves very little room for an imaginary interpretation of the kind biographical facts may logically lead to. As already pointed out, the main prejudice Lacan opposes is that Hamlet is said to be the one who cannot act or can only procrastinate. More importantly perhaps, Lacan cannot be entirely satisfied with the common idea that Claudius acts as Hamlet would like to; in other words, that Hamlet’s act is made redundant by Claudius’s. If we follow Lacan, Hamlet is not paralysed by the fact that the act he needs to perform has already been performed by his rival in the Oedipal structure (Lacan: 289). The reason why Lacan refutes this consensual idea among Shakespearean scholars is that he does not see the non-act or lack of action as a symptom: ‘A scruple of one’s conscience cannot be considered as a symptomatic elaboration.’ (Lacan: 284). It is essential to define ‘symptom’ here as a ‘formation of the unconscious’ (Lacan 1998; Miller 2004: 8). Lacan is yet to elaborate more on this term and its function in therapy, but the term itself was never going to be replaced and one may see in its use for Hamlet some of the ideas that point to his later teaching of the sinthome as a way of using or manipulating one’s symptomatic productions in order to knot together the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic (Lacan 2005). In the 1950s, Lacan’s use of ‘symptom’ is still linked to the medical usage of the term, which as a hospital psychiatrist he would have resorted to extensively in his practice. In that common sense, a symptom is that which hinders your life and which you suffer from. And yet, even at such an early stage, Lacan already is departing from an exclusive reference to the field of physical medicine, because he does not see the

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psychic symptom as simply the sign of trouble and dysfunction, but as an effect of unconscious processes that need deciphering. He does not yet think that the symptom is outside discourse (Miller 2004: 23) or that it ‘does not say anything to anyone’ because it is ‘ciphering and jouissance. . .’ (Miller 2004: 24, quoted in Marret-Maleval). Hamlet’s symptoms are thus to be interpreted. Lacan has not yet uncovered the sexuation formulae4 which will pave the way for another approach to the unconscious, topological and related to the letter, in which the symptom will come to be regarded as that which needs reducing (that is stripped of its imaginary dimension) and remains meaningless, as an agent stapling jouissance to the Symbolic. And yet, as I hope to show, there are already signs that Hamlet guides Lacan towards his future concept. For it should be kept in mind that Lacan thinks literature is not a mirror held up to us, but the production of knowledge about the unconscious: ‘Poetic creations engender, rather than mirror, psychological creations’ (Lacan: 296). What is the unconscious elaboration that manifests in Hamlet’s paradoxical actions? This is at the core of Lacan’s method in addressing the play’s misinterpretations. On the one hand the character is seen as the one that cannot act, a crippled hero so to speak, as in Beckett’s ironic character Hamm; and on the other hand, when Hamlet does act, he does so in an urgent, almost imperative manner that contradicts his initial paralysis. Lacan notes the importance of time in relation to Hamlet and Hamlet’s symptoms, in the sense that he attributes the paradoxical hesitation of the character to a question of finding the best moment, of identifying the time when things must be done. In the world of the play, marked as it is by authority, a patriarchal institution in which the law (the law of the Symbolic and the Father) reigns supreme, Hamlet’s desire is crushed by the place he grants other people’s desires in his own subjective position and in his own time: In their objects, subjects always seek to know when their time will come. It could even be said that they learn how to tell the time. Here is the foundation of a neurotic behaviour, in its most general aspect. And here is where we find our Hamlet . . . Hamlet is always clinging to the Other’s time. — Lacan: 374 The translation above does not do justice to Lacan’s play on words (Le sujet cherche toujours à lire son heure): when I translate ‘know when their time will come’, I only translate one sense of the phrase which could potentially mean, to find one’s rhythm and/or to find what time it is. All these other senses would help strengthen the idea that the subject is always asking for an Other’s guarantee, a yardstick or point of reference external to themselves and which would ensure that

In Encore, Lacan takes a decisive turn in offering to read sexuated identities (sexuated meaning the singular association for each subject of a biological sex, a projected gender role and an unconscious jouissance) as resulting from a specific mode of enjoyment, irrespective of the biological sex of the subject. On the one hand, the ‘masculine’ side is defined by its enjoyment of the symbolic phallus while the ‘feminine’ side cannot be reduced to, although it partly is dependent on, the masculine jouissance, and is best approached as being ‘not all’ concerned by the phallus (Lacan Encore). There is an argument to be made against the persistence of binary terms such as masculine and feminine. However, Lacan was writing at a time that still functioned on a binary opposition between men and women and many analysts continue to show that in their practice, they encounter such fantasized binaries. It would be more honest to remark that sexuation says nothing of the sexual partner and sexual orientation; nor does it evoke a set of behavioural and cultural norms that these positions would be attached or associated to.

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they act when they need to – or to use a phrase quoted above, they rely on an other of the Other, which is bound to fail. There is no denying that time itself is one of the play’s great concerns, and structurally inscribed in the plot’s unfolding, as one of the most famous phrases in the English language precisely suggests. In addition to Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ monologue (III, 1, 56) and Marcellus’s ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (I, 4, 90), the phrase ‘The time is out of joint’ (I, 5, 193) is most often quoted, sometimes out of a context that reads: ‘O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right.’ (I, 5, 193–94). It is remarkable that it is not ‘time’ that is out of joint but ‘the time’5. The use of the determiner suggests that it is a specific time that is at stake and Lacan asserts that it is a time identified as the time of the other, the time of someone else, a time that has been established elsewhere, in an other’s discourse in which Hamlet only holds a symbolic function he has not substantiated.6 If the time is out of joint, it is because it is a time that Hamlet himself cannot rely on, which has no objective reference he can cling to, which sets him wondering when he is supposed to act. If the play is read from this point of view, then the question of the time it took for Hamlet’s mother to mourn, for his other (m’other7), which he thinks is too rapid, becomes another question: that of knowing whether there is a symbolic place where subjective time is in keeping with others’ times. In their conflict, the King and Queen are shown to find Hamlet’s long mourning equally threatening and they repeatedly try to convince him to change his pace by attacking his virility: ‘unmanly grief ’ (I, 2, 94). This injunction from others to act according to their principles, to obey social manners and their own sense of time is reiterated in several places in the play, with various connotations. Answering Ophelia’s question about his apparent gaiety, Hamlet replies: ‘What should a man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks and my father died within’s two hours.’ (III, 2, 123–25). This shows us that Hamlet wants to be synchronous with his mother’s looks, clinging to her timing despite his personal reprobation. Failing to achieve such synchronization, Hamlet’s subjective attention to an other’s desire is shown to cause even more harm, for there is no other of the Other as Lacan points out. For Hamlet is anything but merry at this moment in the play, neither cheerful nor causing laughter, like other mad characters are expected to. In addition to this, this passage takes place when Hamlet lies in Ophelia’s lap, causing equivocation as to his intentions and their relationship, but all the same leading us to see Hamlet in a position of subjection to another woman. Hamlet in this scene is therefore made to look merry by the women around, attributing to them his appearance of merriment and mixing sexual desire with a fantasy of union back with the mother, only this union would be of a different nature. The play indeed is structured on a time that comes from an other whose motive is difficult to gauge or understand and certainly an other’s time whose course is impossible to change. Hamlet’s play is presented to us as a means of catching such other: ‘The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.’ (II, 2, 600–601) Another example can be found with the exposition

Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint borrows the phrase but deletes the determiner. This was a long time before Derrida’s reading of the phrase in Spectres de Marx but Derrida does not refer to Lacan’s analysis. 7 B. Fink uses the same idea but writes it ‘mOther’ (Fink: 190), which I think is more univocal as it only allows us to think of the Mother as the symbolic place, when in fact, Lacan demonstrates that she is the prop in the three aspects of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary. Hence, my choice to spell it differently. 5 6

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scene, i.e. the first scene which, in a play, is the crucial moment in which characters, plot and programmatic themes are introduced to the audience. In act I, scene 1, the ghost may or may not return with the bell which beats (I, 1, 41)8. Horatio tries his authority when he gets nervous: ‘Stay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak.’ (I, 1, 54) to no avail. Horatio’s four repetitions of ‘Speak’ will not solve the issue (I, 1, 135–42). The ghost decides when he returns, the hallucination – for it cannot be anything else given that the scene takes place in pitch darkness – imposes his own time onto the onlookers. Hamlet is therefore subjected to the other’s desire, made manifest in their own time. In that respect, it is important to note that Hamlet, despite him being a Prince, is marked by his own incompetence and powerlessness. When he asks Horatio to leave, Horatio stays; when he asks him to swear, Horatio does not. All of this is strongly linked to desire in the very text of the play (I, 5, 135–165): Ham. I hold it fit that we shake hands and part, For every man hath business and desire, Such as it is – and for my own poor part, I will go pray. — I, 5, 138 Hamlet’s order is not obeyed and his two companions remain near him. As this is placed within the first act, it cannot but seem programmatic of an endlessly failed encounter between Hamlet and his own time, as well as an other’s time that would constitute a guarantee for him. This lack of guarantee is ultimately seen in the fact that time, desire and the Other function in a way that abolishes the binary, and at the time strict, oppositions between men and women: Ham: is a prologue, or the posy of a ring? Oph. ‘Tis brief, my lord. Ham: As a woman’s love. — III, 2, 147–49 It is in this context that Lacan introduces the idea that there is no Other of the Other (this is the title of chapter 16, the fourth and central lecture on Hamlet, Lacan: 345) – i.e. there is no guarantee or law other than the fact that desire always misses its target.

MADNESS AS A SIGN OF HAMLET’S SINTHOME Quite a few commentators have stressed Hamlet’s madness, often contributing to ruling out the question: ‘For the modern reader, Hamlet has become the archetypal sufferer of melancholy, and Shakespeare exploits the blurred line between the melancholy humour and madness.’ (Saunders: 67–87). And yet, the play seems to indicate that if madness is on everyone else’s lips, it is a matter

This notion of time somehow recalls the distinction made by P. Ricoeur in his analysis of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, when he opposes a time that is monumental (and external) to a subjective time, thanks to his reading of the sound of Big Ben interrupting the action.

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of great wonder and an enigma: is Hamlet mad or simply in grief? Is he to be feared or consoled? ’Your noble son is mad. / Mad call I it, for to define true madness, / What is’t but to be nothing else but mad? / But let that go.’ (II, 1, 92–94) This assertion of Hamlet’s madness, like the critic’s, fails to define madness. The tautological approach tends to point to a form of knowledge devoid of demonstration, a sort of intuitive interpretation which condemns and entraps the character into the aporia of an accusation without evidence. This hesitation is all the more remarkable as Hamlet, the play, could be regarded as one in quite a few plays, especially by Shakespeare, which at the time would have tackled the issue. In the Renaissance, madness is certainly a matter of social and health issues, but it is a dramatic, visual and narrative tool used by many artists and for various purposes (Gilman). Playwrights in particular resort to madness because the mad person is often comic or tragic, male and female, central or marginal. One immediately thinks of the trope of the ‘fool’, a character who jests alongside the King or at court in order to entertain, but through whose voice are articulated some of the most ferocious social attacks and satirical comments: the fool’s ‘folly’, which he enacts so well, is a literary stratagem to express the obscene and the censored, under the guise of an absence of reason that is all the more efficient as it is rooted in a ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’: the audience may choose to see in the fool nothing else but the pretence of madness and therefore they may take their comments very seriously indeed. His comments often talk the King or Queen back into reason, open their eyes onto flatterers and other plotters. Falstaff, or Lear’s fool, or even the craftsmen of the play in Midsummer Night’s Dream could be seen as Shakespeare’s versions of such types on stage. Folly and madness therefore were less questioned in their nature as used in cultural demonstrations of what the ultimate other could teach us about our social and cultural structures.9 This rapid reviewing of the fool’s function only serves for me to stress the difference between such approach to madness and the supposed madness of Hamlet: if the fool is known to be mad, Hamlet is only suspected of being so, and at times, – again for lack of any guarantee that he is, thought to be feigning madness. Besides, it is often thought that Ophelia is the mad character – which is not unrelated to the long-lasting impression left by Millais’ pre-Raphaelite rendition of the character and her suicide in the play. If Ophelia is mad, the question is never discussed in the play, it is taken for granted. Hamlet’s madness, on the other hand, is always a matter of talk. If Ophelia is mad, how do we distinguish between Ophelia’s madness and Hamlet’s? Lacan satirizes an etymological explanation of the name Ophelia deriving from the word phallus – he refers to Boissacq, a then well-known Greek dictionary used by school pupils for their translations of Greek texts into French, in order to suggest the obvious nature of such an explanation – and instead invites us to ponder how Shakespeare ‘makes her play the role of the phallus’ (Lacan: 360). But I will not dwell on this development because it is linked to the graph of fantasy and would lead to other developments than the one I am seeking to establish between Lacan’s reading of Hamlet and the beginning of his alteration of what a symptom is. I would like to finish by exploring how Hamlet’s symptom is eventually (already) analysed as sinthome. Let us therefore keep in mind that madness is not enigmatic for all the characters and certainly rarely so in Shakespeare’s theatre.

9 An extensive, and much more complex, discussion of these issues can be found in Foucault’s seminal work, which is a prerequisite to any historical understanding of the evolution of the representation and understanding of madness.

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So why is it that Hamlet’s madness is often more of a question than an assertion in the play? The gap or difference between knowledge and conviction pervades the whole play and constitutes perhaps the reason why the play’s interpretation is still an ongoing process. It has often resulted in a vision of Hamlet as mainly passive and ignorant of other people’s judgements. But Lacan says Hamlet cannot be mad because he knows he is. In other words, madness is psychosis, and since psychosis is the foreclosure of knowledge (in other words, knowledge has not been inscribed), so a mad person cannot pretend to be mad (Lacan 1981). According to Lacan, what makes a hero modern is the fact that they know and therefore ‘they cannot be mad but can only act as if they were.’ (Lacan: 376) Hamlet is not a character in the naturalistic sense, but ‘a mode of discourse’ (Lacan: 323). Hamlet is not neurotic, but he shows us what neurosis is (Lacan: 349). Perhaps this is why there have not been more explorations of Hamlet from a psychoanalytical perspective in recent years and Lacan’s reading of Hamlet has not spurred as many studies as other textual analyses such as Duras, Poe, and others. I would like to conclude by observing the lasting effects of Hamlet as a source of inspiration by presenting a contemporary exploration of Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Hamlet once again enables author, critics and audiences to be witnesses to the stapling of desire and the Other. The play re-interprets Shakespeare’s tragedy into the absurd, or as Hunt says, the play is a ‘re-telling of Hamlet rather than a modern spin-off ’ (Hunt: 645)10. Stoppard’s play opens on two characters tossing coins and wondering about statistics before they follow Hamlet around. The parallel between Shakespeare’s opening on the gamble that the ghost will return and the modern-day risk of gambling with a coin is striking: straightaway, we have to make do with a desire that is suspended to the other’s presence, orders, time and place. In contemporary drama, the enigma and perhaps meaninglessness of the world is now out in the open, characters are in the know of their knowledge’s limitations, and the world is presented as that which cannot be ciphered or mathematically represented without making the characters even more dubious as to the reality of the world. After trying to work out the statistical rules governing the insistent repetition of the coin systematically falling on ‘heads’ (perhaps a translation of the obsessive insistence of Hamlet’s procrastination), the two, largely secondary Shakespearean characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, also ponder the madness of Hamlet: ‘A compulsion towards philosophical introspection is his chief characteristic, if I may put it like that. It does not mean he is mad. It does not mean he isn’t. Very often, it does not mean anything at all. Which may or may not be a kind of madness.’ (Stoppard, III, 116) The hesitation inherent in the play is pushed to its extreme and turned into a farce, while Stoppard lays the claim that such hesitation is the founding principle of the source text’s appeal, leading him to opt for two minor characters in order to change perspectives and re-assert that there is no Other of the other – and not just for Hamlet. Or in other words, Hamlet is a mode of discourse creating effects of reading that convey knowledge about unconscious processes, which Stoppard brings to the fore. In his play, Hamlet (almost) does not speak and he has become literally a function of the symbolic, stripped of any Imaginary representation. The mathematic discourse that is used by Stoppard serves his absurd theatre as well as it reveals the necessity to be on the side of logic when dealing with the play. ‘I’m out of my step here’ (Stoppard,

10

This reflection is based on the review of two stage productions by the American Shakespeare Center at Harry Sudakoff Conference Center, in Sarasota, Florida, directed by Jim Warren, and performed on February 3 and 4, 2009 – Cameron Hunt reviews the complex dialogue between the two plays performed on two consecutive nights by the same company.

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I, 37) says Guildenstern in what could be construed as a modern-day version of ‘the time is out of joint’. It is the reversal or ‘transformation’ (Mitchell 2007) of the text by Shakespeare which is explored by many critics of Stoppard’s play (Suwalska-Kolecka: 310). Some have used this absence of linguistic bearing as an absence of spatial regulations (Kazemi 2017), in a very Foucauldian perspective that has now replaced psychoanalysis as a dominant discourse in the humanities – hence the relative absence of explorations of psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet in recent years. Mostly, what intrigues critics is the postmodern interplay between the two texts and the effects these may have on modern-day audiences (Mitchell 2007). In Stoppard’s play, as in the play it is inspired by, where the off-stage ‘becomes the on-stage’ (Hunt: 645), it is the play-within-the-play device that offers a meta-commentary on the tragic nature of the world displayed. The non-sequiturs that seem to build a dialogue of the deaf between the characters, in and off stage even if all are on stage indeed, reflects the necessity to stop attributing meaning to Hamlet, the character or the play, or to refrain from interpreting him. Hamlet’s knowledge in Stoppard’s version is kept secret and unvoiced but it keeps functioning as a discourse that sets everyone at a place in the symbolic order and what remains to be seen is how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are equally stuck in their own, symptomatic difficulty to access their desire and to act in a world that is bereft of guarantee.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, Lacan’s lectures on Hamlet are a source of reflection at various levels. On the level of the connection between literature and psychoanalysis, it is clear that Lacan perpetuates a tradition initiated by Freud, in which literature is thought to be both a repository of unconscious manifestations and a place of production of psychic structures that teach the analyst as much about the way the unconscious operates as other, clinical cases encountered in practices or at the hospital. In the rest of his teaching, Lacan famously used ‘The Purloined Letter’ by E. A. Poe, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein by Marguerite Duras, the character of Antigone and, perhaps most important of all these references, Joyce’s work, in particular Finnegans Wake. On the level of Lacan’s politics, Hamlet enables Lacan to step further away from Freud and the Oedipus stage, by showing how neurotic structures operate with, without and beyond the Oedipal pattern. On the level of Lacan’s clinical practice, Hamlet offers a new insight into neurosis, one that shows how it is detached from the question of distinguishing obsessive symptoms from hysterical ones. Instead, Lacan chooses to focus on desire as a compass to orient one’s interpretation in a more structural, diagnostical approach distinguishing between neurosis and psychosis. In the meantime, he is already working towards changing his initial theory of the Name-of-the-Father and to invent the paternal metaphor that was going to guide him through the next decade of his teaching. Lastly, these lectures contain many more threads that could be valuably developed in relation to other aspects of Lacan’s work: I have chosen to look at the evolution of the concept of ‘symptom’, but desire itself could be construed as a concept that changed throughout his teaching and the lectures on Hamlet are nor disconnected from his gradual preference for the concept of jouissance. Ophelia and the question of the phrase ‘there is no Other of the Other’ would deserve a chapter on their own too. What this chapter sought to do was to read Hamlet with Lacan by showing how Lacan approaches the literary production with the clinical eye of one who wants to see the logic at play in the character’s act, rather than the imaginary relation of cause and consequence that is often

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exhausted in the very fact that Hamlet is and remains a character of paper, a ‘mode of speech’ (Lacan: 323).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Assoun, Pierre-Laurent (1996), ‘Hamlet à l’épreuve de la psychanalyse. L’inconscient en acte’, in Abiteboul, M. (ed.), Hamlet, Éditions du temps: 84–100. Beckett, Samuel (1957), Fin de partie, Éditions de Minuit. Cottegnies, Line and Venet, Gisèle (2002), ‘Notice de la Pléiade’, in Shakespeare, William, Tragédies, I, Gallimard: 1414–1509. Fink, Bruce (1996). ‘Reading Hamlet with Lacan,’ in Apollon, Willy. Ed. Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, NY State UP: 181–198. Foucault, Michel (1972), Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris: Gallimard, ’Tel‘. Gilman, Sander L. (1982), Seeing the Insane, London: Wiley and Son. Hellebois, Philippe (2018), ‘Un Désordre au joint le plus intime du sentiment de la vie‘, in Hebdo Blog, 137, 13 May 2018. https://www.hebdo-blog.fr/desordre-joint-plus-intime-sentiment-de-vie/ Hunt, Cameron (2009), Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Shakespeare Bulletin, 27 (4): 644–646. Jenkins, Harold (1982), Edition of The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Routledge. Lacan, Jacques (1981), Le Séminaire, Livre III, Les Psychoses (1955–56), Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) Paris : Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, Jacques (1981–83), ’Hamlet: Canevas I, canevas II‘, in Ornicar?, 24, 7–31 ; ’Hamlet : Le désir de la mère, Il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre‘, in Ornicar?, 25, 11–35 ; ’Hamlet: l’objet Ophélie, le désir et le deuil, phallophanie‘, in Ornicar? 26–27, 5–45, Navarin. Lacan, Jacques (1998), Le Séminaire, Livre V, Les Formations de l’inconscient (1957–58), J.-A. Miller (ed.), Paris, Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, Jacques (2005), Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le Sinthome (1975–76), J.-A. Miller (ed.), Paris, Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, Jacques (2013), Le Séminaire, Livre VI, Le Désir et son interprétation (1958–1959), Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Paris: Éditions de la Martinière. Kazemi, Elham and Mohsen, Hanif (2017), ‘Spatial Politics in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’, Artigos, Ilha Desterro 70 (1), https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p287 Lidz, Thomas (1975), Hamlet’s Enemy, Madness and Myth in Hamlet, Vision Press. Maleval, Jean-Claude (2019). Repères pour la psychose ordinaire, Paris: Navarin Éditeurs. Marret-Maleval, Sophie, ’Le Sinthome’, https://www.causefreudienne.net/le-sinthome/ (last accessed 19 Oct 2021). Miller, Jacques-Alain (1999), ‘Les Six Paradigmes de la jouissance’, La Cause freudienne n°43: 7–29. Miller, Jacques-Alain (2004), ‘Pièces détachées’, L’Orientation lacanienne, lesson of 17 November 2004, unpublished. Miller, Jacques-Alain (2018), La Psychose ordinaire, Convention d’Antibes (1999), Paris : Navarin. Mitchell, Marea (2007), Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Transformations and Adaptation, Sydney Studies in English (33): 39–55. Ricœur, Paul (1984), ‘Entre le temps mortel et le temps monumental: Mrs Dalloway’, in Temps et récit, vol. 2, Paris : Seuil: 192–212. Saunders, Corinne (2005), ‘ “The Thoughtful Maladie”: Madness and Vision in Medieval Writing’, in Saunders, Corinne and MacNoughton, Jane (ed.), Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, Palgrave. Shorter, Edward (1997), A History of Psychiatry, From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac, New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Showalter, Elaine (2013), Hystories, Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, Picador.

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Stoppard, Tom (1967), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Grove Press. Suwalska-Kolecka, Anna (2010), ‘A Sense of Epistemological Vertigo in Tom Stoppard’s Spatial Constructions’, in Molek-Kozakowska, Andrzej (ed.), Exploring Space: Spatiam Notions in Cultural, Literary and Language Studies, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 309–323. Tither, Allen (2004), Revels in Madness, Insanity in Medicine and Literature, Ann Arbor, Michigan UP. Žižek, Slavoj (1999), Subversions du Sujet, Psychanalyse, Philosophie, Politique, Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Subject of Poetry Freud and Early Analysis DANIEL BRISTOW

‘It is not from women alone that we must wish for this touch of fancy – or this “touch of poetry” [grain de poésie] – it is from psychoanalysis itself.’ — Jacques Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation (S6: 486) This entry focuses mainly on the early psychoanalysts, and their relations to poetry, in various ways, and builds into analyses of these, with reference to certain Lacanian, and post-Lacanian, schemata. Thus, we work from Sigmund Freud up to – but not-wholly inclusively of – Jacques Lacan. Should time and circumstance afford the possibility of a sequel to this essay at some point, we might approach Lacan’s own fascinating relationship with poetry; and go beyond, to focus on certain successors to this taking-up of the poetical: one such is Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin, White Masks (1952) – which draws extensively on the work of the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire – is poetic and psychoanalytic testament to lived experiences of racism and epidermalization. Another would be Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose ‘schizoanalytic’ meldings of so many poetry-machines produce assemblages that unsettle the very territories on which poetic canonicity bases itself. Further, Alain Badiou, for whom Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan, and – taking off from the event of Judith Balso’s extraordinary scholarship – Fernando Pessoa, provide key coordinates for his systematic philosophy, over which Lacan curatorially presides. In respect of the early analysts, we will begin, here, now, with Freud – the founder of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis – of whose relation to the study of poetry, of literature, of language and its associated critical practices, Lacan said: ‘in Freud’s complete works, one out of every three pages presents us with philological references[,] linguistic analysis becoming still more prevalent the more directly the unconscious is involved’ (‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’ [1957], E: 424); the question as to which – as to whose, as to what – unconscious, will further guide our study. Thus – a foundational line of 1897, from the Fliess papers: ‘Shakespeare was right in his juxtaposition of poetry and madness (fine frenzy)’ (SE 1: 256). William Shakespeare appears within a mostly male and rather classically canonical retinue of central poetic or literary touchstones in Freud’s work, inclusive also – amongst others – of Sophocles, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, and Émile Zola; more occasional references are scattered throughout the psychological works: to poets and authors of 205

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antiquity and modern times, and all in between: the likes of Virgil, Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, and Wilhelm Jensen (to whose popular 1902 novel Gradiva he devoted a psychoanalytic study on delusion and dream); and, more briefly, and more clinically, Freud also mentions works by Sophie Rostopchine, Countess of Ségur and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example (see “A Child is Being Beaten” [1919], SE 17: 180). In his own practice, he was famously analyst to the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who published her Tribute to Freud (consisting of collected memoirs, and a diary, detailing her analysis) in 1956. A major poem that she supressed during her lifetime, ‘The Master’ (written in 1935), represents an extraordinary rendering – at once earthy and celestial – of her relationship with Freud; her warm tenderness towards him, and her fiery disagreements with him, too. We will return to it. In our foundational line above, Freud enrols Shakespeare as analyst to Goethe: The mechanism of poetry [creative writing] is the same as that of hysterical phantasies. For his Werther Goethe combined something he had experienced (his love for Lotte Kästner) and something he had heard (the fate of young Jerusalem who had died by his own hand). He was probably toying with the idea of killing himself and found a point of contact in that and identified himself with Jerusalem, to whom he lent a motive from his own love-story. By means of this phantasy he protected himself from the consequences of his experience. — ibid. Psychoanalysis is here being born: phantasying meets a contact-point, a contact-point leads to an identification, an identification to a creation, a creation from the stuff of word-presentations, wordpresentations as signifying chain, a signifying chain ensconcing an embattled ego against its own hand, from the creation of which issues an immortal sorrowful fiction (the structure itself of truth), and a conclusion drawn, vindicating Shakespeare’s juxtaposition – of what Freud in his shorthand calls ‘poetry and madness’ – in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595): The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name; Such tricks hath strong imagination. — Shakespeare 1951: 408 Psychoanalysis as poetry in motion: the bodying forth of touches of fancy and flights of fine frenzy – forms of things unknown – through airy nothing, which fills with signification – locus and nomination – imaginatively shaped by the pen of the poet; this in sharp contrast to Macbeth’s summation of brief life as ‘full of sound and fury’, left ‘signifying nothing’ (Shakespeare 1958: 435). From such we may learn to listen.

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In a recounting of his first findings in psychoanalysis in the Autobiographical Study (1925), Freud attests: ‘what poets and students of human nature had always asserted turned out to be true’ (SE 20: 33); that is, that central to adult life – its love relations and general sufferings – are aetiological codifications and transferential blueprints drawn in childhood experience and from infantile sexuality. Whilst a great admirer of the poets, Freud also remained dubious of them; yet, like the hysteric, it is from their insights and intuitions that psychoanalysis would come to learn so much. In his short essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) – coming just after the three integral, and perhaps most poetically-, literarily-, and artistically-inspired psychoanalytic texts, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) – Freud expounds on what he sees as the links between childhood play, and adult phantasying, and the constructions of literature and poetry by creative writers. These he relays in their relation to the ego (Freud’s early scepticism towards which – and the characterization of which here as ‘His Majesty the Ego’ (SE 9: 150) – should be kept in mind when regarding the establishment of the second topography, and Anna Freud’s subsequent take-up of it), and to the subversion of psychical apparatuses of censorship apparent in neurotics, one such example of whom is Anna O, of whose defences, Josef Breuer – in the Studies on Hysteria (1895), co-written with Freud – states: ‘she had poetic and imaginative gifts, which were under the control of a sharp and critical common sense’ (SE 2: 21). Underneath the rather clinical veneer of the essay on writing, Freud is hinting at how the creative writer often gets there first, ‘arous[ing] in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable’; paves the way, to the extent even (after what is written is read) of ‘enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach or shame’; and delivers us, at novel frontiers, by ‘bring[ing] us to the threshold of new, interesting and complicated enquiries’ (ibid. 143 and 153). In such we may listen to learn. In 1923 there arose a correspondence between Romain Rolland – the Nobel prize-winning socialist dramatist, student of Eastern philosophy and mysticism, and vociferous supporter of the reign of Joseph Stalin in the USSR – and Freud. The latter cites an instance from it at the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents (1930); that of Rolland’s description of ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, “oceanic” ’ (SE 21: 64), which the writer assumed to be, if not universal, at least familiar to millions, and figured as that which underpins religious sentiments (and in this sense is more akin to the tenets of the analytical psychology of Carl Jung). Freud admits: ‘the views expressed by the friend I so much honour, and who himself once praised the magic of illusion in a poem, caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this “oceanic” feeling in myself ’ (ibid. 64–65). Yet, the feeling of exultation that poetry could arouse had not been alien to him, as is exemplified in a charming recollection in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he and a colleague hesitatingly and falteringly try to recall the exact stanzas of Goethe’s ‘The Bride of Corinth’ (1797), as a test of the colleague’s thesis that ‘the forgetting of poetry in one’s own language could very well have motives similar to the forgetting of single elements from a set of words in a foreign tongue’ (SE 6: 15). After the attempt made on the colleague’s part to recall correctly the poem, the two agree that a distortion had occurred in the recital from memory, and Freud describes how ‘we hurried to the bookcase to get hold of Goethe’s poems’ (ibid. 16), so as to check the original. The excitement in this parapraxis, arising from the

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intersection of poetry and psychoanalysis; of this lapse in memory, of what was thought to be committed to heart – from which a fragment of interpretation comes out concerning the colleague’s rejected proposal of marriage to a woman older than he, which painfully evokes the line ‘tomorrow she will be grey’ for him, after which Freud breaks off the analysis, so as not to distress him further – would ripple throughout the tributary and estuarial waters of psychoanalysis (see ibid. 17–18). We see such an instance of its influence in the occasional paper ‘Ibsen the Druggist’ (likely composed in the early 1910s, and published posthumously in 1934) by Viktor Tausk, in which he recounts a similar kind of forgetting, this time of Henrik Ibsen’s visage by a poet friend of his, referred to as B., who – when confronted by the playwright’s bust – is struck by an uncanny sense of familiarity that he cannot place. Asking Tausk who it is of, the analyst replied: ‘this gentleman is the druggist’ (Tausk 2017: 222). He then relays how on the previous evening he and B. were engaged in a discussion aimed at: determining what gifts a dramatist must possess. I had held, rightly or wrongly, that a good playwright must have a good head for the natural sciences. B. opposed my view and cited Ibsen as a great dramatist who had not concerned himself at all with natural science. “Ibsen,” I replied, “is a poor example. Ibsen had even been professionally interested in the natural sciences – he was a druggist” — ibid. Tausk elucidates that ‘my very presence [at the time of B.’s beholding the bust] must have forced the association between Ibsen and pharmacy into his consciousness[.] To escape from the idea “druggist” he had no choice but to eliminate the other idea “Ibsen” which is closely adherent to it’ (ibid. 223). It transpires that ‘B. had had a love affair with the wife of a pharmacist’ (ibid.), and it is this painful episode that caused the repressed and return of the repressed by these circuitous routes. Ibsen was a favourite writerly choice amongst the early psychoanalysts: both Wilhelm Stekel and (the usually more prosaically-inclined) Wilhelm Reich wrote treatises on Ibsen’s play in verse, Peer Gynt (1867) (‘Comments on Peer Gynt’ [1920]), and ‘Libidinal Conflicts and delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt’ [1920], respectively); and Sándor Ferenczi mentions the playwright – in the early paper ‘The Analytic Interpretation and Treatment of Psychosexual Impotence’ (1908) (and in letters exchanged with Freud) – in whose works references to literature are otherwise infrequent. In Freud’s own writings, Ibsen is referenced with reverential regularity, with the Rat-Wife from Little Eyolf (1894) becoming a key correspondence in the Rat Man case study (see SE 10: 215), and through several of Ibsen’s dramatis personae populating his paper ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’, of 1916 (see, specifically, SE 14: 324–331). Lou Andreas-Salomé had published a major study on Ibsen’s Heroines in 1892, not long before she met Freud, and thereafter Rainer Maria Rilke. Through her take-up of Freud’s ideas, she became established as one of the most prominent and talented psychoanalysts, and remained culturally and artistically invested and relied upon, frequenting the exclusive salons of Rome and Berlin, and becoming a lynchpin within the avant-gardes. In his obituary of Andreas-Salomé, Freud attests: ‘it is well known [that] she had acted alike as Muse and protecting mother to Rainer Maria Rilke, the great poet, who was a little helpless in facing life’ (SE 23: 297).

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Due to these exciting meldings of the poetic and psychoanalytic – as Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer put it in Dreaming by the Book (2003) – ‘the increasing significance that mythology, literature, and art history were coming to have [. . .] as confirmation of psychoanalytic theory called for a new kind of nonmedical expert, and [Otto] Rank was trained for this systematically with financial support from Freud’ (Marinelli and Mayer 2003: 191). Rank produced two supplementary chapters for the fourth through seventh editions of The Interpretation of Dreams (1914–1922), ‘motif collection[s, which] led to a retroactive literary coloration of the dream book, one that was not planned in this form in the first edition’ (ibid. 192): they were ‘Dreams and Poetry’ and ‘Dreams and Myth’. In the former, Rank enumerates ‘countless works of belles lettres – epics, the novel, drama, and poems – in which dreams play a significant role in the characters’ actions and inner life, from the Homeric poems to the Nibelungenlied and the artistic epics of Milton, [Friedrich Gottlieb] Klopstock, [Christoph Martin] Wieland, [Christian Friedrich] Hebbel, [Nikolaus] Lenau, and others’; he states that ‘it is especially striking how often, from time immemorial, both folk and artistic poetry has utilized dreams in the service of the depiction of complex psychic states’ (Rank, in ibid. 205).1 Rank’s restoration represented something of a culmination, in an alchemical heyday, of the interdisciplinary combination of psychoanalysis and the arts; and in the successive works and thought of the generation of psychoanalysts that included the likes of Anna Freud and D. W. Winnicott, poetry, and the poetic, would maintain an importance, though one that was less central, with the notable exception of a work by the French analyst Princess Marie Bonaparte, who wrote a sizeable volume on the study of Edgar Allen Poe – his life and poetic works – which was published in 1933, and consists of biographical and interpretative material (see Bonaparte 1949). Thus, whilst poetry – and its play throughout literary and dramatic form – was predominantly the stuff of directed study in early psychoanalytical casebooks, its influence would become more emergent and immersive as it glimmered through the surfaces of subsequent psychoanalytic writings and psychoanalytic work itself. R. D. Laing, founder of the movement that came to be known as ‘antipsychiatry’ (towards which tag he held a certain antipathy) – who was said to be ‘magnificent at reading [poetry] aloud’ (Heaton 2000: 520), and whose literary focuses alighted on the likes of Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka, initially, and, later, poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, and much else in the way of spiritual and esoteric writings – is remarked to have proclaimed that he ‘could not imagine a person with less sense of the poetry of life than [the psychoanalyst, Melanie] Klein’ (ibid. 525). In contradistinction, Jeremy Tambling’s careful reading, in Literature and Psychoanalysis (2012), of the works of the analyst who gave birth to the Objects Relations school, offers to this rather hasty assertion a rigorous rebuttal, in his not only highlighting Klein’s underappreciated recourse to literary texts in her own – although scant, the posthumously published study on Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458 BCE ) is testament to her critical acumen – but the significance of the very poetry of play and creation in her psychoanalytic work with children, ‘for producing thought about creativity, about writing, and about art’ (Tambling 2012: 68). Within the Kleinian model, Tambling draws out how ‘creativity, poetry (poeisis means ‘what is made’), making and shaping come out of [. . .] contact with the mother, whose milk-giving is a form of creativity’ (ibid. 66), and traces Klein’s significant influence on Julia Kristeva, predominantly – whose Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) begins her transformation of Klein’s psychoanalytic theories into those that centre around

1

As it stands in Dreaming by the Book, the proper names are in italics. I have deitalicized them here.

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the concepts of the semiotic, and later the abject, for example – and much also in the way of the feminist writings, and movements, known as écriture feminine: those of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Catherine Clément, amongst others. Thus, after this brief historical account of early moments between poetry and psychoanalysis, we might ask after the very positions of the unconscious therein; structurally, and also as arrayed against the formulae of sexuation. To begin with the former, which is the question of psychoanalysis’ structuralism. Throughout the century or so that Freud did so much to shape he has often come to assume something of the status of what we might call a floating signifier, having been accorded by nonpsychoanalytic historicist choreographers certain cultural positions, between science, pseudoscience, medicine, humanist literature, quackery, and all besides, often depending on commentators’ whims, the strength of their resistance to psychoanalysis, or disinterest in its practice. The questions arising in regard to all of these positionings are so often phrased in something like the wrong-way-round; in the example of the first: it is properly of little to no interest as to whether Freud’s psychoanalysis is categorizable as a science, according to the scientific standards of the day (as dictated as they are, by privileged groups; as in question and contested as they are, by disagreement between factions; as temporal and contextual as they are, in relation to what represents the cutting-edge, or has become passé); rather, it is of interest as to what the notion of science, what it accords and affords – the question of scientificity itself – did for Freud, and for his work, and its bases. The stock that Freud put in science (and Reich’s foray into laboratory- and then observatory-based experimentation stands as another and extreme case in point here), alongside that in the humanities – at a time in which how it was practiced and what it heralded was about to be brought into a certain line by new legitimative and legislative procedures and conglomerations – is given further piquant political qualification by Jean-Claude Milner in his 1995 work A Search for Clarity, in which he states: Freud had put his trust in humanist culture – literature, history, archaeology. Having recourse to them was not sufficient; one could have predicted that it would be even less sufficient after the institutional, military, political, and moral collapse of the lands in which classical humanism had long survived – the Germany of Melanchthon, the Austria of the Jesuits, the France of the Dreyfusard Sorbonne. Especially since the ideal science had gained in power; after 1945 it was on the side of the winners. The victory of the liberal democracy of engineers and merchants was also the victory of the most obtuse of sciences. — Milner 2021: 98 The ideal-ego that came to guide the imago of science in the wake of the waning, and destruction, of late-nineteenth-century humanist legacies would redistribute its emphases in more exclusive directions, to an extent barring the kinds of inroads that a figure such as Freud was able to make in days of yore, through the fortressing of so much of its empirical and methodological practices and processes. In the wake of such supremacism, of this ‘ideal science’ – that is, that in which science is accorded the position of master-signifier – even the humanities would become rebranded the human sciences; it would be left up to such ventures as the ‘theoretical antihumanism’ painstakingly laid out by Louis Althusser, for example, to switch gears again, and which led to a renewed thinking-through of uninterrogated bases within the scientific establishment. If the ‘scientific unconscious’ of Freud’s day – and which may have underlain Freud’s conceptualization, even idealization, of science – met such

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epistemological rifts as these in his own time, the humanist unconscious would be left permanently marked by psychoanalysis itself. Jacques Rancière designates this kind of unconscious with wider scope as the aesthetic, unconscious, and describes it as ‘occupied by the literature of travel into the depths, of the hermeneutics of mute signs and the transcription of voiceless speech’ (Rancière 2009: 45). Thus, we might alight here on what Rancière in The Aesthetic Unconscious (2001) calls ‘the two versions of the unconscious’ (ibid. 86). These are the Freudian unconscious – which is predicated on psychoanalysis’ practice, technique, and notion of itself as a science – and the aesthetic unconscious; that is, that which was there in the works of art and literature prior to Freud’s intervention, and which his inventions both took off and borrowed from, and modified, too, in what Rancière calls ‘the shape of a singular crisscross’ (ibid.). As he elucidates of the aesthetic unconscious’ pathfinding in the formation of psychoanalysis: If guides are necessary, it is precisely because the space between positive science and popular belief or legend is not empty. The aesthetic unconscious took possession of this domain by redefining the things of art as specific modes of union between the thought that thinks and the thought that does not think. [. . .] This literature has already created a link between the poetic practice of displaying and interpreting signs and a particular idea of civilization, its brilliant appearances and obscure depths, it[s] sicknesses and the medicines appropriate to them. [. . .] The elaboration of a new medicine and science of the psyche is possible because a whole domain of thought and writing separates science and superstition. But the fact that this semiological and symptomatological scene has its own consistency makes any simply utilitarian alliance between Freud and writers or artists impossible. [. . .] The domain of thought that does not think is not a realm where Freud appears as a solitary explorer in search of companions and allies. It is an already occupied territory where one unconscious enters into competition and conflict with another. — ibid. 45–46 It is a striking passage that affords to the realm of poetry – and the creative spaces between ‘science and superstition’ – an abundant dominion and domain the territorialization of which is thrown into question by psychoanalysis; the deterritorialization of which embarked on by it; and the reterritorialization of which inaugurated in a manner yet often unconscious to its own repressiveness. That in which psychoanalysis finds its footing is also trampled somewhat by its sweep, its coordinates necessitously put in flux by poetic re-envisionings of its future-anterior imperatives, of what will have come to be. W. H. Auden – in his poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ (1939) – states of the psychoanalytic method that Freud: merely told the unhappy Present to recite the Past like a poetry lesson. — Auden 1979: 92 To annex Lacan’s wording; however dazzling to the poet’s intuition, or obvious from the psychoanalyst’s viewpoint, this formulation – that the lesson has always been in the poetry of that

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recital itself – may be, it is nonetheless only, and always-already, formed symbiotically of the psychoanalytic and poetic unconsciouses.2 To now turn to the latter question posed above, which we have marked with the Lacanian term sexuation, we might first return to H.D. and ‘The Master’ (this was one of the terms by which she referred to Freud, ‘professor’ and ‘papa’ being others). In the poem, she at moments idealizes and idolatrizes; embraces and enjoins; berates and upbraids; straightens out and queers the figure of the master; that is, the fastidious and infallible; the fairhanded and frail; the frank and ferocious; and the fixated and failed, Freud. The power of the psychoanalyst – in the position, and inhabiting the discourse, of master (as supposed as this discursive position is, on the part of the analysand) – is revered in absolute terms in the first stanza: the man is old, but sage-wise, and his words put order to things; any question that arises can only be one of astonished awe and stunned stupefaction, at first: He was very beautiful, the old man, and I knew wisdom, I found measureless truth in his words, his command was final; (how did he understand?). — H.D. 1983: 451 The poet goes on to declare, with a reverence in her ire, amidst this transference, and through her desire: O he was fair, even when I flung his words in his teeth, he said, “I will soon be dead I must learn from the young”; his tyranny was absolute, for I had to love him then, I had to recognise that he was beyond all-men. — ibid. 452 In this recognition, a moment of change; for in psychoanalysis its dialectic does not stagnate in the concrete, but creates sublational and sublimational flows. Hereafter, in the poem, it is as if

2 In ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’ (1948), Lacan makes ‘reference to the truth of “I is an other,” less dazzling to the poet’s intuition than it is obvious from the psychoanalyst’s viewpoint’ (Écrits: 96). The poet here is, of course, Arthur Rimbaud.

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something of the fantasy has been traversed: the elderly master is showing his weaknesses, the subject-supposed-to-know revealing his blind spots; sympathy is marshalled – as the veil lifts, and death rears its head – in words of encomium: let the old man die, let the old man be of the earth he is earth, Father, O beloved. — ibid. 457 This Name-of-the-Father becomes that of the earth to which he returns, becomes a marker of finitude and death; the fate is that of the Son, as God is separated in the poem from the Master with whom He is first identified. The Holy Spirit, of the analytic third, transubstantiates into the embodied dyadic relation between analyst and analysand, two – in and out of kilter, in the transferential and countertransferential work – man and woman: singly, frustratingly, destinally anatomized by the master; physician and poet: obsequiously inflated, whilst hierarchically infantilized (‘he said,/“you are a poet”;/I do not wish to be treated like a child, a weakling’ [ibid. 455]): I was angry with the old man with his talk of the man-strength, I was angry with his mystery, his mysteries, I argued till day-break; O, it was late, and God will forgive me, my anger, but I could not accept it. but I could not accept it. I could not accept from wisdom what love taught, woman is perfect. — ibid. Mysteries of this ‘man-strength’ and the mystique of this ‘perfect woman’, a reinscription of the ‘war of the sexes’, an angry impasse; this, however, is not the end of the story, as so many commentators take it to be. H.D. goes beyond, much more radically, much more inclusively and incisively, beyond the pleasure of the principle of the disagreement; she looks Freud’s ageing, ailing theories, on feminine sexuality, on sexuation – the cause of so many controversial discussions – in the face, and hands them back, to the earlier, more radical Freud, and to what is found again in his founding ideas on the ‘general bisexual disposition’ (SE 7: 147, n), for example, discussed regularly from Freud’s earliest work, and throughout the Three Essays on Sexuality (1905): no man will be present in those mysteries, yet all men will kneel,

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no man will be potent, important, yet all men will feel what it is to be a woman, will yearn, burn, turn from easy pleasure to hardship of the spirit, men will see how long they have been blind, poor men poor man-kind how long how long this thought of the man-pulse has tricked them, has weakened them, shall see woman, perfect. — ibid. 460 The poem ends in a climactic collectivization, at first evoking prescient moments from the case details of Judge Paul Daniel Schreber, whose autobiographical volume Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) Freud devoted a major interpretative case-study of psychosis to (see SE 12): his becoming-woman, at God’s behest, and his receiving communications through the sun’s rays – ‘we were together/we were one;/sun-worshippers’ (ibid.) – omnigendered under the omniscient sun. In the perfection of the poem’s culmination, narrator and master are subsumed into a cosmos presided over by the flowering sun goddess Rhodocleia, to whom it is sung: “O heart of the sun rhododendron, Rhodocleia, we are unworthy your beauty, you are near beauty the sun, you are that Lord become woman.” — H.D. 1983: 461 Irigaray subsequently similarly attempts to redress balances, launching a destabilization of phallogocentric language, via deployments, in instances, of what might get called – in reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – ‘strategic essentialism’, and through the countervailing speech-acts of parler-femme, through which, as she states, ‘by speaking (as) woman, one may attempt to provide a place for the “other” as feminine’ (Irigaray 1985: 135). These techniques highlight and expose

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disparities that riven the linguistic structures – and, thus, lived experiences therefrom – of patriarchally sexuated discourse. We might let such rubrics as these allow us to reflect on the headway we have made, as well as inform our way ahead. Within those instances of emergences of touches of fancy from the groundswell of the volcanic meetings of the Freudian and aesthetic unconsciouses that we have enumerated, encrustations of courtly love haunt as relational spectres and cultural transferences: those of exalted Woman – always absent; and lovelorn pain – ever-present. Goethe and Lotte Kästner; Freud’s colleague and the rejected proposal; Tausk’s friend B. and his unhappy affair; the unrequited love of Friedrich Nietzsche for Andreas-Salomé, which Freud alludes to in his obituary of the latter: these instances infuse a romanticized sense of a romantic helplessness in the amatory lives of their referents. As gendered as these instances are, this is most so as a consequence of a patriarchal system of discursive relations – that has historically almost totalisingly and archetypically inscribed itself into the aesthetic unconscious – that puts Woman in the place of being. As addressee, in all these instances – and so often in so much poetry (especially in that of courtly love) – there is something of a ‘You’; a ubiquity of a ‘You’. Behind this, Woman has historically been placed – but only under unconscious erasure, which Lacan, in a mode similar to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, showed precisely, with his crossing-out of the feminine definite article (in French) in the denotation ‘the Woman’ (see S20: 80) as ‘ła femme’– and expounds on at length, and with meticulous rigour: If the incredible idea of situating woman in the place of being managed to surface, that has nothing to do with her as a woman, but as an object of desire. And it is that which has given rise to all the paradoxes of the famous courtly love that have caused so many headaches, because those concerned associate it with all the demands of a form of love that obviously has nothing to do with the historically specific sublimation in question. The historians or poets who have attacked the problem cannot manage to conceive how the fever, indeed the frenzy, that is so manifestly coextensive with a lived desire, which is not at all Platonic and is indubitably manifested in the productions of courtly poetry, can be reconciled with the obvious fact that the being to whom it is addressed is nothing other than being as a signifier. The inhuman character of the object of courtly love is plainly visible. This love that led some people to acts close to madness was addressed at living beings, people with names, but who were not present in their fleshly and historical reality – there’s perhaps a distinction to be made there. They were there in any case in their being as reason, as signifier. — S7: 265 Beyond these astonishingly clear words, all Lacan thereafter does is ungenders the signifier, is offers a depatriarchalization, and gives a semblance of what that might look like. Indeed, if Freud got stuck in his question ‘Was will das Weib?’ (Jones 1953: 421, n) – ‘What does woman want?’ – Lacan simply rephrases it, and transposes it into another register (as well as into another world language – from German to Italian) – and, after the author of The Devil in Love [1772], Jacques Cazotte, asks: ‘che vuoi?’ ‘What do you want?’ ‘You’, here: behind which is the Other; behind which we place the Other (in this, it is rather, even, that the Other is made to occupy the place of the is); behind which we fathomlessly attempt

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to fathom the Other: the unhad, in the place of being. Its signifier was never so fixed as to always have been Woman, to have always needed ‘womanliness as masquerade’ (in the place of the signified), as Joan Riviere had it. No; instead, its truth – always and only ever half-said – is more transitory, alike to those moments of meaning that Freud alludes to in his paper ‘On Transience’ of 1916. Lacan: ‘love is nothing but a meaning, namely, that it is empty and one can see clearly the way in which Dante incarnates this meaning. Desire has a sense, but love as I already pointed out in my seminar on Ethics, as courtly love supports it, is only a meaning’ (S24: 108). Freud: Transience value is scarcity value in time. [. . .] A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. [. . .] A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers[;] but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration. — SE 14: 305–306 Indeed, poetry, like ‘love’ – as Lacan put it – ‘is a pebble laughing in the sun’ (S3: 226).3

BIBLIOGRAPHY Auden, W. H. 1979. ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ [1939]. Selected Poems. ed. Edward Mendelson. Vintage. Bonaparte, M. 1949. The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation. Trans. John Rodker. Imago. H.D. 1983. ‘The Master ’ [1935]. Collected Poems: 1912–1944. ed. Louis L. Martz. New Directions. Heaton, J. 2000. ‘On R. D. Laing: Sorcery, Style, Alienation’. Psychoanalytic Review. 87. 4. Irigaray, L. 1985. This Sex Which is Not One [1977]. trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Cornell UP. Jones, E. 1953. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. 2 vols. Hogarth Press. II. Jones, E. 1976. Hamlet and Oedipus [1949]. W. W. Norton. Marinelli, L. and A. Mayer. 2003. ‘Otto Rank: “Dreams and Poetry,” “Dreams and Myth”: Two Texts from Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams’. Dreaming by the Book: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. Trans. Susan Fairfield. Other Press. Milner, J-C. 2021. A Search for Clarity [1995]. Trans. Ed. Pluth. Northwestern UP. Rancière, J. 2009. The Aesthetic Unconscious [2001]. Trans. Debra Keats and James Swenson. Polity. Rank, O. ‘Dreams and Myth’ [1914]. Dreaming by the Book: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. Trans. Susan Fairfield. Other Press. Shakespeare, W. 1951. A Midsummer Night’s Dream [c. 1595]. Complete Works of Shakespeare, Volume I: Comedies. ed. Peter Alexander, 4 vols. William Collins and Sons. I. Shakespeare, W, 1958. Macbeth [1608]. Complete Works of Shakespeare, Volume III: Tragedies. ed. Peter Alexander, 4 vols. London. William Collins and Sons. III. Tambling, J. 2012. Literature and Psychoanalysis. Manchester UP. Tausk, V. 2017. ‘Ibsen the Druggist’ [n.d.]. trans. Dorian Feigenbaum. Sexuality, War and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers [1991]. Ed. Paul Roazen. Routledge. This essay is dedicated to Robbie Lockwood. 3 The metaphor is italicized in the original text. One may think here also of William Blake’s ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ (1794); with thanks to Jeremy Tambling for this reminder.

PART THREE

Psychoanalysis and Modernism

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Excess, Trauma, and Negativity in Eliot and Lawrence British Modernism and Psychoanalysis FUHITO ENDO *

One of the most crucial characteristics of modernist literary language in the 1920s is what Lyndsey Stonebridge terms ‘the destructive element’ or ‘the apocalyptic rhetoric of interwar England’ (ix). Originally, the former phrase ‘the destructive element’ was borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim by I. A. Richards in 1925 and made use of in his comments on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Stonebridge argues that Richards’ intention was to highlight the poem’s implication that ‘only by immersing oneself in the modern world of destruction can the modern writer reclaim some form of cultural authority and integrity’ (viii). Widely shared by a set of postwar modernists was, Stonebridge continues, a ‘pessimistic diagnosis of the twentieth century’s fascination with destruction’ (viii). In this postwar context, Stonebridge also mentions Edward Glover, an influential British psychoanalyst between the wars, thereby attempting a foreground of historical concurrence between psychoanalytic discourses and such literary engrossment in destructive impulses. Glover played a central role in the British Psychoanalytic Society, where Freudian and Kleinian theories on ‘the death drive’ were amongst the most salient clinical preoccupations. Stonebridge’s focus is thus on the intertextual connections between British modernism and psychoanalysis especially in terms of ‘articulating a sense of national, social, cultural and psychic crisis’ (ix) under the threat of ‘the destructive element.’ Deborah Parsons’ argument entitled ‘Trauma and War Memory’ leads us to read this literary and psychoanalytic obsession with destructiveness as an after-effect of the First World War. Parsons argues that the impact of the war on modernist authors’ minds was something traumatic and by definition beyond conventional verbal expressions. Whilst refusing to be contained within postwar literary representations, Parsons stresses, this traumatic shock manifests itself as something different from the war itself or what might thus be considered as a certain sort of textual distortion: ‘Too close and too incomprehensible to be imagined, its traumatic effect appears indirectly through the characteristic fragmentation of subject and narrative’ (178). Thus, according to Parsons, the war cannot be represented as such, but rather emerges as a disruption of thematic stability or unity.

Some parts of the argument in this chapter are a revised version of that in my monograph written in Japanese: The Death Drive and Modernism: British Literature and Psychoanalysis between the Wars (Keio UP, 2012). My thanks are to Professor Barnaby Ralph for his invaluable comments on the earlier draft of this chapter.

*

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This argument is based on Cathy Caruth, who emphasizes the ‘very unassimilated nature’ of trauma, by which she means ‘the way it was precisely not known in the first instance’ but ‘returns to haunt the survivor later on’ (4; original emphasis). Her point is the epistemological unintelligibility and temporal pertinacity of a traumatic experience particularly in the cases of its literary renderings. Something traumatic in literary language ‘cannot be reduced to the thematic content of the text’ and is therefore ‘beyond what we can know or theorize about it,’ whilst ‘stubbornly persist[ing] in bearing witness to some forgotten wound’ (5). Taking this perspective offered by Caruth as a starting point, Parsons reads D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) as a typical example of such a traumatized text, wherein the war itself is beyond its thematic register, but obstinately lingers as an absent cause of the characters’ psychological predicaments: If the war itself is absent from Women in Love, its scars are nevertheless to be felt in the mechanical self-defensiveness of its tortured characters, in their will to destruction, in their social and psychological dislocation and their desperate desire for meaning. — 178 As Parsons reminds us, Lawrence himself was aware of this sort of traumatic ontology or absence of the war in his novel, completed in 1917 and published in 1920. In the foreword to this text (1919), the author remarks: This novel was written in its first form in the Tyrol, in 1913. It was altogether re-written and finished in Cornwall in 1917. So that it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters. — 485 Lawrence thus inspires us to redefine the war as an absent cause of the postwar modernist preoccupation with ‘the destructive element’. Taking my own cue from Stonebridge and Parsons, the aim of this chapter is to contextualize the languages of D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and psychoanalysis within this postwar traumatic milieu, thereby reexamining the ways in which their textual and thematic forms are characteristically structured, driven, or distorted by a series of what they attempt to characterize as destructive excess, inherent in the human psyche and societies. Invisibly but insidiously functioning, the war as an absent cause is generative of this uniquely modernist textuality. Eliot and Lawrence can indeed be considered as contrasting and perhaps even conflicting literary figures in the 1920s, given, for example, the former’s growing adoration of Christian orthodoxy and the latter’s aspiration for something heretical. Yet, it is worth noting that Eliot’s attitude towards Lawrence is intriguingly ambivalent. Eliot confesses that ‘there is however one contemporary figure about whom my mind will, I fear, always waver between dislike, exasperation, boredom and admiration. That is D. H. Lawrence’ (Eliot 1965: 24). Their shared and concurrent immersion in what Stonebridge calls ‘the apocalyptic rhetoric of interwar England’ may be understood to account for the sympathetic side of Eliot’s ambivalent feelings towards Lawrence. Or rather, one should say that the prevalence of this rhetoric is such that it is able to be discerned in seemingly disparate modernist texts, such as those of Eliot and Lawrence. More specifically, their languages overlap in

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what can be read as particular types of textual excess, trauma, and negativity. These textualities, in some significant cases, can be viewed as comparable with the Freudian and Kleinian death drives, despite Eliot’s explicit antipathy towards and Lawrence’s critical intervention in psychoanalysis.

KLEINIAN AND PARANOIAC EXCESS IN ELIOT Of particular interest here is Tony Pinkney’s speculative approach to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Hamlet’ (1919): Had Eliot read Klein, he might have recast his account of Hamlet in terms of her psychic position, to the effect that Hamlet, fixated in the paranoid-schizoid organisation, has his most intense relationship with the internal objects of his own phantasy world, and that these relationships have a primitive force out of all proportion to the real objects in the external world to which they are none the less related. — 141; original emphasis As Pinkney suggests, such a Kleinian affective excess reminds us of Eliot’s well-known idea of an ‘objective correlative’ or lack thereof in this essay (‘Hamlet’ 140). What exasperates but simultaneously captivates Eliot in reading Hamlet is the dramatic absence of any necessary logical and psychological relevance between Hamlet’s intensive abhorrence in his psyche and the supposed outside object of this affectivity, his mother: Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. — 145; original emphasis Eliot’s point is that ‘[t]he only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “object correlative” ’ (145), the lack of which induces him to declare that ‘the play is most certainly an artistic failure’ (143). As I have argued elsewhere (Endo 2006), the historical fact that Melanie Klein was enthusiastically received after the war by a set of ‘Bloomsbury’ members is highly revealing, particularly given the paranoiac affectivity of contemporary modernist language. Vividly reminiscent of Eliot’s reading of Hamlet’s paranoiac aggression, the Kleinian subject’s inner aggressivity is projected onto the outside, thus producing a monstrously disgusting object in its subjective sphere. This phantasy is therefore devoid of what Eliot terms ‘objective correlative’: a Kleinian outside object is a reproduction/reflection of the inside violence. In this vein, it is interesting to mention Alix Strachey’s letter to her husband James in 1924, in which she gives a detailed description of Klein’s oral presentation on ‘the paranoid-schizoid position’ at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. Alix and James Strachey were amongst the central members of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’:

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[C]hildren often projected their already-formed Ueber-Ichs back onto their parents, & so feared them in a quite exaggerated way, & often thought them tyrannous & cruel when in reality they were as mild as milk. — 146; original emphasis What characterizes Klein’s meta-psychology of psychic aggression or the death drive is this way of rendering the superego – ‘Ueber-Ichs’ as Alix puts it here – as a very early psychic excess of primitive violence, which is therefore essentially undistinguishable from the Freudian conception of das Es or ‘the id’ in Strachey’s translation. In the case of the Kleinian paranoiac phantasy, furthermore, there is hardly any correspondence between the superego’s cruelty and that of actual parents. In sharp contrast, Anna Freud, a formidable rival to Klein in the psychoanalytic circles between the wars, showed her daughterly obedience to her father’s orthodox definition of the superego in The Ego and the Id as a more organized psychic function to repress the primitive aggression of the id (SE 19: 52–53). Anna’s theory is predicated upon the corresponding relationship between the superego and parents: If externally the level of good relations with the parents rises, so does the internal status of the superego and the energy with which it enforces its claims. If the former is lowered, the superego is diminished as well. — 54 Hence, Anna Freud’s conceptualization of the superego as a pedagogically oriented internalization of parents’ cultural and social values and a consequent repression of the primitive and unconscious violence of the id. In the interwar years theoretical debates between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, Alix was on the side of Klein’s view of the ‘cruel’ superego without any objective correlation to actual parents. Alix suggested to Ernest Jones – the then president of the British Psychoanalytic Society – that they should invite Klein from Berlin to London, where Kleinian psychoanalysis was to gain theoretical, clinical, and political dominance in the 1920s. When we read Klein’s own depiction of such inner aggression uncontrollably intensified by the superego as well as the id, in ‘An Obsessional Neurosis in a Six-year-old Girl,’ partially based on her lecture in London in 1925 and translated by Alix herself, it becomes evident that her report of Klein’s paper in Berlin was quite accurate: Where [. . .] the child’s fury against its object is really excessive, the fundamental situation is that the superego has turned against the id. The ego escapes from this intolerable situation by means of a projection. It presents the object as an enemy in order that the id can destroy it in a sadistic way with the consent of the superego. If the ego can effect an alliance between the superego and the id by this means, it can for the time being send out the sadism of the superego that was directed against the id into the external world. — 72 What emerges here is an intense inner violence, driven by the ferocious conflict between the superego and the id, which is accelerated by a series of interactions between them. The implications

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of this psychoanalytic picture are rather disquieting and scandalous, especially because, as I have discussed elsewhere, the superego was generally assumed by orthodox Freudians to be ‘a cultural prohibition and sublimation of violence’ (Endo: 175–6) in its repression of the id. Based on this historical context, I conclude that ‘the conventional opposition of culture vs. violence is deconstructed by Klein in a uniquely psychoanalytic way’ (176). The Kleinian death drive can thus be understood to be an escalating psychic process of inside sadism and its aggressive projection onto an outside object, whilst being evocative of Eliot’s Hamlet.

TRAUMA IN EXCESS OF LITERARY THEMATIZATION It is worth recalling that Eliot asks a negative rhetorical question, with epistemological resignation, regarding the unreadability of Hamlet’s psychology: ‘Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know’ (‘Hamlet’ 146). This question, which is assumed to be unanswerable, is addressed to Shakespeare, and yet it is worth trying to direct it to Eliot himself. We can then wonder what kind of experience might have compelled Eliot to advance this query in 1919. It should also be noted that Eliot’s criticism fails to serve as a meta-language in analysing Shakespeare’s language: Eliot himself cannot answer the question Shakespeare is supposed to have answered. Eliot merely reiterates the question which he claims Shakespeare should have answered, without reaching any conclusion except that Hamlet is a failure on artistic grounds. Eliot thus identifies himself with Shakespeare, who identifies himself with Hamlet in the critic’s view, to the extent that Eliot finds it virtually impossible to tell his own problematic from the dramatist’s as well as the protagonist’s. This self-referential conundrum naturally forces Eliot to leave his argument unfinalized: We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself. — 146 All Eliot can say with certainty is that ‘[t]he intensive feeling, ecstatic or terrible’ in this play is ‘doubtless a subject of study for pathologists’ (146). Such obsessively self-reflective repetition of the impossible question makes us suspect – as Pinkney does – that Eliot unwittingly ‘rewrite[s] him [Hamlet] as a precursor of the psychic dilemma of his own texts’ (141). We are also urged to read this text as a failed theorization of ‘the destructive element’ as Stonebridge puts it. Suggested here is a self/reflection of what she terms a ‘pessimistic diagnosis of the twentieth century’s fascination with destruction’. This perspective encourages us to construe this essay, published immediately after the war, as a traumatized language in the sense of Parson and Caruth, who examine the ways in which something traumatic in literary language eludes its thematization. We may be tempted to read this traumatic textuality as symptomatic of the war as an absent cause, whilst it is not revealing itself, but rather invisibly persisting in disrupting and frustrating Eliot’s endeavour to psychologize Hamlet’s paranoiac destructiveness.

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PARANOIAC CO-EXISTENCE IN LAWRENCE In a way which recalls Eliot, Women in Love can also be read as a textualization of this type of paranoiac projection of inner violence onto outside objects without convincingly objective correlatives. What strikes one as rather daunting when reading this novel is the degree to which its characters’ psychic inside unexpectedly becomes charged with intensive destructiveness, quite often out of given contexts. It follows that there is hardly any corresponding relevance between their inner affectivity and those objects onto which it is projected. One example of this internal affectivity is to be found in Rupert Birkin, who is keen to advance his own – and typically Lawrentian – metaphysics on love, or a certain idealist conception beyond ‘sex marriage’, where ‘man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other’ (Women in Love: 199). This metaphysical abstraction reminds him of Ursula Brangwen, the object of his desire, whilst leading him to feel that ‘[t]he merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.’ This abruptly surging disgust against physicality urges him to generalize the capitalized ‘Woman’ as ‘the Great Mother of everything’ to the point of inflaming him to the following extent: It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers, because she had borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable. — 200 Birkin’s misogynistic abhorrence of maternity is in excess of the novel’s thematization of Ursula’s femininity. It is an abrupt deviation from his conversation with her, which takes place just before this unmanageable sense of disgust. It may be possible to take into account biographical facts as to Lawrence’s ambivalent relationship with his mother, which significantly finds itself emergent in Sons and Lovers (1913), for instance. Even with this in mind, however, Birkin’s repulsion towards this maternal femininity can hardly be explained by the text’s thematic information, in such a way as to evoke Eliot’s Hamlet and his paranoiac detestation of femininity and maternity. Hamlet’s generalized misogyny triggered by his mother is worth recalling. Of especial interest is the way in which this sort of uncontextualizable intensification of aggression can simultaneously be pointed out in the psyche of Ursula, whose sudden outburst of hatred is also in excess of the novel’s thematic content: When he [Birkin] was gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life. — 197–98

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We can find here one of the most intriguing aspects of this novel’s characters’ psychic excess, in the minds of whom the war is ‘taken for granted’ as the author puts it. Recalling Eliot’s way of figuring Hamlet’s disgust as ‘the inexpressibly horrible’, in the cases of Birkin and Ursula as well – to quote from Eliot again – their ‘disgust is occasioned by’ their love objects, but those objects are ‘not an adequate equivalent for it,’ and their ‘disgust envelops and exceeds’ them. Ursula is overwhelmed by the degree to which ‘[i]t was so completely incomprehensible and irrational’ so much so that ‘[s]he did not know why she hated him, her hate was quite abstract’ (198, original emphasis). This is evocative of the paranoiac Hamlet, yet what distinguishes this novel’s characters from him is the unique co-existence of such paranoiac psychic intensities amongst them, represented by Birkin and Ursula. Discernible here is Birkin’s ideal of not ‘[t]he merging, the clutching, the mingling of love,’ but what he abstractly figures as ‘a pure balance of two single beings’ (148), where ‘man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other’. Paradoxically, such an abstract metaphysics is enabled by their paranoiac phantasy, in which they cannot comprehend their own inner psychic excess, much less convey it to each other. Ursula is insightful with regard to this in that she is perfectly conscious of the abstractness and de-physicality of her affective negativity. Their paranoia is peculiarly exclusive to but concurrently inter-dependent upon each other, thus realizing Birkin’s metaphysics of ‘a pure balance of two single beings.’ Birkin and Ursula enjoy their own paranoiac imaginings respectively – the latter implies the masochistic pleasure of her ‘exquisite force of hatred’ – with hardly any objective correlation to the realities in which they exist or ‘out of the world into some terrible region’ as she puts it. In their actual relationship, they cannot but help running the risk of ‘[t]he merging, the clutching, the mingling of love.’ Hence, the narrator’s proclamation: ‘[i]t was a fight to the death between them – or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no one could say’ (143). What we can suggest here is the paradoxical potential of psychic negativity in postwar modernist language.

TRADITION AND ITS EXCESS IN ELIOT As I have mentioned, Stonebridge examines ‘the destructive element’, with reference to I. A. Richards, in order to bring into relief modernists’ sense of horror in the aftermath of the war. According to her, inspired by Eliot, Richards’s literary criticism and psychology attempted to postulate the importance of ‘an organized system that can keep conflicting impulses in balance’ or ‘a well-ordered individual psychology’ as ‘a microcosm of the balanced liberal state’ (24). It is thus possible to find a parallelism between psychic violence and that inherent in a given society, often figured as ‘an organic unity’. Richards endeavours to theorize what he believes to be cultural ‘value’ as ‘the achievement of equilibrium through the reduction of tension’ (26). Stonebridge is critical of his discursive dilution of Eliot’s more radical insight into ‘the destructive element’. Richard’s interest in ‘the reduction of tension’ is reflective of the fact that he worked under the influence of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, more specifically his meta-psychological speculation on ‘the death drive’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this work, Freud struggles to theorize an uncontrollable acceleration of psychic intensity and its persistently compulsive repetition. This forces Freud to put into question his psychoanalytic premise so far based on ‘the pleasure principle’ and thereby speculate this psychic excess to be evidence of ‘the death drive’, something ‘beyond’ his existing conception. Inspired by G. T. Fechner, Freud thinks of this pleasure principle as a biological

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one, where ‘unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution’ (SE 18: 8; original emphases). Just after ‘[t]he terrible war’ (12), however, in the context of ‘war neurosis’, Freud finds it necessary to reconsider ‘traumatic neurosis’ as characteristic of ‘repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident.’ This perspective tempts him to conjecture that ‘the patient is [. . .] fixated to his trauma’ (13). This type of ‘repetition of this distressing experience’ (15) leads Freud to look into ‘the mysterious masochistic trends of the ego’ as ‘the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis’ (14). Such masochism is ‘beyond’ the control of the pleasure principle, because of its repetitive and persistent compulsion to return to the traumatic, a maximum degree of psychic excitation. From this point of view, Richards’ criticism can be taken for an attempt to manage such a selfdestructive tendency, thereby regulating it under the pleasure principle. His ‘cultural value’ as ‘the achievement of equilibrium through the reduction of tension’ thus lies in a kind of a homeostatic stability – or what Freud terms ‘the principle of constancy’ (9) – within the human psyche and societies. This can indeed be labelled as a ‘liberal’ solution to the death drive. In comparison, Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) can be viewed as a text which reminds us of Stonebridge’s observation on Eliot: ‘only by immersing oneself in the modern world of destruction can the modern writer reclaim some form of cultural authority and integrity.’ Particularly noteworthy is that Eliot’s idea of ‘tradition’ as an organic whole is not presumed to be a closed and finalized entity or stability, but rather it is constantly in the process of becoming so. This dynamic structure incessantly and obsessively drives a dialectical and recurring process of decomposing and thereby recomposing what he terms ‘tradition’: [W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relation, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. — ‘Tradition’: 15; original emphasis What we can observe here is a dialectical system, which continually needs to be complemented, revised, and intervened by ‘the new (the really new) work of art.’ We can thus argue that something in excess of ‘the whole existing order’ is repeatedly required for this tradition to decompose and reproduce itself. In this repetitively self-destructing and reproducing dynamics, the inner stability of ‘the existing order’ – which recalls Freud’s ‘principle of constancy’ or ‘pleasure principle’ – should be imploded ceaselessly by something disruptive of such a static equilibrium. This process also accompanies a backward movement of returning to and re-writing its own origins. If we assume that this essay is a justification of his coming work, such as The Waste Land, this regression can be regarded as a repetitive impulse to allude to past texts in the present contexts.

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Such a structural and recurring obsessiveness is reminiscent of Freudian compulsion to repeat or, by implication, the death drive ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. Eliot’s tradition is compelled to exceed or go beyond its homeostatic stasis, whilst finding itself constantly reverting to its origins. This movement thus takes place in opposite directions at the same time: forward and backward. The developing and expanding process of Eliot’s tradition as a cultural system connotes a progressing movement, whilst concurrently returning to the time before it exists in order to start this progression. Such a temporal paradox recalls Peter Brook’s analogical juxtaposition of narrative desire and Freud’s death drive. His point is that any narrative desire to reach its ending can be read as something similar to Freudian ‘pleasure principle’ in the sense that it seeks ‘for the gratification of discharge’ (89). This means that the tension or driving force of any narrative system innately demands its complete release so as to ‘ensure that the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more complete’ (90). This is directly analogous to Freud’s pleasure principle, where ‘unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution.’ It is therefore possible to point out a temporal paradox: a narrative direction can be at once a forward movement and a regression to the temporal point before it starts. In any narrative, Brooks concludes, ‘the end is a time before the beginning’ (103). We need to remember that Freud’s death drive, as self-destructing masochism, unconsciously directs the human psyche towards something before it exists. Freud speculates: ‘we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones”’ (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 1920: 38; original emphases). This destination – death – is what Freud hypothesizes as the ‘final goal of all organic striving’ (38). The paradox is that the ultimate purpose of the Freudian death drive – ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ – is a realization of it: the pleasure of the zero degree of inner excitation. With reference to this, Brooks reminds us that ‘[a]s Sartre and Benjamin compellingly argued, the narrative must tend towards its end, seek illumination in its own death’ (103). Given this, we should add, the final paradox here is that the repetitive compulsion of this drive serves as a postponement of its ultimate goal, death. Conversely, death puts an eternal end to this drive for repetition. Freudian compulsion to repeat can thus be defined as a perpetual and recurring conversion of destruction into reconstruction and vice versa. Reconsidered from this perspective, Eliot’s idea of tradition as a dynamic desire to decompose and recompose itself – whilst reverting to its origins or the time before it exists – may be viewed as analogous to the Freudian paradoxical drive of destruction/reconstruction and progression/ regression. The crucial point is that this driving force is not only a self-destructive one, but it works as a self-reproducing dynamism as well. This allows us to say that Eliot’s ‘immersion’ in ‘the destructive element’ is much more radical than Richard’s ‘liberal’ adjustment of it: the former can serve as a daring redefinition of ‘some form of cultural authority and integrity’ in the context of the postwar modernists’ preoccupation with destructiveness.

DRIVING NEGATIVITY IN LAWRENCE Almost contemporaneously with Eliot’s preoccupation with the unknowability of Hamlet’s emotional excess, Lawrence was also absorbed in the psychic intensity of the unknowable. Following the publication of Women in Love in 1920, Lawrence presented a radical re-evaluation of negativity in the human psyche as a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921;

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hereafter cited as Psychoanalysis) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922; hereafter cited as Fantasia), he tries to defy Freud’s theory as what he understood an institutionalized psychology designed to repress the intensity of the unconscious. In Psychoanalysis, Lawrence declares that ‘Freud’s unconscious amounts practically to no more than our repressed incest impulses’ (11). In contrast, Lawrence’s idea of the unconscious is driven by the negativity of its unknowability. Lawrence argues in Fantasia: Yet we must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere. That is, how to live dynamically.[. . .] — 111; original emphases To know is to lose.[. . .] As soon as I have a finished mental conception, a full idea even of myself, then dynamically I am dead. To know is to die. — 108 Lawrence seems to be aware of the original German phrase for ‘the unconscious’ – ‘das Unbewusste’ – whilst implying its original German sense: the unknowable. Evident here is Lawrence’s radical exposure of the dynamic vitality/negativity of this unknowable psychic intensity. This Lawrentian negativity – or the unknowable – is energized by a particular type of vital strength. Importantly, this negative vitalism, thus read, has a great deal to do with his conception of ‘wholeness’ or ‘totality’. This is unique, because his ‘wholeness’ or ‘totality’ is always indicative of something exceeding holistic stability or reductionism. In Psychoanalysis, Lawrence stresses that the unconscious goes ‘beyond all laws of cause and effect in its totality.’ Lawrence’s unconscious as a radical negativity thus always exceeds any static closure: ‘[f]or the whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits’ (18). In a way reminiscent of the dialectical movement of Eliot’s tradition, something unknown to and in excess of a given system – in this case, preceding psychological theories – activates and vitalizes what Lawrence renders as ‘the unconscious’. Once such negativity is lost – when it is ‘known’ – this movement terminates (Lawrence says, ‘dynamically I am dead’). In Fantasia as well, Lawrence is quite explicit about this driving force of negativity as the unknowable: ‘most things can never be known by us in full. Which means we do never absolutely die’ (108). This antipsychological dynamic is prompted by something ‘beyond’ any homeostatic closed totality. In this sense, I contend, the Freudian death drive – a psychic excess ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ – is found to be re-interpreted here as the propelling energy of the unconscious. Significantly, Lawrence’s unconsciousness as the radical unknowability perpetually retards the final destination of ‘death’ in such a way as to recall the similar paradox of Freud’s death drive. It is intriguing here to refer to Eliot’s oft-cited comments on May Sinclair’s psychoanalytic novel in The Dial in 1922, where he was critical of its reductionist attitude towards something ‘unknown’: [B]ecause the material is so clearly defined (the soul of man under psychoanalysis) there is no possibility of tapping the atmosphere of unknown terror and mystery in which our life is passed and which psychoanalysis has not yet analysed. — 330; emphasis added

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Eliot and Lawrence thus share a strong and keen interest in something ‘unknown’ in the human psyche, a certain kind of negativity in excess of what they deem to be an institutionalized version of psychoanalysis. Worth mentioning is, moreover, Eliot’s positive evaluation of Fantasia as a criticism of ‘the living death of modern civilization’ in his 1933 lecture (22). Given his stress on the significance of the unknown in psychoanalysis, this observation can be read as connected with Lawrence’s negative vitalism of the unconscious/the unknown. In this Lawrence’s work, indeed, such an excess of unconscious negativity plays a vital role in a delineation of his developmental theory as an intervention in the reductionism of a Freudian Oedipal narrative: This quality of pure individuality is, however, only the one supreme quality. It consummates all other qualities, but does not consume them. All the others are there, all the time. And only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them. “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” But this does not alter the fact that within him lives the mother-quick and the father-quick, and that though in his wholeness he is rapt away beyond the old mother-father connections, they are still there within him, consummated but not consumed. — 76 Reminding us of his metaphysics in Women in Love, Lawrence’s point is the radical negation of the confinement of the human psyche within Oedipal theory, thereby reconsidering human development as a process of deviating from and going ‘beyond’ its origins/parents. Moreover, he stresses, these ‘are still there within him.’ This can be seen as the simultaneity of the new and the old, thus evoking Eliot’s definition of a ‘truly new’ poet as one who ‘lives in what is not merely present, but the present moment of the past’ in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (22). Similar to Eliot’s theory, Lawrence’s idea of development is not just a progressive movement, but also a retroactive re-writing of the relationship between the present and the past. What engrosses Eliot and Lawrence is, thus, the negative force of something excessive, unknowable, and beyond any historically-given homeostatic or psychologized stability. This is not suggestive of a simple exaltation or merely pessimistic despair of destructive violence, but rather a paradoxical strategy of progressive and retroactive reinvention of the past/present. Their shared preoccupation with the negativity thus read manifests itself as a variety of excesses in their texts, whilst implying their discursive kinship with contemporary psychoanalytic explorations of the death drive. This intertextuality may thus be read as expressive of one of the possible modes of creativity in the aftermath of the First World War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard UP, 1984. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Eliot, T. S. ‘To Criticize the Critic.’ To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. Faber, 1965. Eliot, T. S. ‘Hamlet.’ Selected Essays. Faber, 1980. Eliot, T. S. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ Selected Essays. Faber. 1980.

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Eliot, T. S. ‘London Letter, August 1922.’ The Dial 73 (September 1922). Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. The 1933 Page-Barbour Lectures. The Great Auk, 2021. Endo, Fuhito. ‘Radical Violence Inside Out: Woolf, Klein, and Interwar Politics.’ Twentieth Century Literature. 52.2 (2006). Freud, Anna. Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Hogarth, 1974. Klein, Melanie. ‘An Obsessional Neurosis in a Six-year-old Girl.’ The Psychoanalysis of Children. 1932. Trans. Alix Strachey. Hogarth, 1963. Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. Ed. David Farmer et.al. Cambridge UP, 1987. Lawrence, D. H. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge UP, 2004. Parsons, Deborah. ‘Trauma and War Memory.’ The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls. Cambridge UP, 2004. Pinkney, Tony. Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Macmillan, 1984. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism. Macmillan, 1998. Strachey, James, and Alix Strachey. Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924–1925. Ed. Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick. Basic, 1985.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Counter-Impulses of Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu L. SCOTT LERNER

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) likely never read Freud. If he had, one readily imagines that he would have harbored an ambivalence toward the Science of Psychoanalysis not unlike his attitude toward the immensely popular work of Henri Bergson. “I have enough to do,” he wrote a friend, “without trying to turn the philosophy of M. Bergson into a novel!” (Corr: 13: 39). That Proust and Freud shared many concerns, however, is abundantly clear. Indeed, his exploration of the unconscious mind begins on the very first page of In Search of Lost Time “with the Narrator’s loss of his identity in the book he is reading” (Jordan: 100). The conscious and unconscious mind is in fact just one of ten intersecting themes between Proust and Freud that Malcom Bowie identified in a list that ranges from sadism and masochism to homosexuality, infantile sexuality, jealousy and dream analysis (Freud, Proust, and Lacan: 68–69). In relation not only to Freud’s work but to psychoanalytic theory writ large, one should also note Proust’s profound interest in various forms of subjectivity and identity formation, in primary and subsequent object-relations, and in love, loss and the work of mourning. And yet, the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and Proust’s fiction is as complex and nuanced as the fiction itself. Not only psychoanalytic theory, but theory tout court— including the novelist’s own—finds itself in creative tension with Proust’s artistic creation. In his seminal essay on Proust and Freud, Malcom Bowie describes the tension between “a narrator who psychologized, who ‘did’ psychology, and a narrator who was the instrument of an alternative psychology, resembling psychoanalysis, that the Proustian text itself enacted in its discontinuities, contradictions and reversals” (97). Over the years, a considerable portion of the vast critical attention directed at Proust’s fiction has been informed in one way or another by psychoanalysis (Kemp). The most notable of the early studies was Serge Doubrovsky’s “psychocritical” examination of unconscious fantasies and desires embedded in the text. Doubrovsky read the central example of what Proust’s narrator calls “involuntary memory”—the episode of the small butter-cake called a madeleine—in relation to other scenes of masturbation and defecation, famously concluding that the narrator’s unconscious desire to eliminate the mother was expressed symbolically in terms of fecal elimination and ejaculation (Doubrovsky: 29, 25–27; Kemp: 84). Psychoanalytic perspectives have been applied to a whole range of characters, scenes and elements in the Search, including the “scene of sadism” involving Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her girlfriend, the sadomasochism of Monsieur de Charlus, and the myriad representations of loss and desire contained in the novel. At a certain point some of the principal contributors to the “genetic” turn in Proust scholarship—the meticulous study of 231

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Proust’s texts and their evolution over the course of countless manuscripts and variants—sought to turn the page on certain forms of literary criticism based “on a model of external explication” of which psychoanalysis was a primary example. In an essay entitled “What One Can No Longer Say About Proust,” Antoine Compagnon took aim at an “often unbridled” psychoanalytic study of proper names in Proust’s fiction (Compagnon: 55–56 on Roger). The well of psychoanalyticallyinformed studies of Proust’s fiction did not dry up, however, and indeed some of the best work was yet to come: Leo Bersani returned to Proust and Melanie Klein in the opening chapter of The Culture of Redemption, and Julia Kristeva brought a psychoanalytic lens to genetic criticism. Increasingly, Proust’s work came to be perceived as fertile ground not only for the scientific study of memory (Lehrer), but also for explorations of homosexual desire, gender construction and queer theory (Bersani Homos, Sedgewick, Ladenson, Soldin) as well as loss and mourning (Ricciardi, Lerner, Elsner). My own approach is indebted to a strain of Proust criticism that sees the representations of identity, love and desire, and to an extent also memory, as bound to a primary relationship with the mother. Already in 1965, Leo Bersani gave expression to a theme that he would develop further in The Culture of Redemption, observing of the narrator that “his self is with his mother and he must have her in order to have it” (Fictions: 32; Culture: 7–10). Others have also located the source of desire and identity in the primary maternal relationship, in some instances seeing the relationship with the mother as dispersed in substitute relations throughout Proust’s fiction (Forrester: Baudry 43) or “at the center of a primordial sadomasochism” (Kristeva: 175). In what follows I build on the premise that the mother-son relation is originary with regard to subsequent love relations represented throughout the novel and constitutes a primary object-relation out of which the self is constituted.

THE BROKEN GLASS AND THE IMPULSE TOWARD RESOLUTION AND REPARATION In Proust’s early novel Jean Santeuil, Jean enters into a violent conflict with his mother and father. The latter declares: “You know, it’s simple enough . . . if you don’t want to work you can leave this home, I’ll throw you out” (209). Jean then slams his door “so violently behind him that the glass ornaments fixed to its panels [. . .] were shattered into fragments” (210). Moments later he rises, runs toward the fireplace and hears a terrible noise: “the Venetian glass, which his mother had bought for him for a hundred francs, and which he had just shattered” (213). These instances of breaking glass seem to constitute a single act of violence experienced in two different ways: first, when he breaks the glass of the door, as the enactment of Jean’s desire to strike out at his parents, and then, with the vase, as the suffering he himself must endure as a consequence of his act. For Jean, the act of breaking the Venetian glass is less real than the feeling of guilt it provokes (213). Yet the act is doubly irreversible, the first scene having been “public” thus “irreparable” (415) because witnessed by a servant, while the Venetian glass is left “in fragments [that] no amount of contrition could bring back together again, recompose, melt back” (213). A coat bearing his mother’s fragrance then triggers an involuntary memory of his ten-year-old self kissing his mother: “his lips, pressed to her forehead, breathed in all the happiness that she radiated and seemed to promise him” (214). In memory, his mother of that period remains intact (214) though inaccessible: “He longed to kiss upon his mother’s cheeks the remains of her youth and happiness, to hold with his kisses onto the

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instants that passed by, [. . .] and to the existence of the person in relation to whom he conceived everything and who would one day be annihilated forever, without his ever being able to have her back without anything of her remaining, as if she had never been” (214 my emphasis). Like many of his early writings and manuscripts Jean Santeuil (1895–1899) served as something of a laboratory for In Search of Lost Time, and this scene provides a simplified and condensed view of the complex representation with the mother as a originary object-relation in the Search. The scene finds a strong parallel in Kleinian theory: perceived as the source of life, the other becomes, in unconscious fantasy, inseparable from the self, and her death would result in one’s own annihilation (Klein: 321–322). It provides an early representation of an unconscious dilemma of separation, in which the existential need to break free of the bond of dependency is opposed by the prospect of the annihilation of the other and fear of a corresponding death of the self. In Jean Santeuil, it turns out, the conflict is suddenly and surprisingly resolved. Having destroyed the simulacrum of the loved object and overcome with guilt, when he longs for her, fearing his own annihilation in hers, Jean confesses to his mother that he has broken the Venetian glass. He anticipates her anger but instead, “remaining as gentle as before, she kissed him and whispered in his ear: ‘It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible union’ ” (218). As Madame Santeuil substitutes the shattered vase for the broken wine glass, she reimagines the fragmented object as the paradoxical symbol of a sacred union between mother and son. (The original author of this declaration is not Madame Santeuil, the character who belongs to a bourgeois Catholic family, but rather Jeanne Weil, Proust’s own Jewish mother, who wrote to her son: “The broken glass shall only be what it is in the Temple—the symbol of an indissoluble union” [Corr 2: 160–61].) With the broken glass at his feet “in fragments [that] no amount of contrition could bring back together again, recompose, melt back” (213), Jean is then overcome with guilt, fearing that “the person in relation to whom he conceived everything” could be “annihilated.” His mother’s reparatory speech act correlates with Klein’s account of the reparative wishes that follow the infant’s aggression toward the other, the feelings of guilt it produces, and the fantasies of restoring the object through love (Klein: 308). It dresses the dilemma of separation in an aura of resolution. Proust abandoned this potent symbol when writing In Search of Lost Time, but the reparatory impulse that it distills would nonetheless occupy a central place in his novel. A line can be drawn between the mother’s pronouncement in Jean Santeuil and Proust’s biography to his narrator’s declaration that he has ceased to love and “forgotten” Albertine (5: 873–874). Like Jean Santeuil, whose mother was “the person in relation to whom he conceived everything and who would one day be annihilated forever”, the narrator of the Search cannot conceive his own self in the absence of his love for Albertine (6: 515). Much like the declaration by the mother regarding the broken glass, however, he will eventually assert that he has survived her loss, or the loss of his love for her, just as he has given up and forgotten the previous objects of his love—Gilberte, his grandmother, and Mme. de Guermantes—thanks to his successive selves and successive deaths (5: 650; 6: 515– 16). These acts of successful forgetting enable him to introduce a final element to the sequence in the form of “my book” (6: 516). He thus invests his esthetic project with a redemptive quality: the work of art, as the final element of the sequence of loved objects, enables him to survive the potential death of the self—brought on by the loss, or forgetting, of these attachments. It is important to recall, however, that such theories offered up by the narrator are not separable from the rest of the fictional universe but are rather “caught up in the fictional texture” and made “within the force-field of human desire” (Bowie, Proust: 65 47–48). The reparative and redemptive

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impulse, in which the aesthetic object is said to supersede all other love relations, coexists with representations of its opposite: a continuing investment in the other even beyond her death. And this, too, is the legacy of the repaired glass. This desire to repair will take on its own trajectory in the idea of redemption through art expressed repeatedly in Time Regained, but it will coexist in Proust’s fiction with representations of a love bond that cannot be fully undone.

THE PARADOX OF THE ORIGINARY OBJECT-RELATION The first of these depictions of a central dilemma in the relation with the other, which cannot be resolved by successful mourning and forgetting, is the drama of the goodnight kiss in the Combray section of Swann’s Way. Here, the son has already experienced his exile, without the kiss—because Swann has come for dinner—as the prelude to his own interment: “Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt” (1: 36–37). About to be caught in flagrante delicto at the top of the staircase, his father approaching, he hears his mother exclaim: “Run for your life!” “Flee!” (1: 47). At the approach of the father who has deprived him of the mother and who, he fears, will tear him from her further, he calls out to the mother: “Come and say good night to me.” Finally, she answers, concedes, but it is too late: “Instinctively I murmured, though no one heard me, ‘I’m done for!’ ” (1: 47; “ ‘Je suis perdu!’ ” Recherche 1: 35). And then, unexpectedly, the father says what was unthinkable: “you can see quite well that the child is unhappy. We aren’t executioners after all!” (1: 48). The son, it would seem, has triumphed. At this moment, when the father has already violated the law, unexpectedly allowing the heronarrator not only to receive the desired kiss but also to remain in the presence of the mother, the father appears “with the gesture of Abraham” (1: 49):1 I stood there, not daring to move; he was still in front of us, a tall figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet cashmere scarf which he used to wrap around his head since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, with the gesture of Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself from Isaac’s side. — 1: 48–49 This depiction of the father reframes the drama of the goodnight kiss as a scene from an originary sacred drama. It places not only the father but the center of the drama—the boy’s relation with his mother—under the sign of the covenant between God and Abraham. Like the Abrahamic family history, the mother-son relation has an originary quality with regard to future relations with the other in the novel. It is both first and primary: first in the series of love relations, and primary in literary kinship with a primary object-relation out of which the self is constituted. Specifically, the figure of the father in the gesture of Abraham recasts the father’s determinative action in the drama as a scene from the story of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham (Gen. 22.1–14). It thus frames the originary object-relation of the novel within the fictional simulacrum of a sacred original. In so

1

Throughout this essay I have silently modified the published translations of Proust’s work.

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doing it presents the relation between the son and mother as a variant of the Abrahamic covenant as it is presented in the sacrifice of Isaac, where faithfulness (to God) requires criminal betrayal (of son and self). In Genesis Abraham prepares to pass the test of fidelity to his covenant with God by sacrificing Isaac. Immobile, as though petrified in the presence of the divine, the hero-narrator beholds his own father not as Abraham, but with the gesture of Abraham. In a work after the Italian Renaissance painter Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–97), Carlo Lasinio (1759–1838) condenses several fresco panels by Gozzoli into a single, multi-scene engraving. (Fig. 17.1) None of these representations depicts Abraham gesturing to Sarah and telling her that she must tear herself from Isaac’s side, nor could any Gozzoli fresco correspond to this particular gesture of Abraham toward Sarah because no premodern Christian artist would so blatantly depart from the sacred original. Nor could the biblical original accommodate such a communication between Abraham and Sarah. For Abraham, in Genesis, as Jacques Derrida has stressed, keeps secret his covenant with God. He reveals to no one his intention to sacrifice his beloved son in faithfulness to the covenant, neither to Sarah or anyone else (Derrida: 128). For Derrida this silence provides the foundation for the “absolute axiom” which “obliges us to pose or suppose a demand of secrecy, a secret asked by God, by him who

FIGURE 17.1 Carlo Lasinio, “The Sacrifice of Abraham” (c. 1812), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray. Photo ©President and Fellows of Harvard College, G2166.

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proposes or promises the covenant.” Such a secret belongs to the “pure singularity of the face-toface with God, the secret of this absolute relation,” while Abraham’s silence ensures that there will be “no third party between us . . . so that the covenant remains absolute and absolutely singular in its act of election” (Derrida: 154–155). And yet the gesture of Abraham appears, in Lasinio’s engraving, in plain sight. In the scene in which the Lord delivers his command, Abraham appears in a sumptuous tent whose drapes have been pulled back, allowing us to see inside. He is looking up and to the right, with both hands open in an expression of wonderment. Following the direction of his gaze we encounter the Lord himself, displaying a halo and beard much like Abraham’s, at the center of a multi-ringed aureole. In the Christian-pictorial logic of the engraving, the viewer must imagine the command passing from the outstretched arm of the Lord to the receiving hands of Abraham. In the pictorial scene, Abraham is not alone but seated next to Sarah and Isaac. Unlike Abraham, who stares wide-eyed at the Lord above with hands opened wide, as if to receive his commandment, Sarah and Isaac rest chin or cheek upon their hands, with eyes closed, fast asleep. With a shift of perspective, however, it is possible to imagine that Abraham directs his gesture not at the Lord above but at Sarah and Isaac below. The scene thus becomes precisely the one described in Combray: Abraham has already received the Lord’s command. Mother and son are awake. Abraham gestures not as one who receives the news, but as the one who conveys it. And the news is precisely that which Proust’s narrator relates: Sarah, next to whom sits Isaac—his head rests on her shoulder—learns from Abraham, from his gesture, that she will have to tear herself from Isaac’s side. In the Search, therefore, Abraham’s gesture betrays the pictorial logic of the engraving that most likely serves as its source, just as it betrays its originary tale in Genesis. Unlike the Abraham of Genesis, described by Derrida—the Abraham who keeps the secret of the covenant and God’s command—the Abraham of Combray reveals the secret by communicating with the boy’s mother before the sacrifice and “telling Sarah that she must tear herself from Isaac’s side.” The gesture of Abraham in Swann’s Way thus places the originary relation of self and other under the sign of the covenant in which God promises Abraham “to multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven [. . .] because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Gen. 22.17–18).2 It does so at a distance of multiple removes from the original covenant, in a way that underscores the distances crossed. At each juncture the representation of the original—the original covenant (Genesis), the original representation of the covenant (the Gozzoli), the original representation of the representation (the engraving)—is dissimulated. And it places the originary relation, between mother and son, under the sign of the covenant, only to interject a third, Sarah, between God and Abraham, thereby betraying the secret of the covenant. In the gesture of Abraham the covenant that remains no longer partakes of the “absolute axiom” expressed in Scripture. Instead, it performs the defining act of “literature”: in faithfulness, it betrays. This paradox of betrayal in faithfulness and faithfulness in betrayal is introduced not only in the fact of communicating with Sarah but also in the meaning of the communication. Were Sarah to learn of Abraham’s intended action, no doubt she would, in her love for Isaac, need to be torn away

2

The King James Version of the Bible is cited.

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from him lest she prevent Abraham from obeying God. Such is the meaning of the archaic verb, “se départir”: “to part from.” In Swann’s Way the father tells her too that she must part “du côté d’Isaac,” (from Isaac’s side). The gesture, however, belongs not only to Abraham but also to the narrator’s father. It operates as a communicative gesture within each of the two storylines that converge here—the story of Abraham, Isaac and Sarah, and the story of the narrator, his mother and father. Rather than continuing to deny the legitimacy of the boy’s desire to be with his mother and forbidding their union, the father—acting against the mother’s expectations—has allowed mother and son to remain together. The representation of Sarah as a mother who is forced to tear herself from her son thus not only fails to conform to this narrative context; it stands in contradiction to it. Faithful to the biblical story, it betrays the novelistic one. The paradox deepens when we consider that the use of the archaic verb “se départir” to communicate the meaning of the gesture of Abraham “promotes a significant lexical ambiguity.” As Francine Goujon observes, it “amalgamates” two separate meanings: the archaic “se départir de,” meaning “to separate from,” and the common “partir du côté de” which carries the opposite meaning (Recherche 1: 36 n. 1). Indeed, this latter expression appears later in the novel, when Marcel’s grandfather is waiting for him “pour partir du côté de Méséglise” (Recherche 2: 384), (“to set out for a walk along the Méséglise way” 3: 106). Proust’s amalgamated construction, in fact, can mean both “taking a distance or parting from the side of, but also taking a distance or parting in the direction of” since “du côté de can mean both toward and away from, to and fro” (Mehlman: 414). Rather than “along the Méséglise way,” one might just as well say “in the direction of Méséglise.” It is this second meaning within Proust’s amalgamated expression that pertains to the scene in the novel. Having just declared, contrary to expectations, that the mother should go to her son, he now directs her to do just that. In this case, rather than translating the expression, “disant à Sarah qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac,” as: “telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac,” we could render it as: “telling Sarah that she must go to Isaac.” Just as the first translation is faithful to the storyline of Abraham, Isaac and Sarah, this second rendering of “se départir du côté de” is faithful to the domestic scene in the novel. In each case, to be faithful to one story is to be unfaithful to the other. In the gesture of Abraham the paradox of faithfulness and betrayal has thus thrown deep roots. It appears in the nature of the biblical covenant, which commands faithful obedience at the price of betraying one’s son and oneself. It emerges in the work of literature, which betrays the command of secret exclusivity demanded by the covenant of Scripture. It is present when the literary representation of the gesture reimagines and betrays its original pictorial source. It is revealed in the particular convergence of two storylines, one biblical, one novelistic, such that any message communicated to the mother in one story, and in a manner that is faithful to that story, necessarily bears a contradictory meaning in the other story, proves unfaithful to the other story, and betrays it. It results in the transposition of guilt from the father who would sacrifice his son to the son who would annihilate his mother by betraying and forgetting her. And it arises in the ambiguous lexicon adopted by the novelist, with its archaic verb and amalgamated, contradictory, yet precise meanings, which ultimately leave us with the impossibility of determining whether the son is united with the mother or torn away from her. But this is of course precisely the point. At the bottom of these layers of originals and representations, of faithfulness and betrayal, of ambiguity and indeterminacy, the result is not one or the other—separated or reunited—but both, simultaneously.

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GUILT, MASOCHISM, INTERMITTENT MOURNING AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE OBJECT Does he tell Sarah (the mother) to tear herself from Isaac’s (the son’s) side so that, knife in hand, he can take him up Mount Moriah? Or does he tell her to go in the direction of her son, to rejoin him, despite the interdiction? As we have seen, the strange, part-antiquated, amalgamated verb construction, se départir du côté de, conveys both meanings simultaneously. In the context of the drama, however, as Goujon observes, the verb does not express a wholly neutral ambiguity: “the father still separates at the very moment in which he reunites” (Recherche 1: 36 n. 1). In contrast to the reparation of the broken glass, the episode will conclude with the object more annihilated than repaired: “It struck me that if I had just won a victory it was over her, that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in undermining her judgment; and that this evening opened a new era, would remain a black date on the calendar” (1: 51). The victory is achieved neither by illness, nor grieving, nor age—the agents of death—nor even, in the subjective experience of the son, by the father, but rather by the son himself and by him alone. The narrator has thus internalized the view that his desires were transgressions, and has been conscious of the guilt that arises from this internalization. As in Jean Santeuil, the initial act of aggression—the breaking of the glass or, in this case, the insistent call to the mother in violation of the paternal injunction—is followed by an expression of this guilt: if the mother is to spend the night in his room, it is because “I had just committed an offence for which I expected to be banished from the household” (1: 49). Now, however, the guilt that comes from the internalized view that this victory has resulted from a greater failure has given way to a feeling of omnipotence in victory. If he could take back his victory, he would do so out of a new desperation (1: 51), and he is already aware of the true cost of his action: “I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and brought out a first white hair on her head” (1: 52). The internalized guilt born of helplessness to resist his nervous impulses is transformed into the far greater guilt of the omnipotent victor, the would-be executioner, the parricide.3 This generation of conscious and unconscious guilt in relation to the other is crucial to a dynamic that will be described more fully in relation to the grandmother in the Intermittences of the Heart section later in the novel. The return of the grandmother in involuntary memory makes her loss real to him and this potentially real loss of the object threatens to bring about the annihilation of the self (Lerner: 47; Search 4: 213). No sooner does he experience the reemergent presence of his grandmother and the contradictory feelings of her survival in him—her real absence and his selfannihilation—than he recalls the acts of sadism that he believes he perpetrated against her while she was alive (4: 214). What is striking about this example is that it provides an ongoing source of guilt. He feels this guilt increasingly acutely as he realizes the irony of his present desire and past crimes in the form of “wounding words” he once uttered, which he now recalls in an act of self-mortification: “it was I whose heart they were rending now” (4: 214). The words he now perceives as sadistic are not eliminated or reduced, but redirected in full force toward himself. The sequence of recollections

3 In “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide” (Contre: 150–159) Proust reflected at length on the theme of parricide. Ultimately, he concluded that, deep down, all loving sons are killers of their mothers.

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serves to produce an elevated degree of self-inflicted suffering. The behavior that has returned in an involuntary memory is thus experienced as having been sadistic, and the guilt it produces serves a masochistic aim: I clung to this pain, cruel as it was, with all my strength, for I realised that it was the effect of the memory I had of my grandmother, the proof that this memory was indeed present within me. I felt that I did not really remember her except through pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper. I did not try to mitigate my suffering, to embellish it, to pretend that my grandmother was only absent and momentarily invisible, by addressing to her photograph . . . words and entreaties as to a person who is separated from us but, retaining his personality, knows us and remains bound to us by an indissoluble harmony”. — 4: 215, my emphasis Although the mechanisms differ, this representation of loss and mourning in Proust’s text is consistent with the late Freudian and Kleinian insistence on the preservation and incorporation of the object in the work of mourning. Here, the guilt generated by the aggression toward the other ultimately turns back upon the self. It constitutes a secondary masochism with no primary aim of its own (in the search for pleasure), but rather serves instrumentally, as part of a complex dynamic of aggression, guilt, and self-inflicted suffering. The aim of this dynamic, through all its parts, is to preserve the object-relation itself, such that the work of mourning remains incomplete, not constant, but intermittent (Lerner: 46–52). Such suffering, paradoxically, makes an indissoluble bond of “that contradiction of survival and annihilation, so strangely intertwined within me” (4: 215). It is “the painful synthesis of survival and annihilation” (4: 216). The adjective “indissoluble” helps us chart this second trajectory from Jean Santeuil to the Search. From the early version to the mature novel, the broken glass and its “union” are abandoned. Only the adjective remains as the trace of the perceived shattering of the love bond. The reparatory fiat of Jean Santeuil will have a long life in Search, where the narrator, as a solution to the problem of survival that this loss of the other introduces, will rely on a theory of successive selves and ultimately a vision of redemption through “my book.” As Malcom Bowie reminds us, however, “the centralised and resolved self on which the novel ends may be seen not as a redemption but as one momentary geometry among many others” (Proust Among the Stars 29). The counter-impulse, in the Search, to this impulse toward reparation and redemption is found in the trace of the broken glass itself: in the gesture of Abraham, with its multiple layers of separation and union, of faithfulness and betrayal. This Proustian counter-impulse defers reparation by generating, via aggression and guilt, a self-inflicted suffering that sustains the intensity of the relation with the other even when the other has been lost, either in unconscious fantasy or by death. It will constitute the originary relation with the other, between mother and son, and will also become visible in other highly ambivalent attacks and betrayals: by Mademoiselle Vinteuil toward her father the composer, by Gilberte toward Charles Swann, and by the narrator toward his grandmother. In each case, the guilt-generating betrayal, and the masochistic pain it produces, will serve to impede forgetting and preserve an ongoing attachment to the other.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This essay was originally commissioned for The Proustian Mind (edited by Anna Elsner and Tom Stern, Routledge). A version of the essay appears in the publication.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudry, Jean-Louis. Proust, Freud et l’autre. Editions de Minuit, 1984. Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Harvard UP, 1990. Bersani, Leo. Homos. Harvard UP, 1995. Bersani, Leo. Marcel Proust: the Fictions of Life and Art. 2nd edition. Oxford UP, 2013. Bowie, Malcom. “Bersani on Proust.” Oxford Literary Review 20.1–2 (1998): 23–32. Bowie, Malcom. Proust Among the Stars. Columbia UP, 1998. Bowie, Malcom. Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge UP, 1987. Chill, Abraham. The Minhagim: The Customs and Ceremonies of Judaism. Their Origins and Rationale. Sepher-Hermon P, 1979. Compagnon, Antoine. “Ce qu’on ne peut plus dire de Proust.” Littérature 88 (1992): 54–61. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, translated by David Willis. Chicago UP, 2008. Doubrovsky, Serge. Writing and Fantasy in Proust: La Place de la madeleine, translated by Carol Mastrangelo Bové with Paul A. Bové. U of Nebraska P, 1986. Elsner, Anna. Mourning and Creativity in Proust. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Forrester, Viviane. “M. Proust: le texte de la mère.” Tel Quel 78 (1978): 70–82. Jordan, Jack. “The Unconscious” in The Cambridge Companion to Proust, edited by Richard Bales. Cambridge UP, 2001: 100–116. Kemp, Simon. “Postpsychoanalytic Proust.” Modern Language Quarterly 75.1 (2014): 77–101. Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945. Dell, 1975. Kristeva, Julia. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman. Columbia UP, 1996. Ladenson, Elisabeth. Proust’s Lesbianism. Cornell UP, 2007. Lasinio, Carlo. (c. 1812) “The Sacrifice of Abraham” (Il Sacrifizio di Abramo, Le sacrifice d’Abraham), engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli, Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa. Harvard Museums. https:// harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/274564?position=2 Lauterbach, Jacob Z. “The Ceremony of Breaking a Glass at Weddings.” Beauty in Holiness: Studies in Jewish Customs and Ceremonial Art, edited by Joseph Gutmann. Ktav, [1970]. 340–69. Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Lerner, L. Scott. “Mourning and Subjectivity: From Bersani to Proust, Klein and Freud.” Diacritics 37 (2007): 41–53. Littré, Emile. Dictionnaire de la langue française. Vol. 4. Paris: Hachette, 1885. Mehlman, Jeffrey. Review of The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews by Maurice Samuels. Antisemitism Studies 1.2 (2017): 409–415. Proust, Marcel. Correspondence, edited by Philip Kolb. 21 vols. Plon, 1970–93. Proust, Marcel. Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges, et suivi de Essais et articles, edited by Pierre Clarac. Gallimard, Pléiade, 1971. Proust, Marcel. Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, edited by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. Gallimard, Pléiade, 1971. Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié et. al. 4 vols. Gallimard, Pléiade, 1989. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. 6 vols. Modern Library, 1993. Ricciardi, Alessia. The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film. Stanford UP, 2003. Roger, Alain. Proust, le plaisir et les noms. Denoël, 1985. Sedgewick, Eve Kosovsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Penguin, 2011.

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Soldin, Adeline. “Seeing Feeling: Queer Voyeurism in A la recherche du temps perdu,” French Studies 69.3 (2015): 318–32.

FURTHER READING Bersani, Leo. “Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein” in The Culture of Redemption. Harvard UP, 1990. 7–28. Kristeva, Julia. Proust and the Sense of Time, translated by Stephen Bann, Columbia UP, 1993.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

James Joyce, or the Literary Symptom of Psychoanalysis JEAN-MICHEL RABAT É

The links between Joyce and psychoanalysis have often been addressed with a measure of hesitation, if not perplexity.1 In spite of obvious similarities and common interests, Joyce was quite adamant in his rejection of psychoanalysis, a technique that for him recycled the catholic practice of confession, all the while asking for hefty payments (Ellmann 1982: 472, also 393 and 510). It did not help that, when Joyce was penniless in Zurich in 1918, the rich heiress Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick, who had begun sponsoring him lavishly, added as a condition for her generous patronage that he should start analysis with Carl Jung. Jung was training her as a psychoanalyst at the same time. Joyce refused indignantly, and lost her support. He reports on the incident ironically in a letter to a later and more steady patron, Harriet Weaver: “A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually growing mad and actually endeavored to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets” (Joyce 1975: 282). However, soon after, Joyce met Jung in more favorable circumstances, albeit brought about by his daughter’s psychic trouble, and he began appreciating him better. A second psychoanalyst who met Joyce after he come to Paris was Jacques Lacan. Lacan renewed interest in Joyce for all the psychoanalysts of his school. At the end of his career, he devoted a yearlong seminar to Joyce, finding in his works new keys for clinical practice. Lacan understood this simple truth: it is a waste of time to psychoanalyze either Joyce himself or the works, nevertheless psychoanalysis has a lot to learn from Joyce.

DUBLIN, TRIESTE AND ZURICH Joyce’s early work evinced common features with Freud’s investigation of human psyche by paying sustained attention to dreams and parapraxes. Already the Dublin years reveal a proximity with the rhetoric of suspicion that characterized early psychoanalysis. Joyce wrote many types of “epiphanies,” (see McDuff 2020), those neat impressionistic vignettes by which the soul of Irish people would be

1

See Further Reading. 243

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“betrayed” and disclose a mixture of personal paralysis and colonial subjection, his first-hand acquaintance with psychoanalysis dates from the years he spent in Trieste and in Zurich, two cities that were capitals of psychoanalysis for different reasons. When Joyce settled in Trieste in 1905, the city was a thriving place, the only harbor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. With its varied ethics groups, languages and cultures, it soon became a center for psychoanalysis. For more than ten years, Joyce lived in the double monarchy of which Freud and Kafka were citizens. We observe that Freud’s and Joyce’s trajectories crossed twice in a curious historical chiasmus. Freud came to Paris in 1885–1886 to work with Charcot; Joyce came to Paris to be a medical student in 1903–1904, but ended up reading Aristotle and a compendium of Aquinas’s texts at the Sainte-Geneviève library. Earlier, in March 1876, Freud had stayed in Trieste where he was a graduate student instructed to dissect eels and check whether they exhibited testicles; working at the Trieste zoological research station, Freud dissected hundreds of eels until he finally located tiny testes in male bodies. Meaning to dissect the Irish soul in his writings, Joyce went to Trieste in 1905 and stayed until 1915. With the exception of a short and miserable stay in Rome, these were ten years during which Joyce immersed himself in discussions of Freud, which pushed his investigation in two directions: the interpretation of dreams and their general significance for humanity, the family structure dominated by the father and his symbolic power. While in Trieste, Joyce had bought Ernest Jones’ book on Freud and Hamlet in its German version. The book summarizes Freud’s insights about Hamlet. It allowed Joyce to add an extra touch to his own theory about Shakespeare, thus contributing importantly to one episode of Ulysses in which the “Viennese school” is mentioned. Stephen simply grafts Aquinas onto Freud. Also, Joyce had acquired Jung’s 1909 The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual. He used it to sketch a general psycho-biographical conception of art. When Joyce took refuge in Zurich during the war, he happened to live in a city dominated by Jung from his post at the Burghölzli. After Mrs. McCormick withdrew her support, Joyce blamed this economic downturn on Ottocaro Weiss, a psychoanalyst friend from Trieste who can be credited with starting Freudian psychoanalysis in Italy after the First World War.2 In fact, Weiss, a strict Freudian, had nothing to do with the mishap with Jung. Joyce learned even more about psychoanalysis in Zurich with Weiss’s brother, Edoardo: Joyce’s main biographer, Richard Ellmann, documents a conflicted discussion they had about Freud’s theory of humor (Ellmann 1982: 398). While in Trieste, before and after the war, Joyce would discuss psychoanalysis with his friend Ettore Schmitz, alias Italo Svevo. Svevo had translated essays by Freud during the First World War. Both Trieste and Zurich were centers of psychoanalysis. Finally, when Joyce moved to Paris, he found a devoted supporter in Eugène Jolas who believed that Jung offered a key to ‘language of the night’ and universal mythology. When Joyce’s daughter became psychically troubled, after having tried numerous other treatments, Joyce sent her to Jung. Jung concluded that it was too late to do anything. These biographical details show the complexity of Joyce’s relationship with psychoanalysis. They throw some light on the willful darkness surrounding Finnegans Wake, a book that explores Freudian themes like incest and Oedipal rivalry. Joyce’s ongoing confrontation with psychoanalysis betrays a deep proximity, and a text that best shows the proximity of Joyce and psychoanalysis is his unique play, Exiles.

2

See Paul Roazen, 2005. Weiss is credited for being the model of “Dr. S” in Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923).

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The play’s plot hinges around the moment when Richard Rowan, a writer who clearly stands in as Joyce’s alter-ego, hears of his common-law wife’s seduction by his friend Robert Hand from her herself. He is not sure how to react and decides to leave her free to do what she wants. Indeed, Hand has been instrumental in bringing his family back from Rome, perhaps for the wrong reasons. Thanks to Robert’s efforts, Richard might obtain a professorship at the University. Moreover Richard is glad to reconnect with Beatrice, Robert’s cousin with whom he has corresponded for years and in whom he found an “anima inspiratrix,” a role that the earthly and sensual Bertha would not fulfill. When Bertha confesses to Richard the seduction scheme, he first refuses to intervene, but nevertheless appears at the house where Bertha will later come; after a long discussion, he leaves, preferring not to know what will happen. Thus masochism plays an important role in this play, Richard being clearly on the side of Sacher-Masoch. Joyce described the plot as a “rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher-Masoch.” (Joyce 1992a: 351). In the last scene, Richard is still uncertain as to whether Bertha has slept with Robert or not, but decides to renew his vows with her on the basis of this uncertainty. Richard and Bertha found their love not on bourgeois marriage but on a “living wound” of doubt, which leads to an ethical sense of freedom: Bertha becomes a free agent manifesting her renewed desire and not just the object of the desire for male rivals, a pattern that announces the complex interactions between Molly Bloom, unfaithful for one day, and her forgiving husband in Ulysses. The writing of the play shows how Joyce tapped the unconscious associations of Nora, his common-law partner, who had also been tempted by the seductive strategy of a family friend, Prezioso. In the notes for Exiles, among first drafts of scenes and meditations on exile, jealousy, and pain, one section reproduces dreams by Nora Barnacle. Then Joyce analyzes these dreams at some length. Here is one example: N. (B) – 12 Nov. 1913 Garter: precious, Prezioso. Bodkin, music, palegreen, bracelet, cream sweets, lily of the valley, convent garden (Galway), sea. Rat: Sickness, disgust, poverty, cheese, woman’s ear (child’s ear) Dagger: heart, death, soldier, war, band, judgment, king.” — Joyce 1992a: 346 Nora’s dream is reduced to a series of floating signifiers culled from her narrative. The mention of “precious” calls up “Prezioso,” too close a friend of the family in Trieste, a dashing journalist who made a pass at Nora. Unlike Richard, Joyce countered by denouncing him publicly in Trieste. Bodkin is the name of an old flame of Nora. Joyce uses a technique that had been invented by Jung in 1904, when he asked patients to associate images with a list of words he would read. Joyce generalizes from these private associations revolving around images of dead lovers and graves. Finally, he translates Nora into a natural force, allegorizing her into a universal agency: “She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts” (Joyce 1992a: 346–347). Another series is telegraphic in its concision: “Blister—amber—silver—oranges—apples— sugarstick—hair—spongecake—ivy—roses—ribbon.” (Joyce 1992a: 347) A whole page is needed to unfold the associations, Nora’s memories of having burned her hand as a little girl, of being given fruit, of the color of her mother’s hair, her girlish joy facing simple pleasures, until Joyce reaches

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the themes of girlhood, virginity and sexuality, discovering a deeper layer at which love and death seem linked, that immediately generates a short dialogue between the play’s male characters: A proud and shy instinct turns her mind away from the loosening of her bound-up hair – however sweet or longed for or inevitable – and she embraces that which is hers alone and not hers and his also—happy distant dancing days, distant, gone for ever, dead. Or killed? Cf. Robert You have made her all that she is. A strange and wonderful personality. Richard (darkly) Or I have killed her. Robert Killed her? Richard The virginity of her soul. — Joyce 1992a: 348 Joyce goes faster and further than Jung’s word-association technique, in which observation of speed in response was the key. These networks of images would surface again in Molly Bloom’s monologue and endow Molly with a rare vitality, while showing Joyce’s boldness in his exploration of feminine sexuality. Joyce betrays considerable expertise in deciphering Nora’s recondite obsessions. Similarly, Richard Ellmann quotes from a dream book kept by Joyce in 1916 at the time of the Zurich stay. In one dream, Nora watched the performance of a newly discovered play by Shakespeare in which there were two ghosts. Shakespeare was present. Nora feared that Lucia, her daughter who was then nine years old, might be frightened. Joyce’s interpretation links this vignette with his theory about Hamlet as explained by Stephen Dedalus in the library scene of Ulysses, in which the ghost of the dead king (who had been played by Shakespeare himself) addresses the ghost of the playwright’s own son, Hamnet). His elaboration is both engrossing and rife with ominous suggestions for the future, as it concludes with this sentence: “The fear for Lucia (herself in little) is fear that either subsequent honours or the future development of my mind or art or its extravagant excursions into forbidden territory may bring unrest into her life” (quoted Ellmann 1982:437). This shows that Joyce was aware of the dangers of his explorations of the unconscious thoughts of characters like Leopold and Molly Bloom. Writing constituted a self-analysis thanks to which he attempted to penetrate the deepest recesses of human subjectivity. There was some hubris in accomplishing this by himself, but Joyce was ready to pay the price for his genius. Much later on, he attributed the onslaught of Lucia’s disease to the stay in Zurich, the time he was toiling on Ulysses: “Some mysterious malady has been creeping over both my children (the doctors are inclined to trace it back to our residence in Switzerland during the war) . . .” (Joyce 1975: 381).

JUNG ON ULYSSES AND LUCIA This sends us to Jung’s rather bad-tempered review of Ulysses, “ ‘Ulysses’: A Monologue,” which was published ten years after the English publication. By 1932, Joyce’s book had been hailed as a

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modern masterpiece and received universal critical acclaim. By contrast, Jung’s biting tone in his review is surprising. He claims not to understand a novel that resembles the ravings of a schizophrenic. For Jung, in the 736 pages of the German translation, “nothing happens.” (Jung 1972: 109) More ominous is the assertion that the book betrays a “schizophrenic mentality” (Jung 1972: 116, 117). Like Van Gogh, Joyce would exhibit a “disintegration of the personality into fragmentary personalities” (Jung 1972: 117). Joyce’s perverse Catholic medievalism expresses a collective unconscious but only negatively. Ulysses is an emetic, a purgative and, as such, resembles Freud’s works or Nietzsche’s philosophy. Joyce has in common with Freudian theory a tendency to “undermine with fanatical one-sidedness values that have already begun to crumble” (Jung 1972: 119). Hence Joyce would be the Freud of literature, which was not praise coming from Jung at this moment! Both would be “prophets of negation” who, despite their nihilism, nevertheless manage to reveal “the other side of reality” (Jung 1972: 121). For Jung, the most important figure in Ulysses is Moses: “Looked at from the shadow-side, ideals are not beacons on mountain peaks, but taskmasters and gaolers, a sort of metaphysical police originally thought up on Sinai by the tyrannical demagogue Moses and thereafter foisted upon mankind by a clever ruse” (Jung 1972: 122). Indeed, Joyce’s favorite passage, taken from the “Aeolus” chapter, was John Taylor’s peroration comparing the Irish with the Jews about to be freed by Moses. It was the single passage from Ulysses that Joyce recorded. For Jung, of course, Moses calls up Freud, an inflexible, dogmatic leader, soon to be murdered by his followers. It is in this loaded context that Jung examined Lucia after she started showing signs of hebephrenic schizophrenia in the early 1930s. In 1932, Joyce went to Zurich for an eye operation and arranged for Lucia to follow. Two years later, they came back after Lucia’s symptoms had worsened. She was sent to the Burghölzi clinic, where she was treated by Jung whose treatment was successful at first. However, when she expressed herself more rationally, Lucia wrote a letter to her father in Triestine dialect that Jung had translated. It looked like a love letter; almost every sentence begins or ends with “Father.” Here is a typical confession: “Father, if ever I take a fancy to anybody, I swear to you on the head of Jesus that it will not be because I am not fond of you.” (quoted Ellmann 1982: 676) Therefore Jung diagnosed an irreversible schizophrenia and saw the futility of therapy. He was blunt and told this to Joyce, who was, in a way, relieved. Jung believed that no one could understand Lucia except her father and that psychoanalytic treatment could only make things worse. According to him, Lucia had become her father’s muse, an anima inspiratrix. Joyce was the stronger “animus” who had survived a deep dive into the waters of the Unconscious, while the weaker “anima” was drowning in them. A heated controversy surrounding Lucia’s symptoms has greeted the publication of Carol Shloss’s biography, Lucia Joyce: Dancing at the Wake (see Shloss 2005). Shloss believes that Lucia had been victimized by her family. If for her, the link between Richard and Bertha in Exiles can be replayed by Joyce and Lucia, and if Molly is still Bertha, then Giorgio, the brother, must play the shady role of Robert. It is true that Lucia was forced to renounce her career as a talented dancer in unclear circumstances. Meanwhile young men would visit her home not to see her but to meet her famous father, as Beckett did. Lucia was also subjected to her brother’s ambivalent attentions. And then Jung’s diagnosis contributed to the confusion. Debates are still raging about Lucia’s condition. Anyway, in Christmas 1934, Joyce forgave Jung his negative review of Ulysses and inscribed a copy mentioning his “grateful appreciation of his aid and counsel.” Had Joyce been persuaded by Jung’s theories about paternity, incest and madness? Joyce would have used the insights of Jung’s earlier theses, as a time when he was still fairly Freudian.

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The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual, originally published in 1909, was revised in 1948, and offers a palimpsest of Jung’s evolving terminology. Jung pays homage to Freud when gathering case studies. In the 1909 version, he mentioned “original sin,” adding that one should not blame one’s parents for everything, as Freud tended to do. When he revised the passage in 1948, the Unconscious itself bore the brunt of the critique: “They do not know what they are doing, and they do not know that by succumbing to the compulsion they pass it on to their children and make them slaves of the parents and of the unconscious as well. (. . .) Unconsciousness is the original sin” (Jung 1974: 109–110). These ideas, strongly expressed, are adumbrated in Ulysses and resoundingly present in Finnegans Wake, a book Joyce declared to be founded upon one main mythical paradigm, that of original sin, as we will see later. In some of passages added in 1948, Jung discussed the father-daughter complex in terms that echo his interpretation of Joyce’s predicament. Against Freud’s determinism in terms of the parents and the child, Jung introduces a theory of “archetypes,” pre-existing patterns of behavior deriving from a collective unconscious. One of these is the ancient belief in the power of the father. If fathers identify with the unconscious archetype, they become total monsters: “The more a father identifies with the archetype, the more unconscious and irresponsible, indeed psychotic, both he and his child will be. In the case we have discussed, it is almost a matter of ‘folie à deux.’ ” (Jung 1974: 109). Jung perceived that Joyce’s attitude towards his daughter betrayed a sort of “folie à deux.” Indeed, Lucia’s delirium of grandiosity exacerbated her father’s awareness of his genius. She wanted to have Ireland officially recognize him as the prominent artist of the century. Her mission was to “reconcile” them, and for this she would enlist the Pope himself. On the other hand, Joyce’s increasingly obscure writing mimed the “language of the night,” as his friend Eugène Jolas would call it. Joyce immersed himself in an opaque dream logic to such an extent that, to use Jung’s terms, he would plumb the depths of a collective unconscious. It is likely that Joyce accomplished this so radically in part to prove that Lucia was not insane. If she spoke and wrote like one main character of Finnegans Wake,3 it was because she obeyed the dictation of pre-existing unconscious archetypes. Her flashes of insight and twisted words paved the way for the invention of a new synthetic language.

LACAN’S JOYCE Whereas Jung only saw “schizophrenia” in the process linking father and daughter, a different picture emerged from Lacan’s frequentation of Joyce. Lacan perceived that a language made of puns using more than seventy languages offered new tools for psychoanalysis. Moreover, unlike many Freudians, Lacan had never condemned or rejected Jung.4 In 1921, Lacan had a glimpse of

The best exploration of the links between Lucia and the “schizophrenic” language of Finnegans Wake is Margaret McBride’s “Finnegans Wake: The issue of Issy’s schizophrenia,” James Joyce Studies Annual, vol. 7, Summer 1996, p. 145–175. McBride explains the variations of the diagnoses of Lucia’s state, ranging from “hebephrenic schizophrenia” to “dementia praecox,” and shows how Issy’s language duplicates the most prominent linguistic symptoms of what Bleuler and Jung identified as “schizophrenia.” 4 One year before he went to see Heidegger in his house in Freiburg, in June 1954, Lacan paid a visit to Jung’s house in Küssnacht. Jung narrated the now famous story of how Freud quipped: “They don’t realize we’re bringing the plague” when they arrived to New York in 1909. Lacan reported the story widely; it has been known under this version since then thanks to him (see Elisabeth Roudinesco 1997, pp. 264–265). 3

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Joyce during a visit to the rue de l’Odéon, either in Adrienne Monnier’s or in Sylvia Beach’s bookstore. This generated a life-long fascination for the French psychoanalyst. This led to his 1975 lecture opening the Paris Joyce symposium, and a lengthy Joyce seminar the following year. When the French Joyce scholar Jacques Aubert invited Lacan to give the major address at the 1975 International Joyce Symposium he was organizing in Paris, he did not guess that he would lure Lacan into new regions for so long. Lacan gave a talk entitled “Joyce the symptom” at the Sorbonne on June 16, 1975, already hinting that the chance encounter of James Joyce at Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore and his being present at the Ulysses reading when he was twenty5 was a promising coincidence. The main image that Lacan mobilized to discuss Joyce was that of the Borromean knot. Already in April 1975, Lacan buried himself in books and critical approaches to Joyce to prepare his introductory lecture. In the seminar entitled R, S, I, from 1974 to 1975, Lacan had set the registers of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary in such a way that they were both knotted together and called up the signifier of “heresy” (the capitals R, S, I, pronounced in French, sound like hérésie). The key was Joyce: “I have been taking a look at Joyce because I have been solicited to open a conference. Well, if Joyce is completely caught up in the sphere and the cross, it is not only because he read a lot of Aquinas thanks to his education with the Jesuits. You are all as caught in the sphere and the cross. Here is a circle, the section of a sphere, and within the cross. (. . .) noone has perceived that this is already a Borromean knot.” (Lacan 1975: 37) Lacan animates the cross and the sphere, as a cross can result from two curves, the sections of interlocking circles. The source for this scheme is Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake. Hart showed how Joyce’s world-view is made up of an interlocking of sphere and cross, a pattern accounting for a universe that looks closed upon itself (as everyone knows, the first words of the book, “riverrun, past Eve’s and Adam’s” continue the last words of the last page: “. . . along the”) and yet keeps generating new versions in an attempt to provide a solution for the old paradox of the quadrate circle (Hart 1962, passim). The Borromean knot describes the figure from which the later Joyce starts. It is a way of interlocking three rings in such a way that if you take out one, the other two fall apart. Lacan drew complex knots and circles on the blackboard, often getting lost, insisting that the circles spelled out Joyce’s symptom and that it could be described by mathematical topology. Whereas in the R, S, I Seminar Lacan considered that the three letters would make up the knot of the Name-of-the Father. In the following year, the Joyce seminar, he presents a more active knotting that becomes identical with writing: it is the concept of “Joyce the Sinthome,” the “sinthome,” by adding a crucial fourth circle to his triple knot. Joyce allowed Lacan to overcome an all-too static figure of Trinitarian resolution so as to bring it closer to a more radical heretic. Lacan’s starting point is simple: Joyce embodies the “symptom” as such, he is the Sinthome, for with him, symptom has to be written “sinthome,” an older form of the word that Rabelais had used. Rabelais appeared as Joyce’s predecessor in verbal experimentation, and on top of that he too was a medical doctor. The words symptôme and sinthome being homophonic, this archaic spelling changes a common term while confirming the crucial dimension of writing. Joyce’s name is the

When he was twenty, Lacan attended the first public reading of parts of Ulysses on December 7, 1921, at La Maison des Amis des Livres.

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Sinthome: the Irish writer becomes a literary saint, or the patron saint of literature, which corresponds to how he presented himself to posterity. The serendipitous coining releases other associations, like the allusion to Aquinas called “saint Thom-as d’Aquin” in French, but also to “sin” in English, and finally to literature with all its “tomes.” Joyce stands forth for all eternity as the saint and martyr of literature. Joyce the “sinthome” gives an active meaning to his name: the sinthome discloses the positive enjoyment of jouissance. The sense of enjoyment turns Joyce’s name into an active verb. For Lacan, Joyce erects a literary monument in place of his father’s real-life shortcomings; his writing compensates for failings that he excuses, negates and sublimates at the same time; Joyce becomes the Symptom himself by turning his body into a text that looks difficult and foreign. The Joyce ends up bequeathing his readers aims at the glorification of his name, a name that translates “Freud” (in German, Freud is close to Freude meaning happiness or enjoyment) into English (the joy contained in Joyce) and in French, as joie. The 1975–76 seminar on “The Sinthome” stages a confrontation with Joyce that made Lacan go beyond the three interlocking circles of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, concepts that had been the mainstays of his theoretical elaboration for twenty years. Joyce allows him to see that their knotting depends upon the function of a fourth circle, Σ or Sigma for the Symptom. However, such a reading remains traditional in so far as it predicated on a biographical approach. For instance, Lacan reads A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a straight-out autobiography. Downplaying distinctions between Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce, he accredits Joyce’s choice of an artistic career as a wish to compensate for a lack on the side of his own father. Joyce’s father would have been lacking, failing, drinking irresponsibly, and his elder son’s writing redeemed this fundamental deficiency. By becoming a writer, Joyce burdens himself with the paternity that his own father rejected or belittled. The symbolic mistake in the knotting of the circles of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic left them have untied together, and writing splices together these loose strings. Joyce would have been caught up in his father’s symptoms, all marked by a central perversity: both were spendthrift, heavy drinkers, and gifted tenors, but unable to keep their families sheltered from disaster. If John Joyce believed that he had “killed” his exhausted wife, who died of cancer at an early age after having given birth to thirteen children, four of whom died early, James Joyce’s own cross was his daughter, who started showing signs of derangement in the late twenties and was institutionalized in 1934 when she was 27. Lucia’s fate might suggest that Joyce’s family struggled with psychosis. Indeed Joyce may have wished to defend Lucia against psychoanalysis so as to ward off any suggestion that his own writing could be seen as “schizophrenic.” Like Jung, Lacan admits that Lucia drowned in the black waters of the Unconscious, whereas her father, a more experienced swimmer, managed to reach back to the surface (for Jung’s statement, see Ellmann 1982: 679–80). To demarcate his own approach, however, Lacan denounces Joyce’s tendency to fall into the trap of Jungism: the attempt to provide a universal history in the Wake boils down to the recycling of a few archetypes (S23: 106). Facing Joyce, Lacan voiced a ferocious rejection of previous psychoanalytical approaches. In January 1976, he heaped scorn on Freudian interpretations of Joyce, like Mark Shechner’s Joyce in Nighttown. Schechner provides an egregious counter-model; “. . . imagin[ing] that he is a psychoanalyst because he has read many psycho-analytic books,” he wants to psychoanalyze the characters. As Lacan quips, such an endeavor “gives you an absolutely terrifying impression, suggesting that the imagination of the novelist, I mean the imagination that constructed Ulysses is

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entirely to be discarded” (S23: 56). Lacan manifests only disdain for critics who submit novels to wholesale psychoanalytic readings, and does not spare Freud who, at least, had the merit of restraining himself—he never “analyzed” long novels. As for him, Lacan refrains from reading the unconscious of Stephen or Bloom. Fundamentally, Lacan’s reading of Ulysses revolves around the issue of paternity. Joyce’s symptom would be the denial of his father, but like Peter denying Christ, the denial tightens the noose around his neck, a noose that is a four-fold knot. The presence of two fathers in Ulysses, Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s real father, and Bloom, the symbolic father inherited from the pattern of the Odyssey, suggests that paternity is not “real” but a function of language. Joyce reveals that the symptom is caught up in a structure determined by the function of the Name-of-the-Father. While the last weeks of the seminar were devoted to discussions of a specifically Joycean jouissance as opposed to feminine jouissance, on March 16, 1976, Lacan announced a radically new thesis about the ego. In the very last seminar, Joyce’s ego was revealed as occupying the fourth circle. The ego was placed at the spot previously occupied by the Sigma of the sinthome. Joyce’s Ego would be an effect of writing similar to the sinthome. If there was indeed a mistake in the knotting of the circles of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, Joyce had compensated for the error with his ego, an Ego, which in Lacan’s scheme is not represented as a circle, but by double square brackets, so as to play the role of a clamp keeping the circles together. The ego is just an “artifice of writing” through which “the Borromean knot is restored” (Lacan 2016: 131). Joyce’s ego becomes sinthome by exploiting the ruses of literature: this egoic “artifice” is a supplement reattaching the floating components of subjectivity. Lacan used ego, following for once the English use, and not the French moi that translates Freud’s Ich, which suggests a renewed confrontation with British and American ego-psychology. The idea of the lability and supplementarity of the Joycean ego was confirmed by a passage taken from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen remembers how a number of schoolboys had tormented him because he claimed Byron to be the greatest poet of all. After his friends viciously lash at him, he is overcome by anger; sobbing and clenching his fists, he runs after them, but then feels this anger fall from him, in a moment of dispossession: “. . . even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones’s road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel” (Joyce 1992b: 87). For Lacan, such a transformation of anger into disgust defines the Joycean body, a body that can fall from one’s self. The body is a mere envelope that cannot hold the subject. Joyce’s ego would be a mere “peel” that would be loosely floating in the Imaginary, a labile and porous surface that can fall (S23: 128). As a consequence, the Real is not knotted to the Unconscious but appears in symptoms metonymically linked with places like Cork or Dublin. The knot performed by a writing that passes through paternity will assume an even more essential function. The concept of the ego proposed here is not “natural.” On the contrary, it is totally artificial, but cannot be reduced to the flat register of the Imaginary. The Lacanian ego is indeed, as Ezra Pound wrote in his Cantos, an Ego Scriptor (Pound 1986: 472). An ego migrating from Joyce to Lacan sends us back to Joyce’s very name, that repeated and translated Freud’s own name. Such a coincidence does not trigger condemnation, as it did for Jung, but transference: in the end, Joyce became Lacan’s wild psychoanalyst and allowed him to dislodge his ego-narcissism. Moreover Lacan found countless useful tools in Joyce; for once, his practice of linguistic equivocation via puns has practical uses for therapy. If Lacan betrays a mimetic fascination,

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almost a subjective identification with Joyce, it is because Joyce has become Lacan’s symptom. Here is why the question of Joyce’s madness acquires a sharper edge. If Joyce was mad, is Lacan mad too? In February 1976, Lacan was wondering whether Joyce was mad while mentioning his Inspired Writings, his early approach of the language of psychotics (Lacan 2016: 630). Lacan asked Jacques Aubert whether Joyce identified himself with a Redeemer. Aubert, cautiously, admitted to finding certain traces of this drift, without committing himself further (S23: 65). The reference to this 1931 seminal essay sends us back to his earliest writings. “Inspired Writings” marked a refusal of a medical approach to the language of psychotics by referring to experiments by the Surrealist poets (Lacan 1975: 369–380). Lacan did not distinguish the artful simulations of psychotic delirium that André Breton and Paul Eluard had jointly penned in The Immaculate Conception from verbal productions coming from institutionalized patients. Puns and homophonic patterns allow both poets and psychotics to use language as chains of signifiers; desire moves along with the chain, generating metaphors that break through and pass through the bar dividing signifier from signified. This does not solve the question of Joyce’s potentially psychotic structure. Lacan never provides a single answer. Lucia would figure a trace, a remainder of such a symptomatic formation, for she was clearly psychotic. Joyce’s last years were darkened by his daughter’s schizophrenia and the awareness that looming political crises would prevent people from reading such an obscure and experimental book as Finnegans Wake. However, Joyce offers Lacan a structure that he can use for other cases. With the new concept of the symptom as sinthome, he works at the cusp between psychosis and “normality.” It is life that needs a “writing,” and this is not limited to literary writing, since what is at stake is the constitution of the subject—a useful notion to deal with the clinic of trans people who decide to rewrite their bodies. When Lacan reintroduces the ego as symptom, it turns out to be no ideological or metaphysical illusion as in the 1950s but it works a useful artifice, which is the effect of writing. Joyce’s ego launches a subtle art of braiding, a tolerable re-knotting of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary unified by the Symptom. With Joyce, one moves from the original sin of the father—as we saw, Joyce wrote to his brother that the theme of Finnegans Wake was original sin—to writing as an overcoming of sin, less a sublimation than a transmutation to the level of the symptom. Lacan goes back to Joyce’s earliest insight when he described the Dublin he wished to portray on Dubliners as a “hemiplegia”, a paralysis,—declaring that he saw symptoms everywhere (Joyce 1975: 22) Lacan expands this insight by adding that we need Joyce to think psychoanalytically about literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce, 2nd edn, Oxford UP, 1982. Hart, Clive, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Faber, 1962. Joyce, James, Selected Letters, edited R. Ellmann, Faber, 1975. Joyce, James, Poems and Exiles, ed. J. C. C. Mays, London, Penguin, 1992a. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. S. Deane, Penguin, 1992b. Jung, Carl Gustav, Die Bedeutung des Vaters für das Schicksal des Einzelnen, Deuticke, 1909. Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972. Jung, Carl Gustav, The Psychoanalytic Years, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Princeton UP, 1974. Lacan, Jacques, De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, suivi de Premiers écrits sur la Paranoia, Seuil, 1975. Lacan, Jacques, “R.S.I.” in Ornicar? Paris, n° 5, 1976.

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Lacan, Jaques, The Sinthome, The Seminar Book XXIII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2016. McDuff, Sangam, Panepiphanal World: James Joyce’s Epiphanies, Florida UP, 2020. Pound, Ezra, The Cantos, London, Faber, 1986. Roazen, Paul, Edoardo Weiss: The House that Freud built, Transaction Publishers, 2005. Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Jacques Lacan, translated by Barbara Bray, Columbia UP, 1997. Shechner, Mark, Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Berkeley UP, 1974. Shloss, Carol Loeb, Lucia Joyce: Dancing in the Wake, Picador, 2005.

FURTHER READING Aubert, Jacques, ed. Joyce avec Lacan, Paris, Navarin, 1987. Brivic, Sheldon, Joyce between Freud and Jung, Port Washington, Kennikat, 1980. Brivic, Sheldon, The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan, and Perception, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1991. Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed., Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, Cornell UP, 1993. Ingersoll, Earl G., Engendered Trope in Joyce’s Dubliners, Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Kimball, Jean, Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce’s Ulysses, Southern Illinois UP, 1997. Kimball, Jean, Joyce And The Early Freudians: A Synchronic Dialogue Of Texts, Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 2003. Leonard, Gary M. Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1993. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Restuccia, Frances, James Joyce and the Law of the Father, Yale UP, 1989. Thurston, Luke, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge UP, 2004. Van Boheemen-Saaf, Christine, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History, Cambridge UP, 1999.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Entangled Minds Bion and Beckett ANGELA MOORJANI

In 1934–35, the future Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett (1906–89) moved temporarily from Dublin to London for thrice-a-week psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic with the yet-to-be renowned Wilfred R. Bion. Recognized today as one of the most influential and creative psychoanalysts after Freud, Bion (1897–1979) was born to British parents in Muttra in northern colonial India. Enrolled at age eight in a boarding school in England, he transitioned directly from his schooling into the traumatic experience of combat in the First World War, leading to experiences that were to influence his later theories. After a BA in history from Oxford and medical training at University College London, he qualified as a medical doctor in 1930, joining the Tavistock Clinic in 1932 as a trainee psychotherapist, an engagement to continue until 1948. Beckett, on the other hand, was born in a prosperous Protestant suburb of Dublin, and after graduating from Trinity College Dublin with a BA in French and Italian, had spent 1928–30 in Paris as an exchange lecteur at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, become part of the circle around James Joyce, and begun publishing criticism, poetry, and fiction. A little over a year after returning to Dublin, he permanently abandoned his fledgling academic career for writing, but found no publisher for his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Jobless, he was forced to return to his family home, where a troubled relationship with his disapproving mother and the death of his father in 1933 reinforced the anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and a host of psychosomatic ills that led to his therapy with Bion (Knowlson: 167–69). The close association of two of the most prominent and internationally acclaimed figures in their respective fields, whose fame continues unabated in the twenty-first century, has intrigued scholars of either or both. Examined first is a scholarly disagreement about their relationship.

THE IMAGINARY TWIN CONTROVERSY In 1950, Bion, who was at the time in a training analysis with Melanie Klein, qualified as a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society on presenting his membership paper “The Imaginary Twin” (“ImT”) to the group. Several psychoanalysts and Beckett scholars maintain that in this paper Bion reflects, fifteen years after the fact, on the two years of sessions with the young writer. They recognize Beckett in the paper’s analysand A, or contend that he is among the patients Bion condensed into this fictionalized composite—a device psychoanalysts share with writers of 255

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fiction—or, thirdly, that his analysand suffered from similar complaints as the young writer from Dublin. Others contest these views because of their conjectural nature. Two psychoanalysts—the prominent French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu (1923–99), in the early 1980s, and, later that decade, the Harvard professor Bennett Simon (b. 1934)—independently hypothesized that the twinning relationship with A (or Beckett), which Bion explored in his 1950 paper, continued in later years. It did not matter that the two had no direct contact except for brief exchanges of messages in the first years after when, against Bion’s advice, Beckett broke off the therapy at the end of 1935. My own conviction that there are elements of Beckett mixed into the A composite, despite the necessary falsifications to protect the identity of patients, results principally from Bion’s analysand imagining himself in a womb (Bion, “ImT” sec. 21) and his artful projections of an imaginary twin (secs. 16, 28). (The section numbers are Bion’s.) These descriptions correspond to Beckett’s imagining in his first novel, written in 1931–32, a womblike and tomblike creative retreat in the psyche, from which his persona’s “unborn” will be born or reborn (Beckett, Dream: 6, 44, 121), a trope to reappear in his writing over the next fifty years. Further, he spoke post-Bion of intrauterine memories and of harboring an embryonic being, and repeatedly scrutinized the writing process in terms of an unborn twin to bring to life. But there are other clues, such as the relationship to a minimally disguised Joyce to which Bion alludes in his portrait of A (“ImT” sec. 13), and a number of his patient’s traits such as speaking in a monotone leaving rhythmically placed pauses inviting his therapist to take his turn (sec. 9); making statements open to multiple interpretations (sec. 8); and even the fear of drinking too much (sec. 7). All of these suggest the young Beckett. (On Beckett and A, see, in addition to Anzieu and Simon, Moorjani, “Beckett and Psychoanalysis”: 176–78, and on opposing views, see Baker: 289–90 and Oppenheim: 768.) Although Bion found the “reductive analysis” of free association and dream analysis in vogue at the Tavistock to be insufficient, he seemingly used it to some extent with Beckett (Bléandonu: 43). “I used to lie down on the couch,” Beckett told his biographer some fifty years later, “and try to go back in my past,” a method resulting in some extraordinary intrauterine memories of painful entrapment (qtd. in Knowlson: 171). Moreover, having reported “Bion is now a dream habitué” in a letter written on the first of January, 1935 to his friend Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett was aware of Bion’s interpretations of his patients’ dreams (L I: 240). On 10 March 1935, he explained to MacGreevy that, for Bion, his was a “diseased condition that began in a time which I could not remember, in my ‘pre-history’ ” and that that the pathology was “invalid from the word ‘go’ & has to be broken up altogether” (L I: 259). It is fascinating to find Bion in two late works of the 1970s—the paper “Caesura” and his fictional trilogy A Memoir of the Future—explore the influence of prenatal development on postnatal existence and emphasize the danger of “the experience of the coming together of the pre-natal and the post-natal personalities” (Memoir: 551). Could the memory of the pathology attributed to Beckett’s “pre-history” have contributed to this view? For Beckett, however, as reported in this same revealing letter, his pathology prior to the therapy, consisted in a cultivated “misery” leading to self-isolation, apathy, and “arrogant ‘otherness,’ ” which, only on resulting in “terrifying physical symptoms,” made him understand the morbidity of his state and seek help (L I: 258–59). Beckett’s hope was that the therapy will “render the business of remaining alive tolerable” (259), although at times he feared that it may turn out to be a failure or later that it had been a failure when, after ending the therapy, the panic attacks returned (240, 300). Depressive episodes continued throughout his life but also the will “to turn this dereliction, profoundly felt, into literature” (recorded in his German travel diary on 16 February 1937; qtd. in

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Knowlson: 235). Shortly before his death, he confided to his biographer that the therapy “helped me to understand a bit better what I was doing and what I was feeling” (qtd. in Knowlson: 171; on Beckett’s two years of treatment, see also Bléandonu: 43–46, and Miller and Souter: 37–73). Noteworthy too is Beckett’s attendance at a 1935 conference by C. G. Jung on the invitation of both Bion and Beckett’s friend Geoffrey Thompson, an event that led to Beckett’s identifying himself and some of his characters with the young girl whose early death Jung attributed to her not having been born entirely (Cronin: 220–22). After ending the therapy and returning to the family home, many of Beckett’s symptoms returned. Consequently, Anzieu and other psychoanalytic thinkers maintain that Beckett’s moving permanently to Paris in 1937 was a liberating event, further strengthened by writing his postwar fictions and plays mostly in French (Moorjani, “Beckett and Psychoanalysis”: 181). Anzieu further posits resemblances between Bion and Beckett in light of their common French Huguenot heritage (“Beckett and Bion”: 164). And similar to the traces in Bion’s writings of his combat experience in the First World War are the unmistakable scars in Beckett’s later texts occasioned by the Second World War in which he had joined the French Resistance. The author of an impressive study of Freud’s self-analysis, Anzieu credibly contends that Beckett continued the therapy with Bion by means of his oeuvre (Beckett: 40–41, 83–84), even if some of the French analyst’s specific interpretations are questionable. Several Beckett scholars similarly draw attention to Beckett’s self-writing or self-unwriting infused with his experience of psychotherapy and the knowledge he gleaned from his readings on psychology and psychoanalysis at the time of his therapy with Bion (Abbott: ix; Moorjani, “Beckett and Psychoanalysis”: 173–78; Rabaté: 25). However, when Anzieu asked Beckett what he thought of his approach to his writings, Beckett, not unexpectedly, rejected his interpretations as “a psychoanalyst’s phantasms” (qtd. in Anzieu, “Beckett and Bion”: 164). Beckett would regularly disavow any approach that risked limiting him to one standpoint—a trait he shared with Bion—although he also admitted about his writings that “there had always been more in the work than he’d suspected was there,” as reported by Lawrence Shainberg (133). The two-way influence, or entanglement, hypothesized for the two writers, along with Bion’s frequent citations of Milton, Pascal, Keats, Lewis Carroll, among other literary figures, help elucidate Bion’s eventual adoption of parallels with the artistic process in re-envisioning what he found unsatisfactory in the communication between analyst and analysand and its recording after the fact. In this connection, both Jean-Michel Rabaté and Bennett Simon see a link between Bion’s fictional trilogy A Memory of the Future and Beckett’s novelistic trilogies in their common explorations of unanswerable questions and the inadequacy of language, not without humor and irony (Rabaté: 25; Simon: 345–6).

BION AND BECKETT’S VIEWS ON THE IMAGINARY TWIN Bion’s interpretations concerning the imaginary twin involve three different periods of his career. The first consists of the notes he tells of writing after sessions before he later discontinued the practice (STh: 123), followed by his views in his 1950 membership paper, seemingly based on earlier notes. A third interpretation comprises Bion’s perspective at the time he was preparing “The Imaginary Twin” for republication in the 1967 volume Second Thoughts (STh), his paper having previously appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. To the 1950s articles (with one

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exception) collected in the 1967 volume, at a time when many of his most influential writings had appeared, Bion added a commentary closely engaging with his earlier interpretations. My summary of Bion’s first and “second thoughts” begins with his 1950 account of the two years of therapy with analysand A who, Bion reports, spoke of harboring an unborn twin whose birth he had prevented. In turn, Bion surmised, the twin was determined to block A from being born in the sense of achieving independence. In interpreting his analysand’s dream about a twin, Bion concludes that his patient was using his therapist to personify a part of himself he rejects by means of the mechanisms of introjection and projection, splitting, and personification (“ImT” secs. 16–17). The importance Bion attached to these mechanisms vouch for his familiarity at the time of the therapy with the early work (pre-1935) of Melanie Klein on splitting, projection, play-therapy, and the transference. One need only compare Klein writing in 1929, “I believe these mechanisms (splitting-up and projection) are a principal factor in the tendency to personification in play” (205), with Bion’s: “Patient ‘A’ personified his splits with such success . . . one might almost imagine one’s self watching a session of play therapy with a child” (“ImT” sec. 28). Bion further emphasized the “mastery and confidence” with which A brought unconscious material to consciousness and manipulated Kleinian splitting and projection to subject his personified splits to the scrutiny of his eyes and intellect (secs. 24–26, 28). This appreciation helps elucidate Beckett’s extraordinary accomplishment in writing, in 1947, his “split” antinovel Molloy, after becoming aware of his own ignorance and “folly,” as he put it, permitted him to write what he felt (qtd. in Knowlson: 319). Additional splits reported by A, Bion writes, consisted in a complaining parent, an entire poisoned family, and an injured girl (secs. 14, 24–27), for all of which one can find exemplars in Beckett’s later writing. It bears mention at this point that Beckett, who began composing his second novel Murphy while in therapy with Bion, describes one layer of the eponymous anti-hero’s mind in Kleinian terms: “the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy” (Murphy: 112). In fact, in relation to Murphy, several commentators suggest that Beckett slipped his therapist into the composite portrait of Murphy’s guru Neary at the beginning of the novel. (See Moorjani, “Beckett and Psychoanalysis”: 176.) Bion further refers to Klein’s 1928 article on the early onset of the Oedipus situation (“ImT” sec. 33; Klein: 186–98). Associating the emergence of Oedipus with the development of visual capacity and the intellect, Bion explains that A eventually struggled “to come to terms with an emotionally charged oedipus (sic) complex” (sec. 33). This is the very dynamic pervading Molloy, although in the manner of postmodern negative, or ironic, allegory, so that it is missed by many readers. In an allusion to the reparative process Klein explored in a 1929 article on the creative impulse (Klein: 210–18), Bion further tells of alerting A about the importance of accepting the personified splits of his personality and of restoring the internal injured objects with which he was preoccupied (sec. 26). As the therapy progresses, Bion notices the increasing ability of analysand A to face reality and tolerate exploring his intra-psychic tensions. Ultimately, patient A, Bion concludes, permitted his therapist to exist as a separate person, not an imaginary twin created by him (sec. 31). Conspicuously omitted in Bion’s 1950 paper are references to Klein’s controversial writings after 1935 despite her standing in the British Psychoanalytic Society and his analysis with her. This omission strengthens further the supposition that he is writing about an earlier case and relying principally on his notes detailing his interpretations at the time.

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As outlined above, Bion’s 1950 paper provides substantial textual evidence that Beckett figures in Bion’s A composite. The most salient argument, for me, is not only Beckett’s obsessive “twin” or “split” writing in Molloy and other works, which is often commented on, nor his pointing in later conversations to being inhabited by an embryonic being, but most spectacularly by his Pochade radiophonique / Rough for Radio II, written originally in French around 1960. It was at this time that his interest in Klein was reawakening. He asked his cousin, a psychiatrist, about the difference between Freudian and Kleinian analysis (Bair: 519–20), and, tellingly, embedded a story recalling Klein’s 1932 The Psychoanalysis of Children into his 1961 play Happy Days (Kim: 124–31). In Beckett’s brief radio play, or “rough”, the character Fox, who is compelled under the whip to utter, imagines himself pregnant with his unborn twin—“my brother inside me, my old twin”—and speaks of a breast to give suckle to the twin should he have himself “opened” (Beckett, Coll: 119, 123). The characters of the play have been generally recognized as personifying interrelated facets of the creative process and the constituents of the writer’s mind. Autobiographical hints point to the writer’s identification not only with Fox and the twin he harbors, but also with the torturing role of the Animator, thus gathering his personified splits into one short play transmitted to an audience of listeners. Play-therapy, indeed. The “rough” further suggests a spoof on a Kleinianinfluenced psychotherapeutic session, replete with a torturing analyst forcing his patient to associate, which Fox proceeds to do in a marked poetic manner, and with all he says recorded in notes by an assisting stenographer. Such simultaneous scenarios are among the Beckettian techniques of multiplying standpoints, here the aesthetic and the psychoanalytic. In examining Bion’s 1967 comments on “The Imaginary Twin” in Second Thoughts (120–38), written seventeen years after the article, the severity with which he discounts many of his earlier interpretations astonishes. In fact, after his 1950 membership paper Bion’s career had taken a brilliant turn: his early work in group dynamics gave way to explorations of psychosis resulting in influential concepts extending the work of Freud and Klein. These innovative writings were followed by an epistemological period devoted to his theory of thinking and to systematizing the analytical encounter by introducing mathematical notations and inventing his notorious ‘grid’ to focus the attention of analysts on components of the interaction with patients. By 1967, however, Bion was becoming increasingly aware of the congruence between his conception of the analytic relationship with philosophical, artistic, and mystic thought and experience. Bion begins his commentary by cautioning the reader to be aware of the fictitious nature of “The Imaginary Twin” narrative. Moreover, his explaining twice, within ten pages (120–21, 131), the need to falsify the facts to prevent identification of his analysand, when such discretion is routinely demanded by the profession, makes one suspect that A had attained a certain notoriety by 1967. He further regrets in his commentary that in the 1950 paper he failed to contrive an “artistic representation” involving a transformative selection and ordering of the material (120, 131–32). Intriguingly, when Bion tells, in 1967, of not recognizing the patient or himself in his 1950 article (123), he is repeating an impression felt by fiction writers, Beckett among them, about what they have written owing to the dissociative nature of the creative process. By 1967, Bion had indeed advocated a waking dream state for analysts during a session, avoiding thereby coming to pre- and misconceived conclusions by taking account of the ineffable, or the Bionian “O,” the ultimately unknowable, which he had introduced two years earlier in his Transformations. (See the last section below.) In his commentary Bion consequently concludes that the relationship of analyst and patient is “an ineffable experience” difficult to describe in factual or sensory terms, particularly to a reader

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(STh: 121). Among Bion’s further “second thoughts” about his 1950 article is downplaying the significance of the imaginary twin configuration by attributing the former importance he attached to what can be subsumed under the more general pattern of splitting to his inexperience as an analyst (127). As mentioned earlier, both participants in the therapy at the beginning of their respective careers were thought to continuously extend their later thinking by going back to what remained unresolved in their two years together, an unending entangling process involving an openness to unknowing and uncertainty important to both. Even those who question a special relationship between Beckett and Bion after 1935 nevertheless agree that the many correspondences between their writings bear investigation, each helping to elucidate the other. The remainder of this essay will briefly explore such mutually illuminating resemblances.

PATHOLOGICAL AND NONPATHOLOGICAL SPLITTING That writers project their mental states and fragments of their personalities into their texts was emphasized in Freud’s 1908 paper on “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (150), in which, as others have before and after him, he associates creative writing with childhood play (152). Intriguingly, Otto Rank, in his 1914 The Double (75–76), sees in the imaginary twin fantasy of writers a split in the psyche in the form of a double, or a doppelgänger, a common enough literary device since the turn inward by the Romantics. In fact, Beckett repeatedly dramatizes in his fiction and theater the tendency of children to divide themselves in two in order to have a playmate for company, and he personifies suffering splits, inner twins or doubles, that dictate fragments of their stories to narrating voices, essentially ventriloquizing the outer speakers (Watt and Not I, among others). Beckett further invented doubles that function as split-off parts of a protagonist that must be recovered (Molloy), or an embryonic being to bring to birth (Rough for Radio II). In his late theater and fiction, ghostly doubles listen to the tales of the protagonists’ lives that are based on the author’s (That Time, Company, Ohio Impromptu); and finally, in his last prose fiction Stirrings Still of 1987, he stages a personage who sees his doppelgänger in a dream or near-death scenario heading into an elsewhere. Bion’s is an important voice in countering the tendency to judge such literary fragmentation in terms of pathological schizoid mechanisms instead of reconfigurations of the dissociated nature of writing. The concept of “non-pathological splitting,” Bion maintains, is applicable to splits of a personality that enable several vantage points (“Caesura”: 45–46). There is a clear parallel in the multiple viewpoints of Beckett’s twins, doubles, “vice-existers,” narrative voices, which remain, however, under the writer’s control and “scrutiny of his eyes” and are especially palpable in his novel Watt, his postwar trilogy, and the play Not I. Similarly, in his late fictional A Memoir of the Future, Bion multiplies vantage points, or “vertices,” on psychoanalysis and his life—mostly childhood and war traumas—by splitting “BION,” the authorial persona in the text, into many personalities—from a dialoguing psycho-embryo through many life stages to the writer at seventyseven—and by multiplying contradictions among “P.A.” (psychoanalyst), “MYSELF,” and fictional vice-existers debating with other characters, with some of the disputes occurring in disturbing nightmares. The writer’s control precludes identifying such literary devices with the defense mechanism of pathological schizoid splitting. If there are traces of such, they are “contained” in the writing.

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BION AND BECKETT’S CONTAINERS—CONTAINED In Beckett and Bion, psychoanalyst Ian Miller and literary scholar Kay Souter contend that because Beckett “employs the reader as an audience to his narrators’ psychological states,” his readers unknowingly take on the role of a psychoanalyst; deprived of an analyst’s toolbox, however, they lack the means of countering the narrators’ hostile psychic projections. Bion’s two-way interaction of container–contained, Miller and Souter assert, is consequently short-circuited (122, 134, 144). Bion’s influential concept of the “container–contained” entails the psychic receptivity of a person— beginning with the child’s first caregiver or mother—who on receiving another’s anxious message, returns it in a “detoxicated” form (Elements: 27). That psychoanalysts perform this role for their analysands is commonly recognized. Thinkers in several fields have advanced quite different views of the container–contained function in literature and the arts than the torturous short-circuiting adduced by Miller and Souter (144), by emphasizing the transformative action on author and reader of such container–contained relations. The explicative power of Bion’s container–contained has proven to be remarkable. In The Hidden Order of Art, art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig contends that artists, in contrast to psychotics, create a womb in their unconscious, a Bionian container that reshapes hostile split-off parts into creative acts of regeneration or rebirth (124–25). For him, the work of art functions as such a womb “to receive and nurture projective identifications” (Ehrenzweig 222), the latter Kleinian term referring to “the mechanism by which parts of the personality are split off and projected into external objects” (Bion, STh sec. 92). In a parallel development and similarly derived from Bion, psychoanalysts Maria Carmen Gear and Ernesto Cesar Liendo emphasize the capacity of subjects to receive and metabolize in their psychic wombs their own and others’ anguish (25). In terms of audience reception, psychoanalyst Margot Waddell (290) similarly postulates that artworks can fulfill a containing function for receivers. Such transformative wombs concur with Beckett’s portrayal of a womblike and tomblike space of creativity in the psyche described in the first section above. These alternate views of the function of the container–contained in creative work give writers and readers an active role in contrast to a suffering passivity.

BION’S “ATTACKS ON LINKING” (1959) AND BECKETT’S LANGUAGE GAMES Several of the writers on Bion and Beckett affirm that the former’s influential investigations of psychotic and borderline attacks on anything that links two objects together, especially destructive attacks on “verbal thought” and emotional ties, find multiple analogs in Beckett’s writing (Bion, STh sec. 92; and see, for example, Connor: 15–30, and Oppenheim: 774–76). Simon, on the other hand, recognizing the paradoxical coexistence of contraries in Beckett’s writing, sees a simultaneous “push to break all meaningful links” and “a persistent push to keep trying, to keep communicating” (341). The key word here is “meaningful.” Beckett’s well-known language skepticism, adopted from the Czech-German writer and philosopher Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923), critiques language’s pretense of giving meaning to an unspeakable, unknowable world. Retained, however, is the social function of language to create linkages between people, not via thinking and meaning-making, but by what Mauthner (and Wittgenstein after him) envisaged as social or language games. Sidelining the referential function of language, language games put emphasis on the use of language to link

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participants together, such as conversation with its interactional rules of initiating, turn-taking, pausing, and ending. In one of the most acclaimed plays of the twentieth century, Beckett’s stirring and enigmatic tragicomedy Waiting for Godot (first written in French in 1948–49), in which all declarative saying is put in doubt or negated and punctuated by “nothing is certain,” the tramps Gogo and Didi, wait night after night for a mysterious Mr. Godot who is said to come tomorrow, but never today. To pass the time, they engage in one language game after another by playing at conversing, at abusing each other and making up, at role playing, at telling stories, and using words poetically, musically to enchant and soothe. The request to “return the ball” in one of the to-and-fros between the two (9) echoes analysand A’s strategic pauses asking his therapist to take his turn. The ties uniting the two tramps are threatened with dissolution but always tightened again as is the mutually destructive bond of the play’s master–slave couple that traverses the stage in each of the two acts to vary the action, or rather inaction. Left indeterminate is the link to the absent Godot—of whom Bion’s O can be considered a close relative. A Kleinian, Bionian, and Winnicottean analysis of the simultaneously vindictive and connecting ties of the three generations of Beckett’s next play Endgame, in the aftermath of catastrophe—the linking presence of transitional objects, for instance—also yields suggestive insights. Parallels in Bion’s writings came late in his career in his search for means to communicate with both his patients and readers about what is ultimately “ineffable,” turning late in life to writing the disconcerting, yet dialogical, three volumes of A Memory of the Future.

PATHOLOGICAL VISION AND BIZARRE OBJECTS Pathological vision is the subject of Beckett’s silent Film of 1964. His stated intent was to make an unrealistic film portraying two “diseased” and deviant forms of vision: a “ferociously voracious” eye (E)—the role given the camera—pursuing “a reluctant, a disgusted” object (O) fleeing perceivedness, played by Buster Keaton with one eye covered with a patch (Beckett, “Beckett on Film”: 187, 190, 192). In the final sequence, when the opposing forms of single-eyed vision merge, it becomes evident that E and O are conflicting aspects of a split protagonist. Foregrounded at the beginning of the scenario is Berkeley’s “Esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived) to highlight visibility’s link to being (Beckett, Film: 11), a link O wants to escape, and E to empower. To rid himself of the menace of visibility, O avoids all eyes—animate and inanimate— projecting eyes into objects that subsequently threaten him with their looking. In a farcically staged attack on linking, he veils, expels, or destroys all such menacing objects, which are rendered “bizarre” by his projections and with which the room (his mother’s) is overloaded. Evocative of the Kleinian/Bionian oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Bion, STh sec. 98), Godlike images of parental superego surveillance—a recurring motif in Beckett—are attacked with particular ferocity, the most difficult to obliterate being a photograph of the protagonist’s mother “devouring” the six-month-old infant in her arms with her “severe eyes” (Beckett, Film: 61). In the final sequence, O is cornered into visibility when he finds his hallucinated out-of-body double peering down on him as he dozes in his “mother rocker,” Beckett’s term in his late play Rockaby for his recurring womblike rocking chairs (Coll: 280). This echo of the “devouring” and stern eyes of the parents results in a terrorized silent scream. Covering his eyes with his hands in a final depressive flight from external- and self-perception, O, in a simultaneously regressive and

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progressive action, continues his womblike rocking, until “the rocking dies down,” seemingly rejoining in death an elsewhere beyond being and nonbeing (Beckett, Film: 52). Such a reading of Film foregrounds the confluence of Bion and Beckett’s explorations of pathological vision as an escape from the painfulness of reality. (See Moorjani, “Peau”: 28–35). Understanding Beckett’s film scenario is enhanced by taking into account a number of key features: Bion’s variations of the Freudian contest between the reality and pleasure principles (Bion, Learning: 31); the notion Bion developed of attacks on vision, one of the essential links between personality and world, required not only for being but also for the development of knowledge (“ImT” secs. 32, 33); his concept of “bizarre objects” extending the Kleinian projection of injured parts of the personality (STh secs. 57–59); and, as already noted, his allusions to schizoid-paranoid attacks on phantasized parental figures and the depressive turnabout countering persecutory and vengeful phantasms. Beckett’s Film and Bion’s theories are mutually elucidating.

TRANSFORMATIONS IN “O” “Transformations,” as defined by Bion, refer to the interpretations imagined for the ultimately unknowable of the analytic situation (Tr: 1–13). He refers to this unknowable as “an O, or a zero, or a naught” (Tavistock Seminars: 33). Among several analogies, he describes O in terms of Plato’s theory of Forms of which phenomena are only shadows (Tr: 138), and relates it to the Neoplatonic thought of the great German fourteenth-century mystic philosopher Meister Eckhart, who distinguished an ultimately unknowable and unnamable gotheit (godhead or godhood) from its realization or transformation into a personal God. For Eckhart, Bion explains, it is possible to envisage a mystical oneness with God, but not with the ultimate reality of the godhead (Tr: 139). His own concept of O, Bion maintains, is further congruent with the thought of Kant, Berkeley, Freud, and Klein and all who believe “a curtain of illusion separates us from reality,” resulting in a gap between knowable phenomena and the Kantian unknowable “thing-in-itself,” a gap that is unbridgeable for the human mind limited to transformations of O (Tr: 147). In foregrounding the ontological emphasis on being or becoming rather than epistemological knowing, Bion subsequently accentuates the importance of a psychoanalytic “transformation in O” for an analysand’s psychic development. Tendered by the analyst from the standpoint of O, such a transformation leads beyond self-knowledge into an elsewhere that, for Bion, has as its closest analog the mystical (Tr: 148, 156). Preceding his therapy with Bion, Beckett found in his early reading of Schopenhauer and of and about Christian mystics, including Eckhart, the same philosophical and mystic configurations later adduced by Bion of an unknowable ultimate reality. Schopenhauer, however, the influential transmitter of Indian thought to the West, included the Buddha as well as Eckhart among his forerunners, claiming that they and he teach the same thing: the illusory nature of phenomena and of the self, an ethics of compassion, and the ultimately unknowable. It is because so many artists, writers, and philosophers, in the first half of the twentieth century adopted Schopenhauer’s Buddhist-inspired view of the creative process, related to a metaphysical timelessness, that it is no surprise to find in Beckett’s works, suffused with Buddhist allusions as well as variations on “transformations in O,” his personas’ always uncertain aesthetic and contemplative attempts to reach an unspeakable “home.” In consonance with the Buddha, Beckett conceives of ultimate reality not in terms of the divine but in the form of a productive void, so that the narrator of his

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late prose fiction Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) exclaims: “Void. Nothing else. Contemplate that. Not another word. Home at last” (31). (On the topics introduced in this paragraph, see Moorjani, Beckett and Buddhism chs. 1–3 and 7.) Adopting the modernist ploy of hiding sources, Beckett kept his Buddhist allusions mostly indirect. Bion, too, although familiar with Buddhist thought, does not mention Buddhist parallels in his writings. For both, however, commentators have not failed to notice, without denying differences, the reverberations of their writings with Buddhist thinking. For Bion, a convergence often adduced is the necessity to suspend: (1) memory (conscious recall versus dreamlike remembering); (2) desire—“sensuous greed” (Att: 33)—and (3) sensory perception and understanding to assure the analyst’s contact with the O of analytic experience and, more generally, with “the formless, infinite, ineffable, non-existent” (Att: 129). (See also Bion, Att: 41–59; and Cooper: 37–52 and Zhang: 331–55 on the many articles on Buddhist analogies in Bion and their own views on the subject.) Bion and Beckett’s like-mindedness is less astounding when one considers that they threaded similar intertextual material—Freudian, Kleinian, Jungian, biblical, literary (including Joyce), mythological, mystic, mathematical, and philosophical, including Buddhist, Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Kantian, and more—into their own transformations of O, the psychoanalytic for one, the aesthetic for the other (Moorjani, “Peau”: 31–32). In the many crossovers from one to the other who is to say that their earlier therapeutic association does not play a role? If lack of empirical evidence about their knowledge of each other’s later work has made commentators question direct influence, it appears incontrovertible that theirs, at the very least, is a relation of “family resemblances,” to use the Wittgensteinian phrase, partly derived from the entanglement of their minds dating from a shared conceptual environment and the 1930s therapy. For both, arguably, the therapy and its entangling effects were never brought to an end.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Cornell UP, 1996. Anzieu, Didier. “Beckett and Bion.” 1986. International Review of Psycho-Analysis 16 (1989):163–69. Anzieu, Didier. Beckett et le psychanalyste. Éditions Mentha, 1992. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Harcourt, 1978. Baker, Phil. Book Review of Beckett and Bion: The (Im)patient Voice in Psychotherapy and Literature, by Ian Miller with Kay Souter, and of On Minding and Being Minded: Experiencing Bion and Beckett, by Ian Miller. Journal of Beckett Studies 25. 2 (2016): 285–93. Beckett, Samuel. “Beckett on Film.” The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, by S. E. Gontarski, Indiana UP, 1985. 187–92. Beckett, Samuel. Collected Shorter Plays. Grove P, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Written 1931–2. Ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier, Arcade Publishing, 1992. Beckett, Samuel. Film: Complete Scenario/Illustrations/Production Shots. Grove P, 1969. Beckett, Samuel. Ill Seen Ill Said. Grove P, 1981. Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929 – 1940. Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge UP, 2009. Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. 1938. Grove P, 1957. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove P, 1954. Bion, Wilfred R. Attention and Interpretation. Jason Aronson, 1970. Bion, Wilfred R. “Caesura.” Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. Karnac, 1977. 35–56.

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Bion, Wilfred R. Elements of Psycho-Analysis. 1963. Karnac, 1984. Bion, Wilfred R. “The Imaginary Twin.” Written 1950. Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. Jason Aronson, 1967. 3–22. Bion, Wilfred R. Learning from Experience. Basic Books, 1962. Bion, Wilfred R. A Memoir of the Future. Karnac, 1991. Bion, Wilfred R. Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. Jason Aronson, 1967. Bion, Wilfred R. The Tavistock Seminars. Ed. Francesca Bion, Karnac, 2005. Bion, Wilfred R. Transformations. 1965. Karnac, 1984. Bléandonu, Gérard. Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897 – 1979. Trans. Claire Pajaczkowska, Other P, 2000. Connor, Steven. “Beckett and Bion.” Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2 (2009): 9–34. Cooper, Seiso Paul. ‘Realizational Perspectives: Bion’s Psychoanalysis and Dogen’s Zen.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 80 (2020): 37–52. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. HarperCollins, 1997. Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Hidden Order of Art: A Study of the Psychology of Artistic Imagination. U of California P, 1967. Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” 1908. SE 9. 142–53. Gear, Maria Carmen, and Ernesto Cesar Liendo. Sémiologie psychanalytique. Trans. Marie Tulien and Daniel Glauser, Éditions de Minuit, 1975. Kim, Rina. Women and Ireland as Beckett’s Lost Others: Beyond Mourning and Melancholia. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921 – 1945. Free P, 1975. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Simon and Schuster, 1996. Miller, Ian, with Kay Souter. Beckett and Bion: The (Im)Patient Voice in Psychotherapy and Literature. Karnac, 2013. Moorjani, Angela. Beckett and Buddhism. Cambridge UP, 2021. Moorjani, Angela. “Beckett and Psychoanalysis.” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Ed. Lois Oppenheim, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 172–93. www.umbc.academia.edu/AngelaMoorjani Moorjani, Angela. “Peau de chagrin: Beckett and Bion on Looking Not to See.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 14 (2004): 25–38. www.umbc.academia.edu/AngelaMoorjani Oppenheim, Lois. “A Preoccupation with Object-Representation: The Beckett–Bion Case Revisited.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82.4 (2001): 767–84. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Beckett’s Ghosts and Fluxions.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 5 (1996): 23–40. Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. 1914. Trans. Harry Tucker, Jr., U of North Carolina P, 1971. Shainberg, Lawrence. “Exorcising Beckett.” Paris Review 29.104 (1987): 100–36. Simon, Bennett. “The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion.” International Review of PsychoAnalysis 15 (1988): 331–52. Waddell, Margot. “Meaning and Form: The Containing Function of Art.” Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained: Bion’s Continuing Legacy. Ed. Howard B. Levine and Lawrence Brown, Routledge, 2013. 287–97. Zhang, Yichi. “Wilfred Bion’s Annotations in The Way of Zen: An Investigation into His Practical Encounters with Buddhist Ideas.” Psychoanalysis and History 21.3 (2019): 331–55.

FURTHER READING Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski, Grove P, 1995. Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Grove P, 1955–58. Beckett, Samuel. Watt. Written 1941–44. Grove P, 1959. Civitarese, Giuseppe. The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis. Trans. Ian Harvey, Routledge, 2013.

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Lévy, François. Psychoanalysis with Wilfred R. Bion: Contemporary Approaches, Actuality and the Future of Psychoanalytic Practice. Trans. Andrew Weller, Routledge, 2020. Ogden, Thomas H. “An Introduction to the Reading of Bion.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85.2 (2004): 285–300. Pickering, Judith. The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy: Spiritual Practice, the Apophatic Way and Bion. Routledge, 2019. Chs. 15–17. Souter, Kay M. “The War Memoirs: Some Origins of the Thought of W. R. Bion.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90. 4 (2009): 795–808. Vermote, Rudi. Reading Bion. Trans. Anneleen Masschelein and Elisabeth Allison, Routledge, 2019. Williams, Meg Harris. “Catastrophic Change.” The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis. Essays on Bion, Meltzer, Keats. Karnac, 2010. 41–52.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Badiou’s Lacan and the Beckett-Event COLIN WRIGHT

INTRODUCTION The French philosopher, activist, dramatist, and novelist, Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937), is widely recognized as one of the most significant philosophers living today. He has almost singlehandedly shifted the terms of debate within continental philosophy over the last thirty or so years. Thanks to his work, a number of previously unfashionable concepts have been revitalized, such as the ‘subject’, ‘truth’, ‘love’, and even the ‘Idea’ (including the Idea of Communism). In what follows, I want to focus on the first of these: the subject. A number of theoretical movements since the 1950s, from structuralism to poststructuralism and from Derridean deconstruction to postmodernism, forced this concept into the background, or even into the ground (recall Roland Barthes’ famous declaration of the ‘death of the author’ – Barthes, Image: 142–148). This was thanks largely to the anti-Humanist orientation shared by these movements. An exception to this was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who always cleaved to the notion of the subject within a critique of Humanism, as he ploughed his own idiosyncratic furrow right through the middle of the structuralist and then post-structuralist ‘revolutions’ without really belonging to either. Badiou, ever since his early Sartrean existentialism, has shared this commitment to the category of the subject, and Lacan could be said to have passed the baton of the subject on to him. Yet he has been going in his own decidedly philosophical rather than psychoanalytic direction with it since the 1980s. I want to focus on the extent to which we can discern in Badiou’s reconsideration of the subject both a deep indebtedness to, and a profound ambivalence towards, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. He approaches the latter always as a philosopher and not as a psychoanalyst, or even as someone who has felt the need to risk its praxis on the couch: he admits that ‘this experience has remained completely foreign to me’ (Badiou and Roudinesco: 18). Notwithstanding the fully acknowledged intellectual debt to Lacan, or perhaps precisely because of it – on the model of Harold Bloom’s socalled ‘anxiety of influence’ – Badiou frames the discourses of philosophy and psychoanalysis as mutually productive antagonists. This is spelled out in his frequent references to Lacan as both his ‘master’ and as an ‘anti-philosopher’. How is it, we might rightly ask, that someone so committed to reinventing philosophy can claim as his master a psychoanalytic anti-philosopher?

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BADIOU’S SUBJECT In order to trace this indebtedness to, and distance-taking from, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I will first outline a key moment in Badiou’s development of his notion of the subject. First published in 1985 and probably still his best-known work, Being and Event makes a novel intervention into the branch of philosophy concerned with the question of being – ontology – by re-founding it on the basis of developments in the field of mathematics, specifically the invention of set-theory by Georg Cantor in the late nineteenth century. This surprising move allowed Badiou to argue that the ‘being’ of ‘situations’ ultimately depends on a counting operation, just as the axioms of set-theory establish what elements belong to a set and how they are included within it. Beyond mere analogy, Badiou sees set-theory as revealing something fundamental about the nature of being itself, including the type of being in which humans participate. Thus, in social situations individuals are included according to innumerable predicates – ‘male’ or ‘female’, ‘black’ or ‘white’, or indeed ‘blue-eyed’, ‘size 10 feet’ or ‘fans of Star Trek’ etc. – but only because they are already counted as belonging to that situation. In set-theory, this difference between belonging and inclusion is important enough to have received two separate notations, € and ⊂ respectively, and they have distinct operational qualities. For example, inclusion is reflexive, in the sense that every set is always included as a subset of itself, whereas belonging is not, as suggested by Bertrand Russell’s famous paradox of the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. So, for Badiou individuals are individuated by being counted twice, once at the level of belonging, which he calls presentation, and again at the level of inclusion, which he calls re-presentation. In another calculated move which brings Lenin and Mao into unlikely dialogue with Cantor, Badiou identifies the ‘state of the situation’ as the operation that counts all its elements as if presentation and representation, belonging and inclusion, were one and the same thing. The state counts as One all the ones that are elements of its situation, making it a count of the count. Perhaps it is easiest to think of this in terms of liberal democratic politics, and a slogan like ‘one man, one vote’? In such a view, the individual belongs because counted (one man), but the state’s legitimacy rests on the fact that the individual also counts in the political sense of being included and thus recognized (one vote). Liberal representational politics effectively claims that belonging equals inclusion in order to construct the body-politic as if it were a quasi-organic whole, a One. Except that, as per George Orwell’s famous quip about equality in 1984, we know that some people count more than others. Women, for example, have had to fight to be included in this masculinist universalism of the One. There are even those who, like so-called illegal immigrants, belong to a situation but are not included in it at all, and who therefore exist but count for nothing. Thanks to this Leninist-Maoist take on set-theory, Badiou brings out the disjunction between presentation and representation, the denial of which is the very function of the state. The state does not exist because it represents everything that belongs to and is included within it; rather, it exists because presentation and representation do not coincide. To switch to a more Lacanian register which is already in the background here, we could say that the individual is in fact divided by the count that claims to represent them, and that the One is in fact not-all. This basic idea, that the individual does not coincide with their representation in the situation, has more than a passing resemblance to Lacan’s insistence, ever since his early paper on the mirror stage, that the ego is not self-identical because it receives its primordial sense of being from the Other. For Lacan too, the ego is divided by its alienation in this pre-existing Other.

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However, in Being and Event even this divided individual is absolutely not a subject in Badiou’s very specific sense. For him, the individual is the stark antithesis of the subject. Using a rather pejorative framing, he often characterizes the individual as animal, not fully human, because passively determined by their situation. By contrast, the Badiouian subject is dynamic, selfconstituting, human in a universal self-affirming sense. For a mere individual, stuck in animal repetition, to be reborn as a subject in this rather exalted sense something literally extra-ordinary is required. This is the meaning of the conjunctive in Badiou’s title in fact. The set-theoretical ontology outlined in the first half of Being and Event holds open the possibility of the sudden emergence of something unpredictable, unknowable, and thus profoundly disruptive of the ontological count – in other words, an event. Though never probable, the event is always possible. This is because, for structural reasons formalized by set-theory, every situation must include what Badiou calls ‘a void multiple’. This is a generic element that grounds the ontological count and so has to belong to the situation but at the same time cannot be included in it. Lacan might call it ‘extimate’, meaning at once internal and intimate, yet radically alien (S7: 119). In set-theory itself, the void multiple is usually referred to as the ‘empty set’ and written ∅. It cannot be included in the set because it has no elements of its own (it is empty), but for the same reason it cannot not belong to it (there are no criteria by which to exclude it). From this perspective, the state’s job is to dis-count this void multiple in order to render the situation it presides over a supposedly sovereign One; but on very rare occasions, something can happen which reveals an exception to the state’s capacity to count its elements, and this something is the event. Revealingly, many of Badiou’s examples come from revolutionary history, though he also identifies others in the domains of love, art, and science. What they have in common is that the world is never the same afterwards. In addition to disrupting the state’s status quo, events are what enable individuals to become subjects by participating in the novelty they unleash. This is a very strong thesis in Badiou: it is only on condition that an event has happened that a subject can emerge. In the absence of one – and they are necessarily very rare – we are only ever dealing with individuals submerged in automatism and a kind of herd-mentality. For the state, individuals are perfectly knowable and predictable because of the predicates that pin them to their allotted places and functions. A subject, however, breaks with their situational determination, becoming an unpredictable ‘excrescent multiple’ which the state does not know how to count. Arguably still a Maoist, Badiou’s subject is thus constituted in and through fidelity to the event, militantly pursuing its transformative implications which he calls – philosopher that he certainly is – its ‘truth’. This knot is a tight one: not only is there no subject without an event, but there is no event without a subject to force its consequences on to the world. Nevertheless, it is all-too easy for the subject to return to being a mere individual by recoiling from such a demanding task if they lack the fortitude to continue with it. By definition, there can be no ontological guarantee for subjects: they can easily be sucked back into the gravitational pull of their world’s banality. Badiou has several names for this reneging of subjective commitment to the truth of an event, such as ‘disaster’, ‘betrayal’, and even ‘evil’. The theological tenor of this opposition, between the grace-like event and the evil of its betrayal, indicates how prohibitively high the bar is set for the subject in Badiou’s thought. We will come back to this issue later in this chapter.

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NOT-ALL LACANIAN There is much in Badiou that appears very ‘Lacanian’, but we should be cautious: these superficial ‘family resemblances’ can obscure some crucial differences. By considering the different phases of Lacan’s teachings – moving from the Imaginary to the Symbolic and on to the later difficult notion of the Real – two areas of this deceptive resemblance emerge: firstly, around the aforementioned distinction between the individual (or ego for Lacan) and the subject; and secondly, regarding the opposition between truth and knowledge. I will take these in turn. Although the ego is certainly not the same as the subject in Lacan, the link between them is arguably more topologically complex than the stark, ruptural model Badiou insists on in Being and Event. As Lacan’s early distinction between empty and full speech in the ‘Rome Discourse’ of 1953 (Lacan, ‘Function’: 197/237) suggested, in which one cannot arrive at the latter without going through the former, the relation between the ego and the subject of the unconscious is less an abrupt cut, and more akin to the figure of the Möbius strip (a loop with a twist in it which has but a single surface): far from one being a radical break with the other, the ego and the unconscious are each other’s accompanying lining. Moreover, for the Lacan of S11, although the ego is indeed alienated through its determination by the Other, there is nevertheless a remainder left over: the famous objet a which can provide the basis for the subject’s separation from the Other and thus a certain trajectory for the end of analysis. By contrast, for Badiou there is no equivalent to the object a in the individual, and the only thing that brings about separation proper is a completely contingent event. Since events are so rare, it is quite possible, indeed probable, that individuals remain in animalistic docility for their whole mundane existences, earning them evident contempt in Badiou’s eyes. Yet from a psychoanalytic perspective, especially a clinically grounded one, I would suggest that the ethical proposition must be the exact reverse of this Badiouian principal of subjective rarity, namely, the hypothesis that there already is a subject. To give the analysand their dignity in the treatment from the outset, analysis begins with the supposition that the event of the subject has always already taken place, and that it will be possible to construct some knowledge about it through speech under transference. However, with this word ‘event’, we are evidently not referring to the same thing in both cases. For Badiou, the event is a profound rupture with the given that signals the emergence of nothing less than a world-historical novelty in one of four realms (politics, science, love, or art); whereas in psychoanalytic practice, the event of the subject can be seen – no doubt much more modestly – as the traumatic encounter between a body and the effects upon it of the signifier, to which the subject is a creative and absolutely singular response. As we will see, this ethical supposition that there is already some subject in the individual is what Badiou’s philosophy of the event must reject. Regarding the second ‘family resemblance’ around the truth-knowledge opposition, this is indeed pivotal in both Being and Event and early Lacan. In his 1932 thesis on Aimée when he was still a psychiatrist, Lacan argued that conscious knowledge has a paranoid character due to its origins in the Imaginary relation, implying the delusional aspects of connaissance (Lacan, Psychose, 43). Then, as a psychoanalyst in the 1940s and 1950s, he came to see egoic knowledge as a neurotic defence against the truth of Symbolic castration, and thus as a form of méconnaissance (or misrecognition) of this truth. Knowledge even became linked by him to a ‘passion for ignorance’ (see S1) vis-à-vis the inconvenient truth of castration, with effects of repression and resistance

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during analysis. Nevertheless, this unconscious truth could still be discerned in irruptive formations such as dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, and pre-eminently symptoms. Over the course of an analysis then, this ‘truth’ might be experienced by the analysand – in a lightening flash with bodily effects rather than as a ‘lightbulb’ moment of merely cognitive ‘insight’ – but Lacan did not believe it was a truth amenable to full symbolization within language. Like Freud’s uninterpretable ‘navel’ of the dream, Lacan came to argue that unconscious truth can never be wholly articulated. Increasingly, it was linked to the concept of the Real as an impasse within the Symbolic. By S17, he argued that psychoanalytic truth can only ever be ‘half-said’ (mi-dire) due to its relation to this Real that is outside sense. Badiou borrows several aspects of these arguments in Being and Event. Thus, the event makes a truth emerge which breaks with the dominant apparatus by which the situation knows itself, termed by him its ‘encyclopaedia of knowledge’. Truth constitutes a rupture with this encyclopaedic knowledge, much as the Lacanian unconscious wakes us from what we think we know. There is even something of Lacan’s logic of the half-said in Badiou’s notion of evental truth, since, by definition, this truth cannot be articulated within the existing terms of the situation. Instead, truth is a procedure testifying to something that ex-sists but cannot be fully said. Like the events that condition them and the truths they force, subjects are inexplicable from the point of view of encyclopaedic knowledge. For example, a protest movement uniting people across classes, ages, ethnicities, and sexualities around a single militant cause, irreducible to any one of those identitymarkers, might well constitute a subject for Badiou (if faithful to an event). Such a subject would not ‘make sense’ from within any existing sociological division of people into discrete, knowable groups. Thus, the Badiouian subject bores a hole into ‘doxic’ knowledge, confronting the situation with a truth akin to its repressed unconscious. However, there is a further elaboration of this truth-knowledge opposition in later Lacan which Badiou arguably refuses to follow. The concluding piece in the Écrits of 1966, ‘Science and Truth’, already complicates this earlier opposition. There, truth is no longer an effect of signifiers to be deciphered from knowledge as méconnaissance; rather, truth become an obscure yet Real material cause about which psychoanalysis can produce a knowledge inspired by, though distinct from, the formalist reductions of science. Three years later in S17, Lacan criticized philosophical versions of truth, for example the Hegelian fantasy of ‘Absolute Knowledge’, as a mode of mastery and expropriation, contrasting them to a specifically psychoanalytic concept of truth which cannot be mastered, only ‘half-said’, due to its growing link to the unsymbolizable Real. However, by 1976, when Lacan is writing his preface to the-then new English translation of S11, this reworking of the category of truth is pushed further still, towards a definite discrediting. He refers there to the unconscious as a ‘lying truth’ (S11 ix), indicating that the final meaning implied by any concept of truth, philosophical or otherwise, necessarily obscures the dimension of the Real that should propel an analysis to its conclusion. His previous opposition is therefore inverted: ‘truth’ had been the positive Symbolic term compared to a derided Imaginary ‘knowledge’; now ‘truth’ becomes the deceptive term and ‘knowledge’ – the singular knowledge an analysis can produce for the analysand, as well as for the wider analytic community via the mechanism of the pass – becomes the positive term. This notion of a ‘lying truth’ pointed beyond the interpretable Freudian unconscious Lacan had spent decades reconceiving using structural linguistics and the primacy of the Symbolic. It implied something completely different which he announced in that same preface by asserting that ‘the unconscious, I would say, is real’ (S6: vii). This Real unconscious is not reducible to the logic

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of the S1–S2 signifying chain, of which the subject had been the decipherable effect, as in Lacan’s oft-repeated definition of the subject as that which one signifier represents for another. Instead, the Real unconscious is characterized by what Lacan calls in S20 – mobilizing the homophony between essaim and ‘S1’ in French – a ‘buzzing swarm’ (S20: 143) of S1s. These S1s have much more to do with lalangue, the meaningless rhythms of sonority which strike and resonate within the body, than with the language linguists concern themselves with: the S1s of the Real unconscious thus cause a jouissance which is beyond an S2 of articulated knowledge, beyond the pleasure principle once imposed by the Oedipal norm. Thus, at the end of Lacan’s teachings it is no longer the case that ‘truth has the structure of fiction’, implying that it could be read between the lines of the Imaginary speech of the analysand. Rather, truth itself becomes a kind of fiction, the last delusion of meaning supported by the signifier when mistaken for a signified, the final semblant we use to veil the Real. As a philosopher whose very currency is truth, it is little wonder that Badiou refused to follow late Lacan towards its radical devaluation, despite the ‘family resemblances’ that arise from his use of earlier Lacan.

ANTI-PHILOSOPHER? These differences become clear in the final meditation of Being and Event, where Badiou identifies the point at which he must leave Lacan behind, with a grateful but decisive wave. Entitled ‘Descartes/ Lacan’, this meditation essentially argues that Lacan remains too much of a Cartesian structuralist for Badiou to retain within his own emerging theory of the subject, which is explicitly both antiCartesian and anti-structuralist. The general logic of this argument is not actually new. Badiou’s experience of May 1968 already led him to develop a political critique of structuralism as reformist at best, reactionary at worst. This is most fully developed in his 1982 book, Théorie du sujet (Badiou, Theory), where the main target is Althusser’s structuralist Marxism rather than Lacan’s structuralist re-reading of Freud. Indeed, Lacan is Badiou’s primary inspiration and ally (alongside Mao) in Théorie du sujet, so much so that the style of its presentation is self-consciously ‘Lacanian’, complete with mathemes and graphs. What is new by Being and Event is that it is Lacan himself – or a certain version of him – that is pulled into the orbit of this critique of structuralism. What Badiou no longer wants from Lacan is the link to Descartes that implies a universalizable philosophical anthropology that would deprive the subject of its rarity: ‘What Lacan still owed to Descartes, a debt whose account must be closed, was the idea that there were always some subjects’ (Badiou, Being: 434). As I have already suggested, this idea, that in the individual there is already some subject, can be linked to an ethical position of the analyst responding to the peculiar ‘human condition’ of the parlêtre (a neologism of late Lacan’s that invokes the ‘speaking (parle) being’ but also that entity which obtains its being through (par) speech). However, this ethic fits poorly with the completely different programme of Badiou’s evental philosophy. Nevertheless, even this apparent parting of the ways with Lacan remains obscure and incomplete. In the reflection on what philosophy must henceforth be in the closing paragraphs of Being and Event, Badiou advocates ‘an intersection without fusion with psychoanalysis’ (Badiou, Being: 435). This odd phrase, combining proximity and distance, remains enigmatic, following as it does on the heels of a strong critique of Lacan. However, it does prefigure Badiou’s characterization, around ten years after Being and Event, of psychoanalysis as an ‘anti-philosophy’, and of Lacan, his former

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master, as an ‘anti-philosopher’ (Badiou, Lacan: 8). Far from being a total rejection, this designation situates Lacan as a formidable thinker to whom all philosophies worthy of the name must henceforth be capable of responding, primarily with a defence of the concept of truth. In his 1994–1995 seminar, Badiou describes ‘the basic gesture of every anti-philosophy [as involving] a destitution of the philosophical category of truth’ (Ibid.), but also as emphasizing the singularity of an ‘act’ which is subjectively grounded in ‘the anticipated certainty of victory’ (Badiou, Lacan: 3) He names a number of anti-philosophers, often by pairing them with the philosophers whom they pillory: Pascale for Descartes, Rousseau for Hume, and Kierkegaard for Hegel. Other anti-philosophers oppose not a specific thinker but the entire Western philosophical tradition, such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Moreover, their relation to this tradition is not one of critique per se (especially after Kant, the philosophical tradition is a practice of critique), but rather a therapeutics: both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein present their thought as an antidote to civilization’s metaphysical sickness. The fact that some names on this list would be referred to simply as philosophers shows the close and productive dialectic between the two discourses, each spurring the other on rather as Sophism did Platonism in Ancient Greece. So, it is among this group of rival anti-philosophers that Badiou will come to include Lacan, albeit in a very particular way. Lacan is an anti-philosopher not only because he embarked upon a psychoanalytic critique of the philosophical notion of truth, but also because he too emphasized the power of the subjective act. This is evident in the seminar Lacan devoted to the act between 1967 and the turbulence of 1968 (S15), which took as the paradigm of the act Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, not in order to valorize political voluntarism as might Badiou, but to develop an analogy with the psychoanalytic act by which an analysand passes to the status of an analyst. In fact, this seminar built on the previous institution, quite literally, of this notion of the act through his ‘Act of Foundation’, the text by which he inaugurated his own School in 1964 (Lacan, ‘L’acte’). In a related ‘institutional’ text written alongside S15 in 1967, Lacan proposed the mechanism of the pass as an act by which analysts might authorize themselves rather than look to an external Other (Lacan, ‘Proposition’). So, Lacan was certainly an advocate of the transformative power of the act which Badiou associates with anti-philosophy. Yet once again, even as Badiou situates Lacan in this category, he seems uncertain about just what kind of anti-philosopher his ‘master’ is. He recognizes that Lacan progressively discredits the notion of truth, but also that he does so without ever giving up on the category of knowledge, since – as his strenuous efforts with topology demonstrate – Lacan is very far indeed from some kind of mysticism of the noumenal real, that is to say, from positing an unknowable realm beyond the transcendental categories of possible knowledge. On the contrary, he aimed to produce a deimaginarized knowledge of the effects of the real. Ultimately then, Badiou is impressed by Lacan’s use of the matheme to formalize an integrally transmissible knowledge about the real, even as Lacan asserts that there can be no true concept of the real. Indeed, Lacan’s formalism coincides very strongly with Badiou’s own asserted Platonism, whereby mathematical objects such as those described by geometry are contrasted to context-dependent perceptions of ‘worldly’ things. It is perhaps for this reason that Badiou presents Lacan, again ambiguously, as ‘someone who brings contemporary anti-philosophy to a close’ (Badiou, Lacan: 2), meaning that although he derides truth, unlike previous anti-philosophers such as Nietzsche, he does not relativize knowledge. Nevertheless, I would suggest that Badiou’s distancing from Lacan, at the end of Being and Event and then with this concept of ‘anti-philosophy’, left him with a significant problem within his own

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theory of the subject. Does the insistence on the rarity of the event and thus of its faithful subject not imply a certain quietism which flies in the face of Badiou’s Maoist militancy? For if we must wait for an event for the subject to appear, are we not condemned to what he will later call ‘atonal worlds’ (Badiou, Logics), completely devoid of points of potential change, and peopled overwhelmingly by individuals? What are we ‘mere’ individuals meant to do as we twiddle our thumbs in anticipation of an event? What of pre-evental resources for resistance and change, of the glimmerings of subjective potential within the individual? Almost despite himself, Badiou will stumble on some answers to these sorts of questions not in philosophy, or indeed in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but in literature.

THE BECKETT EVENT In the 1990s, Badiou wrote a series of four pieces on the work of the Irish/‘French’ writer Samuel Beckett, which have been collected in English in the volume On Beckett. In one of them, aptly entitled ‘Tireless Desire’, he characterizes the experience of discovering Beckett’s work in the mid1950s as ‘a real encounter, a subjective blow of sorts that left an indelible mark’ (Badiou, Beckett, 37). I want to argue, in closing, that this encounter with Beckett constituted a kind of event within Badiou’s own thinking on the subject, one that parallels Lacan’s transformative encounter with the work of another Irish writer, James Joyce. Already moving in avant-garde circles in Paris in the 1920s, Lacan met Joyce in person at Adrienne Monnier’s famous bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, first when he was only 17, and again when he was 20 at the first reading of the French translation of Ulysses. However, it was not until 55 years later that he would really engage seriously with Joyce’s work. In 1975, Lacan was invited by the French Joyce scholar Jacques Aubert to give the inaugural address of the annual Joyce Symposium held at the Sorbonne. That talk then fed into Lacan’s own seminar the following year (S23), in which he outlined an idiosyncratic reading of Joyce that was simultaneously entangled in an experimentation with the mathematics of knots. Ostensibly, this ‘reading’ diagnosed the itinerant Irish author as a psychotic whose ‘sinthome’, or stabilizing symptom, was his writing, in his case a practice of the letter rather than of the signified or even the signifier, one which ‘knotted’ the registers of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real together. At first glance, Lacan’s endeavour sounds like the crass psychobiographical reductionism of which psychoanalytic literary criticism has sometimes been guilty. And yet seen in the context of his wider work, S23 suggests the exact reverse: Joyce’s texts were the occasion for Lacan not to ‘apply’ his pre-existing theory but to completely reinvent it on the basis of the singular relation to language he found therein. Where his classical structuralist theory had privileged the Symbolic and thus the signifier known as the ‘Name of the Father’ (inscribed for the neurotic, foreclosed for the psychotic), in S23 the Symbolic had the same importance as the Imaginary and the Real thanks to the ‘flattened’ surfaces of topology. For related reasons, neurotic structure was no longer assumed as the ‘norm’ by which to measure the ‘deficit’ of psychosis, in response both to Joyce and to the broader decline of the Name of the Father in a culture less and less like the Oedipal one Freud had known. Indeed, Lacan’s reading of Joyce was instrumental in his inversion of the primacy of neurosis over psychosis, encapsulated in his later proposition that ‘we are all mad, in the sense of delusional’, suggesting that the belief in meaning as such is but a defence against the real (see Miller). Like Joyce himself, late Lacan was engaged, in the form and content of his theoretical articulations, in a ‘littering of the letter’, an

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emptying of meaning in favour of the nonsensical cadences of lalangue. The concept of the letter has a long and complex trajectory in Lacan’s work which there is not space here to outline, suffice it to say that the essentially cybernetic version that appears in ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1955) or indeed ‘The Instance of the Letter’ (1957) is not the same as the one that is developed in later texts such as ‘Lituraterre’ (1971), where it is linked to a rubbishing of meaning. This might appear to have been anticipated in an earlier pun, poubellication – which combined publication (publication) with the dustbin (poubelle) to express Lacan’s disdain for the printed word over speech – yet the letter-litter allusion in ‘Lituraterre’, effectively reverses the previous valorization of living or full speech over the dead letter of writing, instead giving a priority to a conception of writing, explicitly indebted to Joyce, which concerned not the Symbolic-Imaginary nexus of meaning, but a more direct tracing of the non-sensical Real of jouissance. This is developed in complex detail between 1975 and 1976 in S23 which turned many Lacanian concepts on their head. We are therefore justified in calling this encounter with Joyce’s writings a kind of event within Lacan’s thirty-year elaboration of psychoanalytic theory, in so far as, truly, nothing was the same thereafter. Something very similar can be said of Badiou’s ‘encounter’ with Samuel Beckett. He has referred to a ‘forty-year passion for this author’ (Badiou, Beckett, 40), but it was only in returning to him in the 1990s, after writing Being and Event, that the philosophical framework developed there could be shaken precisely through its application to Beckett’s unique oeuvre. For as with any encounter proper, both parties emerged from it somewhat altered. On the one hand, just as Lacan could be accused of psychobiographical reductionism regarding Joyce, so Badiou could be deemed guilty of the philosopher’s indifference to the nuances of writerly style or literary critical reception. He does not deal with the structure of whole works or their intertextual relation to other works, let alone with debates within literary criticism. Instead, he extracts terse and largely contextless quotes and treats them like the axioms of a literary thought akin to philosophy. Nor does he situate his own decisive intervention within Beckett Studies as such, apart from to refute the critical tradition – associated with Martin Esslin’s ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, but also with Bataille and Blanchot – that aligned Beckett with existentialism, nihilism, and pessimism in the 1950s and 1960s. Badiou admits that as a ‘young cretin’ (Badiou, Beckett: 38) he was himself persuaded by this existentialist account of Beckett, but his later philosophical framework leads him to refute it almost dismissively. In all these ways, his is very much a philosopher’s reading of Beckett that borders on hermeneutic violence. On the other hand, however, and conversely, Beckett’s consistent preoccupation with the darker side of the Cartesian cogito, with its mediation by language and thus the repetitive question of Being, forces Badiou up against a version of the subject he had attempted to leave behind when settling his debt to Lacan, and via Lacan to Descartes, at the end of Being and Event. That is to say, Beckett makes Badiou rethink the link between the subject and language, central in Lacan of course, but incompatible with the Badiouian subject. What Beckett brings to this problematic of the subject and language is an additional factor, namely, a pre-evental courage, which to some extent leads Badiou to qualify the absoluteness of the rupture between individual and subject. Surprisingly then, Badiou finds a tenacious optimism in Beckett largely missed by other commentators – ‘all of Beckett’s genius tends towards affirmation’ (Badiou, Beckett: 41) – which in turn stretches Badiou’s own account of the subject. In order to contest the conventional view of Beckett as a ‘writer of the absurd, of despair, of empty skies, of incommunicability and of eternal solitude’ (Badiou, Beckett: 38), and to make the alternative case for him as a writer of stubborn hopefulness, Badiou constructs a clear division

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within Beckett’s oeuvre. This conforms, suspiciously conveniently, to the basic schema organizing Being and Event, as if the Irish author also moved through a trajectory that began with an interrogation of the limits of Being and ended with an intimation of the dimension of the event. So for Badiou, the famous ‘Trilogy’ of novels written in the 1950s – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable – and the short prose works collected in Texts for Nothing, represent the first phase of Beckett’s work, in which he focussed obsessively on the problem of the ‘grey black of being’ but also the speaking subject’s tortuous yet inescapable relation to that being. With a darkly Cartesian method of merciless reduction, Beckett in this period whittles the subject of enunciation down to its irreducible suspension from a question, until there is nothing left but the anxious repetition of that question, an ‘imperative of saying’ (Badiou, Beckett: 81) which refuses even the respite of silence. In the famous concluding lines of The Unnameable, ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’, Badiou sees a conceptual but also personal crisis for Beckett which represents the unbearable culmination of this ‘Cartesian terrorism’ (Badiou, Beckett: 55). For several years after the ‘Trilogy’, Beckett struggled to write anything at all. The caesura in Beckett’s oeuvre, the break that helped him to move beyond this Cartesian impasse, comes, according to Badiou, with the 1961 text How It Is. This was first written in French and its original title, Comment c’est, involved a homophonic pun with Commencer, thereby announcing the thematic of the emergence of the new. Moreover, the very structure of How It Is implied something like the commencement, but also the passing, of an event. The narrator’s unpunctuated monologue, as he crawls across an endless expanse of black mud with nothing but a sack of tins of food, is divided into three parts: ‘Before Pim’, ‘With Pim’, and ‘After Pim’. The narrator encounters Pim, another creature likewise slithering across the mud, completely by accident, but after tormenting him and yet sharing odd moments of tenderness too, Pim abandons the narrator to his previous solitary state; except that, on Badiou’s reading, this aleatory encounter with an Other suggests some release from the tortuous solipsism of the Cartesian subject otherwise trapped in the prison house of language, namely, the Two of a (potential) couple which punctures the infinite solitude of the One. Without conflating this with the romantic weight Badiou elsewhere gives to the ‘scene of the Two’ when writing of love, what he stresses here is Beckett’s grasp of radical contingency as the potential catalyst of an exit from the hell of eternal sameness. However, what I want to emphasize here, in concluding, is less this ‘evental’ reading, and more what Badiou is forced by his ‘encounter’ with incredible texts by Beckett, such as Waiting for Godot, Worstward Ho and The Lost Ones, to acknowledge: namely, the pre-evental subjective resource, within the individual, of courage. To the extent that this complicates the rupture between subject and individual, I find in this concept a partial rapprochement with Lacan. Badiou had in fact appealed to this affect in his most ‘Lacanian’ work, Théorie du Sujet (Badiou, Theory), but there it was a more Maoist, voluntarist concept linked to what he called ‘confidence in confidence’: courage was thus a willingness to act decisively and without anxiety despite doing so completely in the dark. That version of courage can therefore be seen as a precursor of the notion of post-evental fidelity developed in Being and Event. In the later reading of Beckett however, courage clearly becomes a subjective disposition prior to an event: it is the ability to keep going in the ungrounded, unreasonable, indeed irrational anticipation of an event – or an encounter – that has not yet happened. This not an empty and therefore absurd faith that Godot will finally arrive one fine day, since beyond an affective disposition, Beckettian courage is also an urgent and ongoing labour on and through language itself. It is a work, to use Beckett’s terms from Worstward Ho, of ‘lessening’

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or ‘worsening’ of language’s promise of meaning and correspondence (and we might say truth, though Badiou understandably does not). This courageous work on language, not unconnected to Lacan’s Joycean ‘littering of the letter’, prepares the way for an openness to the radical non-meaning that is the chance encounter. Under Beckett’s sway then, Badiou finds himself conceding what he refused in Being and Event: ‘we can say that every event admits of a figural preparation, that it always possesses a pre-evental figure’ (Badiou, Beckett: 111). In a way that brings his notion of the subject back down to earth, and that also emphasizes his proximity to, rather than distance from, Lacan, Badiou seems at this point to share Beckett’s ‘powerful love for human obstinacy, for tireless desire, for humanity reduced to its stubbornness and malice’ (Badiou, Beckett: 75).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain, On Beckett, Eds. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Clinamen Press, 2003. Badiou, Alain, Being and Event, Trans. Oliver Feltham, Continuum, 2005. Badiou, Alain, Theory of the Subject, Trans. Bruno Bosteels, Continuum, 2009. Badiou, Alain, Logics of Worlds, Trans. by Alberto Toscano, Continuum, 2009. Badiou, Alain, Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3, Trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer, Columbia UP, 2018. Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author ’, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977: 142–148. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford UP, 1997. Lacan, Jacques, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité: suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa, Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Lacan, Jacques, ‘L’acte de fondation’, Autres Écrits, Éditions du Seuil, 2001. Lacan, Jacques, ‘Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’École’, Autres Écrits, Éditions du Seuil, 2001. Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton, 2006: 75–81. Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, Écrits, Trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton, 2006, pp.197–268. Lacan, Jacques, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Denis Porter, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Miller, Jacques-Alain, ‘Everyone Is Mad’, Culture/Clinic, Vol. 1, 2013, pp.17–42.

FURTHER READING Badiou, Alain, and Roudinesco, Élisabeth, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue, trans. Jason E. Smith, Columbia UP, 2014. Bosteels, Bruno, Badiou and Politics, Duke UP, 2011. Clemens, Justin, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy, Edinburgh UP, 2013. Gibson, Andrew, Beckett & Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency, Oxford UP, 2007. Hallward, Peter, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minnesota UP, 2003. Pluth, Ed, Badiou: A Philosophy of the New, Polity, 2010. Thurston, Luke, Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge UP, 2004. Tomšicˇ, Tomo, and Zevnik, Andreja (Eds.), Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, Routledge, 2016. Wright, Colin, Badiou in Jamaica: The Politics of Conflict, Re.Press, 2013.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Narcissism and Paranoid Interpretation Surrealism, Ernst and Dalí JEREMY TAMBLING

And if Narcissus does not recognise himself, it is because what he sees is an image, and because the similitude of an image is not likeness to anyone or anything: the image characteristically resembles nothing. Narcissus falls ‘in love’ with the image because the image exerts the attraction of the void, and of death in its falsity. — Blanchot: 125 Images derive from the imagination, the fantasy. Fantasy, the fantasmatic, fancy, the phantasmagoria and the phantom all associate with a Greek etymon, meaning ‘to appear’. This chapter makes no difference between the spellings fantasy and phantasy, though some writers have, profitably, done so.. Freud sees dream-images as comprising a picture-puzzle, a rebus, which alone makes sense of their arbitrary details (e.g. ‘a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away’ (SE 4: 278–279)). They show that images are writing. The image is never single; it may comprise writing as much as visual image. For Lacan it partakes of the trompe l’oeil, in emerging from fantasy (S11: 110–111). For Ernst Kris (1900– 1957), art historian and psychoanalyst, caricature and the grotesque emerge from previous images – like Honoré Daumier’s depictions of Louis-Philippe as a pear (1831). Kris saw caricature, which often depends on the perception of double meaning, as a remnant of magical, primitive thinking, an aggressive art, with potential destructive magic effects on the person caricatured. Maurice Blanchot, calling his essay (‘A Primal Scene’?), writes of Ovid’s Narcissus, (Metamorphoses 3: 339–510; Ovid: 149–161). Tiresias, the blind seer says that Narcissus will reach ripe age ‘if he never knows [or ‘recognizes’] himself ’ (‘si se non noverit’, 358). He is loved by Echo, and by another youth, who when scorned wishes ‘so may he love, and not gain the thing he loves’ (405). Nemesis, as Justice, punishes Narcissus when he bends to drink at a pool and sees an image, upon which: He loves an unsubstantial hope and thinks that substance which is only shadow. He looks in speechless wonder at himself, and hangs there, motionless in the same expression. . . . unwittingly he desires himself; he praises and is himself what he praises; and while he seeks, is sought; 279

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equally he kindles love and burns with love. . . . What he sees he knows not, but that which he sees he burns for, and the same delusion mocks and allures his eyes . . . — 417–432 Does Narcissus know or not know himself? Were Tiresias’ words a riddle, where a riddle implies the power of words to produce mirroring meanings, deceptively? Does Tiresias, as blind, warn against looking as a way of knowing (‘scopophilia’ – SE 14: 111–140)? Similarly, Oedipus answers the Sphinx’s riddle with ‘Man’, which kills the Sphinx, but would a fuller answer be ‘Myself ’? Then self-knowledge goes through the mirror-image. Narcissus sees an image and loves that which gives him a deceptive sense of self, which is what Tiresias warned against. Narcissus liquefies, in a death-drive. Caravaggio’s painting (c. 1600) shows darkness, apart from the boy looking into his dark image, which looks from the Styx. The scene is in the underworld, so he loves a death-image. Caravaggio shows Narcissus seeing, and being seen, which no one can do for themselves: I can see myself in a mirror but I cannot also see myself looking. In the mirror, as in a photograph, I become an image, like any other image I look at; I become something other. No one has a direct perception of their own face other than as image: I am constituted as a subject by the image. Being created as a subject by the mirror means that there can only be narcissism; the desire to establish identity creates an alienated being: ‘I constitute myself in the process of “posing” . . . I transform myself into an image . . . the Photograph is the advent of myself as other’ (Barthes: 10, 12). I am made by the image, but this, as Blanchot says, does not resemble anything save another image; in that sense it resembles nothing. Narcissus becomes the asphodel, whose etymology recalls ‘narcotic’. Freud links narcissism with sleep (‘absolute narcissism, in which libido and egointerests dwell together’ – SE 16: 417, 420–42). Everything here is the law’s punishment – the work of Nemesis – failure to respond to others produces entrapment by the image.

LEONARDO Freud approached narcissism via ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ (1910, SE 11:59–137). A translation-failure in the essay’s Chapter 2 affects the evidence which Freud wants to use, but not the argument’s speculative force, which is on the pre-Oedipal relationship between the child Leonardo (1452–1519) and the mother, arguing that Leonardo loved males because he repressed his desire for his mother, identified with her, put himself in her place, and took himself as a model for love, loving: substitute figures and revivals of himself in childhood – boys who he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a child. He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism . . . for Narcissus . . . was a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything else . . . — SE 11: 100 Leonardo’s art, according to Freud, has a sublimated and non-sublimated narcissistic impulse. Speculating on the ‘Mona Lisa’, Freud quotes Marie Herzfeld: ‘in the Mona Lisa Leonardo encountered his own self, and for this reason was able to put so much of his own nature into the picture “whose features had lain all along in mysterious sympathy within Leonardo’s mind’ ” (110).

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This implies the ‘childhood memory’ of the essay’s title. Leonardo’s sexual life comprised ‘what is called ideal (sublimated) homosexuality’ (SE 11:80). But his scientific speculations and experimentations let an ‘obsessional neurosis’ enter (SE 11:105), sublimating sexuality into a desire for knowledge, which gave him an ‘unyielding rigidity’ (SE 11: 132,133). This incipient paranoia accompanied hostility to the opinions of ‘the ancients’ and ‘authority’, which Freud reads as hostility towards the father (122). Freud repeats that everything in Leonardo is enigmatic, riddling; the Mona Lisa shows, in the contrast between her eyes and her smile (so her mouth): the contrasts which dominate the erotic life of women; the contrast between reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding – consuming men as if they were alien beings. — SE 11: 108 The mouth makes the woman machine-like, or, following Freud’s argument, bird-like: for Freud the sexual slang in the verb vögeln (to bird: it implies male sexual activity) (125) is decisive. It affects Max Ernst and Surrealism, as we shall see below. This argument comes when analysing Leonardo’s childhood dream, of the vulture coming down upon the child in his cradle and forcing open his mouth with its tail (82). The translation is wrong; it was a kite, not a vulture (which Freud associated with the Egyptians, seeing the vulture and the mother as equivalents) in the phantasy. Freud uses this to argue that the mother is like the phallic bird, this – horrifying and pleasurable together – being Leonardo’s ‘childhood memory’: a phantasy, perhaps going back to a dream. Sublimation starts from that phantasy, according to Freud; it affects the Mona Lisa’s ambiguously smiling mouth, and turns a fantasy, which the adult constructs as a childhood memory, into a specific dream. In 1919, Freud added a footnote, following, appreciatively, comments by Oskar Pfister (1873– 1956) of the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis. Pfister detected a ‘picture-puzzle’ in Leonardo’s ‘St Anne with two others’, a painting which Freud considered ambiguous (114), saying it presented the mother as dual; both his birth-mother, Caterina, and Donna Albiera, his father’s wife. (Lacan’s reading, finding a threesome aspect to the mother, who represents the imaginary state, (S4: 411– 426). is relevant here.) Pfister saw in the drapery of the blue cloth the form of a vulture (SE 11: 115–116). Empirically, no vulture was associated with Leonardo’s dream. Pfister cannot support Freud’s argument, but after Pfister, the vulture’s shadowy presence remains immanent in the picture. Once ‘seen’, it can hardly be unseen. It questions what we see when we look.

NARCISSISM The history of narcissism shows in the narrative poem The Romance of the Rose, (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, c. 1237–1277). The ‘I’, the Lover (Amant), in the Garden of Mirth, finds a fountain inscribed: ‘Here ‘twas that Fair Narcissus wept himself to death’ (1438). Amant sees two stones in the water, highlighting the importance of his eyes, the power of the lover’s vision, and imagination. The water is the ‘Mirror Perilous’, and seeing the stones, he loves everything appearing he sees. Cupid has ‘sown the seed of love that has dyed the whole fountain’ (lines 1586–1588). This echoes the story of Salmacis and Hermaphrodite (Metamorphoses 4: 274–388), placed in apposition

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to Narcissus. Salmacis ‘looks in the mirror-like waters [of the fountain of Salmacis] to see what best becomes her’ (311–313). These waters render men who bathe there soft and weak. Salmacis, already narcissistic, sees Hermaphroditus and pulls him into the water to seduce him. The two grow together, becoming the hermaphrodite. The Romance of the Rose pertains to the’courtly love’ tradition, idealizing the lady to the poet/ lover, in a situation outside marriage. Lacan discusses courtly love as a narcissistic desire to go beyond the mirror, and giving a sense of the lady as inaccessible, and so identified with what Freud calls the Thing (S7: 151–152, compare 51–52, and SE 14: 201, where ‘the thing’ is in the unconscious, before any inscription; larger, then, than any signification, indeed, a void in signification). Courtly love is, then, a relation to the Other, but narcissism acquires a new sense through Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) in 1898. Freud’s essay dates from 1913, though the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) had seen narcissism as a necessary stage between autoeroticism and the formation of an ego. In 1913, narcissism takes the self for a love-object (SE 14: 88). It commences in ‘primary narcissism’, which is produced in the way the child is valued by the mother. Freud then makes a gender-distinction. In men, the love is transferred to the love-object, whereas some women retain original narcissism, giving them ‘the greatest fascination’: for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love. The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. . . . Even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic tendency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it. — SE 14: 89 Other women love ‘according to the masculine type’ (SE 14: 89); that is, they have surrendered primary and secondary narcissism. Freud links narcissism and paranoia, since the narcissist may create an ideal ego which is now the target of self-love. This ‘ideal ego’ may be a love-object who is idealized, though not negating sexual appeal: ‘the sexual overvaluation of an object is an idealisation of it’ (SE 14: 94). Then a psychic agency may be set up to watch the ego, measuring it by the ideal. It produces the sense of being watched (as if controlled by ‘conscience’), that being a symptom for paranoia (SE 14: 95): The complaints made by paranoics also show that at bottom the self-criticism of conscience coincides with the self-observation on which it is based. Thus the activity of the mind which has taken over the function of conscience has also placed itself at the service of internal research, which furnishes philosophy with the material for its intellectual operations. This may have some bearing on the characteristic tendency of paranoics to construct speculative systems. — SE 14: 96 A footnote conjoins memory with a sharpened awareness of time. Narcissism and paranoia together produce a readiness to narrativize, with an autobiographical awareness, and ‘philosophic introspection’ (97), with a sense of how everything works together, fitting into one grand system of thought, religious or political: the development of conspiracy theories corresponds to this. The

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narcissist increases their self-regard, and the love-object is idealized, because the aim and the satisfaction in the narcissistic object-choice is for the narcissist to be loved (98). The narcissist desires love. Writing on paranoia, in the Schreber case, and discussing jealousy, persecution, and erotomania, Freud supplies several fantasized contradictions of the statement ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’ (SE 12: 63), which he sees as the basis of paranoia. The culmination in denial is: ‘I do not love at all – I do not love anyone’. This ‘megalomania’ is narcissistic, regressive. (Its similarities to some of Shakespeare’s characters, including Richard III and Iago, are worth considering.) The libido which has been detached from the person loved shows narcissism in this megalomania: ‘paranoiacs have brought with them a fixation at the stage of narcissism’ (SE 12: 72). Thus Freud says about paranoids ‘they love their delusions, as they love themselves’ (Fliess 111). Such delusions are fantasies, ‘psychic facades produced in order to bar access to [early sexual memories]’ (240).

PARANOIA Loving means surrendering part of the self ’s narcissism, though believing that the loved object will return it. In Lacan, narcissism, and the desire to increase it, combined with a fantasized sense of the other as returning that narcissism, virtually defines love. This comes out in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where ‘the Real’, and the objet petit a, and the gaze are discussed in virtually equivalent terms (compare S11: 65, 73, and 83, and ‘the objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze’ – 105). The other person is endowed in fantasy with the quality of these ambiguous qualities, which cannot be brought into definite form, or conceptualized. Their fantastic qualities complete the person, making them more than they are. A lure works here: When in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always wanting is that – you never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I want to see. — S11: 103 The other must complete the lover’s narcissism, but their objective existence is ignored in the lover’s fantasy. While the fantasy holds up, the love survives, but it battles against incipient paranoia wherein the lover feels threatened by the fantasy’s non-sustainability. The self ’s narcissism overvalues – fantasizes – the loved object. The lover is threatened with the gaze, which Lacan defines via Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1961): In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted from stage to stage and is always to some degree eluded in it – that is what we call the gaze. — S11: 73 Reality is not confined to the empirically visible, nor described within the grids which create/ construct the possibilities of expressing what we see. Merleau-Ponty in ‘Eye and Mind’ takes Cézanne painting Mount Ventoux as an example. The ‘mountain makes itself seen by the painter’, who asks it ‘to unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself a mountain

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before our eyes’ (287). Blanchot on Narcissus agrees: ‘what he sees is the invisible in the visible – in the picture the undepicted, the unstable unknown of a representation without presence, which reflects no model . . . it is madness he sees, and death’ (134). Lacan agrees, theorizing ‘the mirror stage’. There, the child derives a sense of self from identification with the mirror-image. The child is in the ‘Imaginary’ state in terms of its experience – it is in a state of ‘insufficiency’, outside language, pre-Oedipal, but it is already looked at from all directions, already inserted within the patriarchal symbolic order, which genders, and necessitates language. Hence Lacan, speaking of the pre-existence of the gaze, as something which makes me look: ‘I see only from one point but in my existence I am looked at from all sides’ (S11: 72). The conditions of culture – inside and outside the subject – are those of a series of mirroring scopophilic drives. Something of Foucault’s interest in painting, in his study of Velasquez’s Las Meninas arises from this. Velasquez’s painting shows the gaze coming from many different sources: the king and queen in the mirror, the painter, the court-women, the figure at the back; the image is a collection of looks which establish everyone as images for each other. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation, and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out [machine] fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an ‘orthopaedic’ form of its totality – and to the finally donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits. — E: 78 The ‘lure’ is that of a complete body, flattering the ego narcissistically. Another fear, of fragmentation – of the body in pieces – creates the paranoid necessity to assume a rigid identity, though marked by the irreconcilability of the inner subject with the outer world, into which the ego attempts to fit, like Leonardo da Vinci’s line-drawing of Vitruvian Man (1487). ‘Orthopaedic’ shows that the mirror stage, while flattering the ego’s narcissistic sense of centrality, disciplines it, making it walk straight. It opens up desire, for the one looking in the mirror knows the impossibility of being that ideal self with which it identifies. Lacan stresses that I am in the picture; if we think of images, I am an image; how I am looked at shows as ‘a lack that constitutes castration anxiety’ (S11: 73). There is not a fullness in the Other which looks. Hence the anxiety the lover feels towards the other (S11 103). For the film theorist Joan Copjec (37), ‘narcissism cannot consist in finding satisfaction in one’s own visual image. It must [imply] that one’s own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism . . . seeks the self beyond the self-image . . . something more than the image’. Hence an aggressivity towards the image – towards all images.

SURREALISM I will apply these points to Surrealism, specifically Ernst, Dalí, and Bataille. Surrealism, though primarily a literary and Marxist movement, was impacted upon by Freud’s ‘Leonardo’ and ‘Gradiva’ essays. Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924) respected Freud’s work on dreams (Breton: 10), his sense of release from the rule of Cartesian rationalism, and his discovery of the unconscious –

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which became the inspiration for a Surrealist writing reliant on free association, dreams, and hypnosis (automatism), an idea from Dada that signifies writing without rational controls. The manifesto also responded to Freud on hysteria. In 1928, André Breton, author of Nadja, which praises psychoanalysis for ‘its expulsion of man from himself ’ (24), and Louis Aragon, called hysteria the ‘greatest poetic discovery’ of the nineteenth century. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825– 1893) had begun treating hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where Freud had briefly studied. Breton (1892–1966) and Louis Aragon (1897–1982) called hysteria mimicry on the part of patients who, as artists, exhibited bodily symptoms which had no organic source. Max Ernst (1891–1976) had been the major artist in Dada, and ‘demonstrably the first artist to read Freud’ (Spies: 33). He moved to Paris to live with the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard (1895–1952), and his Russian wife, Gala (1894–1982), in a ménage à trois (in 1929, Gala became Dalí’s partner). Ernst used collage, making art the result of chance encounters of disparate images and text, and frottage and grattage, techniques for revealing images beneath surfaces. Frottage takes an impression – for example from the grain of floorboards – and transplants it, in an act whose implications are that it displaces voluntary memory, like Proust, changing, moving, the context of images. In both techniques, ‘the aim was to transform the painting into a screen that entices and at the same time registers the fantasies of its beholders’ (Uhl: 174). Ernst connected frottage with Leonardo’s notebooks advising artists to look at walls with stains, showing: a resemblance to various landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and various groups of hills; or again you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes. . . . Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes . . . Also you can see various battles and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. This happens on such walls and varicoloured stones, [which act] like the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word that you can imagine. . . . It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which if you consider them well, you may find really marvellous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries . . . by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions. — Leonardo: 173–174, Krauss: 66 Stains, outside perspective, show that something has been there. Ernst uses the Leonardo ‘stain’ to retrace a history giving both the primal scene and, further back, prehistory, natural history: Ernst produced a print series called that in 1925 (Uhl: 117–119). ‘Decalcomania’, from décalquer, to trace, has as project ‘to release unconscious forces that leave their imprint on the visible world but that nowhere appear as such’ (Cohen 133). Such forces relate to the Freudian unconscious, and to Marxist arguments which indicate that what shows up as ‘chance’ or an ‘encounter’ is less chance than the encounter with political/economic /social forces whose presence is occulted, but whose force can be traced. We can consider three pictures by Ernst. In Oedipus Rex (1921), pierced fingers protrude constrainedly from a window in a brick wall on the left-hand side, cracking open a walnut. To the right, and looking right, are two birds (parents?), turned away, one with the horns of the cuckold;

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they seem trapped; perhaps they are totemistic. The fingers may recall metonymically Oedipus’s pierced feet; the horned bird – also a bull – may evoke King Laius; the nut may be a half-closed or blinded eye, or the vulva, or an enigma needing solution (a nut to be cracked), or the womb. The hand is also the father’s, and the window is the female genitals (Legge: 183). Perhaps we reconcile the contradiction by seeing repetition working: father and son repeat each other. These figures are arranged in no space connecting part with part or with the spectator, or giving a setting. Legge (36–48) relates the painting to the Sphinx, who as ‘the strangler’ implies the mother who suffocates what comes to birth (hence Jocasta, as the typical mother, hangs herself at the end of the Oedipus). As with Little Hans, of whom Freud writes: ‘he was faced with the great riddle of where babies come from, which is perhaps the first problem to engage a child’s mental powers, and of which the riddle of the Theban Sphinx is probably no more than a distorted version’ (SE 10: 133), the painting may represent a wounded attempt to grasp a problem from which parental heads turn away. (Presumably the Sphinx does not know the answer to the enigma till Oedipus tells her, so revealing to her her unconscious – hence her suicide.) In Elephant Celebes, the machine stands in for the father; his horned head, placed on his tail, resembles a First World War gas-mask, as the rim around the figure suggests a helmet or even a tank – that which had been so important an image for Wilfred Bion in the First World War, as the protective ‘Mother’, the container, which nonetheless might blow up catastrophically. Further, the armoured body is an essential concept for Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’. This two-legged elephant/machine is being enticed by a headless woman with a gloved right hand. This plays on the sources of hysteria which Freud identified, showing the real or fantasized seduction by the father of the daughter. In 1923 followed Les hommes n’en sauront rien (‘men will not know anything about it’). Its title implies a riddle, and a questioning which may recall the Sphinx. Copulating limbs, so imaged to suggest hermaphroditism, covered by an upside down crescent moon are floating above a desert. The moon is beneath an outlined sun, as if another copulation is taking place there. Geoffrey Hinton connects the images with Schreber’s Memoirs, since Schreber spoke of divine rays penetrating him, and such rays are seen in the picture. Elizabeth Legge quotes him and Karl Abraham drawing attention to the two taboos: of making a likeness of God (the second of the Ten Commandments) and of witnessing the primal scene – i.e. the scene of origins, which Blanchot referred to; the scene of the parents’ copulation, where the father implies, in fantasy, God. The need for ignorance here may explain the title. Ernst’s interest was in insanity, in contesting the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), who saw schizophrenia (dementia praecox) in organic terms, which denies, to the mad, meaning and language. Kraeplin contrasts with Dada (a mad title mocking the father, and First World War political and military insanity). Legge quotes Aragon calling Ernst a ‘primitive’, saying that his art ‘does not distinguish that which may be said from that which may not be said, that which may be painted from that which may not be painted’ (Legge 158). The primitive knows no repression. Ernst aligned himself with hysteria and madness, as that which society silences. In the ‘Loplop’ collage series. Loplop (compare ‘Dada’ and ‘Ubu’) he creates a bird-man, ‘a private phantom attached to my person’ (quoted Krauss 65), an alter ego, perhaps a totemistic father. His art is, as Freud commented on Little Hans, a revenge upon the father (SE 10: 129). Krauss compares the images in the ‘readymades’ to the screen memories of which Freud writes (SE 3: 301–322): those which block other more repressed memories. These collages give a hint as to what cannot be said, as Surrealist images do, inherently.

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LACAN, DALÍ AND BATAILLE: PARANOIA The ‘chance encounters’ of Surrealism derive from Lautréamont on the beauty of a sixteen-year-old whom the narrator has designs upon (and murders): He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movements in the sift part of the posterior cervical region. . . . and above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table! — Lautréamont: 217 The combination of active/passive, masculine (umbrella)/feminine (the sewing machine), the machinic and the non-human together, define what Breton saw Surrealism as exhibiting: the marvellous, a convulsive (i.e. traumatic) beauty. Nadja, whose hysteria exhibits convulsive beauty, is presented as mad. Once treated, she dies. Breton mocks her psychiatrist, Henri Claude, a teacher of Lacan. The ‘chance encounter’, Lacan’s theme (S11: 53–64), has the potentiality of the traumatic, since it may be the encounter with the Real (SE 11: 55). Breton’s novel Nadja (52) evokes the trouvaille – the found object, which might re-evoke the lost object, Das Ding, the subject of Seminar 7, and which is associated with the mother, who of course for Freud is associated with what is uncanny (SE 17: 245). So too, psychoanalysis is said to be on the side of what Lacan called objective chance (Foster: 19–54). Lacan comments on ‘objective chance’, which is almost definitional for how Freud defines the uncanny (see SE 17: 237–252), in relationship to Breton’s Amour Fou (Mad Love), as a ‘madness’ which finds/risks love in the very sphere of ‘the thing’: objective chance means things that occur and are all the richer in meaning because they take place somewhere where we are unable to perceive either rational, or causal, or any other kind of order, that can guarantee their emergence in the real . . . It is once again in the place of the Thing that Breton has the madness of love emerge. — S7: 154 Le Minotaure, a journal of Surrealism whose title acknowledged the monstrous – appropriate since ‘monsters would be the dialectical opposites of geometrical regularity’ (Bataille 1985: 55) – opened in 1933 with Dalí’s ‘Interpretation paranoiaque-critique de l’image obsédante “L’Angelus de Millet” Prologue’. It acknowledged Lacan, who came into contact with the Surrealists in 1931 (Finkelstein: 211–226). Dalí (1904–1989) interprets this 1859 picture by Jean-François Millet in plural ways. The husband seems to be bowing in prayer (perhaps over a buried baby), but his hat hides an erection. The husband becomes the son, and the woman, the mother, is about commit incest with him; she is a praying mantis. Dalí calls paranoia a ‘mechanism of strength and power’ (Dalí: 13) because it uses the reality of the external world to validate an obsessive idea, discovering in reality: a double image: that is, a representation of an object which becomes, without the slightest figurative or anatomical modification, the representation of another absolutely different object, it too devoid of any distortion or abnormality that could indicate some sort of manipulation. — 14

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These ‘images of reality depend on the paranoid capacity of each individual’ (14). As Pfister found a vulture in Leonardo; paranoid interpretation and the perception of the double image becomes psychoanalytic, intuiting that an image is never one thing only. Dalí creates the double image, as in the painting ‘The Metamorphosis of Narcissus’. We do not see the eyes of Narcissus, now metamorphosed into stone in the left part of the picture; this contrasts with Caravaggio’s Narcissus, who is nonetheless quoted in the positioning of the right knee of Narcissus in Dalí. The figure becomes in the right part a calcified hand holding the egg from which springs the flower in the right. The dog to the picture’s right may quote the dog in Dürer’s ‘Melencolia’, a key image for the depressed state of Narcissus, and an image to recall ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). Between the two images of Narcissus is a ‘heterosexual group’, as Dalí described it; to the hand’s right is a solitary statue of a Narcissus. Whereas Ernst’s Surrealism had shown a dream reality combining images, Dalí split them, while showing each single image as double, confirming every paranoid reading. Doubling recalls the castrating effects which Freud finds in doubling in ‘The Uncanny’ (SE 17: 235). Petrification implies the power of the Medusa whose head turns to stone: a castrating image (SE 18: 273–274). This Narcissus is ungendered; the painting confirms loss of sexual difference. Paranoid interpretation apparently confirm the fears within the Schreber analysis: i.e. in Lacan’s terms, that there is no sexual relation (S20: 12), nor sexual difference. In 1930, Dalí published ‘L’Ane pourri’ (‘The Rotten Ass’) in Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. The rotten ass relates to castration, for the ass traditionally relates to male virility (Bataille 1985: 24–30). By rotting, the ass shows the work of time, but Dalí writes: ‘nothing can convince me that this cruel putrefaction . . . is anything other than the harsh, blinding reflection of new precious stones’. Dalí may be seen to be rethinking what is meant by the beautiful, and linking it with the disgusting. Thus what he calls the ‘treasure island’ – the realm of desire – hides behind ‘shit, blood, and putrefaction’. Art critics must expect nothing from Surrealist images but ‘disappointment, disagreeableness, and repugnance’. The new images will lead viewers to ‘the limpid sources of masturbation, exhibitionism, crime, and love’ (Dalí: 14). Dalí ends by saying that this will be in the service of the Revolution. A footnote by Dalí attacks Georges Bataille (1897–1962), a dissident Surrealist, associated in the 1920s with Breton, partly through the ethnographer Michel Leiris (1901–1990). However, for some years he and Breton separated, Bataille exploring ‘heterology’ – i.e. the study of that which is completely other. A breach appeared with Breton’s Second Manifesto (published in the final issue of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste, December 1929). Bataille’s essay ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist’ calls Surrealism a ‘revolutionary idealism’ with an addiction to power, in contrast to Marx’s sense of revolution coming from below. He thinks it has an idealist (normative) view of sexuality (decidedly patriarchal in Nadja). Bataille quotes Breton’s Second Manifesto: ‘the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly’ as a way of putting an end to ‘debasement and cretinization’ (Bataille 1985: 39). He says that Breton desires castration, for ‘such an extreme provocation seeks to draw immediate and brutal punishment’ (39). Breton preaches a ‘servile idealism’ (41), whose conceit denies the world’s materiality; hence the prefix ‘sur’ before ‘realism’, implying it claims superiority to realism. Freud calls the unconscious a conservative force repressing material which is unacceptable to the subject. In Surrealism the unconscious does not relate to repression, making Surrealism idealistic in pursuing the ‘marvellous’. And that may be its limitation.

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Bataille had commented admiringly on Dalí’s painting ‘The Lugubrious Game’ (1929), which resembles a parody of an Assumption, and includes a side view of the head of Dalí, mid-right, looking down. Its subject is castration, and the corps morcelé, as if identifying anxieties about these with each other. Yet Dalí’s painting thematizes ‘contrary reactions’ to castration, as Bataille shows, and as noticed already with ‘The Metamorphoses of Narcissus’. That ambiguity, alongside the refusal to idealize, makes Bataille affirm in ‘The Modern Spirit and the Play of Transpositions’ (1930) in Documents that ‘what is really loved is loved mainly in shame and I defy any lover of painting to love a picture as much as a fetishist loves a shoe’ (quoted, Ades 2006: 242). This questions the possibility – or desirability – of sublimation. Dalí might agree with Bataille since his art stresses the idea of regression. Bataille shows fascination with what cannot be given form, as in his essay ‘L’informe’ (‘Formless’) (Bataille 1985: 31). Philosophy needs to idealize, by giving things meaning; materiality, however, means that ‘the universe resembles nothing and is only formless’. It is, however, always dragged by art into some form of use-value. No image can be an image of anything; it would be an image of an image. If it did become an image of something, that would be idealizing. In Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, abject matter is what must be held at bay (Fascism is fascinated by it – horrified and attracted to it), and matter in its non-idealized state is the ‘horror’ which abjection discovers when all binary oppositions which maintain religious and ideological distinctions break down (Kristeva: 209). Yet Dalí does not quite accept Bataille’s view. Even ‘L’Ane pourri’ sees the utterly degraded and material as metamorphosed into something else, which a paranoid understanding reveals.

DALÍ AND LACAN: ANAMORPHOSIS Early Surrealist contributions by Dalí, collaborator with Buñuel on the film Un Chien Andalou, and a novelist (Hidden Faces: 1944), include ‘The Great Masturbator’ (1929) – Freud called masturbation the ‘primary addiction’ (SE 21:193). A mantis or grasshopper/locust clings to the underside of a head facing earth-wards – apparently attacking the space where the mouth should be. It is a selfportrait, eyes closed, the eyelashes enormous. The female mantis Dalí associated with devouring the male after intercourse; here there may be a psychoanalytic fear of the mother as, in fantasy, sexually devouring. From the upper side of the head a woman emerges (Gala), her face as close as may be to the male genitals of another figure, whose head is out of sight, but who is also emerging from the back of the head. The facial features of Dalí here and in ‘The Lugubrious Game’ reappear in ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931), where the ‘soft watches’ draped over the shell-like figure, and over the branch of the tree, and over the box to the left of the picture, suggest memory’s inability to relate to time. Their flaccidity implies impotence, and death. The shell-figure is Dalí, reduced in death, and an example of anamorphosis, or distorted perspective. This, basic to much art, e.g. caricature, was discussed by the Lithuanian art-critic Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1903–1988), in his book Anamorphosis (1955). Lacan comments on Baltrušaitis, remembering his own and Dalí’s interest in paranoia, when suggesting that anamorphosis lets a viewer see what escapes from vision in perspectival painting. This develops from an earlier point: that ‘the gaze’ escapes the conventional grids imposed upon looking (S11: 87). Lacan discusses Dalí and Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) and the skull whose distorted existence makes Lacan think of the phallic, also inherent in Dalí’s soft watches. In Lacan, Holbein relates to the moment of constructing individual subjectivity:

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at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometrical optics was an object of research [giving the subject proportions and measure, and so making the concept normative], Holbein makes visible . . . something that is simply the subject as annihilated – annihilated that is, in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi of castration . . . we shall see then emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsative, dazzled and spread out function, as it is in this picture. The picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear. — S11: 88–89 Renaissance humanism is cancelled out through this anamorphotic insinuation of impotence, castration, and so death. Holbein (‘hollow bone’) signs himself in the picture (like Dalí) via the skull, and the anamorphic shape resembles – recalling Leonardo – a stain (see S11: 97). Dawn Ades (2000: 84–85) indicates Dalí’s awareness of Holbein in his 1931 ‘Diurnal Fantasies’, which suggests a skull – bone – and stone, within a ruined landscape. Holbein’s skull is what ‘escapes from vision’. It is an image for the gaze, which annihilates the onlooker’s narcissism. The picture is a trap for the gaze in holding what disconfirms the spectator. Recalling the terms of Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Lacan allows for something ‘Apollonian’ in painting (S11:101): it permits a belief in subjectivity to sustain itself, however provisionally; it is not Dionysian; its images do not tear the individual apart. Finally, for Rosalind Krauss (66–67), Max Ernst combined the ‘stain’ with the ‘vulture’, the absence in Leonardo’s painting. Leonardo’s ‘memory’ activates the thought of the stain, which allows for the creating of a visual image in collage-form, where the ‘readymade’ becomes the vehicle re-awakening a past experience, retroactively. However, it is like the ‘secondary revision’ within dream-interpretation, concealing the dream’s latent content, and a facade in front of it. Hence Krauss quotes Freud arguing about a specific dream which the context will explain: is it so highly improbable that Maury’s dream [of the French Revolution] represents a phantasy which had been stored up ready-made in his memory for many years and which was aroused – or I should say ‘alluded to’ – at the moment at which he became aware of the stimulus [of being hit on the neck, as though being guillotined] which woke him? — SE 5: 496 This sudden ‘stimulus’ reactivated a stored-up fantasy in Maury, which Freud interpreted as having been a dream, relating not to the French Revolution, but rather to the man’s phantasies of egotistical ambition to which the dream gave narrative and visual form. Phantasies concealing other phantasies are ‘readymades’, appearing in visual form, in an infinite recession. As ‘readymades’, they are the product of the scraps of culture, like those which Ernst put together in collages, but they seem part of the ‘belong to me aspect of representations’ (S11: 81, Krauss: 71). They appear individual, but as images, memories, they never happened; they are stand-ins, as images are, and this is part of how cultural and ideological images permeate.

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BATAILLE Bataille opposed art being called representation, which implies the ability to contain or to control, what is shown; it flatters the artist’s narcissism, which flourishes on the basis of possessing supremacy over what is seen, or represented. His novel The Story of the Eye contrasts with representation and idealism when the narrator stares at the Milky Way, ‘that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault . . . that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapours shining in the immensity of empty space’. But, he says, ‘to others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. . . . In general, people savour the “pleasures of the flesh” only on condition that they be insipid . . . I cared only for what is classified as “dirty’ ” (Bataille 1982: 42). The dirty equals the abject, that which refuses idealization. Bataille associates idealism, as a distaste for the body, which desires repression, with castration: the gelded eyes recall the eye-cutting sequence in Un Chien Andalou. Bataille discussed Manet, the artist of nascent Modernism; Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère may be compared to Las Meninas: at its centre is a void, where the absence of a first initiatory looking renders reality absent, as does the indifference of the bar-woman; the mirror does not confirm a space of representation, there is no place for narcissism; no room for the subject which everything of the discourse of narcissism tries to sustain. Rather, invisibility or blindness permeates what is visible, in the reverse sense from that of Merleau-Ponty. Similar emphases appear in Lascaux: Or the Birth of Art: 1955. And the cave-paintings at Altamira were similarly discussed by Lacan, drawing on their use of anamorphosis, so confusing the stability of the subject’s relation to the object, bringing out the uncanny quality of what is represented: ‘a work of art always involves encircling the Thing’ (S7: 141). Bataille dwells on the non-Utilitarian function of cave-paintings, outside the economy of work which separates culture from nature and interdicts commonalty with nature: here, transgression shows in the human returning to nature and to the animal: transgression exists only from the moment when art reveals itself; the birth of art in the Reindeer Age coincided fairly closely with the outbreak of tumultuous play and festivity [féte] announced deep in the caverns by these figures from which life bursts forth in excess and to its fullest in a game of death and birth played on stone. — quoted Ungar: 254 Art paints the non-human, the sacred, and superior, masking the human, refusing the human as absolute, giving place to the animal which dies, but is sacred. Transgression, which affirms the taboo it crosses, while putting the bounds of the human into question, shows in this art, non-work based, non-functional, which recognizes the erotic and the death-drive within art (the man is sexually aroused, the bison is dead). So Bataille argues about Lascaux; the implications for modern art make ‘man’ not the measure of everything. Thus they question narcissism.

CONCLUSION ‘If I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen . . . the stain, the spot’ (S11: 97). What screens, prevents seeing. Holbein’s anamorphotic figure shows that my perspectival looking is partial; the figure marks the spot where my looking distorts, being, in that way, exemplary

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of the gaze, revealing my presence in the picture as distorting it. If Lascaux shows us the image as trying to hold the thing, the objet a, then the image lacks something, which points back to the spectator, as it pointed back to Narcissus, showing up how he is constituted by what is a void, an image with no referent other than the one he takes from it. Surrounded by images, as in the caves in Lascaux, visual culture nonetheless leaves something as irreducible to vision. The image in painting, film, and photography show what Derrida considers deconstruction to show, always: the spectral. That, Derrida says, exceeds the ‘oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible’ as a trace ‘that marks the present with its absence in advance’. It produces ‘spectrality’ (Derrida 2002: 17). Images are an exchange between fantasy and the phantom; both relate to the Lacanian ‘real’, and both question conventions by which reality is defined.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Karl, 1927. ‘Restrictions and Transformations of Scopophilia in Psycho-Neurotics’, in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey. Hogarth P. 1927. Ades, Dawn (ed.). Dalí’s Optical Illusions. Yale UP. 2000. Ades, Dawn, and Simon Baker (eds.). Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents. London: Hayward Gallery and Cambridge, MIT P. 2006. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. Fontana. 1981. Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye by Lord Auch. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Penguin. 1982. Bataille, Georges. Lascaux, Or, The Birth of Art: Prehistoric Painting. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. Geneva: Skira. 1955. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 ed. Allan Stoekl with Carl Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr (trans). Minnesota UP. 1985. Bataille, Georges. The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture. Ed. Stuart Kendall. Zone. 2005. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Nebraska UP. 1986. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Michigan UP. 1972. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. California UP. 1993. Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. MIT Press. 1994. Dahlberg, Charles (trans.). The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Hanover: New England UP. 1983. Dalí, Salvador. ‘The Rotten Ass’, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Grand Street 60 (1997) 12–15. Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Steigler. Echographies of Television. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Polity. 2002. Finkelstein, Haim. The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P. 1993. Hinton, Geoffrey. ‘Max Ernst’s ‘Les Hommes n’en sauront pas’. Burlington Magazine. 117 (1997) 292–299. Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P. 1993. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 1982. Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse). Maldoror and Poems. Trans. Paul Knight. Penguin. 1973. Legge, Elizabeth M. Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research P. 1989. Leonardo da Vinci. Notebooks selected by Irma A. Richter, ed. Thereza Wells. Oxford UP. 2008. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso). Metamorphoses trans. Frank Justus Miller, Cambridge: Mass: Harvard UP. 1977. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. London: Free Association Books. 1990. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought. Trans. Barbara Bray. Cambridge: Polity. 1997.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP. 1985. Shepherdson, Charles. ‘A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s reading of The Visible and the Invisible’. Diacritics. 27 (1997): 70–86. Spies, Werner (ed.). Max Ernst: A Retrospective. London: Tate Gallery. 1991. Uhl, Ralph. Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting Between the Wars. Trans. Elizabeth Tucker. Chicago UP. 2004. Ungar, Steven. ‘Phantom Lascaux: Origin of the Work of Art’. Yale French Studies. 78 (1990): 246–262. Zhuo, Yue. ‘Alongside the animals: Bataille’s “Lascaux Project” ’. Yale French Studies 127 (2015): 19–33.

FURTHER READING Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Ed. Michael Richardson. Verso. 1994. Fanés, Felix. Salvador Dalí: The Construction of the Image 1925–1930. Yale UP. 2007. Finkelstein, Haim. Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writintg: The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1996. Finkelstein, Haim. The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2007. Halpern, Richard, Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP. 2002. Kofman, Sarah. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings. Cornell UP. 1985, Laqueur, Thomas. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone Books. 2003. Lomas, David. The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity. Yale UP. 2000. Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Howard. Penguin. 1968. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. ‘Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism Between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism’. Journal of Modern Literature, 25 (200) 258–74. Vinge, Louise. The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature. Lund: Gleerups. 1967.

PART FOUR

Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Gender

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hysteria JUDITH ROOF

Medical writers from the time of Hippocrates to the twentieth century used the term “hysteria,” as the rubric for a wide range of symptoms that included paralysis, anxiety, irritability, nervousness, shortness of breath, loss of voice, insomnia, retention of fluids, anesthesia, fainting spells, violent muscular contractions, blindness, sexual desire, loss of sexual desire, loss of appetite, heaviness in the abdomen, menstrual difficulties, hypochondria, and lascivious behavior, among others. Appearing in medical writings from ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Middle East, Renaissance Europe, the Enlightenment, offering a target for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century treatments for nervous ailments, and finally serving as the illness that spurred Freud’s invention of the “talking cure,” hysteria garnered a number of different etiologies, symptoms, and cures. Although theories about the intrinsic weakness of the female body sustained the belief that women were more likely than men to suffer from hysteria, some diagnosticians also thought males might also be victims of the disorder. Hysteria has long been diagnosed as having a broad variety of symptoms and causes, including its capacity to imitate other disorders and even situations and cultures. As Helen King suggests, “hysteria is in no way a clearly defined disease entity for which most medical practitioners in our society would draw up the same list of symptoms . . .” (9). E. Slater suggests that a diagnosis of hysteria was “a disguise for ignorance and a fertile source of clinical error . . . not only a delusion but also a snare,” and “a way of avoiding a confrontation with our own ignorance.” (1396). British physician, Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), discerned that “hysteria imitates culture.” Sydenham, according to G. S. Rousseau, “was the first to proclaim that hysteria imitated other diseases, and he maintained—by implication—that hysteria was itself somehow an imitation of civilization” (102). And, if hysteria is a disorder one of whose symptoms is imitation, then how could a diagnostician ever discern the symptoms exclusive to hysteria itself? The problem in trying to define hysteria as a constant, is, as King notes, “if anything is a widely accepted part of the definition, it is the suggestion that it can mimic the symptoms of any other disease.” In this case, how can hysteria itself be a disease, and what is to prevent it from taking such radically different forms in different epochs as to be almost unrecognizable as the same condition? The corollary is also true; as Shorter puts it, ‘every organic disease imaginable . . . has at one time or another been classified as hysteria.’ ”1

1 In this passage, King quotes J. Wright, “Hysteria and Mechanical Man,” 233; W. Mitchinson, “Hysteria and Insanity in Women—A Nineteenth-Century Perspective,”: 92, and E. Shorter, “Paralysis—The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom,”: 551.

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Somatic or psychological, primarily female or a condition suffered by both sexes, hysteria’s imitation both of other conditions and of the cultures in which it was diagnosed suggests that throughout history, hysteria has been more than a range of symptoms affecting individuals. Certainly, the use of the term to describe either individual or group conditions of irrational emotion suggests that in its essence, hysteria refers to any symptom that evinces an a response that is out of measure with its apparent cause, even if that cause is an organ that wanders the body.

HYSTERIA’S HISTORIES From the earliest writings on the subject, hysteria was understood as the effect of several possible causes. Some Hippocratic writers, Plato, and Galen thought hysteria was caused by the wanderings of the unmoored, or animate, uterus through the body, hence the name “hysteria” from the Greek word for womb, “hysterika.” The womb’s movements were instigated by “menstrual suppression, exhaustion, insufficient food, sexual abstinence, and dryness or lightness of the womb,” movements that might “be cured by marriage and/or pregnancy, scent therapy, irritant pessaries, and various herbal concoctions administered by mouth, by nose, or direct to the vulva.” (King: 14). As the womb moved around the body, its displacements caused everything from suffocation and bad judgment to exhaustion. In another somatic theory of its etiology, hysteria was the effect of the retention of fluids or eggs, exhaustion, a lack of sexual congress, or uterine dryness. As causal agent, the womb also accounted for hysteria’s association with females whose bodies, according to Hippocratic writers, tended to absorb and retain more liquid, producing the need for menstruation and making females much softer and wetter than males. Yet other diagnosticians saw hysteria as a mental disease, a disease of the brain, as an emotional disorder linked to melancholia and hypochondria suffered by both sexes, or even as the effects of lovesickness. And in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hysteria was also seen as an effect of satanic possession and witchcraft (Rousseau: 97). These theories for the causes of hysteria often co-existed, came in and out of consideration, and reappeared through the centuries in slightly different forms. Throughout its early history, hysteria was the interpretation applied to a motley conglomerate of symptoms that never comprised a clear diagnostic tradition. In the Middle Ages, however, a second theory of etiology and the treatment of hysteria emerged. Although the Greek and Roman theories of and treatments for hysteria had survived in the Middle East through the efforts of Avicenna (980–1037) and Maimonides (1138– 1204), the more “scientific” theories of the Hippocratic writers and Galen began to compete with spiritual etiologies, as religion began to overtake medicine and hysteria became as much a matter of the soul as of the body. Europe in the Middle Ages was governed by both Aristotelean and Biblical premises that males are naturally superior to females. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) situated females as failed males, an idea that subtended hysteria’s premise that females were much more likely than males to give into evil and heretical beliefs (Tasca et al.: 111–113). In this context what some Greek diagnosticians had perceived as the effects of organic displacement became evidence of spiritual weakness, where females, as inferior beings, were much more likely to fall prey to the evil influences that penetrated both body and soul, wreaking the havoc of hysteria. Thus, during the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, hysterical symptoms become the signs of witchcraft (Kramer and Sprenger). As the signifier of demonic power, hysteria became an evil manifestation that threatened Western belief systems as both the symptomatic foe of the

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religious hierarchy that had gained much political control and a continuing challenge to a patriarchal system that depended upon the repression of females. Hence, hysterical females became not simply the victims of displaced organs and sexual repression; these somatic etiologies themselves became metaphors of the invasion of evil, as weak females were susceptible to becoming the penetrable repositories of heretical beliefs and demonic visitations, while their hysterical symptoms were an indicator of “sorcery,” a theory that persisted through the Renaissance and early Enlightenment (Tasca et al.: 113–114). Having gained a far more wicked connotation, hysteria became the province of clerics who treated hysteria’s malevolent spirituality with exorcism (Tasca et al.: 113–114). Exorcisms and other ways of cleansing the spirit took precedence as treatments for hysteria, although remedies premised upon sexual repression such as stimulating female sexual organs to provide some sexual relief lurked, not quite erased by sexist imaginaries of doctrinal purity (Tasca et al.: 113). The re-emergence of medical science in Europe in the sixteenth century refocused attention on the somatic origins of hysterical symptoms, leading to a balance between somatic and spiritual theories and treatments of hysteria. As René Descartes’ philosophy reconnected the soul and the body, and others, such as Thomas Willis, hypothesized that hysteria was more an effect of problems in the nervous system and brain than anything to do with a delinquent uterus, the etiology of hysteria began to move from the spirit and the body to the psyche. (Tasca et al.: 113–114). Discounting earlier theories of the uterus as hysteria’s cause, since “the body of the womb is of so small a bulk, in virgins, and widows, and is so strictly tied by the neighboring parts round about, that it cannot of its self be moved, or ascend from its place, nor could its motion be felt . . .” Willis also avoided a psychological etiology, relying on the nervous system itself as the source of hysteria’s symptoms (Scull: 31). As medical thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries increasingly regarded hysteria as the effects of a nervous and/or mental disturbance, some, such as Thomas Sydenham, also considered the connections between the disorder and aspects of culture and society. Working in England in the mid-seventeenth century, Sydenham proclaimed that “hysteria imitates culture.” (Rousseau: 102). As Rousseau notes, “Sydenham observed that the crucial hysterical symptom was always produced by tensions and stresses within the culture surrounding the patient or victim” (Rousseau: 102). At the same time, relocating the causes of hysteria from the uterus to problems of the nervous system or even psychology suggested that males could also be hysterics, a possibility that lurked for the next two centuries within the still dominant assumption that females were the disorder’s primary victims. Although a belief in demonic possession, witchcraft, and female weakness also continued through the Renaissance and eighteenth century, (cf. the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692 which executed 19 females and detained more than 100 others), the concept of hysteria as a nervous disorder, an imbalance of body and psyche, or even as a psychological issue emerged as a kinder diagnosis than the religious notion that the forces of evil had conquered weak female terrain. Nonetheless, the belief that women were weak continued, “whether viewed in theological or medical contexts, whether by the ancient scholiasts or the derivative Aristotelian biologists and philosophers, whether concretized as weak virgin, bride of Christ, or as deranged Ophelia (another hysteric of course),” as Rousseau summarizes it (Rousseau: 108). Despite more sophisticated understandings of physiology and greater focus on the role of the nervous system as contributing to hysteria, the cultural context of this period continues to perceive females “as part animal, part witch;

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part pleasure-giver, part wreaker of destruction to avenge her own irrationality—anything but as strong, rational creature resembling homo mensicus, this view coexisting while men of the Renaissance debate the heresies of Galilean astronomy and the subtleties of Cartesian physiology” (Rousseau: 108).

INCIPIENT PSYCHOLOGIES OF HYSTERIA A common element of all of the theories of the etiology of hysteria before the nineteenth century was the idea that hysteria is a behavioral/emotional response to the repression of something, most often suffered by females. If the etiology of hysteria were the womb, whether it moved throughout the body or retained fluids, then the symptoms of hysteria would be the behavioral and emotional manifestations of a repressed somatic disorder. If hysteria were the effect of demonic possession or witchcraft, then its symptoms would be the effects of the victims’ essential spiritual weakness and inferiority, as hysterics fail to repress the effects of the aggressively evil forces that have infiltrated their bodies and souls. As the victims of social expectations, hysterical females might also have been those women who, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had been unable to fulfill “their natural desire,” a circumstance caused by a “moral and physical imbalance produced by ‘the excesses of civilization’ ” (Duby et al.: 1992). In the emerging theories of hysteria as a symptom of nervous system and/or brain malfunction, repression became yet again a somatic mis-alliance between mind or soul and body still akin to earlier theories of hysteria as an effect of sexual repression. In the eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer theorized that life processes flowed freely throughout the body. Hysterical symptoms emerged when that flow was blocked in a return to earlier somatic causes. Whereas the wandering womb had been treated by various methods of luring the womb back into place (e.g., with good or bad odors), or notions of sexual inhibition suggested modes of relieving such pressure, Franz Anton Mesmer introduced “animal magnetism” in the eighteenth century to treat his patients. In one case in 1774, Mesmer gave his hysterical patient a liquid containing iron, then deployed magnets on various parts of her body to encourage the proper flow of life elements. He also treated patients by facing them, touching them with his hands, and looking into their eyes, a kind of precursor to hypnosis, which enabled him to encourage and control the flow of elements within the patient’s body. When he had more patients than he could manage individually, he developed a large round device called a “baquet” with a series of iron rods jutting out of the top. His patients would sit around the baquet, apply the rods to affected areas of their bodies, while Mesmer would connect with one patient via a rope and thereby conduct the life fluids strategically. (Ellenberger: 56–75). Despite Mesmer’s return to earlier theories of the improper circulation of life fluids, by the nineteenth century French physicians increasingly regarded hysteria primarily as a nervous and/or mental condition. In Traité de l’Hystérie published in 1859, Paul Briquet abandoned more specifically sexual elements, redefining hysteria as a neurosis of the brain produced by vulnerable patients’ reactions to environmental elements. Still characterized by a collection of somatic symptoms that ranged from amnesia to irritability, changes in personality, hypochondria, and other expressive dysfunctions, hysteria no longer belonged to a specifically sexual register, even though, as the demonstrations of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at Salpêtrière would dramatically illustrate, females offered spectacular examples of hysteria’s effects. (Mai and Mersey: 57–63).

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SALPÊTRIÈRE Founded in 1656 by Louis XIV, Pitié-Salpêtrière was a gunpowder factory turned hospice for poor women in Paris. Less a medical center than a site for the detainment of female criminals, prostitutes and the mentally-disturbed, by the nineteenth century, Salpêtrière housed a population rife with women who suffered from the symptoms associated with hysteria. When Charcot moved to Salpêtrière in 1862, the hospice/hospital began to focus increasingly upon neurological issues, among them, hysteria. Charcot’s interest in hysteria was not only heightened by the hospital’s numerous female sufferers (since despite the idea that it could also affect males, hysteria was still perceived as primarily a female condition), but also by two circumstances that offered additional suggestions about hysteria’s symptoms and treatment. In 1870 Charcot took over a ward in Salpêtrière that contained both epileptics and hysterics. Charcot soon noticed that the hysterics started to manifest epileptic fits, a circumstance that increased his interest in the mechanisms of hysteria. The other was the re-emergence of Mesmeric techniques, re-named “hypnosis” by James Braid in 1843, as a mode of treatment. (Scull: 112). Charcot took up Braid’s notion of hypnosis as a way of altering “cerebral circulation,” but without Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” that Braid had rejected. Hypnosis seemed appropriate as a treatment for hysteria in so far as contemporary opinion held that hypnosis only worked on vulnerable individuals—the same vulnerable patients as those who suffered from hysteria. Following Briquet, Charcot redefined hysteria as a neurological disorder, though evidence of any anatomical variants in the brain was missing from autopsies of hysterical patients. Persisting in his exploration of hysteria as physiologically-based, Charcot also envisioned hysteria’s etiology as damage in the same regions of the brain that produced similar symptoms in other physiologicallybased neurological disorders. Charcot also believed that hysteria was a hereditary condition whose symptoms might be exacerbated by various interpersonal and social pressures. Observing the tendency of hysterical patients to take on the symptoms of others in their environment, Charcot also tried to discern the difference between hysterical and simulated symptoms in hysterics (Goetz: 11–23). Charcot’s interest in hysteria inspired a study of its symptoms, which also resulted in Charcot’s mapping of hysteria’s “stages,” each of which “succeeded each other in the complete attack with mechanical regularity” (Scull: 115, quoting Charcot, Lectures). Systematizing hysteria’s preEnlightenment variety, Charcot transformed conceptions of hysteria from its extant range of causes (wandering uterus, sexual desire and repression, the invasion of malevolent spirits and evil, infelicitous mind/body relations, blockage in the fluidity of life processes) to a neurological condition manifesting a certain predictable regularity. According to Charcot, hysteria’s first stage, the “epileptoide period” was characterized by fits. The second stage, that of “contortions and grands mouvements,” also included cries, shouting, bodily contortions and for female sufferers, “attitudes passionelles” in which patients might imitate the crucifixion, for example, or sexual ecstasy. The final stage was characterized by “hallucinations or delusions.” (Scull: 115). Following Braid’s theories, Charcot began treatments of hysterical patients using hypnosis, often in public forums that emphasized the dramatic character of the procedures which apparently cured the patients of their symptoms. Often displaying hysterical patients in large assemblages of male physicians, Charcot essentially transformed the patients’ symptoms into staged dramas that artists captured, drawing the symptomatic bodies as they manifested various modes of rigidity, collapse,

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paralysis, fits, contortions, and imitations of various emblematic postures. As Sander Gilman observes, the drawings themselves became models for hysterics’ posturings, a symptom that made visibly apparent the ways representations (or “art”) served as the source for “knowing the world” while also demonstrating hysterics’ imitative capacity (Gilman: 346). The hysterical patients imitated the representations of hysterics as well as other poses, which was itself a symptom despite what appeared to be a species of imitation or faking. As Charcot noted: You will meet with [simulation] at every step in the history of hysteria, and one finds himself sometimes admiring the amazing craft, sagacity, and perseverance which women, under the influence of this great neurosis, will put in play for the purposes of deception—especially when the physician is to be the victim. . . . It is incontestable that, in a multitude of cases, they have taken pleasure in distorting, by exaggerations, the principal circumstances of their disorder, in order to make them appear extraordinary and wonderful’. — Gilman: 352

CHARCOT’S ASSISTANTS During his tenure as head of Salpêtrière, Charcot worked with many assistants, including Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, both of whom also developed new theories of the etiology of hysteria. Janet and Freud rejected notions that hysterical symptoms were an effect of subjects responding to elements of the social environment (sexual, cultural, religious) by repressing or redirecting their responses to such limitations. Instead, they hypothesized that hysteria was the effect of a “dissociation” between a subject’s “subconscious” and conscious processes in which the two parts of a subject’s psyche were unknown to one another. Janet developed the theory that past events in a patient’s life produced mental disease, caused by failures “of the personal synthesis,” so that hysterical symptoms were responses to previous events lingering in the patient’s psyche, but unavailable (unintegrated) into “the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality” (LeBlanc: 332). Using hypnosis for the treatment of hysteria, Janet gave his hysterical patients suggestions for post-hypnotic behavior, which they obeyed. This tendency led Janet to hypothesize a process whereby a second consciousness, whose perceptions were unconnected or “dissociated” from the first, worked outside of the first. Janet’s notion of “dissociation,” then, offered a psychological theory for hysterical symptoms as the emergence of responses to dissociated past events not available to a patient’s conscious memory, but expressed via hysterical symptoms. Dissociation represented a process that differed from repression, but whose effects were similar, ensuing from the functioning of a more organized, purely psychological mechanism. In his 1889 study, Automatisme psychologique, Janet defined the psychic region inhabited by dissociated material as the “subconscious.” The subconscious was a weaker, less assertive mental state prone to what Janet called “automatism,” defined as a return to early, primal processes or to the realm of fixed ideas as opposed to more conscious processes of memory, judgment, and reasoning. Although Janet understood the subconscious and conscious as participating in the same thought processes, he saw hysteria’s symptoms as the effects of the automatonic subconscious gaining influence. This also meant that for Janet, hysteria was not necessarily produced by sexual desires or repression, but could be the emergence of a number of subconscious traumas and fixed ideas.

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Because Janet understood hysteria as the symptoms of unconscious material manifesting itself, his mode of treating hysterical patients was highly interpersonal, “magnetic,” depending in part upon an understanding between therapist and patient (Bühler and Heim: 74–91). He adopted an interpersonal approach to his patients, offering them a process through which they might reintegrate and deal with past trauma. He envisioned the treatment in three stages: 1) addressing and reducing symptoms and rejuvenating the patient’s self-integration; 2) addressing the hysteric’s subconscious traumatic memories via resolution; and 3) working on developing the hysteric’s personality. (Van der Hart and Dorahy, no date). The psychological approaches developed at Salpêtrière shifted understandings of hysteria from a body/mind/invasion/vulnerable subject model or even a neurological disease based on an anatomical disorder to a matter of purely psychological malfunction. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, this also again broadened the diagnosis of hysteria to both sexes. Charcot opened a section of Salpêtrière for male sufferers; and through the end of the nineteenth century, experts estimated the relative incidence of male hysteria to be anything from 1 in 20 to 1/3 to 1/2. Nonetheless, despite the rejection of hysteria’s literal uterine etiologies, divergent ideas about the relative vulnerability of the sexes continued the association of hysteria with females.

STUDIES IN HYSTERIA Another of Charcot’s students was Sigmund Freud who studied with Charcot at Salpêtrière in 1885–86. Examining the hypotheses developed by Charcot, Janet and others, including the role of trauma, processes of dissociation, and the emergence of subconscious material, Freud continued to develop methods of treating hysteria that focused on communication and rapport with patients, a process that generated the psychoanalytic notion of transference and was central to the emergence of psychotherapy. (Bogousslavsky and Dieguez: 109–125). Like Charcot, Freud continued to deploy hypnosis as a way to get patients to re-call and render conscious previously subconscious traumatic material. However, some patients resisted hypnosis and hypnosis itself occasionally introduced material from outside that potentially replaced instead of pinpointing the sources of trauma. Although hypnosis might have allayed fear and caused symptoms to abate, it did not necessarily get to the root of the problem. Freud, thus, determined that hypnosis was “senseless and worthless.” (Gay: 71). When Freud returned to Austria from Paris, Josef Breuer, whose work in the 1880s with hysterical patient Anna O. interested Freud, became Freud’s mentor. Breuer, a much older colleague, had established a successful practice treating patients with hysteria and began referring prospective sufferers to Freud for treatment. Breuer’s method with Anna O. had been to engage with her in regular meetings in which he encouraged her to discuss her symptoms, urging her to discern and discuss traumatic past events. He found that in so doing, the symptoms themselves disappeared. Anna O herself called the process, “the talking cure” (Scull: 135). In this new context Freud gradually abandoned hypnosis as a method of treating hysteria to focus on enabling patients to work through their traumas by fostering free association and carefully observing patients’ responses to touch and other stimuli. Seeing the success of free association, Freud championed Breuer’s “talking cure,” particularly what patients might reveal to themselves when describing dreams, which, Freud believed, were themselves ways of communicating unconscious material. Freud, as Peter Gay describes it, “made learning from his patients a kind of program.” (69) “Listening” Gay

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continues, “became, for Freud, more than an art; it became a method, a privileged road to knowledge that his patients mapped out for him” (69, 70). Freud’s hysterical patients continued to be female, assailed by what Freud denominated a “conversion” disorder in which such symptoms as convulsions, tics, tremors, impaired vision, speech disorders, weakness and paralysis that have no discernable organic basis suddenly appear as a response to psychological trauma. In the case of Fräulein Elisabeth von R., for example, who came to Freud with leg pain and problems walking, Freud first concluded that the source of her symptom was sexual by observing her pleasurable response to Freud’s pressing her thighs. But talking with her offered Freud greater insight—a procedure Freud noted, “we liked to compare to the technique of excavating a buried city” (Gay: 71). When his patient declined to tell Freud what she was thinking or feeling, Freud pushed her to respond, identifying another mechanism— resistance—at work in the patient. (Gay: 71). Freud also learned in his work with her that a cure was not instantaneous, but required much longer processing. And even if (or when) Freud was able to discern what underlying traumas or feelings might be causing her symptoms, she rejected his theories—though the difficulties in her legs had disappeared. In the 1890s, Freud, having abandoned hypnosis as a treatment in favor of the cathartic benefits of the talking cure, invited Breuer to collaborate on a collection of cases of hysteria and the success of intense psychotherapy. Breuer and Freud produced a casebook, Studies on Hysteria, that describes the mechanisms of hysteria, offers five case studies (all of females, including Fräulein Elisabeth von R), delineates Breuer’s and Freud’s theory of hysteria and the “talking cure,” and establishes a treatment protocol authored by Freud. Beginning with Janet’s understanding of hysteria as reflecting a previous trauma, Breuer and Freud list the “symptoms” they had “been able to trace back to precipitating factors . . . which include neuralgias and anaethesias of various kinds . . . contractures and paralyses, hysterical attacks and epileptoid convulsions . . . petit mal and disorders in the nature of tic, chronic vomiting and anorexia, . . . various forms of disturbances of vision, constantly recurring visual hallucinations” (4). They also stress the longevity of these symptoms, noting as well how often there is a fairly “clear” connection between hysteria’s “precipitating event” and the symptom (4). However, as they also observe, sometimes the connection between symptom and underlying cause “is not so simple” (5). Likening hysteria to “traumatic neuroses,” Breuer and Freud suggest that, analogous to traumatic neuroses, hysteria is a response to the “distressing effects” such as “fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain” experienced as an effect of trauma (6). However, they also point out, the trauma is finally not the causal agent of hysterical responses; instead the “memory of the trauma acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work . . .” (6). As they conclude, “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (7). Because the traumatic events that underlie hysteria are “completely absent from the patients’ memory when they are in a normal psychical state, or are only present in a highly summary form” (9), hysteria emerges from the memories of traumas that the hysteric has not “abreacted” (10). These unprocessed ideas “have become pathological” and the extent of the hysteric’s “energetic reaction to the event that provokes an affect” (8) occurs because the pathological ideas “have been denied the normal wearing-away processes by means of abreaction and reproduction in states of uninhibited association” (11). Re-conceiving the psychological condition of hysterical patients in this way motivated Freud to adopt new methods of treatment that ultimately came to ground psychoanalysis itself, an insight Freud and Breuer term “an important practical issue.” (6). In so far as “each individual symptom

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immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words” (6), it becomes more evident that getting hysterical patients to re-find and process traumatic events by talking with an analyst is the most effective means of enabling patients to re-connect what had been longstanding dissociations. No longer dissociated, the underlying responses to trauma no longer exerted any power over the patient.

THE “DORA CASE”: HYSTERIA AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Starting with the notion of the “wandering womb,” and gathering other somatic and dispositional causes derived from assumptions about the female body, hysteria never shed its association with both females and femininity. As Elaine Showalter summarizes it, “Doctors have tended to favor arguments from biology that link hysteria with femaleness . . .” (286). In her study, Showalter then features conclusions from three other commentators, first, quoting Paul Chodoff: “Women are prone to hysteria because of something fundamental in their nature, something innate, fixed or given that obviously requires interaction with environmental forces to become manifest but is still a primary and irremediable fate for the human female;” she then offers a comment French physician Auguste Fabre made in 1883: “As a general rule all women are hysterical and . . . every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria. Hysteria, before being an illness, is a temperament, and what constitutes the temperament of a woman is rudimentary hysteria,” and finally, she includes Mark Micale’s statement that “The hysterical seizure, grande hystérie, was regarded as an acting out of female sexual experience, a ‘spasm of hyper-femininity, mimicking . . . both childbirth and the female orgasm’ ” (320). Showalter’s 1993 reconsideration of the links between hysteria and females arrives at the end of a feminist reaction to such associations centered on Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), (SE 7: 1–122), his case study of his “hysterical” patient, Ida Bauer, known as the “Dora Case.” The Dora Case manifested many of the inequities of patriarchal and/or phallocentric assumptions about sexual difference as these played out in psychoanalytic studies of (primarily) female analysands diagnosed as hysterical. In the mid-1980s, the Dora Case emerged as an exemplary text for feminist discussion, condemnation, and active attempts to analyze the implicit sexisms of patriarchal culture. Dora’s symptoms included a loss of voice, a lack of sociality, depression, and a repressed desire for family friend, Herr K, which Freud first identified as the source of her hysteria. The case study exhibits Freud’s employment of the “talking cure,” as his method with Dora was to have her relate her experiences and dreams. As the patient’s discourse reveals repressed material and, in talking about it, brings it fully into the open, the unrepression, as Breuer and Freud had theorized earlier, removes the hysterical symptoms. Because this process occurs in an environment of trust in which the analysand depends on the analyst, the “talking cure” enlists both analysand and analyst in an exchange in which the analysand transfers feelings onto the analyst—and vice versa. In his analysis of Dora, Freud reveals that he himself became caught up via counter-transference with Dora, ultimately misreading her desires through his own. In his “Postscript” to the case study, Freud comments that he made several mistakes in perceiving his patient’s transferences as well as his own, including his first conclusion that she had transferred her feelings onto him, then that these were invested in Herr K., then finally, Freud confesses that “I

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failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life” (SE 7: 120). The rise of feminist interest in psychoanalysis in the 1970s and 1980s, piqued in part by the emergence of the work of psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, and the commentaries of such French feminist critics as Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clément, and Hélène Cixous, provided a new context within which to analyze and critique the phallocentrism of culture and its effects on women. In this context, the “Dora Case” was an exemplary instance of the irrational sexual dispositions of patriarchal culture that had resulted in women’s repressed desires, frustrations, and inhibitions that grounded hysteria as a traditionally “female” illness. For feminist critics of the 1980s, psychoanalysis— and specifically hysteria—became both the symptom and a means to expose and work through the unfounded fictions that supported the persistent myth and inequities of sexual difference. The “Dora Case” example of a psychoanalytic treatment of hysteria, thus, stimulated both feminist critique and deployment of psychoanalytic concepts as a way to challenge the oppressions of sexual difference in life and in thought. Lacan’s interpretations of Freud’s work offered a new set of concepts that revealed the cultural as well as the psychological status of sexual difference; and the work of Freud and Lacan became another way feminist critics and theorists approached questions of sexual disparity. One central example of this is the collection of feminist critical essays on the Dora Case, In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (Bernheimer and Kahane: 1985), which explored both the presumptions of Freud’s psychoanalytic practice and the psychological responses to the issues produced by sexual difference, its cultural manifestations, and their persistent displacement onto women. Hysteria, thus, became the ideal representative of a long history of a system of sexual disparity displaced onto females.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernheimer, Charles and Claire Kahane, eds. In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, Columbia UP. 1985. Briquet, Paul. Traité clinique et Thérapeutique de L’Hystérie. Paris: J.-B Baillière et Fils, 1859. Bogousslavsky, Julien and Sebastien Dieguez, “Sigmund Freud and Hysteria: The Etiology of Psychoanalysis?” Front Neural Neuroscience 2014, 109–125, at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/25273494/ Bühler, Karl-Ernst and Gerhard Heim, “General Introduction to the Psychotherapy of Pierre Janet,” The American Journal of Psychotherapy 2001, 74–91. Chodoff, Paul, “Hysteria and Women,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1982, 546. Cosmacini, Giorgio. The Long Art: The History of Medicine From Antiquity to the Present. Oxford UP. 1997. Duby, Georges, Arlette Farge, Michelle Perrot. History of Women in the West from the Renaissance to Modern, Vol. 3, Harvard UP. 1992. Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Basic Books, 1970. Fabre, A. L’hystérie viscérale — nouveaux fragments de clinique médicale. A. Delahaye & E. Lecrosnier, 1883. Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. Norton, 1998. Gilman, Sander, “The Image of the Hysteric,” Hysteria Beyond Freud, Edited by Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalter, California UP, 1993, 345–436, https://publishing. cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/viewdocId=ft0p3003d3;brand=ucpress%20(9) Goetz, C.G., “Charcot, Hysteria, and simulated Disorders,” Handbook of Clinical Neurology, 2016: 1–23, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B978012801772200002 Janet, Pierre. Automatisme psychologique, Essay de psychologie experimentale sur les formesinferieures de l’activite humaine. Felix Alcan, Reprint: Societe Pierre Janet/Payot, 1973.

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King, Helen, 1993, “Once Upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates,” Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalter. California UP, 1993, https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/viewdocId=ft0p3003d3;brand=ucpress%20(9): 3–90. Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum, Translated by Montague Summers. Cosimo Classics, 2007. LeBlanc, André, “The Origins of the Concept of Dissociation: Paul Janet, His Nephew Pierre, and the Problem of Post-Hypnotic Suggestion,” History of Science 2001: 57–69, http://legacy.adsabs.harvard.edu/ full/2001HisSc...39...57L Mai, F.M and H. Mersey, “Briquet’s concept of hysteria: an historical perspective,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry February 1981, 26:1, 57–63. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7008930/ accessed September 14, 2022. Micale, Mike S. Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Harvard UP, 2009. Micale, Mike, “Hysteria and Its Historiography: A Review of Past and Present Writings, II,” History of Science 1989: 320. Mitchinson, W., “Hysteria and Insanity in Women—A Nineteenth-Century Perspective,” Journal of Canadian Studies 1986: 87–105. Rousseau, G.S., “A Strange Pathology: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800,” Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalter, California UP. 1993: 91–196, https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0p3003d3;brand=ucpre ss%20(9) Scull, Andrew. Hysteria: The Disturbing History. Oxford UP, 2009. Sigerest, Henry. A History of Medicine. Oxford UP, 1961. Shorter, E., “Paralysis—The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom,” Journal of Social History 1986, 549–582. Showalter, Elaine, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender,” Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalter, U of California P. 1993: 286–335, https:// publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0p3003d3;brand=ucpress%20(9) Slater, E., “Diagnosis of ‘Hysteria,’ ” British Medical Journal 1965: 1395–1399. Tasca, Cecilia, Mariangela Rapetti, Mauro Giovanni Carta, and Bianca Fadda, “Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health,” Clinical Practice, Epidemiology in Mental Health 2012, 110–119, https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480686/ Van der Hart, Onno and Martin Dorahy, “Pierre Janet: The Pioneer on Trauma and Dissociation,” no date, History of Trauma and Dissociation, https://www.estd.org/history-trauma-and-dissociation Wright, J., “Hysteria and Mechanical Man,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1980: 233–247.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Strangers to the Aesthetic Psychoanalysis in the Work of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva MALTE FABIAN RAUCH

In contemporary theory, the notion of alterity has come to designate that which refuses comprehension, resists assimilation, escapes integration and evades possession. It names an irreducible difference within any economy of the same. Since the theorization of otherness always already occurs within an established system of signification, it appears to be self-defeating. This aporetic ambition can be characterized through the concept—coined by Georges Bataille—of a heterology: a science of what is wholly other. Arguably, psychoanalysis may also be understood as an aporetic knowledge of knowledge’s other, since the emergence of the discipline is characterizable as the acknowledgment of an alterity within the psyche that contradicts the supposed ideality of reason and undermines the notion of a self-present subjectivity. And yet, in Sigmund Freud’s work, this theorization takes, of course, the form of a “science of the unconscious,” an ambivalence that led Jacques Derrida to insist that Freud’s discourse borrows its concept from logocentrism but that its force is not exhausted by belonging to them (Derrida 2001a: 248). The analyst Adam Philipps frames this ambivalence in the founding texts of the discipline as the division between the “Enlightenment Freud,” beholden to the project of self-knowledge and the ideal of wholeness, and the “post-Freudian Freud,” who questions the very idea of the unconscious as an object of knowledge and mastery. The latter discovers the notion of an “other unconscious,” unamenable to scientific explanation, which marks “both the limits of what we can know and the areas of our lives in which knowing [. . .] may be inappropriate” (Phillips 1995: 17). This otherness invites a practice of psychoanalysis, Phillips suggests, aimed at becoming “a stranger to oneself ” (Phillips 1995: 16). The work of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva offer two of the most exigent explorations—with and against psychoanalysis—of the various forms of becoming strangeness to oneself. Their readings are interlinked, as Kristeva further develops some of Bataille’s key conceptualizations of alterity. And in both works, the theorization of different forms of alterity raises important questions about the place of art and gender in culture, especially insofar as both Bataille and Kristeva maintain a privileged relation of femininity and alterity that elicits critical scrutiny. Despite these interconnections, however, both authors have a different recourse to the discourse of psychoanalysis. While Bataille’s relation to psychoanalysis can only be reconstructed from indirect hints and references that are scattered throughout his writings, Kristeva, who is a practicing analyst in France, has developed a rich dialogue with Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s work 309

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over the course of several decades. In light of this asymmetry, the aim of this essay is not to give an exhaustive account of Bataille’s and Kristeva’s engagement with psychoanalysis. Rather, it attempts to focus on their attempt to theorize radical alterity, aesthetics and gender in close proximity to the discourse of psychoanalysis, focusing in particular on the concepts of heterogeneity, negativity, the semiotic and the abject.

GEORGES BATAILLE’S HETEROLOGY Freud’s name occurs rarely in Bataille’s writings. And yet, his yearlong analysis, which the 28-yearold Bataille underwent in 1925, undoubtedly had a crucial influence on his life and work. According to a note by Bataille himself, it was the “virulently obsessive character of his writing” that troubled one of his friends, Dr. Dausse, who had him “undergo psychoanalysis with Dr Borel” (Bataille 1997: 114). In Bataille’s case, the psychoanalytic cure didn’t take the form of a normalization, but of a disinhibition, which, in turn, became the very condition of possibility for a certain style of writing. As Bataille remarks in a late interview, it was only through the liberation brought about by analysis that he felt “able to write” (Bataille 1998: 221) at all. Hence Bataille’s first encounter with psychoanalysis was not a theoretical, but a decidedly practical one. In the aforementioned autobiographical fragment, he summarizes the effect of the analysis in this vein, noting that “it put an end to the series of dreary mishaps and failures in which he had been floundering, but not to the state of intellectual intensity, which still persists” (Bataille 1997: 114). Paradoxically, however, it was precisely not the personal aspect of psychoanalysis that would subsequently prove vital for Bataille’s thought, but the theorization of the collective psyche, as evinced by the fact that Bataille’s rare subsequent references to Freud mostly concern his theories of society and religion. Given the eclectic range of Bataille’s theoretical writings, it may be argued that psychoanalysis is one important, but by no means privileged discourse that Bataille uses to articulate his thought. However, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, psychoanalysis did—no matter how scarce the explicit references are—play a privileged role in Bataille’s theorization of alterity and negativity, which he variously described in terms of “base materialism,” the “heterogenous,” the “sacred,” the “abject” and the site of “expenditure.” What these concepts tried to adumbrate from different angles is a domain that can, as Bataille explains, in comparison “to everyday life” only be “represented as something other, as incommensurate” (Bataille 1985b: 143). This radical alterity arguably constitutes the essential matter of Bataille’s thought. Borrowing a definition of the sacred as “what is completely other,” Bataille characterizes his theorization of this domain during the 1930s with the aforementioned term “heterology” (Bataille 1985e: 102 n2), a paradoxical science of all that culture excludes, rejects and exiles. This alterity, Bataille points out, bears a resemblance to the unconscious and the mechanism of repression. And yet, as a memo from the dossier on heterology indicates, he found the heterogeneous to be missing in Freud’s work (Bataille 1970: 170). Hence Bataille recognizes psychoanalysis as a potential—yet somehow insufficient—ally for “mapping” the heterogenous underside of culture. Throughout Bataille’s theoretical trajectory, but perhaps especially at the beginning of his career, the encounter with art was crucial for the development of his signature concepts. In the short, yet extraordinarily dense essays that Bataille wrote for the avant-garde journal Documents, which he co-founded and edited between 1929 and 1930, art appears as one of the possible sites where what he would later call the heterogeneous might manifest itself. In the post-cubist paintings of Pablo

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Picasso, in the works of Jean Miró, in pre-historic painting and children’s drawings, Bataille recognizes instances of an “intransigent materialism, of a recourse to everything that compromises the powers that be in matters of form” (Bataille 1985c: 51). The art that interests Bataille is art at limit of the aesthetic. Deidealized, dehumanized, declassified, it circumscribes an aesthetic negativity that Bataille prominently theorizes with the privative notion of the informe, “the formless.” Another privative term in Documents that has received much less attention is Bataille’s notion of “decomposition,” understood in the dual sense of disorder and decay, the latter referring to the rotting corpse as a marker for what culture must repress in order to constitute itself. Thus, in his contributions to Documents, Bataille champions “decomposed” artworks alongside a variety of phenomena that are usually coded as repellent: death and decay, corpses, slaughter houses, blood, fecal matter, filth, and sacrificial violence. And while he does not yet use the vocabulary of heterogeneity, Bataille here already advocates a “base materialism” that refers to what is “external and foreign to the ideal human aspirations,” a decidedly materialist understanding of alterity that “refuses to be reduced to the great ontological machines” (Bataille 1985c: 51). Psychologically, Bataille notes explicitly, this implies an ambition of “disconcerting the human spirit and idealism before something base” (Bataille 1985c: 51). Specifically in these early texts, Bataille also performatively instantiates such a base materialism in his writing through a fragmentary form, a provocative tone and inverted metaphors—leading to a language that, as Foucault puts it, “only arises in transgressing the one who speaks” (Foucault 1977: 44). Although Bataille attempts no systematic confrontation with psychoanalysis in Documents, one can discern to what extent he diverges from some key Freudian assumptions, especially as they pertain to art and subjectivity. Against the understanding of art as a sublimation of raw instincts, which Freud proposes in various passages, Bataille conceives of art as a form of desublimation and as an outburst of destructive drives. At times, his and Freud’s theories of art appear paradigmatically opposed to one another. In Civilization and its Discontents, which was published in 1930, exactly at the time as Bataille’s essays in Documents, for instance, Freud describes the joyful satisfaction of artistic creation in these terms: “[S]uch satisfaction seem ‘finer and higher.’ But their intensity is mild as compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; it does not convulse our physical being” (SE 21: 79–80). By contrast, Bataille particularly foregrounds art’s convulsive potential and its ability to counter-act the sublimation of ‘crude’ impulses. Art, he writes, is a process of “alteration,” of letting otherness erupt within the economy of the same, of effecting “successive destructions.” And to the extent that such an art “liberates libidinal instincts, these instincts are sadistic” (Bataille 2009: 41). Moreover, while Freud integrates his view of art as “substitutive satisfaction” (SE 21: 75) into a normative account of psychic development, Bataille explicitly departs from the idea of substitutive satisfaction, calling instead for an artistic expression of “what would remain if all types of transpositions were suppressed” (Bataille 2006: 242). Crucially, the experience of such art practices, stripped of all transpositions, would not yield a consolidation of the subject through aesthetic contemplation. Rather, these practices let the subject lose itself through the sensible, letting it get decentered, dispersed and decomposed. This opposition to sublimation also informs Bataille’s critique of Surrealism in the late 1920s and 1930s, which directly pertains to his relation to psychoanalysis. Under the leadership of André Breton, the Surrealists advocated a liberation of the forces that Freud’s work on the unconsciousness had discovered. Surrealism, Breton asserts, is based on the “belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play

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of thought” (Breton 1969: 26), which should become accessible through automatic writing, dreamimages, and other aleatory practices. The impasse Bataille detects in the Surrealist approach is that this supposed ignition of the unconscious tends to idealize what it addresses, effectively assimilating the other to the same. Instead of disrupting systems of signification through heterogenous elements, Surrealist art, Bataille argues, actually re-integrates these elements into established systems of signification, a tendency he sees evinced by the telling emphasis put on the French prefix “sur,” indicating what is more elevated, more refined, more “poetic” than reality. As Bataille notes: “[S]ince surrealism is immediately distinguishable by the addition of low values (the unconscious, sexuality, filthy language, etc.), it invests these values with an elevated character by associating them with the most immaterial values” (Bataille 1985d: 39). This investment is counteracted, in Bataille, by an attempt to excavate the “the fetid ditch of bourgeois culture” (Bataille 1985d: 43). And yet, there is, especially towards the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, a skepticism on Bataille’s part whether art can be the medium for the excavation of this alterity. In the aforementioned critique of transposition, he complains that the reception of art all too often takes the form of seeking “wellpresented remedies for accepted sicknesses” (Bataille 2006: 242). Thus, in Bataille’s confrontation with Surrealism, one of the central problems for his approach comes to the fore: Can there be an art and aesthetics of radical alterity? Or does art necessarily re-appropriate the forms of alterity that obsessed Bataille? As the political turmoil of the 1930s escalated, Bataille’s interest drifted increasingly away from art and precipitated research in sociology, politics, and anthropology. His engagement with psychoanalysis seems to have been most intense during this time. And while Bataille’s and Freud’s theories of art seem opposed to one another in regard to sublimation, there is a greater similarity in their respective theorizations of the domain of the culturally repressed. But even though Bataille acknowledges that the unconscious and the heterogenous have properties in common, to the extent that both seek to demarcate a domain that defies established categories, he nonetheless insists that the “unconscious must be considered as one of the aspects of the heterogeneous” (Bataille 1985b: 14). With this move, Bataille seeks to utilize the Freudian insights into the alterity of the unconscious while circumventing the scientistic elements in his explanatory framework. Significantly, it is in the context of this period Bataille also introduces the concept of abjection to conceptualize the cultural experience of otherness. Abjection—as well as its affective correlate, disgust—is conceived by Bataille as the result of a play of attraction and repulsion, exclusion and intrusion, taboo and transgression. Contrary to a widespread misreading, Bataille does not seek to essentialize these phenomena; rather, he is interested in the social and psychic mechanisms that charge these phenomena with a specific intensity. Abjection is a relational, not a substantive category; it is a force, not a state. And Bataille is at pains to stress that there is an “intimate connection between repulsion, disgust, and what psychoanalysis calls repression” (Bataille 1988: 120). In fact, there are strong parallels between Bataille’s approach and Totem and Taboo, especially the discussion of the emotional ambivalence of prohibitive taboo, which, Freud notes, “owes its strength and its obsessive character precisely to its unconscious opponent, the concealed and undiminished desire [. . .]” (SE 13: 30). Like Bataille, Freud refers to the taboo upon the dead (SE 13: 50). For both authors, what is prohibited by a taboo or perceived as abject through a cultural code, is something that is repellent, but at the same time desired with a dark attraction. For Freud, the taboo upon the dead was the expressive of an ambivalent emotional attitude, which arises “from the contrast between conscious pain and

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unconscious satisfaction over the death that has occurred” (SE 13: 61). By contrast, while Bataille at times seems prone to adopt functional explanations of this dialectic, he also advocates, in contradiction to Freud, a politics in the service of this alterity, which maintains a solidarity between the abjected classes and other heterogenous phenomena. In the midst of the political crisis of the 1930s, Bataille calls for a “revolutionary outburst” (1985d: 35) of society’s outcasts that would liberate the forces of alterity against the rise of fascism.

DEATH AND FEMININITY IN BATAILLE During his work in the 1930s, Bataille links his interest in the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and excretion with a noteworthy emphasis on death (Bataille 1985a: 122). In many ways, death appears as the vanishing point not only of Bataille’s early work, but of his theorization of alterity in his major post-war works, such as Eroticism and The Accursed Share. Death is truly and wholly other, an irreducible alterity that Bataille identified early on both as the primal scene of repression and what attracts humans with irresistible force (Bataille 1985a: 119). It is the cipher of what “cannot be assimilated, cannot be incorporated into the coherent and clear world” (Bataille 1993: 216). As his work developed, Bataille came to unfold his affirmative approach to the alterity of death through the concepts of “general economy” and “sovereignty.” With reference to these concepts one might understand why the heterogeneous is, according to Bataille, “missing” in Freud, and why the unconscious is just one element in a more general theory of the heterogenous. If Freud seeks to account for the negativity of death and destruction in Beyond the Pleasure Principle by introducing an “ ‘economic’ point of view” (SE 18: 7), which ultimately frames the death drive as the “instinctual impulse” to “return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (SE 18: 62), then Bataille might be said to transform such an approach by radicalizing loss, death and expenditure as the anarchic principle of a generalized economy. The qualification “general” designates an economy that is not based on the restrictive imperatives of productivity, systematicity or functionality. Rather, it discloses the necessity of non-finality in every system and framework as it refers, as Jacques Derrida puts it, “not to the telos of meaning, but to the indefinite destruction” (Derrida 2001b: 343). Similarly, Bataille’s sovereignty designates the opposite of what the concept usually stands for, i.e., mastery, authority and self-determination. By contrast, in Bataille, sovereignty describe the desire for self-loss, the suspension of the laws of productivity, and, most importantly, the refusal of the fear of death (Bataille 1993: 222). Not the mastery of the self, but the transgression and the desire to lose oneself is what Bataille envisages as a “sovereign” mode of subjectivity. Thus, in various texts, Bataille describes this propensity for selfdispossession, risk and expenditure through the figure of the “acephal,” a term that Jacques Lacan will pick up on in a decisive passage as he links this figure of a “headless subject” (S11: 181) to his anti-biologist reworking of Freud’s notion of the drive. Arguably, however, it is precisely with regard to the theme of death that one of the most problematic aspects of this theory comes to the fore. In brief, Bataille sutures the alterity of death to the alterity of the erotic, arguing that what we encounter in both realms “is foreign to the received order of things” (Bataille 1989b: 32). The very meaning of eroticism, Bataille asserts, consists, in “assenting to life up to the point of death” (Bataille 1986: 11), since life here exceeds the teleology of reproduction to open itself to a non-finality that Batailles associates with that of death. Yet, Bataille articulates the convergence between these two realms of alterity in a highly

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problematic fashion, as he stubbornly associates the feminine with death, whereas he casts the masculine as the agent that brings this act about, if “only” figuratively. In contradistinction to the deconstructive tendencies in his writings, these strata of Bataille’s text clearly fall back on an essentialized and binary notion of sexual difference, a vulgar form of heterosexism and outright misogyny. His critique of the subject notwithstanding, Bataille relegates women to the “passive, female side,” whereas he endows the “male partner” with agency, to the extent that he is framed as the one who enacts the “dissolution of the passive partner” and thus supposedly achieves a state of fusion beyond self-possession (Bataille 1986: 17). This corresponds precisely to what Judith Butler (1991: xiii) terms the “sexist” view of gender, according to which “a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure (an essence emanates and is confirmed in the sexualized subordination of women).” In strict accordance with this sexist view of gender, Bataille also figures “woman” as the site where death and sex converge: “The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being.” (Bataille 1986: 90) Violence, the destruction of the woman’s agency, modeled on sacrificial victimhood, is here affirmed as the essence of eroticism and celebrated as the act of a sovereignty that is clearly coded as masculine. In all earnest, Bataille asserts that many “women cannot reach their climax without pretending to themselves that they are being raped” (Bataille 1986: 107). The same theoretical violence drives Bataille’s literally objectifying description of the prostitute as an “infinitely available object” (Bataille 1993: 143) and as the “figure of death under the mask of life” (Bataille 1993: 142). Rather grotesquely, Bataille dubs this objectification the “perfection of femininity” (Bataille 1993: 146). And despite the fact that Bataille construes prostitutes as “beings destroyed as ends for themselves” (Bataille 1993: 143), it is all too obvious that these supposed “ends for themselves” are actually means to an end, namely the man, on whose point of view this entire theoretical account remains predicated. Throughout, Bataille’s theory of eroticism assumes the legitimacy of violence done to female bodies and a complete disregard for their agency. In this perspective, sovereignty readily betrays its violently gendered signature. For the alleged dispossession of self-hood in erotic sovereignty remains premised on the “possession of a woman” (Bataille 1997: 436 n10) and Bataille does not even seem to consider a reversal of this gender hierarchy or an alternative to the essentialist understanding of sexual difference in which it is grounded. Hence the refusal of self-mastery, which Bataille generally affirms as sovereignty’s essence, must here be radically called into question. This is for the same reason that Jean-Luc Nancy is certainly right to take Bataille to task for transforming “a very classical manipulation of sexual difference into an appropriation of self by self ” (Nancy 1991a: 24). In sum, women are variously construed by Bataille as having a privileged relation to alterity; but this privilege is of an instrumental kind, being essentially the means through which men exercise their alleged sovereignty (cf. also Hegarty 2000: 66). And while Derrida endorses Bataille’s heterodox notion of sovereignty, other thinkers have forcefully hinted at the theoretical violence inherent in this notion (Nancy 1991b; Agamben 2020). On the face of it, it is hard to resist the impression that Bataille’s erotic fiction aligns itself with this misogynist determination of alterity. Thematically, the link is apparent, as Bataille’s novels and stories obsessively describe the entanglement of sex, desire and death. In Madame Edwarda, for

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instance, the eponymous character stands for prostitution, death and otherness. Edwarda is designated as “something alien” (Bataille 1989a: 152), indeed as “some foreign existence, the creature apparently of another world” (Bataille 1989a: 153). The male narrator of the story “chooses” Edwarda in a brothel, and when she presents him her genitals, which she designates as “rags,” she declares “ ‘I’m GOD’ ” (Bataille 1989a: 150), leading the nameless narrator to an ambivalent experience of excitement and repulsion. Here, exposure to the vagina results in an experience of alterity that seems to recall the fear of castration. Similarly, in The Story of the Eye, Bataille presents a narrative of extreme debauchery that obsessively circles around the exchange of fluids, round objects and organs. Simone, the main protagonist, inserts the eye of two different men into her vagina, bites into the balls of a bull, and orgasms while bleeding from her nose. What is the contemporary readability of such exceedingly graphic texts? Several feminist theorists, Andrea Dworkin foremost among them, challenge Bataille’s fiction for its perpetuation of misogyny. Reading Story of the Eye, Dworkin attacks Bataille, arguing that he exemplifies a general trend in the Western culture, according to which “force leading to death is what men most secretly, most deeply, and most truly value in sex” (Dworkin 1989: 176). Other commentators suggest that Bataille’s fiction may also lend itself to different readings. Thus, Paul Hegarty (2000: 66) notes that the female characters in Bataille’s fiction do not comply with the place of “woman” outlined in Bataille’s theoretical writings, inasmuch as they are not portrayed as passive objects but clearly figure as subjects engaged in the practice of sovereign self-loss. And Judith Still (1997: 230) points to the shifting descriptions of female genitals in Bataille’s text to argue that Bataille’s fiction may indeed undo sexual opposition for the benefit of a gender indeterminacy. From yet another, queer theoretical angle, Shannon Winnubst reads The Story of the Eye as a decentering of heteronormative body markers and the exploration of queer desires: “Bizarre acts seem to multiply possibilities endlessly, exceeding the law of desire and its coding of the body” (Winnubst 2007: 89). Cast in this perspective, Bataille’s fiction extends the project of a general economy—with its critique of teleology, functionality and purposefulness—to eroticism, a move that remains foreclosed in his own theoretical writings on the subject. As such, these contemporary feminist and queer theoretical readings may vindicate one of Bataille’s key insights—stated in the preface to Madame Edward— against the letter of his own theoretical text, according to which excess “cannot be philosophically founded, since excess exceeds foundation [. . .]” (Bataille 1989a: 141).

JULIA KRISTEVA: THE STRANGENESS OF THE SEMIOTIC Alterity is, by any account, a central theme in Julia Kristeva’s work. Over the course of several decades, Kristeva developed one of the most demanding engagements with the different forms of cultural and psychic otherness. If this theme is here approached through her reception of Bataille, this is by no means intended as restricting the genesis of this theme in Kristeva’s work to one source or trajectory. Rather, the focus on her reception of Bataille’s theory of heterology is here undertaken for two reasons. First, it offers something like a leading thread for some of the key questions related to the theorization of alterity in psychoanalytic terms. Second, the relation between Bataille and Kristeva is often invoked but rarely analysed in depth (among the notable exception to this tendency are Still 1997: Direk 2015). Kristeva’s first engagement with Bataille took the form of a major essay, presented at the 1967 Cerisy conference on Bataille, which, in turn, arguably marks the beginning of his canonization

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through the Tel Quel group. Written at the beginning of Kristeva’s career, the text is a testament to her reception of structural linguistics, avant-garde literature, dialectical materialism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which she weaves together in a highly original reading of Bataille. The essay’s point of departure is remarkable. Bataille, Kristeva argues, does not only partake in the negation of culture that has been the hallmark of the European avant-gardes. Rather, Bataille rediscovers the affirmative moment in negativity, the movement of a “ ‘yes’ open to negativity” (Kristeva 1995: 239) For Kristeva, this affirmative moment in negativity revolves around Bataille’s interest in what she terms the “thetic” moment, namely the positioning of a subject that is, however, not a unified and stable subject, but a subject that undoes itself, hence a “sovereign” subject in the sense that Bataille has given to this term. This sovereign operation is traced through the experience of literature in Bataille, the specificity of which is characterized as the affirmation “a ‘non-discursive’ experience, but one that assumes discourse and makes use of it” (Kristeva 1995: 241). Thus, in Bataille’s work, Kristeva finds a “discursive affirmation” that is “laid out upon a flux of negativity that exceeds it and that is extra-discursive” (Kristeva 1995: 240), an exteriority linked to the multiplicity of pre-Oedipal drives. Referencing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s recently published critique of psychoanalysis, Kristeva argues that Bataille’s writing disclose a “transOedipus, as opposed to anti-Oedipus” subject (Kristeva 1995: 252). If Oedipus stands for the constitution of the unified subject, which in turn is linked to the linear structure and cohesiveness of classical narrative, then the “trans-Oedipus” subject, as it is put into play in Bataille’s fiction, is only posited in order to lose itself through the outburst of “pre-Oedipal energies” (Kristeva 1995: 250). Differing from Lacan while employing his lexicon, Kristeva argues that this operation returns the subject to “its heterogenous negativity at the same time as its jouissance” (Kristeva 1995: 252). Hence, negativity and alterity are here understood as having a pre-discursive, pre-paternal and hence maternal inscription, and the notion of jouissance corresponding to this negativity is said to be “beyond” Oedipus to the degree that it precedes the authority of the father. As we will see, this dimension is what Kristeva will later conceptualize as the “semiotic” in contradistinction to Lacan’s notion of symbolic, the access to which is mediated by the Name-of-the-Father. Detailing this displacement of the Oedpial dynamic, Kristeva writes that Bataille’s “sovereign operation consists of traversing Oedipus by means of an Oedipus surmounted by Orestes,” presumably a reference to the third part of Bataille’s The Hatred of Poetry (later retitled The Impossible), which takes its title from the mythological figure who commits a matricide (in opposition to Oedipus’s patricide). Poetry, Bataille writes in the respective section, “is not a knowledge of oneself [. . .] but rather the simple evocation through words of inaccessible possibilities” (Bataille 1992: 162). Such a form of poetry is writing turned against itself, against literature, against language, a form of thought that “denounces thought in its very form” (Kristeva 1995: 247). Remarkably, Kristeva insists on the importance of transgressive themes in Bataille’s fiction (eroticism, sacrifice, etc.), since the theme appears here as the “signified (unified representation) which is not one but which contains a semantic multiplicity at the same time that it is supported by a multiplicity of drives for which it is the focal point” (Kristeva 1995: 250). Apart from the insistence on the thematic, the most remarkable feature of Kristeva’s text is how she ties Bataille’s fiction as experience to an aspiration for political action—while remaining silent on Bataille’s own writing on politics. What thus emerges is the practice and experience of writing that can “lift, in whatever society, the repression weighing upon the moment of struggle” (Kristeva 1995: 262).

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In Kristeva’s reading of Bataille, one can discern a desire for a seemingly pre-discursive intensity, a materiality that evades the assimilatory processes of culture and meaning and by that token contains a subversive potential. Writing in the French context of a radical deconstruction of metaphysics, Kristeva has to articulate this demand while taking a firm stance against figures of immediacy and self-presence. In this vein, some of the themes Kristeva addresses in her reading of Bataille are further developed in her PhD thesis, published in 1974 as Revolution in Poetic Language. The Bataillean inspiration is evinced both by Kristeva’s use of the term “heterogenous” and an epigraph from Bataille that testifies to his opposition towards the Oedipal scheme (Kristeva 1986: 165). This book introduces the distinction, crucial for Kristeva’s entire subsequent work, between the symbolic and the semiotic. Based on this distinction, Kristeva develops a general theory of signification from a psychoanalytic theory of subject constitution. This approach is strongly influenced by Lacan, yet Kristeva also departs from the latter framework in significant respects. According to Lacan’s rewriting of the Oedpial complex, the incest taboo, which Freud associates with the actual father, comes to stand for the founding law of the symbolic. It becomes, in brief, the “basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (E: 230). To become a subject, capable of language usage, means, then, to repress one’s libidinal drives, paradigmatically the desire for the mother. Entry into culture is hence predicated on the loss of the maternal body and submission to the Name-of-the-Father. As a result, the Lacanian subject remains a split subject, defined by a lack that the father’s law inscribes in its very being, forever in search of a necessarily absent object. By contrast, Kristeva challenges this model to excavate a dimension of pre-paternal drives that are signifying without yet being part of the symbolic. Drives, she argues, “involve pre-Oedipal semiotic functions and energy discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother” (Kristeva 1986: 27), traces of which remain present in language and subjectivity. Unwilling to accept the absolute priority of the symbolic, yet intent on avoiding any return to figures of self-presence, Kristeva introduces the notion of the semiotic to approach these traces. Developmentally, the semiotic precedes the constitution of the symbolic and discloses an affective, corporeal dimension of signification that is based on the mother-infant relation. It is noteworthy in this regard that Kristeva underlines her monograph on Melanie Klein how important Klein’s shift away from the excessive focus on the father was for the development of psychoanalysis (Kristeva 2004). Similar to the semiotic, the “chora” is a limit concept, which, Kristeva insists, cannot be conceptually or phenomenologically fixed, but only topologically demarcated as “a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic” (Kristeva 1986: 26). The chora precedes the order of objecthood, which is why it can only be thought of as a rhythm, an intensity, an assemblage of affects and needs. Since both the semiotic and the chora are part of the signifying process, they are best understood as pre-symbolic residues in language that persist in the discursive realm that can be re-activated through forms of aesthetic negativity. As Anna Smith notes, the “semiotic, together with the topology of the chora, introduce a feminine alterity, an ambiguously mediated materiality, within language” (Smith 1996: 93). This ambiguity also constitutes their subversive potential: “In ‘artistic’ practices the semiotic—the precondition of the symbolic—is revealed as that which also destroys the symbolic [. . .]” (Kristeva 1986: 50). Hence the revolution in poetic language, described by Kristeva, is the intrusion of the semiotic into the symbolic, the manifestation of the pre-paternal drives in the domain governed by the Name-of-the-Father. The subversive force of literature is,

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accordingly, its ability to open language up to this dimension, letting the echo of the multiplicity of pre-Oedipal drives reverberate at the point where univocal meaning collapses. Literature can achieve this irruption of the semiotic, Kristeva suggests, by insisting on the materiality of language, in particular through rhythm, syntactical elisions and other formal destabilizations of symbolic. This focus on formal negations marks a clear departure from Kristeva’s thematic approach in her early essay on Bataille. But, as in that essay, this re-redefinition of the negativity of poetic language provides the link to political praxis, since both are construed as undermining coercive, “paternal” structures by evoking what they repress. As such, Kristeva’s theorization of a feminine alterity offers an important corrective to the masculinist signature of alterity in Bataille’s work. And yet, her approach has elicited critical questions with regard to the relation of gender and alterity. Most importantly, perhaps, it has to be asked whether Kristeva’s theorization of alterity in terms of the semiotic runs the risk of reducing femininity to an essentialized notion of maternity. Judith Butler forcefully makes this charge, arguing that Kristeva’s “naturalistic descriptions of the maternal body effectively reify motherhood and preclude an analysis of its cultural construction and variability” (Butler 1999: 103; for a defense, see Olivier 1993: chap. 2). Similarly, it has to be asked whether Kristeva’s association of the maternal with the pre-discursive and pre-symbolic perpetuates an ideal of femininity as the natural, the unmediated and non-rational. While these criticisms pose serious questions for Kristeva’s approach, it should also be stressed that she does insist that there is no direct access to some pre-symbolic immediacy. Rather, the notions of the semiotic and the chora are theoretical constructs that seek to characterize an effect that is only discernible by way of disruption of the symbolic. Ewa Ziarek succinctly makes this point when she notes that these concepts necessarily include “both a presymbolic and postsymbolic” moment (1992: 96), resulting in an approach that poses the crucial question of the genesis, the boundaries and the fragility of the discursive, rather than attempting to safeguard an extra-discursive realm of the maternal.

ART AND ABJECTION In the 1980s, Kristeva relinquishes her hopes for political praxis and recalibrates the focus of her theoretical approach. And even though Bataille remains an importance reference, her reading shifts in accordance with these modifications to her overall theoretical project. It has been convincingly suggested that this may be due to the growing significance of religion for Kristeva, which goes hand in hand with her more or less obviously Christian re-description of the figure of the father as loving and benign—in contradistinction to the purely prohibitive nature of Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father (Direk 2015: 197). Accordingly, the book that is most explicitly dedicated to a Bataillean concept, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, barely references him. In contradiction to Bataille, Kristeva argues, again, that the abject has to be situated in an archaeology of subjectivity underwritten by psychoanalysis. It confronts us, she explains, “with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity, even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language” (Kristeva 1982: 13). Emerging through the separation from the mother, the abject circumscribes a borderline state that “disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva 1982: 4) as it precedes the constitution of secure boundaries. To the extent that it exposes the subject to a radical otherness “prior to the springing forth of the ego, of its objects and representations” (Kristeva 1982: 11), the abject names a crisis in being and language. Situated in a zone of threatening indeterminacy, it can

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only be defined through a series of negations that circumvent the binary oppositions of symbolic signification: neither something or nothing, neither inside nor outside, neither “I” nor other, neither subject nor object. Similar to Bataille, Kristeva construes the abject as something that attracts and repels, disgusts and fascinates and she, too, insists on the structural necessity of this preclusion for the constitution of meaning. Significantly, Kristeva notes that the “articulations of negativity germane to the unconscious” (Kristeva 1982: 7) do not suffice to account for the modality of abjection, since the ambivalence of the state does not accord with the strict separation between conscious and repressed elements. Rather, it operates through a porous form of exclusion that forestalls clear differentiations. As a result, the experience of the abject as a threatening horror dimly recalls the subject’s own cominginto-being, that painful moment of differentiation from the maternal body. The aesthetic task of a literature of the abject, Kristeva argues, “amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless ‘primacy’ constituted by primal repression” (Kristeva 1982: 18). Strangely, however, this description of an eruption of a pre-symbolic dimension— structurally akin to Kristeva’s earlier arguments—seems to be vacated of any emancipatory potential. This shift also betrays itself in Kristeva’s selection of writers, most notably in the chapters she dedicates to the virulently fascist and anti-Semitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the effect of whose horrendous descriptions of women are heralded as calling upon “what, within us, eludes defenses, trainings, and words” (Kristeva 1982: 134). Several commentators have been troubled by this reference, as it seems to perpetuate, rather than challenge, the abjection of the maternal body. It should, however, be noted that Kristeva’s development of the term is not restricted by her own selection of authors. As the reception of her work on the abject in context of the 1980s and 1990s visual arts—one may think of the works of Kiki Smith, Mike Kelly or Robert Gober—has extensively shown, the category can be put to critical usage in questioning the political effects of social and cultural exclusion (cf. Foster 1996). In a study of the “powers and limits” of psychoanalysis from the late 1990s, The Sense and NonSense of Revolt, Kristeva takes up Bataille once more, now read against the backdrop of her growing interest in religion and an increasingly apolitical understanding of the aesthetic. Setting out from a critique of the state of modern societies at the turn of the century, which he portrays as a regime of normalization, she seeks to re-evaluate those twentieth-century cultural forms of revolt that go back to “Hegelian negativity, the Freudian unconscious and the avant-garde” (Kristeva 2000: 7). Psychoanalysis and literary theory are called upon to illuminate “the experiences of formal and philosophical revolt that might keep our inner lives alive” (Kristeva 2000: 7–8), a description that recalls many of the key motifs of her 1967 reading of Bataille. However, if Kristeva had celebrated the experience of Bataille’s “trans-Oedipal” subject in the late 1960s, she now seeks to recover the spirit of revolt through a recourse to the Freudian model of the Oedpial dynamic. Thus, in her archaeology of revolt, the erotic literature of Bataille is cited as a prime example of “transgression” and “subversion,” but Kristeva cautions that this is nothing “we can replay in the context of the end of the century” (Kristeva 2000: 27). This is because, she argues, Bataille’s conception of law and transgression presupposes the existence of robustly entrenched laws, which the general weakening of the Name-of-the-Father has supposedly eroded. Against the experience and practice of Bataille’s writings, Kristeva therefore positions the psychoanalytic cure as an altogether different modality of resistance: “Repetition, working-through, working out are logics that, in appearance only, are less conflictual than transgression, softer forms

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of the displacement of prohibition as the return of the past and possible renewal of the psychical space” (Kristeva 2000: 28). In line with this, Kristeva understands “revolt” as a reworking of the past that achieves a restructuring of psychic life, which is construed in opposition to Bataille’s limitexperiences. Psychoanalysis, religion and aesthetic revolt are now conceived as quasi-sublimatory practices that may vindicate the semiotic forces within the symbolic—the salvaging of which, it might be recalled, she had once paradigmatically credited Bataille’s fiction for.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio, 2020. “Bataille and the Paradox of Sovereignty,” trans. Michael Krimper. Journal of Italian Philosophy: 247–253. Bataille, Georges, 1970. “Zusatz,” Œuvres complètes, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard. Bataille, Georges, 1985a. “The Notion of Expenditure,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP: 116–129. Bataille, Georges, 1985b. “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl. Minnesota UP: 137–160. Bataille, Georges, 1985c. “Base Materialism and Gonsticism.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927– 1939 ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl. Minnesota UP. Bataille, Georges, 1985d. “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur- in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl. Minnesota UP: 32–44. Bataille, Georges, 1985e. “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade (An Open Letter to My Current Comrades).” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl. Minnesota UP: 91–102. Bataille, Georges, 1986. Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Dalwood M. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Bataille, Georges, 1988. “Attraction and Repulsion II: Social Structure,” in The College of Sociology 1937– 1939, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing. Minnesota UP: 113–124. Bataille, Georges, 1989a. My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse. Marion Boyars. Bataille, Georges, 1989b. The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor. City Lights Books. Bataille, Georges, 1993. The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley. Zone Books. Bataille, Georges, 1992. The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley. City Lights Books. Bataille, Georges, 1998. “Interview with Madeleine Chapsal.” Georges Bataille: Essential Writings, ed. Michael R. Richardson. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications: 220–224. Bataille, Georges, 1997. “Autobiographical Note,” in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Blackwell: 113–117. Bataille, Georges, 2006. “The Modern Spirit and the Play of Transpositions,” trans. Michael Richardson and Kryzystof Fijalkowski, in Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, eds. Dawn Ades and Simon Baker. Cambridge, MIT P: 241–243. Bataille, Georges, 2009. “Primitive Art,” in The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall. Zone: 35–44. Breton, André, 1969. “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Michigan UP: 1–48. Butler, Judith, 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. Derrida, Jacques, 2001a. “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference. trans. Alan Bass. Routledge. 246–291. Derrida, Jacques, 2001b. “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reverse,” in Writing and Difference. trans. Alan Bass. Routledge. 317–350. Direk, Zeynep, 2015. “Bataille and Kristeva on Religion,” in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion, ed. Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall, Fordham UP: 182–201. Dworkin, Andrea, 1989. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Plume.

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Foucault, Michel, 1977. “Preface to Transgression.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP: 29–52. Foster, Hal, 1996. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78: 107–124. Hegarty, Paul, 2000. Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist. Sage Publications Ltd. Kristeva, Julia, 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia UP. Kristeva, Julia, 1986. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller. Columbia UP. Kristeva, Julia, 1989. Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia UP. Kristeva, Julia, 1995. “Bataille, Experience and Practice,” in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons. NY State UP: 237–264. Kristeva, Julia, 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1, trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia UP. Kristeva, Julia, 2004. Melanie Klein (Female Genius vol. 2), trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia UP. Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1991a. The Inoperative Community, ed. and trans. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1991b. “The Unsacrificeable,” Yale French Studies 79: 20–38. Olivier, Kelly, 1993. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Indiana University Press. Phillips, Adam, 1995. Terrors and Experts. London and Boston: Faber & Faber. Smith, Anna, 1996. Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement. Palgrave. Still, Judith, 1997. “Horror in Kristeva and Bataille: Sex and Violence,” Paragraph 20(3): 221–239. Winnubst, Shannon, 2007. “Bataille’s Queer Pleasures: The Universe as Spider or Spit.” Reading Bataille Now, ed. Shannon Winnubst. Bloomington: Indiana UP: 75–93. Ziarek, Ewa, 1992. “At the Limits of Discourse: Heterogeneity, Alterity, and the Maternal Body in Kristeva’s Thought.” Hypatia 7(2): 91–108.

FURTHER READING Beardsworth, Sara, 2004. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity, New York: SUNY. Grosz, Elizabeth, 1989. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin Pty. Hegarty, Paul, 2006. “As Above, So Below: Informe/Abject/Sublime,” in The Beast at Heaven’s Gate: Georges Bataille and the Art of Transgression, ed. Andrew Hussey. Rodopi: 73–80. Hollier, Denis, 1992. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing. MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind, et al., 1994. “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the Abject,” October 67: 3–21. Noys, Benjamin, 2005. “Shattering the Subject: Georges Bataille and the Limits of Therapy,” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 7(3): 125–136. Olivier, Kelly and Keltner, S.K. (eds.), 2009. Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva. New York: SUNY. Rauch, Malte Fabian, 2022. “Criticism Decomposed: Georges Bataille,” in Why Art Criticism? A Reader, eds. Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz: 90–96. Ross, Christine, 1997. “Redefinitions of Abjection in Contemporary Performances of the Female Body,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 31: 149–56.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Psychoanalysis and Queer Sexualities Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood CHRIS COFFMAN

Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1937) has long been a touchstone for scholars interested in queer sexualities and has recently been key to transgender re-envisionings of modernism. Nightwood prominently features the transfeminine Dr. O’Connor and a series of love triangles turning on the entanglements of Robin Vote: a figure for Thelma Wood, the butch silverpoint artist who loved Barnes in 1920s Paris only to leave her for Henriette McCrea Metcalf (Herring 1995: 156–70). Robin serially takes male and female lovers—Felix Volkbein, Nora Flood, and Jenny Petherbridge— only to betray and abandon them. All three treat Robin as the Lacanian objet a, the absent center around which desire circles; as Elizabeth Freeman remarks, Robin stands “as the living emblem of Jacques Lacan’s . . . injunction that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relation’ ” (Freeman 2014: 745). Moreover, all three of Robin’s lovers are driven by self-hatred: internalized anti-Semitism in Felix’s case and homophobia in the others’. No lover can hold Robin. Instead, they all unravel: as does Nightwood itself. Written in the wake of psychoanalysis’ emergence in the early twentieth century—a time coincident with European fascism’s rise—Nightwood relies upon and revises psychoanalysis’ theory of the unconscious. In so doing, the novel foregrounds the productive instability of psychoanalytic reading: the way the positionalities of analyst and analysand generate multiple possibilities for interpretation; and the way this generativity destabilizes psychoanalytic claims to truth. Nightwood is organized through a convoluted structure that, mimicking unconscious mechanisms, works “in much the same way as the psyche does,” with “primary and secondary processes” motivating “the psyche” and “rhetoric and grammar (or narrative)” driving “the text” (de Lauretis 2010: 129). In Freud’s Drive (2010), Teresa de Lauretis uses Nora’s “dream of her grandmother’s house” to exemplify Sigmund Freud’s “dreamwork,” noting that repeated tellings of the moment at which Nora views Robin in their garden with Jenny signal “trauma” marking “an impasse for the” nonlinear “narrative” (de Lauretis 2010: 127–30). These reiterations extend to the characters’ splits with Robin, relayed multiple times in the lovers’ own voices as well as those of the third-person selectively omniscient narrator and O’Connor. At the heart of Nightwood’s repetitions lies what psychoanalytic theory calls the drive, about which Barnes offers a “sustained meditation” (de Lauretis 2010: 128). As de Lauretis explains, the 323

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drive consists of psychical energy that becomes bound “to objects or to the ego itself,” and that can be unbound by the “death drive” (de Lauretis 2010: 136, 143). Freud introduced the concept of the death drive in the wake of the First World War, while “living in a Europe under the shadow of death and the threat of . . . genocide” (de Lauretis 2010: 1). Complicating his earlier theory of the pleasure principle, which holds that humans seek pleasure and the perpetuation of “life,” Freud’s wartime writings argue that “although contrary to one another . . . the life and death drives are always at work together in each organism, if in different combinations at different times”; libidinally driven, they “can direct themselves towards the ego as well as towards external objects” (de Lauretis 2010: 24). Whereas “the ego” is capable “of binding, preserving and augmenting the cohesion of social as well as individual psychic life . . ., with Eros or the life drives as its means of production, . . . the death drive”—which is “associated with the sexual drive”—is a radically “disruptive, disaggregating, undoing . . . force” (de Lauretis 2010: 24, 78). Stressing the death drive, de Lauretis reads Nightwood’s refusal of narrative closure—and in particular, Robin’s dramatic rapprochement with a dog at the end of Barnes’ final chapter, “The Possessed”—as foregrounding “the sound and fury of sex and the silent drive to death” in an “emphatic negation of any possible redemption” (de Lauretis 2010: 145). In so doing, she echoes the apocalyptic argument of Lacanian queer theorist Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004), which contends that queers should embrace figures for the death drive and thereby collapse homophobia’s edifices. By contrast, in this essay I offer a reading of Nightwood in which the drive, while deathly, is also generative in ways that invite readerly reimaginings of the early twentieth-century homophobic and transphobic ideologies from which Barnes’ characters suffer. It is apparent from the outset that Nightwood’s characters suffer from the ideological conditions of 1930s Europe: specifically, from “the threat of Nazi racial laws” and the regime’s reactionary views about gender and sexuality (de Lauretis 2010: 14). The novel focuses on the kinds of people “Fascism destined to extinction,” and its opening chapters follow the Jewish Volkbein family (de Lauretis 2010: 125). Robin first appears with the Volkbeins, whose paterfamilias—Guido—is nostalgic for the predominantly Catholic Hapsburg Empire and engages in a “pretense to a barony” shared by his son, Felix (Barnes 2006: 4). By marrying Robin, Felix implicates himself in the novel’s rhetoric of degeneration and solidifies his attachment to the past. The narrator first describes Robin as if she is lying “in a jungle trapped in a drawing room . . . thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration”: as “the infected carrier of the past” who makes others feel “the blood on the lips of our forefathers” (Barnes 1937: 38–40). Moreover, by wearing clothes from “a period that” Felix “could not quite place,” Robin appears “newly ancient”: and her air of antiquity suits the Volkbeins’ aristocratic aspirations (Barnes 1937: 46). The child Robin bears Felix, Guido, is described as an “addict to death” who represents “holy decay”; he repudiates Judaism for his mother’s Catholicism (Barnes 2006: 115). As Lara Trubowitz demonstrates, this plotline turns on Jewish “self-erasure,” reflecting “a sacrificial logic long embedded in Christian hermeneutical interpretations of Jewishness as the prefiguration of Christian salvation” (Trubowitz 2005: 315). Felix is a character who “rejects what he has and seeks what he cannot have,” thereby defining himself “by what he is missing” (Trubowitz 2005: 320). Trubowitz also notes that the Volkbeins exemplify “conventional stereotypes about the Wandering Jew,” whose propensity to movement is shared by many characters, especially Robin (Trubowitz 2005: 320). Similarly, Nightwood prominently features the digressive commentary of Dr. O’Connor, who has “a narrative” but tells readers they “will be put to it to find it” (Barnes

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2006: 104). The novel’s meandering structure eventually precipitates “the dissolution of the narrative itself ” (Trubowitz 2005: 322). The resultant montage of unravelings revises psychoanalytic theories of gender, sexuality, and the unconscious. As I argue in Insane Passions (Coffman: 2006), the indeterminacy of Nightwood’s language—which T.S. Eliot describes as especially enticing to “readers of poetry”—positions Barnes to critique and transform psychoanalysis in ways that remain generative today (Eliot 2006: xvii).1 Insane Passions contends that Nightwood responds avant la lettre to Jacques Lacan’s theories from the 1930s through the 1950s, which frame same-sex desire and transgender subjectivities as psychotic refusals of paternal law. In contrast to neurotics, who deny and thereby repress their knowledge of castration, psychotics foreclose the Name of the Father: repudiate it altogether and thereby refuse to be constituted as Oedipalized subjects within the Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real orders. Nonetheless, that which is foreclosed—“refused in the symbolic order”—“reappears in the real” of delusions: in particular, those of German Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness exemplifies psychosis for both Freud and Lacan (S3: 13). In Lacan’s S3, Schreber’s inversion of “conventional gendered and sexual positionings” illustrates the danger of foreclosing the Name of the Father and refusing to choose between what he will later, in S20, come to describe as sexual difference’s masculine and feminine subjective stances (Coffman 2006: 4). In Insane Passions (Coffman 2006), I argue that Nightwood employs O’Connor and Robin as figures for psychosis to critique this psychoanalytic construct. By contrast, in this essay I reframe my reading of Nightwood through Lacan’s later work on the sinthôme. Lacan introduces the sinthôme late in his career, in S23 (1975–76), replacing his earlier claims in S3 (1955–56) about the Name of the Father’s role in connecting the Lacanian orders. The sinthôme is an individual’s unique mode of anchoring their fundamental fantasy by linking the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. This fantasy can be traversed—gone beyond—by embracing the sinthôme and tapping into the drive in the Real. In S20, Lacan claims that sexual difference is an intractable antinomy between masculine and feminine subjective positions and that therefore “there’s no such thing as a sexual relation,” which inevitably fails. However, I argue in Queer Traversals (Coffman 2022) that Lacanian sexual difference—which I call (hetero)sexual difference— is a fundamental fantasy traversable by embracing the sinthôme (S20 1998: 126). Viewed through this theory, Robin remains a figure for the psychotic refusal of all available subject positions whereas O’Connor’s poetic language taps into the sinthôme to invite readers to reimagine possibilities for gendered subjectivity. Reading Nightwood through O’Connor’s embrace of the sinthôme offers a fresh perspective on queer and trans debates about the drive. First, Barnes’ novel offers an avant la lettre redeployment of what Edelman calls the sinthomosexual: a stigmatized queer figure created by yet also threatening to the meaning-making mechanisms of a heterosexual Symbolic. Opposing pleas for inclusion, Edelman contends that by assuming the sinthomosexual’s position, queers can traverse—and

1

Early psychoanalytic theory wavers between the affirmative understanding of queer sexualities Freud initially offers in 1905 in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—which theorizes “all forms of object-oriented sexuality” as “ ‘perversions’ of our originary autoeroticism”—and homophobic formulations that understand it as a product of arrested development, hysteria, or psychosis (Coffman 2006: 2). See Coffman 2006: 2–11 for a brief overview and assessment of Freud’s and Lacan’s varied early twentieth-century claims about homosexuality.

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thereby collapse—the fantasies animating the homophobic Symbolic: in particular, the heterosexist ideology of “reproductive futurism” that appeals to the figure of the Child as the guarantor of society’s future (Edelman 2004: 28). No Future is therefore frequently identified as an exemplar of queer theory’s anti-social variant (Coffman 2022: 56–60; 74–5). As Freeman observes, in many ways Barnes’ Robin embodies Edelman’s sinthomosexual: “fundamentally not just antisocial, but asocial,” she resists “meaning and intelligibility,” devastating Nightwood’s other characters and precipitating the final chapter’s unravelings (Freeman 2014: 745). Second—and even more significantly—Nightwood prominently features O’Connor, whose garrulousness exemplifies trans-affirmative arguments about the sinthôme. Lacanians such as Sheila Cavanagh (2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2018), Patricia Gherovici (2017), Oren Gozlan (2015) and I (Coffman 2022) rework Lacan to argue that subjects achieve transgender embodiment by using artistry to embrace their individual sinthômes, whose creativity works with linguistic self-inscriptions such as pronouns or names to anchor subjects in all three orders. As I explain in Queer Traversals (Coffman: 2022), Lacan understands embodiment not as determined by “the body’s material contours” but as “a subjective experience . . . achieved through signification and,” the latter of which arises through sexual difference’s inevitable failure (Coffman 2022: 129). In S20, he describes “the substance of the body . . . as that which enjoys itself ” by “‘corporizing’ (corporizer) the body in a signifying way,” and asserts—in a statement that opens up possibilities for theorizing the diversity of contemporary gender embodiments—that “[i]t’s only speaking bodies . . . that come up with an idea of the world as such” (S20: 23, 23, 126). For trans-affirmative psychoanalysts who build on this argument, hormonal or surgical interventions in the material body are salutary but not necessary means to achieve embodiment, which is established by the sinthôme. Correcting early transphobic interpretations of Lacan—such as Catherine Millot’s influential claim in Horsexe (Millot 1990) that transitioning constitutes a psychotic attempt to tear down “the frontiers of the real” by tying together only the Symbolic and the Imaginary— trans-affirmative Lacanians such as Cavanagh, Gherovici, and Gozlan argue that embracing the sinthôme connects all three orders and thereby renders transsubjectivity viable (Millot 1990: 15). Whereas Gherovici and Gozlan rely upon Lacan’s account of the sinthôme, Cavanagh reinflects their arguments through psychoanalytic feminist Bracha Ettinger’s concept of the “matrixial sinthôme,” which operates within the “matrixial borderspace” created through a subject’s experiences “in the womb” (Ettinger 2006: 193, 152; Coffman 2022: 121). For Cavanagh, Ettinger’s argument that the “matrixial” mobilizes an “originary feminine difference that doesn’t confront, submit to . . . fight,” or otherwise depend upon “the phallic difference” allows for the theorization of “an Other axis of sexual difference accessible to us all” (Ettinger 2006 183; Cavanagh 2016b 28). Within the matrixial, the phallus is not “a primary signifier” but rather “only one of others that can be animated and resignified” (Cavanagh 2016b: 38). For transpeople, the matrixial sinthôme grounds embodiment through “acts of artistry that reassemble a borderspace between the subject and m/Other (the I and the non-I) that enables subjectification” and provides “a sense of bodily integration” (Cavanagh 2016b: 39–40). Whether Lacanian or Ettingerian, the transperson’s sinthôme “need not be ‘gendered;’ it can be” any consistent form of linguistic or “bodily writing” that works to “connect the three orders” (Coffman 2022: 127). O’Connor’s discourse forms such a matrixial sinthôme through acts of linguistic creativity that anchor her transfeminine embodiment and position her askance from the phallic order of Lacanian sexual difference. I therefore follow Emma Heaney (Heaney 2017) in referring to the doctor with she/her pronouns. Her sinthômatic monologues inscribe her transfemininity and offer readers, in

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turn, the opportunity to generate alternatives to the bleak early twentieth-century visions of queerness and transness Nightwood registers. The doctor thereby functions as a far different sinthomosexual than Edelman’s by placing queer and transgender characters in a world whose fascist imaginings have already collapsed and inviting them to imagine what may lie beyond it. Like Edelmanian sinthomosexuals, Barnes’ characters embrace stigma to thwart a menacing Symbolic. Yet by using poetic language as a sinthôme grounding novel gender embodiments and inspiring readers to reimagine the Symbolic, they also complicate Edelman’s hardline argument for queer anti-sociality. Freeman makes a historicist case that Nightwood critically engages the “past” by redeploying Christian conceptions of “a radically corporealized relationality, an inhabitation by and of the Other rather than a self-shattering” to understand “bodies and spirits as capable of inhabiting one another in traversals of corporeal boundaries” (Freeman 2014: 744). Countering Edelman’s radical anti-sociality, she highlights Barnes’ pro-social deployment of religious claims that “to inhabit or by inhabited by the Other” allows for “a visceral reckoning with” the “past” (Freeman 2014: 744). This positions Freeman to advance a “queer hypersocial thesis” that uses Nightwood to argue that history “can illuminate the past, catalyze the future otherwise, and create diagonal” traversals of “the temporal field” (Freeman 2014: 744–51). Although I share Freeman’s goal of complicating queer theory’s anti-social thesis and her desire to “catalyze the future otherwise,” I advance not a historicist but a psychoanalytic argument that Nightwood employs the drive’s “destructive” and “productive” possibilities (Coffman 2022: 17–18). Challenging Edelman’s and de Lauretis’s grim interpretations of the drive, Barnes offers a narrative whose characters have no future yet speak of their plights in poetic language inviting readers to tap the drive’s “generativity” and imagine new worlds (Coffman 2022: 17).

BARNES’ TIRESIAS: QUEERING AND TRANSING PSYCHOANALYSIS At odds with the law and dominant culture, O’Connor plays psychoanalyst/confessor for numerous characters, complementing others’ perspectives with commentary in which “Freud is brilliantly parodied” rather than uncritically imitated (Marcus 1991: 233). Whereas de Lauretis relies upon psychoanalysis’ Oedipal narrative, Ed Madden rightfully identifies O’Connor as a figure for Tiresias (Madden 2008: 178). This move trenchantly challenges Freud’s foundational claim to Oedipus’s universality. Nightwood advances a fictionalized, avant la lettre articulation of recent arguments by Trish Salah and Cavanagh, for whom Tiresias heralds trans-affirmative alternatives to traditional psychoanalytic paradigms. Asking “[w]hat would psychoanalysis look like if it were written from a Tiresian” rather than an Oedipal “perspective,” Cavanagh builds on Madden’s observation that “[t]he effect of the Tiresian . . . is simultaneously the sexualization of acts of signification and the signification of sex as itself a signifying system” (Cavanagh 2016a n.p.; Madden 2008: 16). She argues that Tiresias inscribes what Ettinger understands as the “Other”—“matrixial”—”sexual difference,” which stresses the subject’s “co-emergence in differentiation” from the birth parent (Cavanagh 2016a: n.p.). Ettinger’s matrix resonates with challenges by lesbian scholars such as Carolyn Allen (1996) to psychoanalytic claims about Nightwood’s homonarcissism and with Freeman’s argument that Barnes’ novel offers a “hypersocial thesis” countering Edelman’s bleak vision (Freeman 2014: 751). Moreover, Cavanagh correlates Tiresias with the trans-authored

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literature Salah puts into dialogue with psychoanalysis: a project Nightwood—although not written by a transperson—undertakes through O’Connor (Salah 2017: 634–6). Salah rightfully observes that Tiresias is not equivalent to contemporary transpeople; similar critiques have been leveled against readings of transgender figures in literature that historically predates the availability of technologies for gender reassignment (Salah 2017: 632). Such comparisons nonetheless remain generative, inviting readers to tap their creativity to imagine new genders. In Nightwood, the doctor’s commentary performs such a function by working as a matrixial sinthôme that anchors all three orders—and her transfeminine embodiment—without recourse to the phallus.2 Madden, observing that O’Connor’s Tiresian commentary invites “readers to take the position of the” socially “and sexually marginalized,” focuses on Nightwood’s reworking of sexuality rather than gender identity (Madden 2008: 209). Although he acknowledges that “O’Connor clearly represents what Jay Prosser would identify as a nascent attempt at transsexual definition,” Madden’s analysis of “Tiresias’s connection to the feminine” emphasizes male femininity (Madden 2008: 180, 17). Heaney therefore rightfully counters that O’Connor is transfeminine, observing that the doctor’s “gynecological” equipment reflects a professional interest in “abortion and transsexual surgeries” (Heaney 2017: 136). She wears women’s clothing at home and repeatedly calls herself a “girl,” asking “Misericordia, am I not the girl to whom I speak?” and imagining that in another life she would “be the girl found lurking behind the army, or up with the hill folk” (Barnes 2006: 97). These statements do not suggest that O’Connor is a man who is “a woman at heart,” as Madden claims (Madden 2008: 192). Instead, she linguistically establishes transfeminine embodiment. O’Connor states that “In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor,” and asks “am I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I shouldn’t have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner?” (Barnes 2006: 97). Moreover, her declaration that “I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar” reveals her wish to birth children (Barnes 2006: 98). She desires to menstruate, too, staging herself as a Christlike martyr in declaring that “I bled for” Jenny (Barnes 2006: 108). Although O’Connor does not pursue physical transition, a newly available option, she linguistically establishes her transfeminine embodiment (Stryker 2017: 55). Focusing on ways Barnes’ portrayal of O’Connor invites revisions of Freudian rather than Lacanian psychoanalysis, Heaney argues that Nightwood uses the doctor’s desire for transfeminine embodiment to rewrite Freud’s account “of the experience of sex differentiation” in his “Female Sexuality” (Freud 1931) and “Femininity” (SE 22: 1933), both of which questionably insist that women wish to have penises and portray female same-sex desire as a form of arrested development entailing a women’s continued attachment to mother-substitutes (Heaney 2017: 139). Feminist and queer scholars have long considered such arguments to be unacceptably sexist and heteronormative because they presume phallic primary and assume that adult women will eventually come to desire men. Approaching Freud from O’Connor’s perspective as a transfeminine character who wishes for a womb, Heaney observes that the doctor expresses something Freud’s claims about “castration” render “unthinkable”: that of “desiring to have a female body” (Heaney 2017: 139–40). The

See Cavanagh 2016b and chapter 4 of Coffman 2022 regarding the matrixial sinthôme’s anchoring of transgender embodiment.

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doctor’s transfemininity positions her to identify with the “experience of being unable to be recognized as the degraded term” in the “male/female binary”: to understand the “bodily dispossession” Robin feels during an “unwanted pregnancy” and the pain Nora experiences from losing Robin, with whom she shares a “somatic similarity” (Heaney 2017: 139–45). Despite overestimating bodily sameness’s importance to lesbian subjectivity in ways Allen (1996) rightfully challenges, Heaney offers a compelling feminist revision of Freud’s work in the 1930s and shows that O’Connor’s transfemininitity positions her to identify with Barnes’ other queer characters. Heaney therefore argues that O’Connor experiences “bodily alienation” that is “universal” rather than unique to transpeople (Heaney 2017: 139–41). Similarly, trans-affirmative Lacanian Shanna Carlson positions the “transgender subject” as “the human subject as such” because transpeople show that everybody must assume an embodiment (Carlson 2010: 65). Cavanagh, too, observes that “we are all . . . inscribed by a void inaugurated during the mirror stage” and therefore feel “some degree of bodily fragmentation, alienation, and lack regardless of gender, sexuality, and trans* status” (Cavanagh 2018: 304). In Nightwood, the doctor’s transfeminine embodiment both illuminates the experience of inhabiting a body and positions her to comment upon the conditions shaping the lives of Barnes’ other queer characters. Like Nightwood, Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922) features a Tiresian figure: one whose role is mirrored in the poet’s infamous Introduction to Barnes’ text. Eliot insists that Nightwood reveals “the human misery and bondage which is universal,” yet his statement has different effects than those of transpsychoanalytic thinkers (Eliot 2006: xxi). Attempting to discourage readers from perceiving the novel as “a psychopathic study,” he backhandedly derides the text for refusing to closet suffering “mostly concealed” in others (Eliot 2006: xxi). This claim—which stresses the universality of queer characters’ anguish—resonates with the way a Lacanian vision of communication’s and sexual difference’s inevitable failures drives The Waste Land. However, Eliot fails to distinguish between situations in which such miseries are benign (as in everyday missed connections) and those in which they stem either from interpersonal abuse (as in The Waste Land) or societal bias (as in Nightwood). The Waste Land turns on scenes in which love is absent and sexual difference’s failure entails emotional or physical abuse. The poem’s second section, for example, stages (hetero)sexual difference as a “Game of Chess” between husband and wife (Eliot 2001: II). As her demands that he “speak” and share his thoughts escalate, so do the enervated reactions—revealed to readers but not to his wife— through which he emotionally abuses her with the silent treatment (Eliot 2001: II. 112). Nightwood, too, is driven by O’Connor’s and others’ witnessing of the distress created by Robin’s mistreatment of her lovers. Yet The Waste Land also makes Tiresias—and readers—witnesses to sexual assault. In the poem’s third section, Tiresias appears as a seer who, “throbbing between two lives,” surveys the rape of a “typist” by “[a] small house agent’s clerk” whose “assaults” remain “unreproved, if undesired” (Eliot 2001: III. 243–44). This scene, especially notable for the absence of explicit consent, foregrounds the failures of communication—sexual and otherwise—driving The Waste Land. Troublingly, Eliot uses Tiresias, who has “foresuffered all / Enacted on this same divan or bed,” as a figure whose presumed universality—whose experience of ‘both sides’ of the Lacanian antinomy between masculine and feminine—obviates consideration of the divergent forms of agency the clerk and typist exercise within the patriarchal social context reflected in the poem (Eliot 2001: III. 218–244). Similarly, Eliot’s claim to Nightwood’s universality overlooks Barnes’ systemic critique of the social biases from which her queer and trans characters suffer. Notably, Nightwood’s Tiresias-figure

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both registers and reshapes readers’ potential reactions to societally induced queer and trans miseries that Eliot mischaracterizes as universal. Madden rightfully sees Eliot’s use of Tiresias in The Waste Land as an unsuccessful “attempt to shift our attention . . . from the particular to the universal,” noting that by positioning the seer as “androgynous,” the poem seeks to “unite binary oppositions” and to “transcend” rather than reclaim the “devalued . . . feminine” position (Madden 2008: 134–6). Eliot’s Introduction to Nightwood repeats this problem by characterizing the characters’ sufferings as “universal,” overlooking the way O’Connor’s sinthômatic claiming of transfemininity enables Barnes’ novel—and its readers—to push beyond cissexist and heteronormative ideologies that cause anguish (Eliot 2006: xxi).

REFIGURING THE NIGHT, REFIGURING THE DRIVE The doctor’s sinthômatic commentary on the night performs this work by registering the drive’s force within Barnes’ narrative. The drive features prominently in Edelman’s No Future, which argues that embracing the stigmatized figure of the sinthomosexual taps into the drive in the Real, collapsing the homophobic fundamental fantasy. For Edelman, doing so more powerfully challenges heteronormativity than LGBT pleas for inclusion in normative institutions. However, Barnes’ characters’ elliptical relationship to fantasy—most marked in Robin but discernable in others as well—distinguishes Nightwood’s world from the seemingly totalizing symbolic Edelman posits in No Future. Unlike Edelman, Nightwood does not take aim at a fantasy the text presents as intact. Instead, by focusing on fascism’s outsiders—such as Jews, queers, and transpeople—Barnes presents fascist ideologies as always already in shambles. In sinthômatic monologues reversing Eliot’s privileging of the concealments governing “normal lives,” O’Connor embraces the nighttime “detour of filthiness” which allows her and Barnes’ other sinthomosexuals to challenge homophobic and transphobic fantasies (Eliot 2006: xxi; Barnes 2006: 91). Nora assumes the early psychoanalytic stereotype of the narcissistic lesbian when identifying with Robin; O’Connor ironically calls lesbianism an “insane passion for unmitigated anguish and motherhood”; Jenny attacks Robin “in hysteria” (Barnes 2006: 82). Much has already been written about Nightwood’s critique of these pernicious constructs.3 Yet when Eliot patronizingly insists that Barnes’ novel is not “a horrid sideshow of freaks,” he misses the way the text turns on characters who embrace stigmatizing representations to challenge and displace a homophobic Symbolic (Eliot 2006: xxii). Nightwood performs this work with a pro-social, transgender twist. Highlighting the way Barnes’ Tiresias-figure differs from Eliot’s, Madden rightfully observes that O’Connor reclaims “stigmatized or silenced histories” of sexuality, such as her and Robin’s public sex (Madden 2008: 27). By contrast, in The Waste Land, “I Tiresias” registers the suffering attending heterosexuality’s failure (Eliot 2001: III. 218). However, Madden misses transfemininity’s centrality to the doctor’s role in Nightwood (Madden 2008: 27). O’Connor’s sinthôme works in both Edelman’s and transpsychoanalysis’ senses, challenging the dominant Symbolic and anchoring her gender embodiment. Choosing “the night-gown” over “the Bible,” she embraces the image of the “bearded lady,” “the last woman left in the world,” and enjoys the nightworld’s jouissance (Barnes 2006: 87, 107).

3

For two of many examples, see Allen 1996 and Coffman 2006.

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Driven by O’Connor’s monologue on nighttime pleasures, the “Watchman, What of the Night” chapter reveals her transfemininity. Nora arrives at the doctor’s garret to find her “in a woman’s flannel nightgown,” a curly-haired “wig” framing her made-up face; at this late “hour,” she “had evacuated custom and gone back into” her “dress” (Barnes 2006 85–6). Calling attention to her and the sinthomosexual’s shared contestation of Lacanian sexual difference, O’Connor declares that “[t]he Bible lies the one way, but the night-gown the other”: while the former is dominant, the latter is also a possibility (Barnes 2006: 87). In Insane Passions (Coffman 2006), I use Lacan’s work from the 1930s to the 1950s to present Nightwood as critically deploying O’Connor as a figure for psychosis. I argue that Barnes uses the doctor to question the key assumption—that to avoid psychosis, the subject must accept the Name of the Father as master signifier anchoring the three Lacanian orders—through which readers steeped in S3 would read her queer sexuality and genderbending as evidence of madness. However, Lacan’s later work provides for an alternative reading in which the doctor’s sinthôme replaces the Name of the Father with another master signifier, challenging sexual difference and reconfiguring the three orders while avoiding psychosis. Enabling O’Connor to live in a society that marginalizes her, the sinthôme positions her and Barnes’ other characters within viable revisions of hegemonic discourses, forestalling the psychosis they would otherwise risk by refusing to accept the dominant order. O’Connor’s transfemininity also animates metaphorical and conceptual reversals revising psychoanalysis’ theory of the unconscious. Responding to Nora’s complaints about Robin’s wanderings by insisting that “the day and night are related,” O’Connor stresses that sleep disturbs identity, making people unknowable to themselves and others (Barnes 2006: 87). Stating that “The dead have committed some portion of the evil of the night; sleep and love, the other,” she asks “For what is not the sleeper responsible?” and declares that “[t]he sleeper is the proprietor of an unknown land. He goes about another business in the dark—and we, his partners . . . cannot afford an inch of it” (Barnes 2006: 93). This comment figures the unconscious as an inaccessible and unknowable yet motivating force: even those who would “purchase” knowledge of it may not do so (Barnes 2006: 93). The crossing of the psyche’s vertical (conscious, day) and “horizontal” (unconscious, night) axes forces a person to go “perpendicularly against his fate,” impaled by split subjectivity (Barnes 2006: 93–4). As a result, people “wake from our doings in a deep sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names with which to deny them,” for there is famously “no such thing at all as an unconscious ‘No’ ” (Barnes 2006: 94; Freud 1997: 50). Responding to Nora’s declaration that she “never thought of the night as a life at all” and exasperation at Robin’s fondness for it, O’Connor identifies France’s vibrant nightlife as conducive to navigating alterity (Barnes 2006: 89). Inverting dominant value systems, the doctor dismisses Nora’s American Puritanism, praises “The French” for accepting “the good dirt,” and encourages her “to think of the night all day long, and of the day the night through” (Barnes 2006 90–1). Moreover, following the title of the novel’s second chapter, “La Somnambule,” O’Connor interprets Robin as a sleepwalker whose unconscious wanderings leave Nora bereft: she declares that “For the lover, it is the night into which his beloved goes . . . that destroys his heart” (Barnes 2006: 94). Stating that “[t]heir very lack of identity makes them ourselves,” the doctor suggests that Robin is Nora’s unconscious (Barnes 2006: 94). However, O’Connor’s complication of the American dichotomy between day and night, conscious and unconscious, does not successfully challenge heteronormativity: as is clear at one of

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her most Tiresian moments. Staging herself as akin to Robin, the doctor proclaims that “I haunt the pissoirs as naturally as Highland Mary her cows down by the Dee—and by the Hobs of Hell, I’ve seen the same thing work in a girl” (Barnes 2006: 97). This formulation suggests that anybody can be a sinthomosexual. Yet shortly after this paean to public sex, the doctor declares her desire to be a good Catholic housewife attending to “children and knitting” (Barnes 2006: 98). Asking whether it is her “fault that my only fireside is the outhouse,” she notes that a person who loves a “Sodomite” has “committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and they come down with a dummy in their arms,” unrecognized by society (Barnes 2006: 98–100). It is similar, O’Connor claims, for women “who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish” (Barnes 2006: 101). Here, Robin becomes Nora; “night” becomes “day”; unconscious becomes conscious; and the bereft “can never again live the life of the day” (Barnes 2006: 101). No longer flattered by “the light,” the watcher develops “an unrecorded look” and ages prematurely as her beloved wanders the toilets (Barnes 2006: 101). Ultimately, O’Connor suggests, “in the end you’ll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way” (Barnes 2006: 107). Even as the doctor’s joyful descriptions of the night reveal its life-giving capacity, this image of entanglement inscribes the drive’s deathliness. Although O’Connor uses her Tiresian position to critique early psychoanalysis, she does not propose a revised version of it. Instead, she unravels: as do Barnes’ other characters.

NIGHTWOOD’S UNRAVELING Nightwood is animated by the characters’ systemic destruction: by unravelings that undo but do not replace early twentieth-century Europe’s racist, cissexist, and heteronormative order. Focusing on Robin, Nora, and O’Connor, de Lauretis observes that Barnes’ novel inscribes “sexuality” as “shattering”: “as a psychic force that is at once sexual drive and death drive” (de Lauretis 2010: 142). Whereas Robin “goes down” because her “ego . . . is unable to bind” the drive “to itself or to external objects,” the other two characters—and, I would add, Jenny—collapse because the drive’s “affective charge” disturbs their “emotional coherence” and sense of “self-possession” (de Lauretis 2010: 142). The volubility preceding O’Connor’s collapse at the end of “Go Down, Matthew” further underscores Nightwood’s propulsion by the drive. The doctor’s association with death is first visible in her garret, of which the narrator observes that “it was as if being condemned to the grave” she “had decided to occupy it with the utmost abandon” (Barnes 2006: 84). Similarly, during her disquisition on French nights, O’Connor describes “[l]ife” as “the permission to know death,” pointing to the deathliness of life at the novel’s heart (Barnes 2006: 90). This idea drives Barnes’ narrative to its close. Pervasive references to degeneration and death register the unraveling of 1930s Europe by fascism and the characters’ destruction by it. Yet if in one way or another, all of Barnes’ characters “go down” from embracing the drive, they do not experience profound transformation. Like Edelman’s sinthomosexual, the novel collapses early twentieth-century Europe’s fascist Symbolic in upon itself, exemplifying the most unbearable aspect of his thesis: that in assuming a stigmatizing representation, the sinthomosexual is left without a future. Robin’s sudden disappearance from the Volkbeins’ lives furthers this collapse, exposing the self-hating fantasies underpinning their desire to join the Hapsburg Empire’s Catholic aristocracy.

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Several other characters then “go down” in scenes whose repetitions mark the traumatic “impasse” driving the narration (de Lauretis 2010: 127). However, as Freud demonstrates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)—which contains his “first speculations on the death drive”—repetition can either trap people in repression or release them from it (de Lauretis 2010: 121). Capable of carrying both pleasure and displeasure, it enacts the drive’s duality. Exemplifying this duplicity, Freud notes that “artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults . . . are aimed at an audience” and “do not spare the spectators,” who can experience even “tragedy” as “highly enjoyable” (Freud 1961: 17). Offering such an experience, Nightwood’s poetic language registers the characters’ undoing by the homophobic and transphobic ideologies Barnes’ readers are invited to reverse. In so doing, Nightwood—unlike Edelman—collapses the Symbolic in upon itself while also enabling readers to imagine an as-yet-unrealized queer world. As I argue in Insane Passions, Barnes’ references to “people” who “have never been made” (Barnes 2006: 102) herald “a future Symbolic of which one can hear only the longing echoes” (Coffman 2006: 120). Viewed through my reading of the late Lacan in Queer Traversals (2022), this order can be understood as a possible consequence of fantasy’s traversal: a theory Lacan left unfinalized at death. Contemporary Lacanians offer two different accounts of fantasy’s “beyond.” The subject might either use the “sinthôme” to “reconfigure the imaginary, symbolic, and Real” through “a new fundamental fantasy,” or establish a “more radical” and “open-ended relationship to signification” in the “Other” (Coffman 2022: 77). Like Lacan—whose S23 leaves the “question of the treatment’s ‘beyond’ ” to “his audience’s” interpretation (Coffman 2022: 76)—Barnes renders her characters’ collapses in poetic language soliciting both “destructive” and “productive” readerly engagements with the drive (Coffman 2022: 17–18). Through this poetics, Nightwood hints at a better world in ways that reveal the drive as both death-giving and life-giving: capable of registering the characters’ suffering and transforming it into something new.

NORA’S UNRAVELING Keeping Robin’s lovers’ grief alive, Nightwood’s poetic language creatively registers their entrapment by the drive’s deathliness. Whereas O’Connor most overtly illustrates the drive’s duality, collapsing from exhaustion while transformatively critiquing the conditions of the characters’ suffering, Robin’s lovers all succumb to the death drive. Nora is the first and next to last to “go down”: her “ego” devastated by Robin both times (de Lauretis 2010: 142). The “Night Watch” chapter concludes with Nora’s first collapse, relayed through omniscience showing the drive’s workings. Describing “[l]ove” as “the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb,” the narrator states that “[i]n Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora’s blood” (Barnes 2006: 61–2). This metaphor culminates in Nora’s lament that “I can’t live without my heart!” (Barnes 2006: 165). These passages stage Robin as always already dead, and Nora’s love as a futile exercise in reanimating a lover caught up in the death drive. The narrator notes Nora’s recognition that “[t]o keep” Robin “there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her. Death went with them, together and alone,” for their relationship is driven by unconscious alterity (Barnes 2006: 63). Later, O’Connor observes of Robin that “[n]ight people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures” (Barnes 2006: 95).

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Emblem of Barnes’ nightworld, this image exposes rather than hides Robin’s and the drive’s “destructiveness” (Coffman 2022: 143). Suggesting that “there was no way but” psychical “death,” “Night Watch” concludes when Nora falls “to her knees” as Jenny hugs Robin (Barnes 2006: 63, 70). Experiencing the duality of an “awful happiness,” Nora recognizes that they “will not hold together” and that “Robin, like something dormant, was protected, moved out of death’s way by the successive arms of women” (Barnes 2006: 70). Nora then shuts her eyes and utters “Ah!’ with the intolerable automatism of the last ‘Ah!’ in a body struck at the moment of its final breath” (Barnes 2006: 70). However, this moment does not mark Nora’s “final breath”: nor does the concluding scene in which she chases Robin to New York. Instead, Nightwood holds Nora in the excruciating limbo of a grief that, simultaneously embodying the drive’s “destructiveness” and constructiveness, prolongs life while also figuring death (Coffman 2022: 143). In “Go Down, Matthew,” she observes of Robin that “[o]nce, when she was sleeping, I wanted her to die. Now, that would stop nothing” (Barnes 2006: 137). Using a financial metaphor to represent loss of intimacy, O’Connor responds that “death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection. We shed tears of bankruptcy then” (Barnes 2006: 137). Furthering the idea that love’s loss represents death, she declares that “out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off along with a couple of others” needing relief from similar miseries (Barnes 2006: 137). Nora, too, speaks of love’s deathliness, observing that “[l]ove is death, come upon with passion; I know that is why love is wisdom” (Barnes 2006: 146). Stating that “I love her as one condemned to it,” Nora portrays herself as serving a death sentence (Barnes 2006: 146). After O’Connor tells Nora that she is “the only one able to kill yourself and Robin,” she relays the dream about her grandmother and asks the doctor to “[t]ell” Robin “that it is always with her in my arms—forever it will be that way until we die” (Barnes 2006: 155, 159). These figurations of passion’s deathliness culminate in Nora’s recognition that Robin deliberately hurts her. Robin says that she wants to “make everyone happy” but Nora, to whom she refuses affection given to “everyone else in the world” (Barnes 2006: 165). Despite this emotional abuse, Nora chases her lover across three continents, ultimately realizing that she has “been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay, the space between the human and the holy head, the arena of the ‘indecent’ eternal”: a place at “the center of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes” (Barnes 2006: 167). This monologue abandons earlier passages’ reliance on metaphors of bodily reanimation and proposes a deathlier alternative. After desiring that her lover “put” her “down,” Nora imagines herself and Robin memorialized in a “waxworks” (Barnes 2006: 167). Revealing the extremity of Nora’s denial, this image emblematizes their love’s preservation just as Nightwood preserves Barnes’ for Wood. Like the image of the “creature, husked” of its life, that of the “waxworks” figures the death drive (Barnes 2006: 95, 167).

JENNY’S UNRAVELING Even more than Nora, Jenny—a wealthy heiress symbolizing Barnes’ rage at Metcalf—exemplifies Edelman’s death-driven sinthomosexual. After Nightwood’s first telling of the events in the garden, the narrator provides backstory for Jenny, whose personality registers in the chapter title “The Squatter.” Embodying the drive, she reeks of sex and death: “she seemed to be steaming in the

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vapours of someone else about to die; she still gave off an odour to the mind . . . of a woman about to be accouchée” (Barnes 2006: 71). Her constant talk of things being “the ‘death of her’ ” underscores her unsuccessful attempts to cohere her milieu with “the over-sweet phrase” and “tight embrace” (Barnes 2006: 72–4). Before meeting Robin, Jenny drives four husbands to the grave by acting “like a squirrel racing a wheel day and night in an endeavor to make them historical” that engages the drive’s duplicity: as it also does for the Volkbeins (Barnes 2006: 71). As O’Connor misogynistically observes about Jenny’s menopause—“that pitch of life that she knew to be her last moment”—she aims to commemorate herself through her husbands (Barnes 2006: 108). Aware she is a “future dead person,” she “trembled when she saw herself going toward fifty without a thing done to make her a tomb-piece” (Freccero 2007: 184; Barnes 2006: 109). However, her attempts to secure endless life bring only death. Jenny obsessively accessorizes through “second-hand dealings”: her “finger” features “[s]omeone else’s marriage ring” and “her table” displays “the photograph taken of Robin for Nora” (Barnes 1937: 72). Moreover, Jenny’s “fancy for tiny ivory or jade elephants”—of which “she left a trail . . . wherever she went”—is the type of personal signature that might constitute a Lacanian sinthôme. This sinthôme anchors her feminine gender embodiment. The narrator stresses Jenny’s “hoop,” “bonnet,” and ”shawl” (Barnes 1937: 78); Nora describes Jenny as a “poor shuddering creature” with “pelvic bones . . . flying through her dress” (Barnes 1937: 150); the narrator characterizes her femininity as “fluttering,” “quivering,” and “trembling” (Barnes 1937: 72–3). These behaviors’ repetitiveness add to Nightwood’s portrait of a pathetically imitative person, and Barnes scholars frequently echo these hostile characterizations. Heaney, for example, describes Jenny’s femininity as “parasitic, parodic,” and “derivative” rather than a viable mode of embodiment (Heaney 2017: 134). Justus Nieland argues that Jenny’s “bundle of quirks and instincts” amounts “to nothing like a person”; like Nightwood’s narrator, he dismisses her “emotional life” as “secondary” (Nieland 2008: 219). Drawing on Rei Terada’s conceptualization of “passion” as a force driving “intentional subjectivity to its self-undoing in senseless vigor”—as “nonsubjectivity within the very concept of the subject” (Nieland 2008: 220)—Nieland contends that Jenny’s “passion to be a person” reveals the “failure of passion to secure human personality” (Barnes 2006: 74; Nieland 2008: 220). Psychoanalysis, however, understands subjectivity as formed through the identificatory recombining of others’ qualities. As Diana Fuss demonstrates, for Freud “identification”—which can be multiple—involves “incorporating the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object,” and is the process through which “the subject vampiristically comes to life” (Fuss 1995: 1). Jenny’s imitative identifications exemplify subjectivity tout court. Nonetheless, Barnes maligns Jenny’s imitations, using them to incite the series of collapses that push Nightwood to its close. Both she and O’Connor achieve feminine gender embodiment, but to very different ends. Whereas the doctor goes beyond Edelman’s sinthomosexual by embracing the sinthôme in acts of linguistic creativity that tap the drive’s generativity to render her transfeminine embodiment viable, Jenny’s embrace of the sinthôme is not creative but rather enacts a feminine version of the sinthomosexual’s death-driven work. In Nightwood’s eeriest plotline, she incites the narrative’s final goings down. Worried that Robin does not have “a heart,” Jenny orchestrates interactions with a child, Sylvia, she calls her “niece” (Barnes 2006: 123, 76). Felix describes Sylvia as having “fallen in love’ with” Robin, who keeps asking “if she ‘loved her’ ”; the child thereby becomes implicated in the events precipitating Nora and Robin’s split (Barnes 2006: 123). At

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Jenny’s, while “staring” at Robin, Sylvia witnesses the Marchesa de Spada glance “slyly at Robin” and predict that “there was one person” present “who had come to the end of her existence and would return no more” (Barnes 2006: 77). Shaking at this insinuation, Jenny orders a carriage. Noticing a “young Englishwoman” approaching Robin, Jenny collapses; as Robin pets Sylvia, Jenny bristles and begins to “cry slowly” (Barnes 2006: 79–81). After O’Connor criticizes Jenny’s attention-seeking she escalates, beginning to “weep outright” and employing “the catching in her throat to attract” Robin “with . . . insistent fury” (Barnes 2006: 81). O’Connor describes the “English girl” as “sitting up there pleased and frightened” by her involvement in the conflict (Barnes 2006: 113). By contrast, the narrator notes that Sylvia sits “speechless, . . . her head turned as if fixed, looking at Robin” verbally abusing Jenny for voicing naïvetés about women’s superiority (Barnes 2006: 82). Shortly thereafter, every plotline collapses. Jenny hits “Robin, scratching and tearing in hysteria, striking, clutching, and crying”; Robin teeters “forward” and then “down,” with “her knees on the floor, her head forward as her arm moved upward in a gesture of defense”; Jenny falls down upon her (Barnes 2006: 83). The doctor observes “the child . . . sitting still,” her head “drawn down” and “eyes wide open” in “terror,” looking as if she is “running away from something grown up” (Barnes 2006: 113). Sylvia eventually flings “herself down on the seat, face outward” and cries “in a voice not suitable for a child because it was controlled with terror: ‘Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!’ ” (Barnes 2006: 83). Sylvia’s “terror” emerges both from her premature experience of conflict and from her fear of losing Robin (for the child is implicated in the adults’ love triangle through her affection for Robin). It also bears witness to the drive’s “destructiveness” subtending Nightwood’s heterosexual and homosexual versions of “reproductive futurism” (Coffman 2022: 143; Edelman 2004: 28). Guido’s “decay” and Sylvia’s “terror” undermine this ideology; Robin’s flight from her husband and child repudiates it (Barnes 2006: 113–15; Edelman 2004: 121). O’Connor, too, questions reproductive fantasy. Asking “What manner of a man is it that has to adopt his brother’s children to make a mother of himself, and sleeps with his brother’s wife to get him a future,” the doctor intensifies the conflict precipitating the women’s eventual departure for the United States (Barnes 2006: 80).

ALL FALL DOWN: “THE POSSESSED” Nightwood’s final chapter—“The Possessed”—tracks Jenny’s, Nora’s, and Robin’s unravelings in New York, where Robin’s evasions intensify: “Jenny could do nothing with her; it was as if the motive power which had directed Robin’s life, her day as well as her night, had been crippled” (Barnes 2006: 176). Robin refuses Jenny’s desire to “make their home in the country” yet frequently leaves the city, taking the train then “wandering without design, going into many out-of-the-way churches,” posing as if in prayer, placing “her teeth against her palm, fixed in an unthinking stop as one who hears of death suddenly” (Barnes 2006: 176–7). Jenny follows, becoming “hysterical” about Robin’s “desperate anonymity”; after accusing her lover “of a ‘sensuous communion with unclean spirits,’ ” Jenny strikes “herself down” in misunderstanding (Barnes 2006: 177). As Robin circles “into Nora’s part of the country” the latter rouses, flanked by dogs, and climbs a hill where “she heard things rustling in the grass” (Barnes 2006: 178). Seeing a light in the hilltop chapel, she begins “to run, cursing and crying, and blindly, without warning, plunge[s] into the jamb of the chapel door” (Barnes 2006: 178). As she collapses, readers see Robin go “down” inside the church, face-to-face with a dog (Barnes 2006: 179). Robin backs the animal into a corner and

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he becomes aggressive, standing “as if to avoid something that troubled him to such agony that he seemed to be rising from the floor” (Barnes 2006: 179). She hits him and he bites as they struggle; they mimic one another’s movements, “grinning and crying” until they collapse from exhaustion at the novel’s end (Barnes 2006: 180). In this scene, Robin’s actions figure the drive, whose “essence” is “psychic affect” (de Lauretis 2010: 136). de Lauretis observes that Robin displays “an excess of affect that cannot be bound to a suitable object” throughout the novel “or to its immediate object (the dog)” in “The Possessed” (de Lauretis 2010: 136). Although this chapter foregrounds Robin’s role as a “textual inscription of the drive,” her encounter with the dog does not undo fantasy (de Lauretis 2010: 137). Rather, this scene is the culmination of her unsuccessful attempt to confront its longstanding absence. In Insane Passions (Coffman 2006), I argue that Robin figures Lacan’s theory of psychosis from the 1930s through the 1950s. Apparently unanchored by a master signifier situating her in the Lacanian triad, Robin functions within Nightwood as a figure for “the unconscious or for psychosis” (Coffman 2006: 113). She seems not to be oriented by a fundamental fantasy connecting the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; instead, she sequentially tries on her lovers’ fantasies, none of which stick. At the novel’s close, Jenny’s and Nora’s fantasies collapse in upon Robin’s absence of fantasy as they all “go down.” Echoing her abandonment of husband and child, “The Possessed” makes a montage of the devastation Jenny and Nora experience from Robin’s absent presence.

“GO DOWN, MATTHEW”: O’CONNOR’S UNRAVELING, READERS’ HOPE “The Possessed” ends with Edelmanian unravelings that, for de Lauretis, constitute an “emphatic negation of any possible redemption” (de Lauretis 2010: 145). However, I view Nightwood’s poetic language as offering readers hope that is especially evident in “Go Down, Matthew”—even though it ends with O’Connor’s collapse. This chapter’s final segment begins when the doctor enters a bar; the patrons realize she is “drunk” and will put on a show (Barnes 2006 168). She first talks with an “unfrocked priest,” a “friend” who frequents what is likely a queer bar and serves as her confessor (Barnes 2006: 169). Freeman, whose redemptive reading of Barnes aims beyond Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume I (1978), argues that Nightwood moves away from private “confessional” practices that put “desire . . . into discourse” (Freeman 2014: 760; Foucault 1978: 21). Unlike Nora’s visit to the doctor’s garret, which is akin to a confidential psychoanalytic session, O’Connor’s sex in pissoirs reworks “the two most sensate sacraments—Baptism and the Eucharist”— both of which offer communal alternatives to the private “regime of sexuality” grounded in psychoanalysis’ secularization of confession (Freeman 2014: 748). O’Connor’s—and, I would add, Robin’s—trips to the public toilets in search of their “people that have never been made” function baptismally, allowing them “to be conjoined with something, someone, somewhere” (Barnes 1937: 102; Freeman 2014: 749). These characters embrace stigma to raze the heteronormative symbolic, going beyond Edelman’s rigorously anti-social conceptualization of the sinthomosexual to reveal that the drive can both sever and join people. Although I agree with Freeman that Nightwood deploys queer public sex in this way, I also see O’Connor’s garrulous visit to the bar as a pro-social, public confession. Speaking publicly to the “unfrocked priest,” the doctor—when pressed—reveals her own discourse’s unreliability by admitting that she lied about having fathered children in a heterosexual marriage (Barnes 1937:

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169). The doctor then goes on to rail about “queer good people” (Barnes 2006: 171) such as Nora—“an early Christian” who “believed the word”—who capitulate to the straight morality causing their downfall (Barnes 2006: 56). Embracing a rhetoric of damnation, the doctor cries “May they all be damned! The people in my life who have made my life miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night” (Barnes 2006: 171). Naming Nora’s and Jenny’s “love for Robin” as “a grand bad story,” O’Connor continues the reversals of dominant value systems that characterized his earlier monologues about the virtues of the night (Barnes 2006: 171). The drive’s death-giving and life-giving elements animate her discourse, challenging anti-social queer theory— and Freeman—by making confession public. Crucially, this monologue questions the value of closeting feelings. Building on rather than rejecting the confessional putting of “desire . . . into discourse,” the doctor—who paradoxically proclaims herself an “old woman who lives in the closet”—continues a series of questions from “Go Down, Matthew” revealing her pain (Foucault 1990 21; Barnes 2006 146). She asks Nora, “Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my mind goes back, or holding my gut as if they were a coil of knives? Yet you are screaming and drawing your lip and putting your hand out and turning round and round!” (Barnes 2006: 164). Comparing herself to “a heifer on the way to slaughter,” “dragging and squealing” despite “knowing his cries have only half a rod to go,” the doctor says she is “protesting . . . death” because “death has only a rod to go to protest his screaming” (Barnes 2006: 164). However, in the bar, O’Connor admits that she enjoys talking and that it, too, conceals suffering. Complaining that people “tell me everything then expect it to lie hushed” and comparing herself to “the mad king of Bavaria,” she declares that “I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed” (Barnes 2006: 171–2). Revealing the silences underpinning talk, this pronouncement stages O’Connor as an analyst prompting nighttime disclosures unvoiced elsewhere (Barnes 2006: 172). Revealing the characters’ misery, her comments critique and reverse peoples’ closeting of feeling, registering the drive’s deathliness while hinting at its “generativity” (Coffman 2022: 17). O’Connor also reveals her transfemininity in this scene. Comparing herself to “an old worn out lioness, a coward in my corner,” she declares that “for the sake of my bravery I’ve never been the one thing that I am, to find out what I am!” (Barnes 2006: 172). This passage—suggesting that the doctor, contra Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, has “given ground relative to” her “desire” for gender transition—presents self-denial as “bravery” (S7: 319). The apotheosis of O’Connor’s martyrdom, this statement claims courage in her Christlike suffering. However, a bar patron challenges this idea, directing attention to the way the doctor—“the Squatting Beast, coming out at night” to feed on others’ feelings—distracts herself from her own pain: she is “always getting everyone into trouble by excusing them because” she “can’t excuse” herself (Barnes 2006: 172–3). In response, however, O’Connor exclaims that “I’m damned, and carefully public,” highlighting the way her talk makes her transfemininity publicly visible by constituting a sinthôme grounding her embodiment (Barnes 2006: 173). By making her volubility central to Nightwood’s poetics, Barnes offers a pro-social and transfeminine revision of Edelman’s sinthomosexual. Claiming her sinthôme in humorous monologues, O’Connor lightens the atmosphere of doom and gloom that otherwise pervades Nightwood, which seems enamored with the drive’s deathliness in ways that are understandable given the novel’s setting during the rise of European fascism. Although Nightwood might therefore seem to exemplify Edelman’s apocalyptic reading of the drive and insistence that queers should abandon hope within a profoundly homophobic—and, I would

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add, transphobic—Symbolic, Barnes’ language reveals the drive’s “generativity”: its capacity creatively to use the signifier to take her readers, if not her characters, in new directions (Coffman 2022: 17). As O’Connor says to Nora, “the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine and terrifying spectacle” (Barnes 2006: 151). “[T]errifying” and “fine,” “destructive” and “constructive”: the drive razes yet also creates (Coffman 2022: 74). By having her characters and readers witness multiple unravelings, Barnes turns psychoanalysis into a public practice. O’Connor’s garrulous critiques of homophobia and transphobia invite us to reformulate psychoanalysis’ premises: to look, as do queer and trans-affirmative psychoanalysts, for new ways to theorize the sexualities and genders that were beginning to emerge in Barnes’ time; to find new signifiers and sinthômes with which to rework psychoanalysis for the twenty-first century and beyond.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Carolyn (1996), Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss, Indiana UP. Barnes, Djuna ([1937] 2006), Nightwood, New Directions. Carlson, Shanna (2010), “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference,” differences 21 (2): 46–72. Cavanagh, Sheila (2015), “Transsexuality and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” CNPC 1: The Freudian Legacy Today: 104–124. Cavanagh, Sheila (2016a), “Tiresias and Psychoanalysis With/out Oedipus,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/tiresias-and-psychoanalysis-without-oedipus/ Cavanagh, Sheila (2016b), “Transsexuality as Sinthome: Bracha L. Ettinger and the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 17 (1): 27–44. Cavanagh, Sheila, (2018), “Transgender Embodiment: A Lacanian Approach,” Psychoanalytic Review 105 (3): 303–27. Coffman, Chris (2006), Insane Passions: Lesbians and Psychosis in Literature and Film, Wesleyan UP. Coffman, Chris (2022), Queer Traversals: Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories, Bloomsbury. de Lauretis, Teresa (2010), Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, Palgrave. Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke UP. Eliot, T.S. ([1937] 2006), Introduction, in Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, New York: New Directions, xvii–xxii. Eliot, T.S. (2001), The Waste Land, ed. Michael North, Norton. Ettinger, Bracha (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace, Minnesota UP. Foucault, Michel ([1978] 1990), The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vintage. Freccero, Carla (2007), in “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ 13 (2–3): 177–95. Freeman, Elizabeth (2014), “Sacra/mentality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood,” American Literature 86 (4): 737–65. Freud, Sigmund (1961), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Norton. Freud, Sigmund ([1931] 1963), “Female Sexuality,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff, Collier: 194–211. Freud, Sigmund ([1933] 1965), “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans., ed. James Strachey, Norton: 139–67. Freud, Sigmund (1997), “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Touchstone: 1–112. Fuss, Diana (1995), Identification Papers, New York: Routledge. Gherovici, Patricia (2017), Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference, New York: Routledge. Gozlan, Oren (2015), Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach, Routledge. Heaney, Emma (2017), The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory, Northwestern UP.

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Herring, Phillip. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. Viking, 1995. Madden, Ed (2008), Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888–2001, Fairleigh Dickinson UP. Marcus, Jane (1991), “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, Southern Illinois UP, 221–250. Millot, Catherine (1990), Horsexe, New York: Autonomedia. Nieland, Justus (2008), Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life, Urbana UP. Salah, Trish (2017), “What Does Tiresias Want?” TSQ 4 (3–4): 632–38. Stryker, Susan (2017), Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, Seal Press. Trubowitz, Lara (2005), “In Search of ‘The Jew’ in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood: Jewishness, Antisemitism, Structure, and Style,” Modern Fiction Studies 51 (2): 311–34.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Absent Mother in Mrs. Dalloway Woolf, Klein, and Freud FUHITO ENDO *

Any intertextual comparison of modernist literary language and psychoanalysis can be inspired by Elizabeth Abel’s juxtaposition of Virginia Woolf, Melanie Klein, and Sigmund Freud, a revealing reading of the ways in which Woolf ’s novels work as insightful and concurrent responses to psychoanalytic movements between the wars. Abel’s focus is on Woolf ’s aestheticization of the Kleinian critique of Freudian theory almost contemporaneously with some British female analysts’ introduction of Klein, similarly intended as criticism of Freud. Having said that, it should also be noted that Abel’s interpretation is heavily dependent on the binary opposition of Freud’s patricentric ‘Oedipal father’ and the matricentric (Kleinian) ‘preOedipal mother’ (35), a dichotomy Abel tries to foreground as deciding the temporal and spatial structure of Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Despite her inspiring perusal of this text, such a simplistic and reductive assumption prevents Abel from paying attention to a more complicated and even paradoxical relationship between Freud and Klein. This paradox is such that it is only through Freud’s clinical failures that one can ontologically posit Klein’s pre-Oedipal femininity and maternity. In other words, something Kleinian can only be discernible in what I would term the negative ‘gaps’ between the lines of Freud’s Oedipus complexes. This contradictory connection between them has to do with a significant part of the novel’s thematic concern in such a manner as to link its narrative to a set of contemporary psychoanalytic controversies over femininity and maternity. This is what eludes Abel’s reading of Woolf, Klein, and Freud. I will argue that this paradoxical psychoanalytic problematic structures the language of Mrs. Dalloway, whilst suggesting a close intertextual relevance between this novel, Freud’s case history of ‘Dora,’ and Joan Riviere’s theorization of femininity, an implicit Kleinian criticism of Freud. Riviere can be described at once as an excellent translator of Freud and an outstanding Kleinian theorist, whilst being close to the

Part of the argument of Joan Riviere in this chapter is a revised version of that in my monograph written in Japanese: Affect and Modernity: British Literature/Psychoanalysis/Critical Theory (Sairyusha, 2017). My thanks are to Professor Barnaby Ralph for his invaluable comments on the earlier draft of this chapter.

*

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‘Bloomsbury group,’ a core member of which was Woolf. As these historical facts suggest, Riviere plays a crucial role in this intertextual network.

BISEXUAL IDENTIFICATION WITH MEN Particularly noteworthy here is the absence of Clarissa Dalloway’s mother, mention of whom is made only once in the novel (157). Given the importance of a Kleinian mother in Abel’s discussion, this textual fact should be given the utmost importance; however, she just refers to this in passing. I would argue that it is crucial to correlate this maternal absence with Clarissa’s recurring identifications with others, especially such characters as could be called ‘phallic mothers.’ The beginning sequence of the novel is explicit about this: She [Clarissa] would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man . . . . —9 The novel’s logic is that women’s ‘interest in politics’ masculinizes them, which is also true of Lady Bruton, an aristocratic woman who takes great pride in her own military family line and her political influence behind the scenes, and is someone with whom Clarissa desires to identify herself. Clarissa is frustrated by this masculine lady’s disdain for her own femininity: ‘Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed, Lady Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in politics than people; of talking like a man’ (95). It is worth recalling that Abel’s dualistic reading of Mrs. Dalloway divides the narrative into two topoi: ‘Bourton’ as representative of a pre-Oedipal female space and time where Clarissa could enjoy her implicitly homosexual girlhood, and London as symbolical of an Oedipally masculine urbanity which forces Clarissa into heterosexuality as the wife of a Tory MP. This dualism may seem to account for Clarissa’s urge for identification with those ‘phallic’ ladies as a conservative resident of Westminster. However, what strikes us most is how Woolf repeatedly renders Clarissa’s homosexual inclination as a product of masculine identification: [Y]et she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was a pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, some accident—like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. — 28–9 Woolf ’s representation of Clarissa’s sexuality allows us to regard her as a bisexual woman who identifies herself with masculine characteristics. Moreover, we need to reconsider Bourton, the pre-Oedipal pastoral, idealized as a female space and time by Abel. Clarissa’s girlhood there and then is tinged with her homosexual desire for Sally Seton, who is so interested in politics as to encourage Clarissa to read William Morris and Shelley, thereby attempting to politicize her. It is worth adding that Sally enjoys the reputation of being deviant in terms of the Victorian gender standards of femininity. Of greater importance is that

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Clarissa’s female homosexuality and its libidinal intensity are represented through reference to Othello: No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy . . . and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy”. That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton! — 31 Once again, we witness Clarissa expressing and enjoying a desire for a masculine woman, whilst simultaneously identifying herself with a man; in this case, her homosexual ‘feeling’ is superimposed upon Othello’s masculine heterosexual affectivity. It can thus be said that Clarissa’s female homosexuality is intensified and masculinized by her heterosexual identification with men. This means that what Abel reads as a Kleinian pre-Oedipal and female homosexual sanctuary— Bourton—is suggestive of something contrary to this, Freudian Oedipality, where a woman/ daughter identifies herself with a man/father. Clarissa’s bisexuality, thus examined, is reminiscent of what Woolf idealizes as ‘androgynous’ in A Room of One’s Own (1929), where Woolf declares: ‘[i]t is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.’ Hence, Woolf ’s conclusion: ‘Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated’ (137). What should also be noted here is that Woolf ’s thematic concern in this text is ‘women and fiction’ (5), an exploration of literary creativity within the bounds of female subjectivity. In comparison, Mrs. Dalloway is more concerned with the psychopolitics of Clarissa’s bisexuality in such a manner as to indicate its intertextual relevance to contemporary psychoanalytic discourses. What is significant in this vein is that, within a libidinal circuit of Clarissa’s bisexuality, the Kleinian affectivity between mother and daughter is almost totally marginalized or, rather, obliterated. The absence of Clarissa’s mother in this novel provides us with crucial perspectives from which to contextualize Mrs. Dalloway in a set of intertextual connections with Freud, Klein, and Riviere.

DORA AND THE ABSENT MOTHER From the point of view of an absent mother, it is of crucial significance that close intertextualities can be read between Mrs. Dalloway and Freud’s case history of ‘Dora,’ ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1901, 1905). Critical attention has so far been paid to Woolf ’s allusion to this case study in The Voyage Out (1915), but my argument is that Mrs. Dalloway presents much more nuanced intertextual references to Freud’s unsuccessful analysis of Dora. As is known, Freud himself admitted that he had not been able to analyse Dora fully, and it has been argued that Freud’s clinical failure inspired a considerable number of analysts to gain insights into psychoanalysis in a way that I would term a critique of Freudian reason. As Freud confessed, one of the chief reasons for this failure was that he overestimated Dora’s positive paternal transference with regard to himself. In other words, he foregrounded Dora the daughter’s attachment to her father/Freud/Herr K. and her accompanying heterosexuality, only to marginalise

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what we have just described as female homosexuality eclipsed by her relationship as a woman/ daughter to a man/father. What Freud failed to analyse was what Woolf narrativized in Mrs. Dalloway. That which should and could have been fully analysed in this case study is the way in which Dora’s seemingly heterosexual identification with her father/Freud/Herr K. allowed her to cover her homosexual attachment to Frau K. and, by extension, for her mother. In a curious way, Freud acknowledged that Dora’s female homosexual libido was invested onto Frau K. He did so in a few footnotes he added later. This textual gesture reminds us of Leo Bersani’s observation that Freud’s ‘footnotes play the role of the psychoanalytic unconscious’ (18), wherein we can discover what he is reluctant to theorize or the untheorizable in his psychoanalysis as ‘bottom-of-the-page thoughts.’ Textually and clinically, thus, Dora’s bisexual queerness, her homosexuality disguised as heterosexuality, becomes absent in ‘the upper body’ of Freud’s language (14). In this context, Freud’s treatment of Dora’s mother strikes us as astonishingly unfair. In Freud’s opinion, Dora’s paternal transference led her to dilute the affective value of her mother: The relations between the girl and her mother had been unfriendly for years. The daughter looked down on her mother and used to criticize her mercilessly, and she had withdrawn completely from her influence. — SE 7: 20 Freud thought of Dora’s mother as ‘an uncultivated woman and above all as a foolish one,’ who ‘had concentrated all her interests upon domestic affairs’ to the point of inducing him to suggest a diagnosis of ‘the housewife’s psychosis’ (20). I contend that Freudian symptomatology could well have interpreted Dora’s excessive denial of her mother as indicative of an opposite as a kind of reaction-formation. The fact is, however, that Freud himself went to another extreme and attributed the mother’s ‘pathological conditions’ to ‘a hereditary predisposition’ (20). As George Makari notes, one of the crucial elements that distinguishes Freud’s psychoanalysis from other contemporary approaches to psychopathology, representatively those under the influence of Jean-Martin Charcot, is that ‘he turned away from the biological buttressing that Charcot used to justify his psychology’ as ‘the hereditary nature of hysteria.’ This departure from a Charcotian pseudo-biological discourse can be understood to ‘mark the outline of what would become distinctly Freudian ground’ (37). Given this historiography, we have to say that Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s excessive rejection of her mother is itself excessive. In this way, the presence of Dora’s mother is marginalized by Freud as mercilessly as by his patient. Freud’s recourse to heredity is symptomatic of the doctor’s strong wish to diminish the affective value of something maternal in Dora’s psychosexuality.

DORA’S PATERNAL IDENTIFICATION AS A LESBIAN Freud’s unsuccessful analysis of Dora was to result in a series of examinations of his clinical limitations by other analysts. One of the exemplary discussions of this aspect is that offered by Gregorio Kohon, an Argentina-born analyst practicing in London and an expert historian of British psychoanalysis. He tries to ascribe Freud’s failure to the structural asymmetry between male and female in their respective Oedipal processes. In the case of a male subject, he can divert the earliest

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heterosexual libidinal investment from his mother to other women, through his identification with his heterosexual father, without having to change the gender of his object of desire. In contrast, a female subject has to modify the initial pre-Oedipal homosexual attachment to her mother into a heterosexual desire for men, urged by her Oedipal love of her father. This means that ‘[t]he change of object from mother to father is what is problematic for the woman—as relevant and problematic as not having to change objects is for the man’ (376). This difficulty in shifting the gender of an object of desire is reflective of the persistently lingering intensity of female pre-Oedipal homosexuality. What further complicates this narrative is a female subject’s unwillingness to accept castration. What matters here is Freud’s concept of ‘the masculinity complex of women,’ presented, for example, in ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (1925): Thus a girl may refuse to accept the fact of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she does possess a penis, and may subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man. — SE 14: 253 If Freud’s female subject refuses her castration in this way, whilst not abandoning her initial attachment to her mother, this causes her to be a female homosexual subject who identifies herself with her father. Kohon’s argument is that ‘[t]here is plenty of evidence to suggest an unconscious identification of Dora with her father,’ which can be taken for ‘an expression of an unconscious wish to love woman as a man’ and therefore ‘what was suppressed’ by Dora ‘was her phallic attachment to her mother’ (379). This also explains the reason why ‘bisexuality might be more relevant for women than for men’ and the fundamental question dividing this sexual subjectivity is ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ (376; original emphasis). A ‘phallic mother’ plays an important part as a psychic imago for such a bisexual subject to deny the castration of her own, as well as her mother. It needs to be recollected just how Dora comes to desire Frau K. through her identification with Herr K., whilst simultaneously stressing that this lady ‘whom she used positively to worship’ (26) was much more intellectual than her own mother. Of equal importance is her concurrent and excessive stressing of her own mother’s intellectual inferiority and servile femininity as a housewife. We may wonder why this sort of excessively negative attitude on the part of Dora towards her mother did not attract Freud’s attention, not least because the analysis of Dora induced him to highlight the concept of what he terms ‘reactive reinforcement’ (original emphasis), wherein ‘the one thought is excessively intensely conscious while its counterpart is repressed and unconscious’ (55; original emphasis). In one of the footnotes to the ‘Postscript’ of this text, Freud certainly admitted his failure to discover ‘her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K’ (120). This doubly-maginalized addition and admission (in a footnote to the postscript) is indeed a reference to what Freud touched on in the last footnote to the last chapter: ‘we can see the action of the fourth and most deeply buried group of thoughts—those relating to her love for Frau K.’ (110–11). Once again, those observations are textually marginalized in such a way as to recall the repressed ‘bottomof-the-page thoughts,’ as Bersani puts it. This suggests that Freudian psychoanalysis can hardly work in cases where it cannot rely on a positive transference between a daughter and a father. Such a clinical limitation forced Freud to be

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reticent about the mother-daughter relationship and its libidinal affectivity outside of the female Oedipal attachment to the father. More significantly, this allows us to argue that it is precisely in this context of maternal absence that the intertextual relevance between Freud’s text on Dora and Mrs. Dalloway reveals itself.

THE PREDICAMENT OF ‘DAUGHTERS OF EDUCATED MEN’ What Freud terms the ‘female masculinity complex’ can be historicized as a certain psychological dilemma, a historical plight which upper-middle-class women in Europe were forced to face between the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially when they had strong intellectual aspirations. Dora, whose actual name was Ida Bauer, was born to an extremely affluent Jewish family in Vienna in 1882 (exactly the same year in which Virginia Woolf was born). In a biographical account of Bauer, Klare Kahane depicts her brother Otto as ‘one of the principal leaders of the Austrian Socialist party’ and ‘its chief theoretician and ideological proponent’ (34). According to Felix Deutsch, who analysed her in 1922 more than twenty years after Freud, she still ‘recalled with great feeling how close she had always been to her brother, who had become the leader of a political party’ (37). As Freud stressed, her ‘sympathies [. . .] had always been with the father’s side of the family’ (19–20), from which, he was positive, ‘she had derived not only her natural gifts and her intellectual precocity’ (20). Given this, Dora’s bisexuality can be read as what Kohon terms ‘divalence,’ a sort of ‘hysterical stage, in which the subject—caught up in her need to change object from mother to father—can get “fixed”, unable to make the necessary choice’ (363). This psychosexual predicament can be understood to signify the dividedness of a female subject between paternal identification and the lingering residue of her initial attachment to her mother. In Dora’s case, this is symptomatic of what Kohon regards as ‘her phallic attachment to her mother’ or ‘an unconscious wish to love woman as a man.’ Thus historicized, Dora’s case may turn out to be an example of a psychosexual dilemma peculiar to what Woolf calls ‘daughters of educated men’ (35) in Three Guineas (1938), although it is difficult to find in Dora’s life the determined Marxist and pacifist feminism advocated by this text.

WOMANLINESS AS A MASQUERADE Kohn suggests that Freud is not totally to blame for his failed analysis because ‘[t]he hysteric disguises herself.’ According to him, ‘she will pretend to be a woman, she will put on the fancy dress of what she thinks will constitute her “feminine self ’ ” (376–77). This is, significantly, reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway, in which Clarissa attempts to confirm her female identity as Mrs. Dalloway and finds herself preoccupied with her feminine ‘dresses’ (34–6), whilst identifying herself with the whole set of phallic mothers and recollecting her homosexual desire in the masculine terms of a man such as Othello. In this vein, Kohon refers to Joan Riviere’s article ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), thus leading us to conduct a comparative examination of Mrs. Dalloway, Freud’s Dora, and Riviere’s work. Riviere’s starting point is ‘a particular type of intellectual woman’ who ‘wish[es] for masculinity’ and ‘may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and retribution feared from men’ (91). This thesis statement encourages us to read this essay from the viewpoint of the Freudian

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‘masculine complex.’ Despite this Freudian sentence, Riviere also adds: ‘[b]ut the task of guarding herself against the women’s retribution is harder than with man’ (99). This makes one suspect that Riviere’s real interest is not so much in women’s phantasy of being castrated by men/fathers as the fear of being castrated by women/mothers. This shows that Riviere is on the side of Kleinian theory. As a matter of fact, some parts of Riviere’s discussion are distinctly Kleinian in nature: The desire to bite off the nipple is also shifted, as we know, on to the desire to castrate the father by biting off his penis. Both parents are rivals at this stage, both bosses desired objects: the sadism is directed against both, the revenge of both is feared. But, as always with girls, the mother is more hated, and consequently the more feared. — 97–8 This is surely a Kleinian baby girl’s unconscious phantasy, in which the mother is not castrated but rather castrating. The implication is that Riviere’s focus is on the Kleinian pre-Oedipal motherdaughter relationship. Of no less importance is another article of hers, ‘A Contribution to the Analysis of the Negative Therapeutic Reaction’ (1936). This text can be read as her critical response to Freud’s implicit mention of her own analysis in a footnote to the last section of The Ego and Id (1923). Freud represents this analysis as ‘[t]he battle with the obstacle of an unconscious sense of guilt’ (SE 19: 50), thereby emphasizing its unanalysability. Freud also stresses that an analyst can be optimistic in tackling this type of patient, provided that their ‘sense of guilt’ is ‘the product of an identification with some other person who was once the object of an erotic cathexis.’ He further remarks that this identification is similar to ‘what happens in melancholia’, the sense of guilt (50) coming from an identification with, or oral introjection of, something paternal.. Freud’s point is the patient’s (Riviere’s) oral identification/introjection of something paternal, which manifests itself in his analysis of Dora as having an ‘unconscious phantasy’ of ‘sexual intercourse (sucking at the male organ)’ and which accounts for her physical symptoms such as ‘an irritation in her throat’ and ‘coughing’ (SE 7: 51). As in the case of Dora, Freud was thus keen to foreground a female patient’s paternal transference, whilst marginalizing something maternal and Kleinian. Indeed, Freud suggests a possible substitution of ‘the sexual object of the moment (the penis)’ for ‘the original object (the nipple)’ (52) in his analysis of Dora but did not attempt to look into the latter Kleinian oral libido. In his analysis of Riviere, Freud thus intimates the clinical efficacy of transference of a female patient onto a male doctor. In defiance of this, Riviere provides a set of insights into something contradictory about Freud’s analysis. She is acutely aware of what may be termed Freud’s double standard, or rather double-bind attitude: admitting and denying something unanalysable in his psychoanalysis. Riviere draws our attention to just how Freud treats ‘the unconscious sense of guilt’ as ‘unanalysable’; at the very same time, ‘[h]e is not, however, actually as pessimistic about it as people incline to suppose’ (155). Riviere maintains that what Freud fails to analyse is the Kleinian ‘depressive position.’ This position follows a Kleinian subject’s phantasy driven by intense aggression towards the maternal. Klein renders it in ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935): ‘[t]he ego feels impelled [. . .] to make restitution for all the sadistic attacks that it has launched on that

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object’ (265). This affectivity is necessarily charged with a strong sense of remorse, which leads Riviere to present a hopelessly depressive psychic picture: The content of the depressive position (as Melanie Klein has shown) is the situation in which all one’s loved ones within are dead and destroyed, all goodness is dispersed, lost, in fragments, wasted and scattered to the winds; nothing is left within but utter desolation. Love brings sorrow, and sorrow brings guilt; the intolerable tension mounts, there is no escape, one is utterly alone, there is no one to share or help. — 144 This is the real and deeper structure of the patient’s—Riviere’s—‘unconscious sense of guilt.’ This description of the daughter’s melancholic affectivity and resultant ‘sense of guilt’ directed towards her mother is indicative of her Kleinian critique of Freud’s analysis of herself. And yet, things are more complicated: she points out that Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1918) is the first text to make a significant contribution to this type of ‘psychology of insanity’ or ‘the problems of depressive states’ (138; original emphasis). If this is true, Freud should be understood as discovering and concealing such a Kleinian problematic. This allows us to discuss that Freud can be optimistic as long as he can avoid Kleinian melancholic depression as something unanalysable, whilst depending on the patient’s positive paternal transference. Given this Freudian scenario, Riviere’s theory strikes us as devastating to this optimism: she contends that the patient’s positive transference serves as a ‘masquerade’ or ‘mask of compliance’ (137), thereby covering her real resistance to the analyst (Freud). What makes the matter still more complicated and dense is that Riviere continues to argue that ‘analysis means unmasking and bringing to light what is in the depths of [the patient’s] mind,’ but such ‘internal psychic reality,’ thus uncovered, can turn out to be a sort of ‘madness’ or ‘insanity.’ In the depths of such analytic intensity, Riviere continues, paternal positive transference also works as ‘part of a highly organized system of defense against’ (138) this type of insane depression. The Kleinian depressive position in Riviere is thus charged with an impossibly fierce psychic intensity to the point of being termed ‘madness’ or ‘insanity,’ which Jacques Lacan might call ‘the real.’ As will be argued, this is also evocative of his conception of jouissance, potentially self-destructive libidinal intensity. Historically speaking, what Riviere represents as a Kleinian daughter’s extremely paranoiac imago of her mother also reminds us of Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Professions for Women’ (1938). This text is famous for Woolf ’s desired murder of ‘the Angel in the House,’ a symbol of the Victorian conservative and suffocatingly caring motherhood. Woolf confesses that ‘I did my best to kill her’ because ‘[h]ad I not killed her she would have killed me’ (151). The aggression of Woolf ’s statement implies something excessive and paranoiac, thus invoking Klein’s and Riviere’s psychoanalysis, wherein a girl makes an attack on her mother, whilst dreading retaliation from her mother. As we have just witnessed, such psychic excess finds itself in those female subjects whom Riviere categorizes as ‘a particular type of intellectual woman.’

THE CASTRATING MOTHER RE-ACTIVATED Freud’s psychoanalysis as an admission and denial of Kleinian psychic intensity, thus read, is reminiscent of Juliet Mitchell’s account of Freudian temporality of ‘deferred-ness’ or

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‘Nachträglichkeit.’ This is a psychic mechanism, where the meaning of the past is retroactively determined by the present. Freud makes a point of associating this temporality with the way in which something traumatic is given meaning by the present experience. Hence, what Freud terms ‘deferred action’ (SE 17: 45; original emphasis), in ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918), is a kind of re-traumatizing process. Freud depicts how this temporality works regarding his patient who witnessed ‘the primal scene’ of his parents’ coitus: At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression to which he is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be moved by it when the impression is received in him at the age of four; and only twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on him. — 45 The same type of temporality functions in Mitchell’s understating of Freud’s psychoanalysis: There is a fundamental distinction between recognising that the castration complex may refer back to other separations and actually seeing these separations as castrations. To Freud the castration complex divided the sexes and thus made the human being, human. But this is not to deny the importance of earlier separations. Freud himself had proposed that the loss of the faeces constituted the possibility of a retrospective referral; the castration complex could use it as a model. Freud’s account is retroactive: fearing phallic castration the child may ‘recollect’ previous losses, castration gives them their relevance. — 18–19 This Freudian temporality—wherein ‘history and the psychoanalytic experience is always a reconstruction, a retroactive account’ (19)—inspires us to redefine Kleinian ‘pre-Oedipal’ maternal castration as a psychic product of retroactive re-traumatization after a Freudian and paternal one. Paradoxically, the Kleinian ‘pre-Oedipal’ complex is, in fact, ‘post-Oedipal.’ It follows that this paradoxical ‘post-Oedipal’ Kleinian ‘pre-Oedipal’ phase—the earliest relationship between the daughter and mother—is essentially a-temporal, traumatic, and in excess of the Freudian seemingly chronological narrative of Oedipus complexes. Only through or after the Freudian experience of castration can the real significance of Kleinian pre-Oedipality be posited. We are therefore encouraged to reread Freud’s analysis of Riviere as a product of what he terms ‘deferred action,’ wherein he detects her Oedipal attachment through a paternal transference, whilst concurrently re-activating and re-traumatizing Kleinian pre-oedipal libido as something beyond his clinical scope. This reminds us of what Jacqueline Rose views as Freud’s ‘psychotic discovery of a negativity which he both theorized and effaced.’ This can be seen as ‘a residue’ of ‘the Freudian institution, in which Melanie Klein, or more specifically, the controversy on her work, occupies a crucial place.’ Rose’s question here is: ‘Who will analyse the unanalysed of Freud?’ (142). Her answer is Melanie Klein. This argument also makes sense in our context, where Freudian paternal transference re-activates Kleinian pre-Oedipal homosexual affect retroactively as a sort of negative by-product, something uncontainable within Freud’s theory and therefore marginalized and repressed into footnotes to his works. Indeed, this can be taken for ‘a residue’ of Freud’s theorization.

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It is worth stressing that Riviere, in ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ mentions her female patient whose heterosexual ‘enjoyment was full and frequent, with complete orgasm.’ Yet, this perfect sexual ‘gratification’ does not prevent Riviere from concluding that it is ‘not ultimately pure enjoyment,’ but rather ‘a restitution of something lost’ (95). Evidently, female heterosexuality here serves as a ‘masquerade’ and makes Riviere refer to the patient’s covered homosexuality as ‘pure enjoyment’ in such a negative manner as ‘something lost.’ This can be compared with a similar case in which Kohon finds that his female analysand decides to ‘choose a husband according to the image of her father’ and thereby ‘establish with him in fantasy the same relationship that she had with her mother’ (363). This type of highly complicated queerness may tempt one to ask that infamous question Freud asked: ‘What does a woman want?’ As is well-known, Ernest Jones reports that Freud asked this negative rhetorical question in his letter to Marie Bonaparte (421).

FEMALE JOUISSANCE What we encounter here is the impossibility of female homosexuality without any mediation of heterosexuality. The cases of Clarissa, Dora, and Riviere’s female patient lead us to consider that their ‘pure enjoyment’ of female homosexuality is impossible outside of or without their masked acceptance of female heterosexuality. It is worth repeating that, in Riviere’s case, the heterosexual ‘enjoyment was full and frequent, with complete orgasm,’ but this ‘gratification’ is nothing more than ‘a restitution of something lost.’ Hence, this is ‘not ultimately pure enjoyment.’ This mode of sexuality is akin to what Lacan terms ‘phallic jouissance,’ the kind of sexual enjoyment which is enabled by an ‘object that puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed,’ that is to say, ‘object a’ that ‘takes the place of the missing partner’ and we can ‘see emerge in the place of the real, namely fantasy’ (S20: 63). It is no less intriguing that Lacan describes this type of enjoyment as ‘jouissance of the organ’ (7), given that Riviere mentions her analysand’s ‘complete orgasm.’ It is thus possible to juxtapose this patient’s sexual enjoyment—that which Riviere regards as ‘a restitution of something lost’—with the Lacanian phallic jouissance, an enjoyment of a replacement for that of which human subjects—whether male or female—are deprived by their castration, the ‘real’ and immediate access to something maternal. This Lacanian approach naturally obliges us to ask that rhetorical question of Freud’s: what does a woman want? This question here concerns the psychoanalytic status of the absent mothers in Mrs. Dalloway and Freud’s case study of Dora. Accordingly, we are led to ask this question, slightly modifying it in our context, ‘What do you really want under the cover of your disguised heterosexuality?’ Lacan himself wonders what is ‘the term she gets off on (dont elle jouit) beyond all this “playing” (jouer) that constitutes her relationship to man’ (89). Lacan’s answer is female jouissance —‘[a] jouissance beyond the phallus’—which ‘doesn’t exist and doesn’t signify anything’ (74), where ‘something other than object a is at stake in what comes to make up for (suppléer) the sexual relationship that does not exist’ (63). In Lacanian contexts, it is crucial to make a distinction between ‘supplementary’ and ‘complementary,’ because the latter is suggestive of the phallic jouissance, where object a works to cover for something absent and helps to create the fantasy of complete satisfaction. In other words, object a complements an impossible lack with an imaginary replacement. In the case of female jouissance, on the other hand, since ‘it doesn’t exist,’ it is experienced ‘on the path of ex-sistence’ as something ‘extra’ (77) or supplementary outside of the imaginary and perfect ‘whole’ in the fantasy of phallic jouissance. Hence, Lacan’s

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statement: ‘If I had said “complementary” what a mess we’d be in! We would fall back into the whole’ (73). It naturally follows that the ontological mode of this female jouissance is an ‘ecstatic’ (75) one, such as that of Saint Teresa—a representation of which is ‘the statue by Bernini’ (76)—or the libidinal intensity of a human subject’s experience when they abandon their subjectivity. Lacan’s question regarding Saint Teresa, who is ‘coming,’ is, therefore, ‘[w]hat is she getting off on?’ (76). ‘[W]oman’s jouissance’ can thus be viewed as ‘based on a supplementation of this not-whole (une suppléance de ce pas-toute),’ where a ‘not-whole’ subject can enjoy it in such a manner as to ‘make her absent from herself somewhere, absent as subject’ (35). Lacan’s response to Freud’s question (What does a woman want?), in his seminar entitled Encore (1972–3), is resonant with Woolf ’s language in Mrs. Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway enjoys this kind of ex-sistential and by definition ecstatic mode of non-being: But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children. — 9–10 Of interest is that Lacan considers a ‘child’ as a ‘cock’ (S20: 35) for female jouissance, which the translator, Bruce Fink, gives the supplementary meaning of ‘stopper’ or ‘plug,’ thereby suggesting that Lacan means ‘it seems to put a stop here to this form of jouissance’ (35). If this is correct, Clarissa can be taken here not to ‘put a stop’ to enjoying immersing herself in her female ‘exsistential’ jouissance, whilst ‘coming’ and abandoning her social and symbolic identity or subjectivity. What particularly intrigues one is the possible connection between this physical enjoyment of nonphysicality or non-identity—or self-effacement/destruction—and the ontological status of her absent mother. All we can say with Lacan is that ‘something other than object a is at stake in what comes to make up for (suppléer) the sexual relationship that does not exist’ within this text. It is indeed ‘[b]eyond language’ (44) or ‘beyond the phallus’ (74). In any case, this negative dimension can only be read as a mark of impossibility ‘beyond’ any textual presence, namely as textual absence (or ab/ sense). We may thus be inspired to say that Virginia Woolf had given a literary reply to Freud’s failed question of female sexuality almost fifty years before Jacques Lacan did so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago UP, 1989. Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. Columbia UP, 1986. Deutsch, Felix. ‘A Footnote to Freud’s “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” ’ In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism. Ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire and Kahane. Columbia UP, 1990. Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 2. Basic Books, 1955. Kahane, Claire. ‘Biographical Note.’ In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism. Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945. Free Press, 1975. Kohon, Gregorio. ‘Reflections on Dora: The Case of Hysteria.’ The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition. Free Association Books, 1986. Makari, George. Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. Harper, 2008.

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Mitchell, Juliet and Jacqueline Rose (eds.) Female Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. W.W. Norton, 1985. Riviere, Joan. The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers 1920–1958. Ed. Athol Hughes. Karnac, 1991. Rose, Jacqueline. Why War?: Psychoanalysis and the Return to Melanie Klein. Blackwell, 1993. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Fernald. Cambridge UP, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Hogarth, 1959. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. 1938. Ed. Naomi Black. Blackwell, 2001. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Professions for Women.’ The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Hogarth, 1947.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Lacan, the Feminine, and Feminisms MARIA JOSEFINA SOTA FUENTES

PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS Although twenty years of development were necessary for French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, in his Seminars, to face the question of female sexuality and turn it into the focal point of his investigation, as he did in the Encore Seminar, and not without traversing something of himself, the question about women and the feminine had fascinated him since very early in his work. Lacan approaches the theme, not from the prospective of “gender”, a term that he saw born in the United States in the 1950s/1960s, however without adopting it, neither giving it any consistency as would be done by future gender theorists – such as Eric Marty defends in his recent treatise regarding “Le sexe des modernes”. On the contrary, Lacan came across the feminine as something that escapes the classificatory consistencies that supports the identifications, interested by such unknown zones settled in the ends of language, without boundaries or measures, where the word is silent. Ever since the subject of the 1932 doctorate thesis of this young psychiatrist, Lacan would seek to decode the enigmatic passage of the act linked to death in tragic feminine figures (cf. Laurent, 2011a), as his patient Marguerite Anzieu, who he baptized as Aimée, and follower after her famous attempt at murdering an actress. Later, the psychoanalyst would find in the tragic heroine that surpasses all limits, the Greek classic mythological figure of Medea, the example of what would be a “true woman” (Ecrits: 640), if she existed. Medea, the woman who was betrayed by Jason and who kills her own children that were murdered, not by a loving mother, but by a woman able to abdicate what is most valuable to her in the name of an-Other thing. Furthermore, Lacan finds in Madeleine Gide, who burns her lover’s letters, precisely what she had as her “most precious” (ibid.), this “act of a woman”, absolute and without concessions. As she discovered that she was not the only one loved by her husband, in an act of rage and no turning back, she destroyed what was most valuable to her, going beyond the limits of the moral and the civilizing. “Perhaps there never was a more beautiful correspondence” (ibid.) – André Gide would lament upon seeing that “one after the other of the letters was thrown onto the fire of his blazing soul” (ibid.). In this direction, on what grounds would Ysé, the dramatic character of Paul Claudel’s Partage du midi, go ahead without limits and renounce her marriage, children, lover – this Claudel heroine 353

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that “strongly resembles a real woman” (S8: 309), capable of abandoning everything in an overwhelming apotheosis of love? It was certainly not due to a talent for sacrifices, nor revenge. Even less due to an alleged “female masochism” that corresponds more to the “misrecognitions and biases” (E: 614–615), of the psychoanalysts themselves frequently linked to a “fantasy of male desire”. Furthermore, the Freudian concept of the death drive would not do much to shed light on the enigmatic question of the feminine that had already been developed by Freud through the famous question what does a woman want? which led him to the limits of knowledge, woman being named in 1926 following the expression of that time, as the dark continent (SE 20: 212). Even though Freud had faced the question of female sexuality unprecedentedly, giving every single woman a voice and protagonism in the talking cure, thus unveiling the psychoanalytic experience from which he acquired new knowledge about women, Lacan took a decisive step regarding the subject. As an avid Freud reader and having dedicated many of his Seminars to systematically comment on his works, to the necessary “return to Freud” with which he would interpret the “course” of the psychoanalytic movement, Lacan did not refrain from criticizing the founder of psychoanalysis, notably for Freud having confused the woman with hysteria and having acted with his own resistance in cases such as the Young Homosexual Woman (S10: 130) in which, precisely, the emptiness in a cause which was inherent to the object of desire and drive was depicted. It is not inscribed in the Real of the human species that the man will desire the woman and vice versa, as in the “aberrant” thesis of “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” with which Freud (SE 7: 123–246) had opened the twentieth century, questioning the existence of a natural sexual instinct. On another note, the phallic question around which sexuality would gravitate for both genders and would lead the woman to the dead end of Penisneid – to the rock of insuperable castration in analysis and whose effect would be the unavoidable depression in women (SE 23: 252) – brought to the founder of psychoanalysis more criticism and problems than answers to the female question. It would not be long before the phallic dispute emerged in the core of the psychoanalytic debate of the 1920s, led by female analysts who would bring feminist theses to psychoanalysis, such as Karen Horney, who defended an innate femininity placed in the direct relation of the girl with her mother – thus not coming from the frustrated identification with the father and the man, based on a conservative patriarchalism and male domination throughout feminist voices from the twentieth century had already been fighting against. The debate got heated when his analyst, Karl Abraham, defended, in The Hague Congress of 1920, the view that women would unconsciously desire to be equal to men, aggravating the doctrinal differences that revolved around a dead end: phallocentrism. Freudianism would be heavily criticized for having considered the woman as a castrated being, inferior to men, an essentially lacking figure, reinforcing the segregation from which women suffered throughout the history of Western civilization. Sexist sexual politics were exposed, stemming from a patriarchal conservatism dated to the decadent Viennese society, as well as the problematic mystification of the woman as a ‘mystery’, according to criticism made by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedman, Kate Millet, among other voices that shaped the emerging feminist movement throughout the twentieth century. However, if feminism initially had sought equality between genders for the conquering of equal rights that effectively changed the women’s place in politics and society, it wouldn’t be long before a second feminist movement emerged defending an essential difference between the genders

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inspired by certain readings of philosophy and psychoanalysis, as occurred notably in France in the 1970s. A debate was aggravated: on one side, currents of thought that looked for an essence for women appeared, and, on the other, those who would deconstruct any ontological base of the genders, therefore dismantling the sexual difference per se – while in the United States, the concept of “gender” that would promote a disjunction was born, growing effectively more radical, between the biological sex and gender (Stoller, 1968). The feminist movement in France that became known as Psych et Po (Psychanalyse et Politique) or MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes), led by Antoinette Fouque and that had the participation of psychoanalysts such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Michèle Montrelay, had as an inspiration the reading of some of Jacques Lacan’s theses about the “feminine” to lay the groundwork for a femininity referred in a “feminine writing”, according to the concept created by feminist member of the group, Hélène Cixous. Therefore, contrary to most feminists who faced Freudianism as a serious enemy, the French movement found a possible reconciliation between psychoanalysis and feminism, making use of the retake on the Freudian doctrine by Lacan in his first Seminars, as well as the “sexuation” theory developed in Seminars 19 and 20. This way, the Psych and Po wouldn’t abstain from opposing the “idealistic and bourgeois tendencies of a large part of the American ‘radical’ feminism”. That is what Juliet Mitchell (1974: 21) affirms. She was the feminist who was part of the British movement “Women’s Liberation Works” and who, together with Jacqueline Rose, published for the first time in the English language in 1985 Lacan’s texts about female sexuality. However, ever since 1974, she had already announced her purpose of showing that the rejection of psychoanalysis and Freud’s works is an issue for the feminist movement per se. “Regardless of the use that may have been made, psychoanalysis does not support the patriarchal society, it analyses it. If our objective is to understand the oppression suffered by women and to fight against it, we cannot allow ourselves to neglect psychoanalysis” (ibid: 13). Some feminists from the French movement not only participated in Lacan’s Seminars but were also part of École Freudienne de Paris (Cassin: 79–80). And, similarly to the feminist psychoanalysts, Freud’s contemporaries, compelled him to advance towards psychoanalysis and, more specifically, in the subject of female sexuality. The feminist voices present in the Seminars were also important to Lacan, either for their criticism or for the input provided by the women of that movement. In the “Homage to Marguerite Duras, for Lol V. Stein’s”, Lacan mentions the work of Michèle Montrelay, his patient and participant in his Seminars, in which she had presented her work “Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein” (Montrelay: 55–81), calling his attention to a certain “use of letter” (Lacan, 2001: 194) converging with the use of the Unconscious that he formalized. Later, Lacan mentions the theatrical play “Portrait of Dora” in the context of the elaboration of the “Knot Borromean”, telling the author Hélène Cixous, right after the end of the performance at the Petit Orsay theater, which he would comment about in his Seminar – serving to illustrate a specific form of hysteria, “incomplete”, in its “rigidity” (S23: 87–88). However, even though Lacan mentioned the work of the feminists, he didn’t embrace the French movement theses which drew the inspiration from his teaching to postulate the existence of a femininity acknowledged in itself, intrinsic to women and susceptible to being shared through “feminine writing”. If what Lacan called “woman’s jouissance” (S20: 35) would make room for this type of interpretation, the outlined aphorism in this context one of full feminist enthusiasm and triumph, could have served as an answer: The Woman does not exist. “It’s true – what do you

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expect?” says Lacan (ibid: 57), “if the sexual relationship doesn’t exist, there aren’t any ladies. There was someone who was furious, a lady from the Woman’s Liberation Movement down here. She was truly . . . I said to her, ‘Come tomorrow morning, and I’ll explain to you what this is about’ ”.

THE PHALLUS AND THE “LACANIAN MOTHER” A first step was decisive to separate psychoanalysis from sexist doctrines of some post-Freudian professionals who effectively had their place in psychoanalysis. A “feminist Lacan” (Brousse: 42), still in the 1950’s, distinguishes the penis from the phallus, taking it as a “signifier” (E: 579), a symbolic element linked to the structured lack of human desire and the law of castration that applies to both sexes. Lacan, who initially used structural linguistics to read “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”, in his return to Freud summarized the Oedipus Complex and the Castration Complex through the formula of Parental Metaphor (E: 465), indicating the value of the phallus as signifier for the lack that accompanies the first crucial symbolic replacements in child development. Such replacements are necessary to assure them that they will not remain imprisoned in the position of object of maternal and/or paternal satisfaction, according to the Oedipal vicissitudes revealed by Freud. Furthermore, the phallus as signifier establishes the phallic identification, previous to the Castration Complex that presented itself to Freud as a matter of having or not the phallus, the object of desire which in the symbolic series may be the penis, children, money, etc. However, in order to have it, it is necessary to renounce being it, to abandon the identification with the imaginary object that would fill in the absence of the desire for the maternal Other and the consent to a loss linked to the drive satisfaction that Lacan called jouissance – the concept which received distinct meanings according to the paradigm shifts while it was being taught.1 Since Freud, the “development” of the libido that initially presents itself in the autoerotic form, chaotic, fragmented, and unbearable as it is, demands a long process of resignation and consent to the loss of the object, of the Thing that remains lost to create the replacement objects to the desire that opens the symbolic series required by socialization. Lacan’s initial effort was to demonstrate the stabilizing role of the psychic reality that the Paternal Metaphor fosters, by means of the consent to the loss of jouissance that allows the widening of the drive satisfaction circuits involving the Other of the necessary language to socialization. If during the libidinal development the phallus becomes the focal point in the phallic phase discovered by Freud, it is due to the phallus being the signifier of absence, mark of the castration that introduces the sexual difference and a hole in the real body there where the organ may be absent, in girls as well as in boys, but more importantly in the mother. Lacan (E: 576) highlights that it is above all on the figure of the “phallic mother”, which arises invariably during practice, that the castration becomes relevant, precisely when the traumatic maternal absence is revealed to the child, whose effect fractures the child’s own ideal image identified to the object that would complete

1 Regarding the complex concept of jouissance in Lacan, some paradigms can be extracted in his teachings, as proposed by Jacques-Alain Miller (2003: 221–259), which are characterized by the distinct relations between jouissance and language, developed by Lacan over his Seminars. According to Freud, there is a satisfaction that is not always compatible with desire and with life, beyond the pleasure principle, but still satisfied, paradoxically, a body in the limits of displeasure and, even, of the bearable.

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the mother. With “The Mirror Stage . . . as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Lacan announced the child’s joy before the ideal image of the “mirror”, thanks to which they identify themselves with the phallic object that, however, only anticipates their inexorable defeat, inaugurating the so-called “depressive position” established by Melanie Klein (S4: 57). But, to Lacan, the uncertainties around the to be or not to be of the maternal phallus are not solved around the figure of the mother, as not even a “good enough” would be responsible for the stabilization of the child’s psychic reality and for “the inmost juncture of the subject’s sense of life” (E: 466), which is not given a priori in the human experience. Therefore, Lacan also answers the psychoanalytic movement by some female analysts who would have saved psychoanalysis from patriarchal power focusing on motherhood as the cradle of analytic interpretation – the movement which earned the feminists’ sympathy. “Psychoanalysis was turned upside down. Previously being patriarchal and phallocentric, nowadays it is almost entirely focused on the mother” – that is what Janet Sayers (15) wrote in Mothering Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Indeed, in the analytical scenario, the fascination around the ideal unity mother-baby, being added to the efforts of mending the mother before the attacks of the frustrated child’s own demands. But Freud, who had recognized the role of the female psychoanalysts who captured in the transference for being maternal replacements the nuances of the bond between the girl and her mother, reveals the clinical finding “surprising, yet regular, fear of being killed (devoured?) by her mother” (SE 21: 227). Far from promoting a practice that tends to the child’s frustration and the patient’s demands – “The Analyst’s Total Response to His Patient’s Needs”, wished by Margaret Little – Lacan shifts the emphasis from mother’s ideal answers and reintroduces a preliminary question to all possible treatment in practice with children, certainly, but with any subject – the question of female sexuality. The mother is above all a woman and, according to the paths of female sexuality indicated by Freud (SE 16: 221–244), she is moved by the phallic lack. To Freud, maternity is a “solution” found by the woman for the impasses related to castration. However, if the child can embody the phallic object condenser of a jouissance and satisfy her, Lacan highlights the fact that he would never fulfill her, as the woman is not only a mother, and maternity does not answer all the woman’s desires. Therefore, far from nurturing the idealized figure of the mother, Lacan introduces the contradictions of the one who “seeks what to devour” (S4: 199) when evoking the fantasies that gravitate around the “devoured being”. This is the Lacanian mother, French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller (1993: 65) will say, a relentless woman, moved by the phallic absence, as Freud pointed out, but whose satisfaction is not complete in maternity, or ever. Medea, when killing her beloved children, illustrates the reaching of the radical disjunction present between the mother and the woman that dwell in each one, with whom each speaking being will have to deal despite the resistance to accept it. Furthermore, Medea illustrates exactly that maternity is not the authentic feminine pathway and that children are related to the vicissitudes of a woman’s sexuality. In addition, it is worth mentioning that, when confusing the position of the analyst with the mother psychoanalysts themselves slipped into religion promoting the belief of the Other saviour responsible for human helplessness. Religions that praise the figure of the Father-God are well known and revealed to Freud to what extent the neurotic can be devoted, whose symptoms are based on the belief of faith and love of the father, as well as in hysteria and obsession. However, there is also the worship of the all-powerful Mother, ancestral figure of the phallic omnipotence and which can remain untouched in the Unconscious and present in the building of symptoms.

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Lacan (2001: 563) even mentions Robert Graves who, in his research on the poetic myth The White Goddess, reveals that the faith in the goddess was already widespread in ancient times, predating the patriarchal religions. Indeed, the first deity is the mother that emerges as the omnipotent Other to the child, whose power was transferred to the Father-God, and the question is how abandoning the faith in the other can be to find a new alliance with a jouissance, which is not necessarily desirable, but that dwells in each one’s core. In this regard, in the debate with feminisms, a second crucial aspect is highlighted (Brousse: 45) which consists in emphasis placed by Lacan on the paternal function, in which no faith is promoted, neither in the maternal power nor in the patriarchal authority, which had been in decline for a while in Western civilization together with family ties in the socialization processes – as Lacan wrote in 1938, in the “Family complexes”. Situating the father as a symbolic function, the Nameof-the-Father, Lacan makes unsacred the already decaying figure of patriarchal authority, extracting the core from the father in the subjective formation: the power of nomination, to begin with, by the name given to the Mother’s Desire: an enigma that affects the child and separates them from their principal Other.

THE WOMAN DOES NOT EXIST Already in 1958, when writing his contribution to the ‘Convention on Female Sexuality’, Lacan wondered about the existence of a female jouissance apart from the phallic satisfaction discovered by Freud: “it is appropriate to investigate whether phallic mediation exhaustively accounts for everything drive-related that can manifest itself in women, especially the whole current of maternal instinct” (E: 614). On the other hand, Lacan does not reject the Freudian thesis that there is only one signifier, the phallus to designate the identification to the gender that is only fulfilled in terms of castration, of a fundamental absence. Conversely, Lacan considers that it is not written in all Freudian texts, but assumed, the aphorism of the “non-sexual relation” that he, Lacan (S18: 91) formulates, and which is related to the thesis of only the phallus being inscribed in the Unconscious, so that men and women, or any other intended sexual identification, are only semblants built with the fabric of social language. In other words, the phallus does not establish a “sexual bipolarity” (ibid: 62), or a gender binarism that would complement each other at the sexual satisfaction level, but rather represents its unsustainability. “Does it not occur to you that what is specific to man in ‘sexual reality’, as I put it just before, is that between male and female there is no instinctual rapport?” (Lacan 1975: 11). Effectively, there is no sexual instinct as it is not written in the human species what would be the object of satisfaction – being the reason why the term “instinct” per se is not adequate and it was necessary for Freud to postulate the concept of “drive”, whose object is the most variable one for it is a void around which drive will circumvent paradoxically satisfying itself, not being satisfied with any object. Therefore, the objects of drive highlighted by Freud – such as the breast and the feces to which Lacan added the gaze and the voice – do not reach the sexed Other, but a small bodily part, a signifier trace situated in the partner that only causes desire according to the unconscious fantasy of each one. That is why, as Lacan insists, the human drive that is already born defined by language will always be biased and, from the point of view of the species’ reproduction purpose, will never be able to find in its target The Woman defined as the object of satisfaction. This is the traumatic human

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sexuality aspect that involves a constant encounter with the Other sex’s absence of representation, of the woman in the Unconscious. And the partner is “vanished” because “from the moment language starts functioning there is no second sex”, Lacan affirms (S19: 80), conversing with Simone de Beauvoir. And postulating begging the existence of a “genital drive”, that which would inscribe the relation with The Woman at the sexual level, to Lacan was nothing more than the analysts’ symptomatic response before this traumatism2 inherent to human sexuality and that was scandalously revealed by Freud. Therefore, at the sexual level there is only the encounter with the heteros, with The Vanished Partner (S19: 78), with the Other sex’s otherness that fades for being unrepresentable as such in the Unconscious. And if The woman does not exist, as Lacan would finally announce in the 1970s, it does not mean that there are no women, only that they, without essence, do not lend themselves to phallocentric generalization: It is not only that there is no Woman, Woman defined as being what some time ago I pinned down, and now repeat for you, as not-all (pas-toute). This goes further, and it doesn’t come from man, contrary to what members of the Women’s Liberation Movement believe, it comes from themselves. It is within themselves that they are not-all – namely, that they do not lend themselves to generalization. Not even, I say this parenthetically, to phallocentric generalization. — Lacan, 1975: 11–12 On a different note, it is also relevant to highlight that the phallus primacy as what is inscribed in the Unconscious does not mean, under any circumstances, male superiority. Moreover, in Seminar 10 Lacan accentuates the difficulties of the male who carries the organ that is above all a “deciduous object” (S10: 168), materialized as such in the detumescence and the impotence as such. “The fact that the phallus is more significant in human experience through its possibility of being a fallen object than through its presence is what distinguishes the possibility of the place of castration in the history of desire” (ibid.) – Lacan concludes. And, still in Seminar 10, contrary to Penisneid and what was believed about women in psychoanalysis, Lacan affirms their “superiority” regarding sexual pleasure and the fact of them being more at ease sexually due to not being directly marked by the phallic absence. “Woman lacks nothing!” (ibid.: 182) – Lacan affirms surprisingly, anticipating an unprecedented approach to female sexuality that would be developed in the 1970s. From Seminar 18 on, when Lacan starts to elaborate the formulas of “sexuation”, entering the “dark continent” to decipher the female position, the phallus reaches a new spectrum as it is no longer only a signifier of absence that gives reason to the desire and establishes the phallic identification, neither to highlight the dissymmetry between sexes already formulated in terms of being or having the phallus (E: 583). In the 1970s, the phallus is approached by a relative function to jouissance, and that Lacan writes with the assistance of logic function: f(x). There, f represents the function, and x represents any Subject inscribed in the phallic function, meaning, the function of castration that imposes the

Lacan (S21, unpublished) says “troumatisme” making use of the misunderstanding produced in the French language between “hole” (trou) and “traumatism” (traumatisme) to evoke the sexual encounter always traumatic with this hole inherent to human sexuality. 2

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loss of the autoerotic jouissance. The phallic signifier guides the desire to reclaim this satisfaction outside of their own body, in the sexual partner, covering the drive object that is always lost (object a as Lacan states), and allocating it in the sexed Other who, thereby, gains consistency. This is the phallic jouissance, equipped and domesticated by language, that infiltrates the symbolic networks of the unconscious signifier’s plot, imaginarily covering the objects that give ballast to the circuits of drive and desire. Therefore, the phallic jouissance supplies the absence of sexual intercourse building a possible bond to the sexual partner that does not exist in the species. At the same time, it is what materializes the impossibility to develop a sexual relationship with the Other as it is. “Phallic jouissance is the obstacle owing to which man does not come [. . .] to enjoy a woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is . . . of the organ” (S20: 7). The Other that does not exist is unreachable, similarly to The Woman, however the phallic jouissance demand for satisfaction, mediated by the phallic signifier that awakens the desire, makes the sexual encounter possible. Libido is always masculine, according to Freud, it demands to be satisfied even when its end is passive, establishing the out of body object through the phallic signifier. The “phallic primacy”, the “phallocentrism”, as Lacan says, that signifies the occurrence of castration in the unconscious, valid for everyone – as Freud would conclude from what his psychoanalytic experience had revealed to him. Paradigmatic is the structure of the world and of Little Hans’ phobia (SE 10: 1–197) around the premise that “everyone has a phallus”, or the deception of the Homosexual Young Girl (SE 18: 145–172) around the phallus/child she wished to receive from the father. Also serving as examples are the impasses of the hysteric that relates to the phallus to the point of maintaining her desire essentially unsatisfied, as well as the obsessive strategy of mortifying himself to the point of annihilating his desire that “literally, goes down the tubes” (S8: 204), in order to save “at least one”, the idealized father who would escape castration. Thereby, Lacan does not discard but interprets the phallocentric psychic operation identifying it to the masculine form of inscription in sexuality, that takes place under the regimen of the phallic jouissance, represented on the left side of the “sexuation” formulas (S20: 73). All speaking beings inscribed there, in the process called “sexuation” by Lacan that implies an unconscious choice related to sex, are subjected to castration, and limited by the phallic function. All except the one that would escape castration and which, as an exception, logically generates a set – and the mythical figure of the father of “Totem and Taboo’s” (SE 13: 1–255) primitive hour is evoked (Lacan 2001) for being paradigmatic of the father’s incidence in the experience of analysis, as being the one spared from this condition and that transmitted the incest law and the jouissance interdiction. Therefore, the masculine form isn’t exclusively allocated to the male, on the contrary, it is nothing more than the psychic functioning common form, the normality – the “norme-mâle”, as Lacan would say (ibid: 479) making use of the French wordplay “norm” (norme) and “male” (mâle), to emphasize the normatization of desire as an effect of castration done by the Name-of-the-Father, as well as the phallic measure shared in “normality”. What “virilizes” is represented in the “sexuation” scenario by the same unconscious fantasy formula that Lacan had worked on throughout his Seminars, now situated in the masculine side of “sexuation”. The “Subject”, that is a pure effect of the signifier, of the language that establishes them as lack of being, finds an object of desire within the cause of unconscious fantasy, that fills the void of castration. It is the case of the man that takes a woman as the cause of his desire, materializing his fantasy of having her as an object, something that is never achieved, since she, The Woman is not an object and does not exist. “I didn’t say that

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woman is an object for man. On the contrary, I said that here is something he never knows how to cope with” (Lacan 1975: 12). Turning the other into a fetish can also be a mother’s symptom, as Lacan indicates in Seminar 4 (403), referring to Hans, the maternal fetish, since every individual struggles (literally is embarrassed by) with the phallus and with universalizing norms.

NOT-WHOLE Considering the feminine as what escapes the universalizing generalizations wouldn’t exactly be new. If, as Lacan affirms, “The most famous things that have come down to us about women in history are, strictly speaking, what one can say that is infamous” (S20: 85), the philosophical trends, that emerged throughout the twentieth century, firmly criticized the prevailing misogyny that segregated women over the history of Western civilization and promoted an apology of the feminine as an ethical principle that was banished from thought and philosophical reason (Fuentes: 51–81). In this regard, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, author of Description de la femme. Pour une philosophie d’autrui sexué (1945), is noteworthy, as well as Emmanuel Levinas (1961) who found in the feminine the ethical principle of the fundamental otherness in which the dimension of the infinity of human experience is revealed. Moreover, the philosophy of Walter Benjamin (Cf. Matos) granted to the feminine the necessary political and epistemic reach. For the Frankfurtian in his criticism of society. Such great minds criticized the philosophical trends that eliminated the difference of the other sex, based on a universalizing masculine supremacy that annihilated the feminine representing the epistemic opening necessary to philosophy, as well as the creative power that disturbs the sedentary truths enclosed in themselves. “The feminine” – Matos affirms (183) when commenting on Benjamin – “is the Subject’s masculine philosophies questioning badge, of their permanent and stable identity, and of the separation of the self from the objects of reflection”. According to Benjamin, the feminine, annihilated under the object-woman fetish, which has deteriorated in the society of consumerism and masses, of technique and stock, and representing the unrepresentable, translates the muteness of the feminine to the sonority of the word, as if this fulfilled the function of communicating the incommunicable. But for Benjamin, there is a living and political reach within the language of silence, and which disrupts the fixed meaning of words led by the conventions of linguistic norms. To the Socratic dialogue, paradigmatic to the exercise of reason and male domination, Benjamin opposes the feminine conversation that happens at the edge of language, the one which gives grounds for the creative margins of the poetic word. “To men”, Benjamin (40) wrote: “convincing is sterile”. Still in 1845, in Kierkegaard’s symposium dedicated to the theme of love and women, In Vino Veritas, the passages in which the philosopher refers to the impossibility of the generalization of women are noteworthy, differently from men, to whom “the essential is essential, and, therefore, it is always the same: in women what is casual is what is essential, and the result is endless diversity.” (Kierkegaard: 155). As such, Kierkegaard continues: “To be a woman is something so strange, so mixed, so complex, that no predicate expresses it, and the many predicates one might use contradict one another so sharply that only a woman can endure it, and, still worse, can enjoy it” (ibid.: 106). Still and in light of this, Lacan’s approach to female sexuality in the 1970s is unprecedented. The table of “sexuation” stems from the premise extracted from the psychoanalysis experience of the absence of the sexual relationship – and Lacan makes use of the term “relation” not in the common meaning, but from Mathematics and Logic designating the correspondence between two sets. And if Lacan

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suggests some men may have witnessed having experienced a female satisfaction different from the one caused by object a and limited by the castration in the phallic peak regimen, men such as the mystics or even Kierkegaard (S20: 76–77), it is because, under no circumstances, were they accepting a sexual binarism with the ‘sexuation’ formulae based on two jouissance-modes, which Lacanian psychoanalysis had finally identified: the phallic jouissance, masculine, and the not-whole (pas-tout) feminine. Mysticism [. . .] is something serious, about which several people inform us – most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when is male, to situate oneself on the [masculine] side [. . .]. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women.” — S20: 76 Upon localizing the right side of the “sexuation” board (ibid.: 73) the female position, Lacan does not establish a sexual identity to men and another to women; instead, he indicates two ways of failing the sexual relationship once such correspondence does not exist, due to the impossibility of establishing the “second sex” set. Without the essence of the Name-of-the-Father law that implies the castration and operates in the norme-mâle, in the masculine normality, there is not a formation law for the set of women (Cf. Miller, 2013: 167–190), neither is it possible to affirm “all women” without falling, paradoxically, in the male logic that is exactly meant to be opposed, not least through feminist criticism. It is also not about concluding that women are the same as men and eliminating the sexual difference as it is, instead supporting that women exist in a set that remains open, inconsistent, resulting in an endless pool of diversity of an infinite series that are counted one by one. Therefore, it means two confrontation modes with the sexual difference left as impossible to be symbolized as it is. Women, “Truer and More Real” (S10: 182), more independent from norms and civilizing semblants, face the otherness as it is, the place of “absolute difference”. That means, not the “relative difference” between one sex and the other, between the set A element and set B element, able to be named according to the oppositions established by the language – such as man/ woman, light/dark and passive/active. The idea of an “absolute difference” in question implies that it exists in Real, but it is impossible to be named, elaborated with the resources of a language, reason as to why “everything can be attributed to a woman insofar as she represents the absolute Other in the phallocentric dialectic”, says Lacan (E: 616). As an effect, the countless representations around women that emerged throughout history reveal “the intrinsic multifaceted feminine character” (Fuentes: 51) embodied by them, beyond the domination-and-segregation relations working against women firmly denounced by feminist criticism. Therefore, “the woman does not exist”, but it does not mean there is not a place for the feminine as a representation of absence and as an unspeakable mode of jouissance that takes place at / in the limits of language, in “the shine of absences” (E: 611) – a place where a significance in the other is missing to identify the woman. Thus, the feminine does not ensure a feminine identity, in such a way that it is always problematically a sexual identification, that is invariably produced with the semblants of a given culture. In addition, the lack of a female identity is no less of a problem to women themselves, just as the hysteric does not cease to reveal, since there is no signifier for the woman in the Unconscious to substantiate the feminine existence as it is. However, the female jouissance does not regard only the women who could be seen by men at a distance in a “dark continent”, defamed and segregated by the exercise of masculine power and

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domination. As Miller affirms (2021), the feminine jouissance concerns the speaking being as it is, regardless of the intended identification. It even disturbs the identification convictions, the experience that dislocates the Ego. Therefore, the feminine tears out the Ego from its dwelling place, from its Heim cocoon in the sense that Freud attributed to the experience of the strange, the Unheimlich. Indeed, as Lacan indicates (S10: 42), the angst that bursts in Heim points to the presence of a Real jouissance that shatters the worshipped image of itself in the mirror. Therefore, the anatomy is not destiny, and nothing prevents a male from adopting a female position – but the fear of losing the phallic power, the impotent failure that limits the man to the male regimen. On the other hand, the aforementioned feminine jouissance, “not-whole”, is not complementary or an alternative that would cancel the phallic jouissance, but it is “ ‘supplementary’. If I had said ‘complementary’, what a mess we’d be in! We would fall back in the whole.” – says Lacan (S20: 73). As the woman will also be in the phallic function, but “not-wholly”, in such a way that this “extra” [encore] jouissance, “beyond the phallus” (ibid.: 74), crazy and enigmatic, is what happens in the body [en corps]3 without it being experienced as its “own” body. Differently from the phallic jouissance which is extracted from the body by the Name-of-the-Father operation, the feminine jouissance bursts as an excess, disturbing even, in the place where the Subject does not recognize itself for being absent, misplaced and, even, raptured, as the mystics reveal. It regards a jouissance in the body as Other that does not allow to be assimilated, not by the symbolic, and neither by the mirror Imaginary: it happens there where it is unrecognizable, where the woman is Other, even to herself.

THE FEMALE ‘SINTHOME’ HERESY As Miller (2021: 34) indicates, it was necessary for Lacan to traverse and “tear something out of himself ” from what he had forecast through the female jouissance bias, to generalize and conceive it as a “jouissance as it is regimen” (ibid.). Out of sense, dull and silent, the feminine jouissance escapes understanding and happens as a disruptive experience of satisfaction in the Real of a body that enjoys itself “but knows nothing about it” (S20: 76), as it is indeed a jouissance impossible to be explained by words and conceptualized as it is. Differently from the phallic jouissance, that is the talkative jouissance and from which knowledge is extracted – the phallic jouissance that “consumes the analysand” seeking the meaning of their symptom whose unconscious knowledge can be revealed in the analysis – the female jouissance remains senseless and does not accept being absorbed by language, regardless of the intended verbal or writing style. It is what objects to the attempts of finding a language that would be specifically feminine, able to mobilize an Other sensibility and put into words a satisfaction that would, therefore, be shared. Contrary to such efforts from the 70s French feminism, the artist to whom Lacan paid tribute, Marguerite Duras (1993: 51–51), warned: “To write. /I can’t. /No one can. / We have to admit we cannot. /And yet we write.” The art of highlighting the impossibility of saying this feminine

Lacan again makes use of the misunderstanding caused by the French language – and that titled Seminar 20 – between “extra” (encore) and “in the body” (en corps), suggesting that the feminine supplementary to the phallic, is made by and excess experienced in body as Other. 3

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jouissance is what the artist reveals in many ways (Cassin: 80), especially through the ravissement (the ravishment) that created the character Lol V. Stein, that makes the void evident, “the empty life’s silent wedding around the indescribable object” (Lacan, 1965/2001: 198). The ravishment as an extreme feminine experience shows the dimension of the stunning satisfaction experienced in a body that, however, is not inhabited by anyone, as the subject there is absent, out of themselves, and there is no Imaginary to dress the naked body in its Real. Furthermore, Dura’s novel reveals the experience of a tripartite body situated in the narrative through three characters, this being “three-way-being” mentioned by Lacan (ibid.: 196): the thought place attributed to the narrator; the image that dresses the body offered by the friend; and Lol, the “hurt figure, exiled from things” (ibid.), mute and ravished in regards to her misplaced body. “If Lol is silent in daily life, it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent.”, writes Duras (1964: 49). Therefore, anticipating Seminar 23’s “Spirit of the knots”, Lacan wondered already in 1965 about what could keep the body together in its Real, Symbolic and Imaginary constitution4 “Who knows what happens in one’s body” – Lacan will question (S23: 128), once the body “foreign to us” (S23: 129), is precisely what always escapes. Therefore, as Miller affirms (2021: 34), walking through female sexuality was decisive to lead Lacan into situating an obscure jouissance into the meaning of what he called sinthome [cf. note 4], to differentiate it from the Freudian “symptôme”. While the latter brings a truth to be deciphered, the first one implies the repetition of an excessive jouissance out of meaning and that emerges as a rupture in relation to the established order, including the disturbing effects regarding the organism’s homeostasis. In this moment, Lacan takes Joyce’s writing as a paradigm to think of the sinthome, the heretic by excellence in the history of literature, and not the Borromean rings based on the belief in the Name-of-the-Father in the phallic jouissance anymore. That is finally revealed as one among many possible solutions that only supports itself for being a defense against this feminine jouissance at the expense of the unconscious repression. Whereas the Joycean heresy, to Lacan, consists of precisely not defending this obscure real, nor sacrificing it in the sublimatory work of producing his writings. Instead, through a unique style of writing that dismantles the common meaning with the continuous misunderstanding game, Joyce made the “heretic” choice that preserves the singularity of a jouissance as pure knowledge of the body linked to the “unforgettable jouissance experience that will be celebrated in repetition” (Miller 2021: 34). Lacan considers that he himself was also “heretic in the right way” (S23: 7) when making the choice in which “one has to choose the path by which to capture the truth” (ibid.) away from the orthodoxy of what shared common sense would demand. As Eric Laurent (2011b: 203) comments, Lacan’s choice throughout his teachings was not to join the “common soup of general psychology and emotional cognitivism”. In Belgium he gave a conference addressed to the Catholics complimenting the Beguines mystic cults persecuted as heretic by some clerics “for their devotion

4 Even though the conception of three fundamental registers of human experience, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, had been present since the beginning as a crucial mark of Lacan’s teaching, it was only in the 1970s that he formalized such experience starting from the concept that the three registers, a priori separated from each other and heterogeneous, find necessary a common measure to keep them entwined, without which the “human reality” cannot be sustained. In S23, Lacan creates the notion of the “sinthome”, differentiating it from the Freudian “symptôme”, elevating it to the category of the fourth knot which maintains the three registers knotted together (Cf. Skriabine: 104–106).

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and incomprehensible ecstasies” (ibid.: 201). There is no lack of testimony to this mystical jouissance from the limitless surrender to the divine, as in Hadewich d’Anvers’ or in Saint Tereza of Ávila’s poetry, which is based on the certainty of the love stemming from God, contrary to popular opinion based on “orthodoxy that supposes, in its horizon, a ‘love for all’ ” (ibid: 202). This love does not seek the similar, “Love your neighbor as yourself ”. Its foundations are not in the siblings’ imaginary retribution, but finds its cause placed in the encounter with an absolute Other of the “radical” love with which it would be possible to get reunited. For this nonsensical unique love, Lacan searched for a logic formulation, giving it the destiny and dignity, not of a symptom to be corrected by normative psychotherapies, but a testimony of the “unforgettable jouissance celebration” to dwell in the sinthome’s heart. And that could only be conjugated in the singular, in the place where the feminine emerges in each one. Maria Josefina Sota Fuentes Translated from Portuguese to English by Erica Nunes Goes Pereira English review by Penelope Evelyn Freeland

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Walter. Rua de sentido único. Trans. Isabel de Almeida. Relógio d’água.1992. Brousse, Marie-Hélène. ‘Feminism’, Scilicet to the name-of-the-father, New Lacanian School. 2006: 42–43. Cassin, Roger. ‘Féminité et féminisme’, Spicilège. Section Clinique de Rennes. 1998: 67–86. Duras, Marguerite. Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Gallimard. 1964. Duras, Marguerite. Écrire. Gallimard. 1993. Fuentes, Maria Josefina Sota. As mulheres e seus nomes: Lacan e o feminino. Scriptum. 2012. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. Faber & Faber. 1948. Kierkegaard, Soren. In Vino Veritas. Trans. José Miranda Justo. Lisboa, Antígona. 2005. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu’ (1938), Autres écrits. Seuil. 2001: 23–84. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras, du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein’ (1965), op. cit.: 191–198. Lacan, Jacques. ‘L’Étourdit’ (1973), op. cit.: 449–496. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Préface à L’Éveil du printemps’ (1974), op. cit.: 561–564. Lacan, Jacques. “Geneva lecture on the symptom” (1975). Trans. Russell Grigg. Available: https://static1. squarespace.com/static/5d52d51fc078720001362276/t/5de93d7518cc940feecd433d/1575566711978/ 19751004+Geneva+Lecture+on+the+Symptom+Jacques+Lacan.pdf Laurent, Éric. ‘Lacan as analysand’ (2011a). Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4DgZ_OgKf4 Laurent, Éric. ‘Lacan, hérétique’, La Cause freudienne: nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, n. 79. Navarin. 2011b: 197–204. Little, Margaret. ‘ “R”: The Analyst’s Total Response to His Patient’s Needs’, Transference neuroses & transference psychosis. Aronson. 1981. Marty, Eric. Le sexe des Modernes: pensée du Neutre et théorie du genre. Seuil. 2021. Matos, Olgária, Discretas esperanças. Nova Alexandria. 2006. Miller, Jacques-Alain, A lógica na direção da cura. Trans. Lázaro Rosa and others. EBP-MG. 1993. Miller, Jacques-Alain. La experiência de lo real en la cura psicoanalítica. Trans. Nora Gonzalez. Paidós. 2003. Miller, Jacques-Alain. Piezas sueltas. Trans. Gerardo Arenas. Paidós. 2013. Miller, Jacques-Alain. ‘L’Un est lettre’, La Cause du Désir: revue de psychanalyse, n. 107, Navarin. 2021: 15–37. Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, Jaqueline, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Trans. Jaqueline Rose. W.W. Norton. [1974] 1985. Mitchell, Juliet et. Rose. ‘Introduction’. Psychanalyse et féminisme. Tome 1. Ed. des femmes. 1974: 13–22. Montrelay, Michèle. L’ombre et le nom sur la féminité. Minuit. 2007.

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Sayers, Janet. Mothering Psychoanalysis. Hamilton. 1991. Skriabine, Pierre. ‘Knot’, Scilicet to the name-of-the-father, NLS. 2006: 104–106. Stoller, Robert. Sex and Gender. Routhedge. 1994.

FURTHER READING Brousse, Marie-Hélène, Mulheres e discursos. Trans. Ana Paula Sartori. Contracapa. 2019. Fajnwaks, Fabian; Leguil, Clotilde, Subvertion lacanienne des theories du Genre. Ed. Michèle. 2015. Menezes, Magali et. alli (org.). As mulheres e a filosofia. Ed. Unisinos. 2002. Miller, Jacques-Alain et al., Duras avec Lacan. Michèle. 2020. Moi, Toril, French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Trans. Seán Hand and Roisin Mallaghan. Basil Blackwell. 1987.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Lesbian Film Theory JUDITH ROOF

Coincident with the rise of the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the emergence of the concept of the “cinematographic apparatus”, a specifically lesbian film theory began sharing insights, alongside those offered by feminist film theorists, into film image, narrative, and the ways spectators consumed films, beginning in the early 1970s. While some feminist film theorists focused more on the various ways elements of the cinema represented a masculinist/patriarchal socio-political perspective, other feminist and lesbian film theorists deployed psychoanalytic concepts from Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean LaPlanche and JeanBertrand Pontalis. While socio-political approaches assume viewers’ alignments with role models and/or with characters like themselves as the basis for cinematic identifications, and employ structures of social inequity as ways of understanding sex/gender roles in narrative, feminist psychoanalytic critiques discern and depend upon the complex psychic operations of sexual difference in the construction of both the subject and of cinematic representations, including the sexual disparity of narrative itself which tends to privilege masculine action. Instead of an “identity politics,” psychoanalytic approaches derived from Freud’s work and starting with the concept of the cinematic apparatus envision cinematic identifications as the effects of complex psychical and ideological dynamics that work through both conscious and unconscious subjective processes, offering another mode of critique through which feminist and lesbian film theorists might identify and analyze the operations of sexual difference in films and their technologies. Such feminist and/or lesbian film theorists as Laura Mulvey, Jacqueline Rose, Teresa de Lauretis, Jackie Stacey, Judith Mayne, and Patricia White offer theories of fantasy, oppositional readings, negotiation, new ways of seeing, metacinema, and productive tension that suggest that cinema works within a much broader range of possibilities for female spectators, even if it reflects the phallocentric biases of culture. The problem was, as Mary Ann Doane describes it: “The feminist theorist is thus confronted with something of a double bind: she can continue to analyze and interpret various instances of the repression of woman, of her radical absence in the discourses of men—a pose which necessitates remaining within that very problematic herself, repeating its terms; or she can attempt to delineate a feminine specificity, always risking a recapitulation of patriarchal constructions and a naturalization of ‘woman’ ” (9).

“THE INITIAL IMPULSE” Feminist film scholars began their critique of cinema’s reliance upon the disparities of sexual difference in the 1970s, at the same moment Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz developed the 367

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concept of a “cinematic apparatus.” The “cinematic apparatus” delineates the ways cinema’s viewer/ screen/frame architecture relates both to viewers’ psychological apprehensions including identifications, fantasmatic connections, and positions in relation to the films’ editing practices, narrative organizations, characters, sound and other aspects of the diegeses, and the ideological constructs such as narrative, patriarchy, capitalism, and even religion that pre-condition both what films offer and the ways viewers consume films. Sexual difference began to make a difference in critical analyses of cinema when Baudry’s and Metz’s theories of the cinematic apparatus made psychoanalysis an intrinsic element for the analysis of film practice, image, spectation, and consumption. Using the concepts of the “mirror stage” and the “Imaginary” from the work of Jacques Lacan, Baudry’s “Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus” concludes that “[t]he ideological mechanism at work in the cinema seems thus to be concentrated in the relationship between the camera and the subject. The question is whether the former will permit the latter to constitute and seize itself in a particular mode of specular reflection” (34). Baudry adds, “[t]he cinema can thus appear as a sort of psychic apparatus of substitution, corresponding to the model defined by the dominant ideology” (35). In The Imaginary Signifier, Metz regards the cinema itself as an “imaginary” signifier, meaning, in Lacanian terms, that films are not the “real,” but also that films signify because they are imaginary. Film viewers also recognize the imaginary existence of the filmic world, seeing films as simultaneously unreal and absent and as visions of plenitude. Feminist and lesbian film theorists and critics of the 1970s and 1980s seized on both the notion of a governing ideology (in the case of feminism, the primacy of the male, and in addition, for lesbian critics, the issue of the object of desire) and the extent to which cinema’s mechanisms would permit (or not) the specular positions of female and lesbian viewers as such. If film practice is intricated with the ideologies of sexual difference that centralize males at the expense of females, feminist and lesbian film theorists ask how female viewers can gain pleasure from watching representations that perpetuate patriarchal disequilibrium, and with what elements of such films might female spectators identify. How might women create what Claire Johnston calls a “countercinema” that addresses female viewers? In what ways might the psycho-ideological mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus operate so as to be understood in different terms? Often deploying the counter-example of Sheila McLaughlin’s 1987 film, She Must Be Seeing Things, lesbian film theorists examined the ways female viewers might enjoy films differently, engaging such mechanisms as cross-identification, same-sex desire, negotiation, self-conscious apperception of cinematic address, and fantasy.

THE CINEMATIC APPARATUS Much lesbian film theory emerged in response to theories of the cinematic apparatus, which linked the cinematic apparatus’s combination of the presentation, ordering, and manipulations of projected images and sound to one of Lacan’s three intrapsychic realms: the “Imaginary” (the others are the “Symbolic” and the “Real”). Lacan’s Imaginary consists of the narcissistic process by which human subjects produce both fantasy images of themselves and of their objects of desire. The cinematic apparatus locates the cinema’s more mechanical apparatus—camera’s point-of-view and distance, lighting, editing, and its rendition of human performers—as producing a twin to the Imaginary. In The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz hypothesizes: “More than the other arts, or in a more

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unique way, the cinema involves us in the imaginary: it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only signifier present” (46). For Metz, cinema’s on-screen imaginary correlates with the “imaginary” of the human subject, a subject who emerges as nascent humans begin to comprehend themselves as separable beings via the apprehension of an image of a separable being in a mirror. Lacan called this “the mirror stage,” a process that initiates the experience or capability that is “. . . Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (E: 75–81). This image of a separable subject sustains an imaginary order in which subjects continue to identify themselves narcissistically with images, that are, by definition, also the mark of the absence of what the images represent. In the cinematic apparatus, this imagistic “imaginary” characterizes both the cinematic product of the apparatus—films—and the psychical mechanisms of viewing film, including processes of viewer identification with image and narrative, voyeurism, fetishism, and fantasy. The cinematic apparatus is, thus, that which invites viewers to apprehend via the projections and arrangements of images of actors and events an absence—an imaginary—that offers potential renditions of self with which viewers might identify and of others whom viewers might desire. “But,” Metz queries in The Imaginary Signifier, “with what, then, does the spectator identify during the projection of the film?” (46). Since the cinema screen is not a mirror, spectators cannot identify with themselves, which, according to Metz, makes cinematic identifications “secondary” (47), but this opens up multiple possibilities: “the character of the fiction,” “the actor,” “the human form,” with “himself ” as a perceiving subject and with the camera itself (49). The complex multiplicity of possible identifications offered by theories of the cinematic apparatus provides feminist and lesbian film theorists an opening for questioning the necessary hegemonies of sexual disparities, object choice, and desires. These possibilities, then, provide an opportunity for lesbian feminist theorists to use formulations of the cinematic apparatus to complicate and elaborate feminist theories of sexed identifications (like with like). The early 1980s work of Stephen Heath and Teresa de Lauretis continued to complicate the operations of the cinematic apparatus, adding additional insight into the possible ways the apparatus is not as hegemonic as originally conceived. In the 1981 Questions of Cinema, Stephen Heath elaborates the psychoanalytic parallels of cinema and psyche, suggesting that the cinematic apparatus locates viewers through the operations of the psychoanalytic process of suture. “ ‘Suture,’ ” as Heath defines it, “names the relation of the individual as subject to the chain of its discourse where it figures missing in the guise of a stand-in (its place is taken and it takes that place); the subject is an effect of the signifier in which it is represented, stood in for” (14). This filmic “subject,” Heath proposes, consists in “the play between its multiple elements, including the social formation in which it finds its existence, and the spectator,” while “suture, finally, names the dual process of multiplication and projection, the conjunction of the spectator as subject with the film—which conjunction is always the terrain of any specific ideological operation of a film” (109). As Heath observes, echoing the insights of feminist critics, “From genre to genre, film to film, the same economy: the woman in image, the totalizing of the body, her, into unity, the sum of the gaze, the imaginary of her then as that perfect match, perfect image (and hence the violence, the aggression against women as bad, a disturbance of sexuality, as the narrative moves to establish the image, to set out its law)” (187). Hence, if the cinematic “signifier” is itself complex and variable and the “subject” of a film is a “play of multiple elements,” then in terms of sexual difference and same-sex desire which are

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always a part of the “ideological operation of a film,” cinema might present multiple mechanisms for spectatorial engagement, despite the apparent limitations of suture and ideological constraint.

SITES OF CONTENTION In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey undertakes a psychoanalytic analysis of cinema in which “sexual difference . . . controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle” (58), locating the “woman” “as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic commands by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning” (59). Basically, Mulvey suggests that cinema’s deployment of female images occurs not only from a male perspective, but also enables and secures male fantasies of their own significance and empowerment. The role of the woman as the to-be-seen “bearer” impels all film viewers into the position of the male whose fantasies the female image secures. Mulvey’s counter-psychoanalytic reading represents one approach that feminist and lesbian film theorists began to deploy: the tactic of re-reading psychoanalysis for its inherent possibilities that extend possible vantages, negotiate oppositions, receive cinema’s (hetero)sexist “imaginary” ironically, develop the broader ways fantasy might operate, and suggest that occupying the perspective of she who sees how spectators are seeing might reveal and surmount some of the disparities of sexual difference in film spectatorship. Mulvey’s tactic of deploying psychoanalytic notions to commence a re-reading of the central role of sexual difference in the structures and assumptions of the cinematic image, narrative, and the apparatus itself—what she calls “the political use of psychoanalysis”—sets the opening terms of a feminist psychoanalytic film theory (58). Using a Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic approach that both accounts for the disparities of sexual difference and relies on them is an effort to elucidate the mechanisms identified by theorists who deploy more socio-political explanations of the gendered alignments of film form, narrative, and spectatorship. The socio-political and the psychoanalytic, though often not found together as critical methods, do work together to identify and analyze the ways sexual difference continues the ascendancy of the male as actor and female as image/object in film image and story as well as in the larger culture. There is very little feminist and/or lesbian film theory after 1975 that does not address and/or deploy psychoanalytic theories as ways of elucidating the problem of sexual difference and same-sex desire in cinema. Despite the historical coincidence of second wave feminist and gay movements and the integration of psychoanalytic concepts in film theory, some feminist and lesbian film theorists continued the Women’s Movement’s focus on the study of women as already a neglected socio-political category. Many of these early critiques provided the groundwork for further, often more psychoanalyticallyinclined approaches. In her 1973 essay, “Women’s Cinema As Counter-Cinema,” for example, Claire Johnston questions the possibilities and methods for creating a women’s cinema. Noting that female characters in film often function in ways that correspond to the roles of females in myth, Johnston locates cinema’s verisimilitude in rendering such myths as “responsible for the repression of the image of woman as woman and the celebration of her non-existence” (33). Johnston’s critique of cinematic treatments of females and the coincident question of how female viewers might relate to such renditions opens up a larger set of questions about the inter-relation of sex, sexuality, gender, image, desire, elements of spectatorship, identification, and interpretation.

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In the early 1980s, feminist theorists Jacqueline Rose and Teresa de Lauretis began to critique the centrality of phallocentric assumptions (both cinematic and psychoanalytic) that grounded apparatus theories as such as well as to find ways to undermine and alter their aegis. In her 1980 “The Cinematic Apparatus: Problems in Current Theory,” Jacqueline Rose shows “how the concept of sexual difference functions as the ‘vanishing point’ of the theory [cinematic apparatus] and to suggest some of the possible repercussions for ways of thinking about film-making practice for women” (173). One psychical mechanism that displaces phallic anxieties onto the figure of the woman is the process of “disavowal” in which subjects “know,” “but all the same.” (Mannoni: 1985). Freud deployed the term “disavowal” (“Verleugnung”) in his 1927 The Future of an Illusion as one means by which subjects can repress knowledge that might cause an anxiety (SE 21). In the cinematic apparatus, disavowal works on several levels: knowing that the film world is not real, but all the same taking it as such anyway, or disavowing the absence of the phallus by transforming the female into the phallus she does not have, or even disavowing the unconscious operations of disavowal itself. Rose, then, identifies disavowal as a weakness in apparatus theory feminism might explore. “Thus, it is that the aspect of the concept of disavowal which is most problematic within psychoanalytic theory itself and, not coincidentally, which has been most strongly objected to by feminism (the sight of castration, nothing to be seen as having nothing, Irigaray’s ‘rien à voir équivaut à n’avoir rien’, the concentration on the visual as simply perceptual, is the very aspect that Metz imports into the theory of the spectator’s relation to the screen” (174). Rose’s deployment of the comment by Luce Irigaray, a feminist scholar who studied with Lacan and whose doctoral dissertation, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), offers a critique of psychoanalysis’ fixations on the phallus, draws together both the potentials of psychoanalysis in feminist film criticism and of feminism in the blind spots (disavowals) of psychoanalysis’ own location of the phallus as a central figure. Noting that “the perception of absence can have meaning only in relation to a presence or oppositional term, to a structure—that of sexual difference—within which the instance of perception already finds its place” (174), Rose identifies other weaknesses feminist critics might explore. She asks what might ensue “if the object itself is removed (the body or victim), is or could be a space of open viewing (fetishisation of the look itself or of its panic and confusion)? And what does that do for feminism?” (182). What happens, in other words, if the marks of sexual difference themselves are removed? Or what if women desire their position as fetish? Or can female viewers escape the: genuine double bind . . . which reproduces itself on the level of theory: for if it is in relation to this phallic reference that woman is defined as different or outside and the organisation and cohesion of cinematic space is always also the securing of that reference, then the other side of this—the disturbance or trouble behind the cohesion itself—cannot be brought back into the cinematic space for women without thereby confirming the negative position to which she was originally assigned. — 182 “The aim,” Rose declares, “is a model of desire which might be feminine, or at least outside the structurations of sexuality inherent to classic forms of representation” (182). In her 1980 essay, “Through the Looking Glass,” Teresa de Lauretis critiques the ways the assumptions of psychoanalysis—the primacy of sexual difference, the circumscription of the female

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in service of the male, and its dependence on the centrality of castration—delimited broader thinking about possibilities for female film viewers. Relying primarily on the work of French Freudian analysts, Jean LaPlanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, de Lauretis observes, “certain problematic assumptions and contradictions concealed in that discourse [“semiotics, psychoanalysis, technology”] . . . have hindered and restrained the radical possibilities of cinematic theory even as they provided its initial impulse” (188), assumptions that “hinge on sexual difference and the relation of woman to sexuality” (189). Hence, for de Lauretis the locus of examination through which to interrogate “the operations of the cinematic apparatus” is in the “series of ideological operations that run through an entire theoretical-discursive tradition,” a tradition that consists of “structural-linguistic models of representation” (i.e., semiology) and such psychoanalytic models as “the equation woman: representation (woman as sign, woman as the phallus) and sexual difference: value founded in nature (woman object of exchange, woman as the Real, as Truth)” (189). Because psychoanalysis limits the position of the subject to the male, de Lauretis concludes not only that film theory delimits itself to a phallic logic as if the only possible psychic structure circulates around castration, but also that “what this theory of the apparatus cannot countenance, given its phallic premise, is the possibility of a different relation of woman to spectator-viewer in the filmic image, of different values and meaning-effects being produced for her, producing her, in identification and representation, as subject . . .” (196). As de Lauretis notes, much feminist film theory “insists on the notions of representation and identification, the terms in which are articulated the social construction of sexual difference and the place of woman, at once image and viewer, spectacle and spectator” (196). Just as in the mirror stage, subjects identify with a figure they would like to be, so, too, do they find a figure they would like to have or desire. Hence, this strain of feminist and lesbian film theory also brings forward problems evoked by questions of desire that arise the moment female viewers become subjects in their own right (as the Women’s Movement would advocate), an assertion that can be more easily made without the phallic impediments of psychoanalysis.

ESCAPE FROM THE BINARIES The introductory essay, “Lesbians and Film” in Jump Cut’s special issue on lesbians in film declares: Feminist film criticism has analyzed film texts and film reception to explicate women’s place within male culture and hopefully to extricate us from it. Unfortunately, such criticism has too often accepted heterosexuality as its norm. The refusal to deal with a lesbian perspective has warped film criticism as well as its larger political and intellectual context, including discussions of ideology, popular culture, and psychoanalysis. A lesbian perspective, however, can connect in new ways our views of culture, fantasy and desire, and women’s oppression. The lesbian perspective can clarify how these replicate a patriarchal power structure and how that, in turn, finds expression on the screen. — 17 As B. Ruby Rich notes in her late 1970s essay, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” the wealth of “theoretical” film criticism coming from such journals as Screen and Camera Obscura is “fruitful for its findings regarding signification . . .” (34). However, she adds, “. . . the weakness of

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the approach has been its suppression of the personal and a seeming belief in the neutrality of the analytic tools, so that the critic’s feminist voice has often been muted by methodocracy” (34). Although after the rise of apparatus theory, feminist and lesbian critics were aware of psychoanalysis’ part in theoretical constructions, some chose other methods of analysis as they continued to examine questions about the possibilities for female spectatorship and identification, the functions of female stars, women’s roles in film narrative, and the ways films might play on lesbian presence as a vector of desire and voyeurism. In addition, the rise of the Women’s Movement stimulated the production of explicitly feminist and lesbian films made by women, such as Sheila McLaughlin’s 1987 She Must Be Seeing Things, Michelle Citron’s 1978 Daughter Rite, and Barbara Hammer’s and Lizzie Borden’s experimental lesbian films, which became examples of the multiple and divergent possibilities of both theories of apparatus and other modes of critique. In Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984), Teresa de Lauretis pursues the question of how to develop “a new conceptual framework not founded on the dialectic logic of opposition, as all hegemonic discourses seem to be in Western culture” (58), that provides sites for feminist and lesbian intercession in both film theorizing and film production. Given that in semiotics, the female is not “the producer of signs,” de Lauretis declares that “the woman cannot transform the codes; she can only transgress them, make trouble, provoke, pervert, turn representation into a trap” (35). Mustering the complexities of desire, narrativity, and spectatorship, filmic elements that inform and interact with one another, de Lauretis suggests tactics for the displacement of semiotic oppositions. One question Alice Doesn’t raises is “how to reconstruct or organize vision from the impossible place of female desire, the historical place of the female spectator between the look of the camera and the image on the screen and how to represent the terms of her double identification in the process of her looking at her looking” (69). Another problem is how to re-orient “the movement of and positionalities of desire” in narrativity, given its traditionally Oedipal character (79). But as narrative itself cannot easily escape the aegis of sexual difference, de Lauretis suggests reconceptualizing narrative “in the broadest sense of discourse conveying the temporal movement and positionalities of desire . . .” (81). Linking desire and identification, de Lauretis also raises the questions of “how to address the spectator from an elsewhere of vision, how to construct a different narrative temporality, how to position the spectator and the film maker not at the center but at the borders of the Oedipal stage” (83). These questions provide the basis for continued lesbian/feminist interrogations of cinema practice as well as for explorations of issues of desire and identification in cinema, including lesbian desire. The possibility that female viewers who might identify with characters may also desire those same characters introduces a same-sex dynamic into filmic processes. Noting that identification is a complex and rarely singular process and that individual subjects are neither completely male nor female, de Lauretis suggests that the complexities of identification at work in film spectatorship, processes and relations in the realms of text, discourse, and the social are a useful site for feminist intervention. As de Lauretis concludes in Alice Doesn’t, “the specificity of a feminist theory” exists in the “political, theoretical, self-analyzing practice by which the relations of the subject to social reality can be rearticulated from the historical experience of women” (186). De Lauretis’ signal complication of the issues at stake in feminist film theory provides openings for the theorists who follow, although the shaping force of social reality remains central to explorations of desire, identification and spectatorship that characterize incipient lesbian-oriented film theory. While feminist film theorists still took Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic explanations

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as “central” to their theories, feminist work following Alice Doesn’t nonetheless discerns that identifications might vary, assuming forms of recognition or notions of identity-confirming sameness that might conform with psychoanalytic readings, but that also suggest that spectatorial processes might engender rebellion and “resistance,” that empower viewers. For some feminist/lesbian critics and theorists the questions of spectatorship and viewer identification benefited as much from the complexity of the inter-relations de Lauretis outlines as from psychoanalytic structurations of the subject. As Jackie Stacey asks in her 2006 essay, “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in StarAudience Relations,” “what is being left out of the account of spectatorship by focusing so exclusively on its psychic dimensions?” (197). Noting that Freudian-Lacanian theories of identification have been “based on an analogy between the construction of individual identities in infancy in relation to others, and the process of watching a film on a screen,” Stacey broadens the possible mechanisms of identification, drawing on literary analysis in which identification refers to “sympathizing or engaging with a character” or relies on concepts of “point-of-view” produced by camera perspective (197). Envisioning film viewing as a complex process that extends beyond psychoanalytic description, Stacey expands her analysis by adding questions about the specific investments of viewer fantasy as well as about the role the “cinematic context” plays, suggesting that spectatorship might also involve some alteration in spectatorial identity and positioning. Stacey examines a range of different modes of “identificatory fantasies,” that elaborate notions of wanting to be or to have a star figure. This “star” approach interprets identification as a process of envisioning or imagining a likeness with an image or persona, or with a character’s position and activities in narrative. But it also includes aspects of desire both to want to be and to have imaged film personas. Stacey’s elaborate analysis offers eight ways spectators might negotiate their identifications and/ or desires for stars. These include “Devotion and Worship” where a viewer regards the star as “something different and unattainable” (200); “The Desire to Become” in which “the distance between the spectator and her ideal seems to produce a kind of longing which offers fantasies of transformed identities” (200); “Pleasure in Feminine Power” where identifications with stars offer “normative models of feminine glamour whilst on the other hand, offering women fantasies of resistance” (201); “Identification and Escapism” in which the difference between spectator and star “provides the possibility for the spectator to leave her world temporarily and become part of the star’s world” (202); “Pretending,” which involves the spectator’s conscious absorption into the star’s world which results in a “temporary collapsing of the self into the star identity” (203); “Resembling,” in which spectators select “something which establishes a link between the star and the self based on a pre-existing part of the spectator’s identity which bears a resemblance to the star” (203); “Imitating” where spectators transform “themselves to be more like the star” in a process of pretending (203); and “Copying” which involves spectators’ literal attempts to look like stars (204). Stacey’s essay develops one of the several tactics through which feminist film theorists of the 1980s challenged the monolithic character of processes of cinematic spectatorship as suggested by de Lauretis and pursued by such other feminist film theorists of the 1980s, including identification (with both image and narrative positions), but also aspects of desire and sexualities. Lesbian feminist film culture in this period also responded to the lesbian feminist possibilities of film by making films with obviously lesbian (at least to other lesbians) protagonists such as She Must Be Seeing Things, a film about a film director making a film (or imagining making a film) about a legendary seventeenth-

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century Spanish woman, Catalina de Erauso, who lived and worked as a man. Starring Lois Weaver as film director, Jo, and Sheila Dabney as her lawyer/lover, Agatha, the film encapsulates its filmmaking within the film with a narrative that focuses on Jo’s worry that Agatha is having an affair with a man. The couple reconciles by the film’s ending, though the film never resolves the issue of whether or not Jo actually made the film or merely dreamed having done so. The film also presents Jo and Agatha as a butch-femme couple, repeating Catalina’s butch presentation. Part of the process of demonstrating the complexities of spectatorship exists in mining identification’s multiple motives; the personae with which spectators might identify provides another. But even personae, as critics demonstrate, are not so simple. Performers’ personae may be defined by narrative and by their performances as well as by the accumulated rumors that emerge from the “star system.” In “ ‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You?’ Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s,” Andrea Weiss explores “the possibility of lesbianism” associated both with particular performers (Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn) and narrative roles in which females appeared to have more than the typical female aegis and independence, sometimes even kissing another women on screen, as in the 1930 film, Morocco, in which Marlene Dietrich’s character, Amy Jolly, a stage performer dressed as a man, kisses a woman spectator. Weiss’s book Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (1992), is the first book-length study of filmic portrayals of lesbianism ranging from early Hollywood to the work of lesbian independent filmmakers, but which also plays out a notion of identification of like with like that complies with psychoanalytic accounts.

COMING OUT The rise of a specifically gay and lesbian film theory generally accompanies feminist inroads into the possibilities of lesbian representation and the representation of lesbians, following, in addition to critiques of the cinematic apparatus, questions about the possible “expression of gayness through non-gay representations.” Despite Richard Dyer’s work in gay cinema broadly defined as in Now You See It (1990), examinations of filmic representations of gay and lesbian sexualities remained fairly separate, given the ways that feminist theory, centered on sexual difference, presumes the large socio-political, perspectival, and even psychological disparities between the two. Envisioning the variety of possibilities inherent in cinematic spectatorship and narrative was key to developing a lesbian film theory that simultaneously reveals the complexities of the cinematic apparatus and opens up the binary impetus of psychoanalytic theories of cinema. Lesbian film practice and lesbian/ feminist film theories discerned ways of seeing lesbians as both characters and viewers. Following de Lauretis, lesbian film theorists begin to explore the myriad ways psychoanalytic models might not completely define cinematic processes, opening the way for more multivariant theories of film spectatorship and construction as well as a continued feminist and lesbian film practice. In “Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship,” Judith Mayne makes several points about how film theory and the viewing practices of spectators “bracket” the lesbian as ways of both discerning the lesbian and ignoring her. She also suggests that lesbian film spectatorship may push back against the phallic heteronormativity of traditional representations of lesbians as women. Noting the ways obviously lesbian situations in Hollywood films (as in Queen Christina and Sylvia Scarlett) had to have been detached from their on-going hetero-narrative contexts to have been read as lesbian, Mayne suggests that “there is a striking division between the spectacular lesbian

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uses to which single, isolated images may be applied and the narrative of classical Hollywood film, which seems to deaden any such possibilities.” (103). She notes as well that feminist film theory tends to make a similar division when considering the work of Dorothy Arzner, as although in her films the presentation of lesbian female desire defies patriarchal norms, critics tend to ignore Arzner’s own overtly lesbian image as well as her forty-year relationship with dancer, Marion Morgan. The only female director in Hollywood during the 1930s, Arzner was the first to direct a sound film at Paramount (The Wild Party 1929), and was partly responsible for the rise of such female screen stars as Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell. Bracketed by feminist film theorists, the overt presence of lesbian desire in studies of Arzner’s work, Mayne declares, “is a structuring absence in feminist film theory” (114). Envisioning this division as a species of “both/and,” cinema is, for feminist film theorists, simultaneously “an arena of patriarchal exploitation and of female self-representation” (117). Mayne sees this division, finally, as symptomatic to the ways even feminist film theory tends to “affirm heterosexual norms” (126). Though focused primarily on the work of film critics, Mayne deploys Freudian psychoanalysis and the work of Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig as exemplars of the way lesbian sexuality might be disruptive. As she notes in her 1990 study, The Woman at the Keyhole, “. . . in psychoanalytic theories of the cinematic apparatus, the screen emerges as something of a symptom, precisely because of its totally unproblematized status as ground, a symptom not only of the failure of sexual difference, but also of a refusal to engage with ambivalence in any kind of signifying capacity” (Mayne 1990: 41). In her 1991 essay, “Film and the Visible,” Teresa de Lauretis directly addresses the difficulties in theorizing “an autonomous form of lesbian sexuality and desire in relation to filmic representation” (224). Working through the possibilities of “positive images” within traditional forms of representation as well as transformative modes of contradicting standard practice, de Lauretis offers examples of films that “represent the problem of representing lesbian subjectivity” (224). This problem, as de Lauretis describes it, exists in both film and in film theory. Using as a central example She Must Be Seeing Things, de Lauretis demonstrates the ways the film: “constructs for both spectators and filmmakers a new position of seeing in the movies, a new place of the look: the place of a woman who desires another woman; the place from where each one looks at the other with desire and, more important still, a place from where we see their look and their desire; in other words, a place from where the equivalence of look and desire—which sustains spectatorial pleasure and the very power of cinema in constructing and orienting the viewer’s identification—is invested in two women”. — 227 Pointing to the film’s use of fantasy, de Lauretis uses LaPlanche and Pontalis’ readings of Freud’s theories of fantasy as support for the ways fantasy might provide several vantages simultaneously, suggesting that viewing is much more complex than the binaries of sexual difference. LaPlanche and Pontalis suggest that fantasy is not only motivated by unconscious reveries of origins dissolved by a subject’s recognition of Freud’s reality principle or a subject’s unconscious desire to resolve originary conflicts such as the oedipal conflict. Also, “by locating the origin of fantasy in the autoeroticism,” LaPlanche and Pontalis demonstrate “the connection between fantasy and desire. In fantasy the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he appears caught up himself in the

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sequence of images. He forms no representation of the desired object, but is himself represented as participating in the scene . . .” (LaPlanche and Pontalis: 335). De Lauretis’ explorations of the potentials of fantasy continue in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994), again via LaPlanche and Pontalis’ interpretations of Freud’s work. She returns to She Must Be Seeing Things as exemplary of the lesbian film scenario: two women at Mayne’s “ ‘threshold’ between viewing and fantasy, spectator and image, seeing and being seen” as “they make visible the non-coincidence of the subject of any one term of that fantasy eliciting the spectator’s reflexive look (seeing herself) in the scenario, and thus making possible at once representation and self-representation” (99). Noting that “the effort to represent a homosexuallesbian desire is a subtle and difficult one,” de Lauretis proposes another site of viewer identification in She Must Be Seeing Things: “the symbolic space of excess and contradiction that the role, the lack of fit, the disjuncture, the difference between characters and roles make apparent in each of them, and the scenario or imaginary space in which that difference configures a lesbian subject-position” (110). For de Lauretis, the film finally “does not merely represent a fantasy but marks it as such, recasting and reframing it, working through it, to address the spectator in a lesbian subject-position” (142). The flurry of work on lesbian film theory tends to fade, ending with Patricia White’s 1999 study, The Univited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. White again takes up fantasy as a vector by which lesbian feminist critics might theorize the ways portrayals of the social might interact with individual desires and identifications, the portrayals themselves ultimately suggesting “fantasmatic scenarios” (xx). White’s study also reprises the more social concerns of the continuing tradition of gay and queer theories undertaken by Richard Dyer and others. From the turn of the century, work on lesbian film theory continues to review the dilemmas occasioned by sexual difference and social inequity as well as analyses of the more open lesbian character of more contemporary films. It has also begun to consider whether to continue its connections to feminist film studies, on the one hand, or to locate itself as more a part of “queer” studies, while also questioning the usefulness of psychoanalysis.1 Both lesbian feminist and gay critics continue to examine the tactics and aesthetics through which films present both overt and more subtle representations of lesbian characters, desires, issues, and positions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Trans. Alan Williams. Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings. Ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tanam Press, 1980: 25–37. Becker, Edith, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage and B. Ruby Rich, “Lesbians and Film.” Jump Cut, 1981, 17–21, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC2425folder/LesbiansAndFilm.html Bradbury-Rance, Clara. Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory. Edinburgh UP, 2019. Daughter Rite. Directed by Michelle Citron, performances by Penelope Victor and Anne Wilford, 1980. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Indiana UP. 1984.

1 See for example, Sophie Mayer, “Uncommon Sensuality: New Queer Feminist Film/Theory.” Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, edited by Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2015, pp. 86–96, and Clara Bradbury-Rance, Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2019.

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De Lauretis, Teresa, “Through the Looking Glass,” The Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, St. Martin’s, 1980, 187–202. De Lauretis, Teresa, “Film and the Visible,” How Do I Look? edited by Bad Object-Choices, Bay P, 1991, 223–264. De Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Indiana UP, 1994. Doane, Mary Ann, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, “Feminist Film Criticism: An Introduction,” Re-Vision, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, American Film Institute, 1984. Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales. Routledge, 1991. Dyer, Richard. Gays & Film. Zoetrope, 1984. Gledhill, Christine, “Pleasurable Negotiations,” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, New York UP, 2006: 166–179. Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Indiana UP, 1981. Johnston, Claire, “Women’s Cinema As Counter-Cinema,” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. by Sue Thornham, New York UP, 2006: 31–40. LaPlanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.” Reading French Psychoanalysis. Ed. Dana Birkstead-Breen, Sara Flanders and Alain Gibeault, Routledge, 2009: 310–336. Mannoni, Octave, Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou L’Autre Scène. Seuil, 1985. Mayer, Sophie, “Uncommon Sensuality: New Queer Feminist Film/Theory,” Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, edited by Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers, Amsterdam UP, 2015: 86–96. Mayne, Judith. “Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship,” How Do I Look?. Ed. by Bad Object-Choices, Bay P, 1991: 103–135. Mayne, Judith. The Woman at the Keyhole. Feminism and Women’s Cinema. Indiana UP, 1990. Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brester, and Alfred Guzzetti, Indiana UP, 1982. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, New York UP. 2006, 58–69. Rich, B. Ruby, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch, Minnesota UP, 1994: 27–47. Rose, Jacquelyn, “The Cinematic Apparatus: Problems in Current Theory,” The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, St. Martin’s, 1980: 170–186. She Must Be Seeing Things. Directed by Sheila McLaughlin, performances by Lois Weaver and Sheila Dabney, 1987. Stacey, Jackie, “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in Star-Audience Relations,” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, New York UP, 2006: 196–209. Weiss, Andrea, “ ‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You?’ Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s,” Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch, Minnesota UP, 1994: 330–342. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film. Penguin, 1992. White, Patricia. The Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Indiana UP, 1999.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Battle for the Voice Exploring the Ambivalent Relationship Between Psychoanalysis and Music TOM DEROSE

From its very inception, psychoanalysis has regularly engaged with the arts, most often with literature, but also with sculpture and painting. Psychoanalytic treatments of music, however, have been something of a rarity, and have mostly centred around psycho-biographical accounts of various composers. Music itself has remained curiously resistant to psychoanalytic inquiry. This lacuna appears particularly surprising as both music and psychoanalysis deal with auditory data, they are both activities of ‘listening’. It would be tempting to explain the relative absence of a tradition of psychoanalytic engagement with music in terms of Freud’s concept of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ (SE 18: 101), whereby there is a natural antagonism between peoples (or here activities) that share a great deal in common, but on reflection this antagonism seems to run deeper. This chapter will trace a particular pathway through the (often barren) terrain of the history of psychoanalytic engagement with music, one which will be guided by the concept of ‘the voice’ as a site of ambivalence, a disputed border-territory whose strategic importance makes it a zone of continual dispute.

UNMUSICAL FREUD? Anyone searching for evidence of Freud’s unmusicality would not have to dig too deeply. Negative references to music are scattered throughout his correspondence. ‘To me mysticism is just as closed a book as music’, he writes to Romain Rolland in 1929 (Freud 1960: 389); to Marie Bonaparte he recounts an occasion in which he caught himself ‘humming a melody’ whilst stroking his pet chow Jo-Fi, which, ‘unmusical’ as he is, he recognized as an aria from Don Giovanni (Freud 1960: 343). Whilst we might classify such statements as expressions of a purely subjective attitude, in one of the few references to music in his published works from ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, Freud also seems to suggest that there is something in the quality of the effect that music can have on the individual that may be inimical to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Discussing his response to the arts Freud writes: Nevertheless works of art do have a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such 381

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things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic or perhaps analytic turn of mind rebels against me being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me. — SE 13: 211 Freud describes his response to artworks as comprising of a movement between two distinct positions. Firstly, there is the ‘powerful effect’ the artwork has on him, and secondly the ‘pleasure’ that arises when he is able to explain to himself what this ‘effect is due to’. In psychoanalytic language this movement takes place between the primary and secondary processes, psychical operations which were first outlined in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, written in 1895. Whilst the primary processes seek to discharge excitations by their most direct route, which can result in a generation of unpleasure if denied, the secondary processes enable these excitations to be ‘bound’ by the ego in the act of thinking, and the affect produced can be moderated and effectively defended against, thus turning extreme unpleasure into moderate pleasure. So, for Freud, free-floating excitation arising from the encounter with the artwork (the powerful effect) is ‘bound’ by an act of thinking which allows the tension associated with this excitation to be effectively discharged, thus producing a quota of pleasure. The exclusion of music from the list of artforms that produce a ‘powerful effect’ on him, points to a disavowal on Freud’s part. Indeed, the problem with music here is the fact that it is resistant to the understanding; that its ‘powerful effect’ cannot be ‘explained’ and therefore the pleasure connected to the work of the secondary processes is denied. The ‘powerful effect’ is experienced, but it is not transformed into pleasure because it remains inexplicable and cannot be ‘moderated’ through the operation of the secondary processes. And it is his ‘analytic’ frame of mind, that characteristic that is proper to the psychoanalyst, which seems to reject the experience as being unpleasurable and thus unsuitable. A letter to Fliess, written in December 1897, describes the manner in which Freud is able to experience pleasure in music: The Meistersinger recently gave me extraordinary pleasure . . . The Morgentraumdeutweise moved me considerably . . . Real ideas are put into music as in no other opera through the association of feeling-tones to meaning. — Freud 1954: 238 In this letter, penned when he was composing his own Traumdeutung, Freud explicitly links the pleasure garnered to the presence of ‘real ideas’ in the music. When music produces a ‘feeling tone’ which can be associated to ‘meaning’, the pleasure available to the individual is described as ‘extraordinary’. In the instance of the Meistersinger, it is the legibility of the music, the fact it offers itself for translation, that is key for Freud. It is not simply the co-existence of ‘text’ and music which characterizes the artform of opera that makes it productive of pleasure, but its capacity, as in the case of the Meistersinger, to give ideational content its appropriate tonal expression. This parallels the psychoanalyst’s work of discovering the appropriate language for the decoding of the neurotic symptom. Where this legibility is not available, music would remain in the position of mysticism, as a ‘closed book’ which the psychoanalyst should treat with suspicion.

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MUSIC, MYSTICISM AND THE ‘OCEANIC FEELING’ We can better understand Freud’s suspicion of music against the backdrop of his rejection of the ‘oceanic feeling’ in the first chapter of Civilisation and its Discontents. In a letter to Freud, his friend Romain Rolland had suggested that the ‘fons et origo’ of the need for religion is the human experience of ‘a sensation for “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, oceanic’ (SE 21: 64). Freud admits that this feeling, which Rolland had described as a ‘subjective fact’, is not only unfamiliar to him, but also completely at odds with psychoanalytic thinking. In language reminiscent of his description of his experience at the Meistersinger, Freud suggests that the oceanic feeling is not of a primary nature, but that it is a ‘feeling tone’ that accompanies an ‘intellectual perception’ (SE 21: 65). In attempting to treat the oceanic feeling psychoanalytically, he relates it to states of love, regression and paranoia in which the boundary between ego and object appears to collapse. Although he does not draw a direct comparison, perhaps out of respect to his unwitting interlocutor, Freud’s analysis of the oceanic feeling echoes his earlier description of narcissism (SE 14: 69–102). Freud’s coupling of mysticism and music in his letter to Romain Rolland referred to above is in part due to their shared ability to activate feelings in the subject that could be described as ‘oceanic’. In the ‘un-bounded’ quality of these feelings, they can be associated with a regressive return to the workings of the primary processes, which operated under the original dictates of the pleasure principle, before it had been modified into the reality principle (SE 12: 219–221). A paradigmatic case of this oceanic musical experience is presented by David Schwarz in his book Listening Subjects, in which he attempts to make sense of his subjective response on listening to Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony in the Musikhalle in Hamburg. He describes the ‘oceanic fantasy’ that is activated by the sensation that the sounds of the orchestra seem to ‘come from all around’ and ‘embrace your whole body’. This produces an ‘all-round pleasure’ that is predicated on the fantasy that ‘the boundary separating the body from the external world seems dissolved or crossed in some way’ (Schwarz 1997: 7). The late Romantic repertoire that would have been the staple diet of concert and opera goers in Freud’s Vienna is particularly conducive of the emergence of the oceanic feeling in the ‘listening subject’ (a term coined by Schwarz), and the ‘un-bounded’ quality of this feeling would seem to challenge the psychoanalytic account of pleasure. In a further caution against an engagement with phenomena that evoke the feeling of being ‘un-bounded’, Freud would affirm in the Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939) that it is the purpose of Eros to bind things together, whilst it is the role of the death drive to ‘undo connections and thus destroy them’ (SE 23: 148). The ‘all around pleasure’ associated with the oceanic feeling thus has a certain affinity to the activity of the death drive.

THEODOR REIK, ‘THE SHOFAR’ AND THE SEARCH FOR MUSICAL MEANING How then can one account for the ‘powerful effect’ that music is able to produce in the listening subject? Freud’s thinking breaks down or unravels under the challenge of the musical encounter, and rather than allow himself to be overwhelmed by the intensity of the experience, he retreats, attempting to maintain the integrity of the critical faculty. In order to bring the musical encounter in its oceanic capacity into the field of psychoanalytic inquiry, the ‘intellectual perception’ that lies

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underneath the ‘feeling tone’ would have to offer itself to analysis. We may well doubt Freud’s assertion that he has no subjective experience of the oceanic feeling, but what seems beyond doubt is the fact that he is unable to think through it, to discover the idea behind the emotion. An attempt to translate this experience into analytic terms is in fact initiated, when he suggests that the feeling may be associated with a consolation that is offered under the recognition of the child’s helplessness and need for the father. However, he is unable to follow this line of thought any further; ‘There may be something further behind it’, he writes, ‘but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity’ (SE 21: 72). The task of finding this ‘something further behind’, of unwrapping the obscurity surrounding the oceanic capability of music, fell to Theodor Reik, Freud’s music-loving psychoanalytic colleague. Reik confronted this problem in his extended article ‘The Shofar’, which was published in Ritual Studies (1931), a volume prefaced by Freud himself and released just one year after Civilisation and its Discontents. Reik’s analysis begins in his attempt to account for the absence of a divinity associated with music in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is in the blowing of the Shofar (or ram’s horn) at the festival of Rosh ha-Shanah, that Reik will discover, through a series of displacements, not only the reason for this notable absence, but also the answer to the question of why listening to music can have such a powerful effect; the ‘idea’ that this effect is dependent upon which had eluded Freud. Drawing on Freud’s argument in Totem and Taboo, Reik relates the sounds that emanate from the instrument to the death cries of the murdered primal father, thus ‘according to our view the original cultural significance of music has developed out of the religious cults. We have seen it appear first in the celebration of the death of a god’ (Reik 1931: 304). Inverting Nietzsche’s famous subtitle to his The Birth of Tragedy, he suggests that ‘one might perhaps speak in the sense of the birth of music out of the spirit of tragedy’ (Reik 1931: 304). The guilt that was engendered in humankind after the murder of the primal father was re-activated and ritualized in the celebrations of the feast of Dionysus. This festival became the template for tragic drama and was later disseminated through the various artforms as they separated over the course of history. If, like Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, we are never happy when we hear sweet music, that is because we are, according to Reik, re-hearing the death cries of the primal father, the meaning of which has been inherited unconsciously by us in accordance with Freud’s theory of phylogenesis. What appears to be our ‘immediate’ emotional response to music, is in fact a retroactive encounter with the guilt experienced by the sons in their lament over the act of parricide. With Reik, it is the ‘voice’ of the dying father which echoes in our ears that accounts for music’s power to affect us, and it is within the coordinates of the phylogenetically inherited Oedipus Complex that music can be approached psychoanalytically: Perhaps music, like the other arts, had magical tendencies in the beginning. If so, the imitation of the voice of the god in ancient cults and the imitation of an animal in the totemic rites of savages could be easily understood from this viewpoint. — Reik 1931: 305 An exemplary musical expression of the re-activation of this oedipal conflict might be Bach’s ‘Erbarme dich’ from the St Matthew Passion, where the basso continuo symbolizes the hammering of the nails on the cross, the dripping of Christ’s blood, and the tears of the penitent.

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THE HAUNTING MELODY AND THE CHALLENGE TO PSYCHOANALYSIS In The Haunting Melody (1953), Reik’s position had shifted to the extent that he suggests that Freud’s ‘unmusicality’ may have led to a limitation in subsequent psychoanalytic engagements with music. Reik opines that Freud maintained a strong resistance to the experience of music, which he characterizes in the manner of a defence; a reaction to the ‘musicomania’ that flourished in Vienna between 1890 and 1920 (Reik 1953: 6). Unlike his ‘speculative inclinations and his interest in early history’, music was never allowed to appear ‘from the depth into which (it) had been banished’ (Reik 1953: 6). As a result of Freud’s rejection of music, there is, Reik informs us, only one instance of what he calls ‘the haunting melody’ in Freud’s writings, a melody that seems to come to us from nowhere and that repeats itself continuously. The instance that Reik refers to is from Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in which he describes a patient being ‘haunted’ by a song from Offenbach’s opera La belle Hélène. In Freud’s interpretation ‘it is easy to show that the relation to melody is tied to the text or origin’ (Reik 1953: 245). Although Freud concedes that for ‘really musical people’, the melody itself, regardless of any textual relation, may also have significance, Reik argues that his over dependence on the role of the text in his analysis of the phenomenon of the haunting melody, creates a one-sided and unsatisfactory result. Rather, for Reik, ‘something not expressed in the text or not adequately expressed in it manifests itself in the melody. When I am singing a melody that haunts me, I am expressing emotions’ (Reik 1953: 250). In The Haunting Melody then, music appears to express ‘emotions’; states which are not mediated through language, either in the form of text or unconscious ideational content. The emotion experienced is not dependent on meaning, and therefore cannot be deciphered psychoanalytically. To this effect Reik writes that, ‘the tune expresses something else or more: the immediate quality of experience. It is an emotional expression much more adequate than words’ (Reik 1953: 249). This ‘something else or more’, the expression of the ‘immediate quality of experience’ which is not captured by the signifying capacity of language, appears as a supplement; something ‘beyond’ the psychoanalytic framework. In Lacoue-Labarthe’s conception, Reik’s analysis of the haunting melody: Blurs all the divisions (often strict) to which Freud submits, and plunges into a sort of hole or gap between the ‘symbolic’ if you will, and the imaginary – a hole that is not necessarily occupied by something like the “real”, be it consigned to impossibility. — Lacoue-Labarthe 1989: 153 If we accept that the psychoanalytic subject is constructed in the relation between the ‘verbal’ (the symbolic) and the imaginary (Lacoue-Labarthe 1989: 153), then Reik’s analysis of the haunting melody would seem to challenge its very fabric. Indeed, his theory that language was originally an ‘undifferentiated whole’ that only later ‘developed into a means of communication’ (quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe 1989: 163), seems to approximate to Freud’s assessment of the oceanic feeling, which he describes as indicative of an earlier ‘all-embracing feeling’, which can exist in some individuals as a ‘counterpart’ to the ‘shrunken residue’ that our ‘present ego feeling consists of ’ (SE 21: 68). For Reik, the ‘accompanying sounds expressive of emotion’, the ‘inflection of the voice, in

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the intonation’ that convey significance rather than signification, become primary. It is the ‘musicality’ of the voice rather than its communicative function, that Reik foregrounds as the central point of concern, as he intimates a shift from the ‘vocalization’ and signifying capacity of music, to the musicalization and significance of the voice. But what are the implications of such a move for the psychoanalyst who is confronted with music? How can music be ‘thought’ psychoanalytically, if it evades the ideational content ascribed to it in ‘The Shofar’? Is music then to return to the realm of obscurity that Freud had designated as ‘oceanic’? Lacoue-Labarthe certainly suggests as much when he compares the effect of Reik’s haunting melody to the cathartic release experienced in Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian aspect of tragedy, which ‘permits the subject to mime the return to the originary One, to the undifferentiated – to chaos’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 1989: 188). Although, as Lacoue-Labarthe admits, Reik ‘does not go that far’, his approach certainly seems to be leaving the oedipal dynamic and approaching something more suggestive of the oceanic.

ANZIEU AND THE SOUND BATH – HIS MOTHER’S VOICE In Reik’s excavation of the scene of the killing of the primal father in ‘The Shofar’, it is the father’s voice that becomes the quilting point for ‘meaning’ and ‘emotion’. For Didier Anzieu, in The Skin Ego, it is the mother’s voice that takes centre stage. Building on Klein’s ground-breaking work on the early mother-child dyad, Anzieu’s focus is now on the voice’s melodic (non-signifying) capability which becomes crucial for the ego-stability of the child in the pre-oedipal stage. Anzieu describes the formation of the Self at the earliest stage of (pre-Ego) development, which is ‘formed as a wrapping of sound, through the experience of the “bath of sounds” which accompanied breast feeding’ (Anzieu 2016: 184). The ‘bath of melody’ that issues from the mother’s voice, her songs and the music she plays to the child, offers it an acoustic mirror which precedes the Imaginary mirror and allows the child to receive soothing sounds when it emits a cry, and from which it can explore gurgling sounds and later ‘phonemic articulation’ (Anzieu 2016: 186). The ‘space of sound’ is designated by Anzieu as the ‘earliest psychical space’ which helps the baby to distinguish from ‘mine and not mine’. It is ‘shaped like a cavern. It is a hollow space, like the breast or the buccopharyngeal cavity, a volume full of rustling, echoes and resonances’ (Anzieu 2016: 188–9). Anzieu describes this ‘auditory-phonic skin’ as being formed in the moment of symbiosis between the baby at the breast and the mother, and he argues that it is fundamental to the ‘psyche’s acquisition of the ability to signify and later to symbolise’ (Anzieu 2016: 174). As Anzieu acknowledges, Freud does not recognize this ‘sound bath’, but rather emphasizes the function of the baby’s cry or scream, which acts initially as a motor discharge, and later ‘acquires a secondary function of the highest importance, that of communication’ (Anzieu 2016: 183). Musically, the sound bath is beautifully evoked in the famous ‘forest murmurs’ passage from Act 2 of Wagner’s opera Siegfried. Finding himself alone in the forest, the eponymous hero begins to sing about his mother who died when he was a child, and as he sings, he is accompanied by an orchestral passage which is ‘full of rustlings, echoes and reverberations’, a carpet, or perhaps a babbling brook of sound, in which the orchestra’s instrumental sections are blended and become indistinguishable from one another. He encounters a wood-bird whose song he attempts to imitate with a pipe in the manner of the acoustic mirror that Anzieu describes in The Skin Ego. Whilst Thomas Mann described this musical passage, in which Siegfried’s ‘thoughts of his mother glide into eroticism in his reverie beneath the linden tree’ as ‘pure Freud, pure psychoanalysis’ (Mann 1985: 98), we might

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also think of a pre-oedipal interpretation which could be described as, ‘pure Klein, pure psychoanalysis’. In analysing the importance of the pre-oedipal stage of development, Anzieu offers an alternative possibility for thinking about music psychoanalytically. By linking the baby to the mother via the sound bath, we can perhaps glimpse at a recovery of the ‘oceanic’ aspect of the experience of music which could operate beyond the oedipal dynamic.

MUSIC, LANGUAGE AND THE OCEAN The association that Freud makes between music and mysticism offers us way of thinking through his suspicion of, and resistance to, musical encounters. In Freud’s estimation, the ‘profound effect’ that musical encounters can produce is akin to the ‘oceanic feeling’, that ‘sense of boundlessness’ which is predicated on the regressive fantasy of returning to a state of primary narcissism, in which the ego can return to the bliss of an undifferentiated, all-inclusive oneness. For music to become an appropriate topic of psychoanalytic inquiry, there would have to be some form of unconscious ideational content that allows the analyst to attach meaning to the emotions it provokes, which Reik sought to establish in ‘The Shofar’. However, in his account of the ‘haunting melody’ we find a new conception of the power of music, one which, in its attempt to situate music ‘beyond’ the confines of language, seems to collapse the very framework that supports the psychoanalytic subject. One possible route through this impasse is offered by Anzieu’s Kleinian account of the sound bath, which connects music to the pre-symbolic, to a space which Freud might have described as being linked to the ‘omnipotent illusion of oceanic oneness with the mother’ (Sayers 1992: 264). What Anzieu maintains from Reik’s account in ‘The Shofar’ is the centrality of the voice, although here it is the mother’s voice which, in its musicality, allows the child to develop the capacity to symbolize, whereas in ‘The Shofar’ it was the father’s voice ascribing meaning to the musical experience through the process of deferred action. With the theoretical developments introduced by Jacque Lacan, there appeared a set of concepts that offered new possibilities for thinking about music psychoanalytically.

LACAN AND MUSIC – THE RETURN OF THE REJECTED Like Freud, Lacan has little to say about music across his body of work. However, in his elaboration of concepts such as the ‘object a’ and ‘the Other jouissance’ he developed a discourse in which subsequent thinkers could explore the interrelations between music and psychoanalysis. In his analysis of anxiety Lacan engages with Reik’s ‘The Shofar’ and suggests that the object that emerges in this study indicates a position of the object a, as cause of desire. The object a in Lacan’s discourse designates an object that is unattainable and ineffable, it is that which ‘sets desire in motion’, especially the ‘part objects which define the drive’ (Evans 1996: 125). In the Symbolic register, the object a denotes that which is ‘left over’ or remains as a result of the signifying process. Lacan also employs the object a to refer to those objects that Freud had privileged in relation to the drive such as the breast, faeces, urine and the penis, to which he added the gaze and the voice (Forrester 1994: 111). In the Seminar on Anxiety, Lacan argues that the object a appears at the point where desire and anxiety coincide and that he has been led to add ‘two further stages of the object’ (to the series of oral, anal and phallic object); that which is ‘at the level of the eye’, and that which is ‘at the level of the ear’ (S10: 242).

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At the level of the ear, the object a inhabits the voice that Reik hears in the blowing of the shofar, ‘the voice of Yahweh, the voice of God himself ’ (S10: 249). We are acquainted with its ‘waste scraps, its dead leaves, in the form of the straying voices of psychosis, and its parasitic character in the form of the broken off imperatives of the superego’ (S10: 251). What is crucial in the development of Lacan’s argument is that musical phenomena are derived from the voice which is grounded in speech rather than in melody; where Anzieu writes of ‘rustlings, echoes and resonances’ here we have ‘waste scraps, dead leaves and straying voices’, an interesting comparison when one considers that Lacan was Anzieu’s analyst. For Lacan, the signifier brings truth into the world, which is ‘reflected back by echoes in the real’, which the ‘voice resonates’. ‘It is not a modulated voice, but an articulated one . . . . It is not situated in relation to music, but in relation to speech’ (S10: 276). When the shofar is blown, it produces notes at the interval of the basic fifth, which Lacan treats as not being related directly to music but, to the ‘moment’s possibility that it might be a substitute for speech, wrenching our ear powerfully away from all its customary harmonies’ (S10: 227). Whereas Anzieu maintains the foundational nature of the pre-oedipal experience of the ‘sound bath’ that surrounds the baby, emanating from the melodic qualities of the mother’s voice, which would enable it to experience the ‘space of sound’, Lacan stresses the importance of the ‘articulate voice’ which is ‘related to speech rather than music’, and the primacy of the signifier. According to Roger Kennedy, under this model, ‘it would seem difficult . . . to place the role of music in the subject’s life’ (Kennedy 2020: 82). If the implications of Lacan’s analysis of the object a allow us to trace a thread via Reik’s ‘The Shofar’ back to Freud’s prioritizing of ‘meaning’ over the ‘oceanic feeling’ associated with the experience of music, then his comments concerning the Other jouissance offer a possibility of linking together those notions of ‘music and mysticism’ which had ‘remained a closed book’ for Freud. In his Seminar on Feminine Sexuality Lacan introduces the notion of ‘feminine’ or Other jouissance which he describes as ‘supplementary’ and about which ‘nothing can be known’. This Other jouissance is related to the experience of mystics, who can only affirm the existence of the experience, but ‘know nothing about it’ (S22: 76). But how can one understand an experience about which nothing can be know? The challenge of the Other jouissance, of the experience of the mystics, is the same challenge that leads Freud to reject the experience of music in ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’: the mystic, and indeed the music lover, surrenders themself to this Other jouissance that is felt in the experience, which is conditioned by the fact that it cannot be ‘known’. For Lacan, the symbolic function is established and maintained by the name of the father (E: 230/278), and as psychoanalysts are ‘practitioners of the symbolic function’ (E: 73/286), the notion of the Other jouissance which exists beyond the patriarchal domain of the signifier, would seem to occupy a similar position to the ‘oceanic’ in Freud’s work.

MLADEN DOLAR – THE VOICE AND THE WORD The history of the psychoanalytic engagement with music revolves around the dual capacity of the voice to both signify (bear meaning) and enchant (produce melody). If psychoanalysis, as Derrida argues, is fundamentally dependent on verbal signifiers and visual forms (Derrida 1989: 35) how can a purely ‘acoustic’ encounter, for example that which Reik would call a ‘haunting melody’, be interpreted psychoanalytically? Could such an attempt lead to anything other than a ‘theoretical failure’, the phrase used by Reik to describe his own brilliant study The Haunting Melody (Lacoue-

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Labarthe 1989: 148)? The remarkable fact that in its 100 years of publication history the International Journal of Psychoanalysis has not contained a single paper on ‘pure’ or ‘non-verbal’ music, might not only be due to an unconscious need ‘to keep a reference to words’ (Grier 2021: 278) but also to a methodological impasse. Unsurprisingly then it is the voice that becomes the focal point for psychoanalysts writing on music, particularly those working in the Lacanian tradition. In Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More we are presented with an analysis of the object of the Lacanian ‘invocatory drive’, that manifestation of the object a which is represented by the ‘object voice’. Dolar charts a pathway through the history of the metaphysics of the voice in its ‘pharmacological’ capacity, as both poison and remedy, particularly in relation to writing on music. Quoting Poizat, Dolar refers to an ‘albeit rather questionable and mythical’ text about music, attributed to the Chinese Emperor Chun (c. 2200 BC ), in which it is asserted that music should ‘follow the sense of words’, and that one should avoid ‘pretentious music which is devoid of sense and effeminate’ (Dolar 2006: 43). Such a position can be later found in Plato’s writings on music in the Republic, where ‘the music and the rhythm must follow speech’ (Dolar 2006: 45). When music detaches itself from speech, it becomes dangerous and effeminate. The dismissal of the flutegirl in Plato’s Symposium (Plato 1991: 116) is, for Dolar, an exemplary instance of the linking of music, femininity and irrationality, as the playing of the flute, by its very operation, makes the uttering of words impossible (Dolar 2006: 45). In a passage quoted by Dolar from the Republic, where the philosopher is cautioning men against ‘abandoning’ themselves to music, we encounter an argument that appears to anticipate Freud’s description of the oceanic feeling. Plato describes the man who indulges in the ‘dubious’ pleasures of music in the follow way, ‘the effect begins to be that he melts and liquifies till he completely dissolves his spirit, cuts out as it were the very sinews of his soul and makes himself into a “feeble warrior’ ” (Dolar 2006: 47). Music, if kept appropriately in check by the word, can be essential to a harmonious society and indeed to a harmonious psyche, but it is the place where danger and moral decay can set in; ‘Decadence starts with musical decadence’ (Dolar 2006: 44). If the history of Western metaphysics appears to suggest a concern to separate a male logos from a female voice ‘as an instrument of otherness, femininity and enjoyment’ (Dolar 2006: 52), then Lacan’s discussion of Reik’s ‘The Shofar’ offers, according to Dolar, a new and properly ‘psychoanalytic’ conception of the voice. ‘The Shofar’ illuminates another ‘non-female’ voice, the voice of the dying god, which in turn represents the death cries of the primal father. It is this voice which represents the authority that underpins the performative aspect of the signifier, and that ‘endows the letter with authority, making it not just a signifier but an act’ (Dolar 2006: 54–5). Logos then, would also depend on the voice, the voice of the father accompanying the law. Thus, Lacan’s ‘return to Reik’ leaves us not with a battle between the (male) logos and the (female, musical) voice, but one of ‘the voice against the voice’. However, this battle is not one waged between two opponents, but rather it is the condition of the ‘extimacy’ of the object voice itself; ‘the secret may be that (the two voices) are both the same’ (Dolar 2006: 56).

POIZAT – MUSIC AND THE VOICE AT ITS LIMITS In The Angel’s Cry, Michael Poizat offers a compelling analysis of the cultural phenomenon of opera, a subject that would seem to be ideally suited to psychoanalytic engagement, centred as it is around the voice in both its musical and signifying aspects. As a manifestation of the object a, the

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object voice is that which is situated in the lack that the drive circulates around in a repetitive loop, and therefore becomes an (non)place of fascination and cultural interest. This fascination is marketed and manufactured by the opera industry, in which adoring audiences invest irrationally large amounts of their time and money for the purpose of experiencing that ultimate jouissance that appears at the transgressing of the voice from the plane of speech, across music, towards silence. Despite the fact that the opera industry invests so much in the visual, emerging as it did in the Baroque era when trompe l’oeil and perspective were such central concerns, Poizat suggests that the ultimate experience sought by the opera devotee is the point where she involuntary ‘closes her eyes’. Poizat’s text begins with a series of interviews in which he attempts to discover why people are willing to spend hours overnight in all sorts of climatic conditions, queuing to buy a ‘listening seat’ at the Opera Garnier in Paris, from which they will not be able to see the production but will only be able to hear it. The motivation seems to be an experience of a particular feeling, which is uniformly sought after but seemingly indescribable. One interviewee refers to the feeling of being about to ‘snap’, whilst another declares that on ‘hearing the voice’, or ‘hearing the music’, they fall down on their knees. A third admits that after attending the first act of Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth, he ‘cried and cried, and didn’t know why (he) was crying’. This effect was not down to the story, or the drama on the stage, indeed, he remarks that ‘it wasn’t to be believed. The story wasn’t really heartrending . . .’ (Poizat 1992: 31). Poizat asserts that such a response cannot be accounted for with reference to the ‘dramatic situation’, indeed ‘one of the primordial preconditions for the experience of this emotional upheaval resides in the destruction of signification’ (Poizat 1992: 31). This emotion, ‘occurs as an acute, irrepressible irruption linked to specific musical passages in which all that is visual and all that tends towards signification fails and falls away’ (Poizat 1992: 31). At these moments, the ‘pure voice’ is all that persists. We arrive here at the object voice. In accordance with Lacan’s statement that, ‘all art is characterised by a certain mode of organisation around a void’ (Poizat 1992: 33), the artform of opera is conditioned around the void that appears in the presence of the vocal object. The objects of the Lacanian drive which are ‘irremediably lost’, create a void around which the drive circulates. The object voice is that which is left over in the original instance of the signifying process and continues to be produced as a left over or residue in the repeated production of meaning through signification, as illustrated by the first stage of Lacan’s famous ‘Graph of Desire’ (E: 683/808) and is characterized by its ‘phonic materiality’. For Poizat, this determines that ‘the voice as object is thus constructed both as lost object and as first object of jouissance’ (Poizat 1992: 103). Opera going then appears as a quest; just as the drive continually returns and circulates around the lost object, so the opera goer continually returns and circles around the site of the experience of jouissance that can be re-activated by the intimation of the return of the lost object. For Poizat, the history of opera is a history of the gradual approach and final appearance of, the vocal object. That the extreme moments in which this jouissance can be experienced in opera are normally concerned with death can be more easily understood in these terms, as ‘one never has jouissance of the object in the sense of “possessing it”, except in the embrace of death’ (Poizat 1992: 104). This death in acoustic terms would appear in the ‘absolute, deadly silence’ which represents the ‘silence of the drives’ (Poizat 1992: 92). The ultimate function of music is then to confront this silence and to make it bearable. Opera is particularly fitted to perform this operation as it ‘comes face to face

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with the spoken word’. Its task then is ‘to insert that unnameable silence into a system that makes it acceptable, that signifies its call but denies it even as it recognises it, in the nostalgic yearning to dissolve into it and disappear’ (Poizat 1992: 92).

RETURN TO FREUD – TRISTAN UND ISOLDE, THE OCEANIC AND THE DEATH DRIVE Following Eliot’s lines in Little Gidding, perhaps we can now arrive where we started, with Freud’s suspicion of music, and ‘know the place for the first time’. In Poizat’s estimation, opera would seem to allow us to experience the intimation of a ‘nostalgic yearning’ that calls us to ‘dissolve and disappear’. In these terms it is perhaps hardly surprising that Freud would be suspicious of music precisely because of its ‘oceanic’ capacity; the siren song that threatens to drown our rational faculties and sweep us away in a flood of ecstasy. Kurt Eisler once described Freud as a ‘deeply musical man’ (Leader 2000: 91), a characterization that would seem difficult to support if taken at face value. But if we were to think of this statement in terms of a ‘sensitivity’ to music, then perhaps, due to this very sensitivity, he was able to recognize and then deny the ‘nostalgic yearning’ produced in the opera house or concert hall, which, from the psychoanalytic perspective, would more appropriately be defined as a regression to a stage of ego-feeling that we should have developed out of. The work which perhaps best represents this coming together of the ‘nostalgic yearning’ and the oceanic feeling is Wagner’s ground-breaking opera Tristan und Isolde. In Act 2, in a passage that could have served as a template for Freud’s description of the ‘oceanic’ feeling of falling in love in the first chapter of Civilisation and its Discontents, the tenor and soprano sing of ‘becoming one’ with each other, and indeed, with the whole world. As well as this duet, Poizat mentions Isolde’s ‘Transfiguration Scene’ that concludes Wagner’s masterpiece as particularly expressive of that moment in opera which, ‘quickly lose(s) all meaning’, in which the ‘listener is swept away by the spiralling melodic ascent, by a presentiment (a kind of call) of a culmination yet to come’ (Poizat 1992: 38). The word ‘spiralling’ here might just as effectively been replaced by ‘swirling’. Indeed, in the ‘Transfiguration Scene’, the listening subject can feel herself being enveloped by a swirling flood of sound, just at the soprano’s voice seems to dissolve in the final, barely audible words, ‘to sink/ to drown/ unconscious/ supreme bliss’. It was perhaps against this ‘unconscious, supreme bliss’ that Freud was attempting to defend, when he wrote that mysticism and music had ‘remained a closed book’ to him. To the father of psychoanalysis whose concern was to maintain a discipline that sought to bring his patient’s unconscious desire into consciousness by way of language, ‘sinking, drowning’ into ‘unconscious, supreme bliss’, perhaps suggested an abandonment to the death drive, the cultural manifestations of which he had spent the years after the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle attempting to uncover and demystify. It is Oedipus, the riddle solver, codebreaker and as representative of the psychoanalyst that prevails over Orpheus, the first musician, enchanter and representative of the operatic tradition, in the Freudian narrative. As Žižek and Dolar maintain, ‘the moment of the birth of psychoanalysis (the beginning of the Twentieth Century) is also generally perceived as the moment of opera’s death’ (Žižek and Dolar 2002: vii). However, they will go on to show that such deaths are never as permanent as they may first appear. Indeed, as Freud himself would no doubt affirm, ‘the gods of a superseded period of civilisation turn into demons’ (SE 21: 99).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Anzieu, Didier, 1986. Freud’s Self-Analysis trans. Peter Graham. Preface by M. Masud R. Khan. Hogarth Press. Anzieu, Didier, 2016. The Skin-Ego trans. Naomi Segal. Karnac. Birksted-Breen, Dana (ed), 2021. Translation/Transformation: 100 Years of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Dahlhaus, Carl, 1991. The Idea of Absolute Music trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago UP. Derrida, Jacques, 1989. ‘Introduction: Desistence’, in Philippe, Lacoue-Labarthe. Typography ed. Christopher Fynsk. Stanford UP. Dolar, Mladen, 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT Press. Evans, Dylan, 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Evans, Dylan, 2018. ‘From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance’, in Dany Nobus (ed.) Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Ferenczi, Sándor, 1938. Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality trans. Henry Alden Bunker. New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Forrester, John, 1994. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge UP. Freud, Sigmund, 1960. The Letters of Sigmund Freud ed. Ernst L. Freud and trans. Tanya and James Stern. Basic Books. Freud, Sigmund, 1954. The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fleiss, Drafts and Notes: 1887– 1902 ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris. trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. Introduction by Ernst Kris. Basic Books. Grier, Francis, 2021. ‘Music’s pianissimo presence in psychoanalysis, and its more recent gradual crescendo’, in Dana Birksted-Breen (ed), 2021. Translation/Transformation: 100 Years of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Grover-Friedlander, Michal, 2011. Operatic Afterlives. Zone Books. Kennedy, Roger, 2020. The Power of Music. Bicester: Phoenix. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 1989. ‘The Echo of the Subject’, Typography ed. Christopher Fynsk. Stanford UP. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 1989. Typography ed. Christopher Fynsk. Introduction by Jacques Derrida. Stanford UP. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 1994. Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner) trans. Felicia McCarren. Stanford UP. Leader, Darian, 2000. Freud’s Footnotes. Faber. Leader, Darian, 2021. Jouissance. Polity. Mann, Thomas, 1985. Pro and Contra Wagner. trans. Allan Blunden. Introduction by Erich Heller. Faber. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1993. The Birth of Tragedy ed. Michael Tanner trans. Shaun Whiteside Penguin. Nobus, Dany (ed), 2018. Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Plato, 1991. The Dialogues of Plato Volume II: The Symposium. trans. R. E. Allen. Yale UP. Poizat, Michel, 1992. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera trans. Arthur Denner. Cornell UP. Reik, Theodor, 1948. Listening with the Third Ear. Farrar Straus and Giroux. Reik, Theodor, 1931. Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies. Preface by Sigmund Freud. trans. Douglas Bryan. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Reik, Theodor, 1931. ‘The Shofar ’, Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies. Preface by Sigmund Freud. trans. Douglas Bryan. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Reik, Theodor, 1953. The Haunting Melody. Farrar, Straus and Young. Ricoeur, Paul, 1978. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation trans. Denis Savage. Yale UP. Sayers, Janet, 1992. Mothering Psychoanalysis. Penguin. Schwarz, David, 1997. Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture. Duke UP. Wilson, Samuel (ed), 2019. Music-Psychoanalysis-Musicology. Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj and Mladen Dolar, 2002. Opera’s Second Death. Routledge.

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FURTHER READING Derrida, Jacques, 2001, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Routledge: 246–291. Derrida, Jacques, 1987, The Post Card trans. Alan Blass. Chicago UP. Fletcher, John, 2013, Freud and the Scene of Trauma. Fordham University Press. Forrester, John, 1980, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis. Macmillan. Girard, René, 2013, Violence and the Sacred trans. Patrick Gregory. Bloomsbury. Laplanche, Jean, 1999, Essays on Otherness trans. John Fletcher. Routledge. Magee, Bryan, 2001, Wagner and Philosophy. Penguin. Marcuse, Herbert, 1966, Eros and Civilisation. Beacon Press. Rilke, Rainer Maria, 2009, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus trans. Stephen Mitchell. Vintage. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1969, The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. trans. E.F.J. Payne. Dover. Stiegler, Bernard, 2013, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology trans. Daniel Ross. Polity. Storr, Anthony, 2007, Melodies of the Mind. HarperCollins. Theweleit, Klaus, 1987, Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. trans. Stephen Conway with Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minnesota UP. Wagner, Richard, 2014, Beethoven trans. Roger Allen London: Boydell.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Sibling-Incest in Wagner CHRISTOPHER WINTLE

BACKGROUND Incest as a topic in applied psychoanalysis is almost as old as psychoanalysis itself. Yet the application has changed even if the topic hasn’t. It starts when Otto Rank, who was born in Vienna in 1884, met Freud in 1905, became Secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1906, and for the next twenty years assisted him, partly in editing Imago, a series devoted to psychoanalysis and the arts. Rank was brilliant and original, and from 1926 went his own way, living in Paris and New York until his death in 1939. In 1912, he published The Incest-motif in Poetry and Legend, which he revised in 1926. The book includes a section on Wagner (Rank 1912/26: 587–94). This crosses Freudian psychoanalysis – or ‘psychotherapy’ – with composer-biography and myth, and aims to throw ‘fleeting light onto the inner creative world of the poet-composer’ (Wagner was his own librettist). In life, argues Rank, Wagner sought ‘to compensate again and again for the loss of his mother to his stepfather ([Ludwig] Geyer)’; such a tendency, which for Freud had incestuous roots in infancy, came to a head with both his love for Otto Wesendonk’s wife Mathilde and his marriage to Liszt’s daughter Cosima, who was already married to the conductor Hans von Bülow. Similarly, throughout his operas and music dramas, Wagner portrayed mythic heroes locked in a perpetual ‘fantasy of rivalry’ with the father. This took the ‘wish-fulfilling form’ of ‘snatching the beloved woman from his rival’: the Dutchman stealing Senta from Erik, Tannhäuser taking Elisabeth from Wolfram, Tristan poaching Isolde from Marke, and especially (from our perspective) Siegmund depriving Hunding of his wife Sieglinde (in the Valkyrie, the second part of the Ring cycle). Now, Siegmund and Sieglinde are twins, fathered by Wotan, and for Rank their incestuous craving reflects Wagner’s ‘exaggeratedly tender relationship’ to his sisters, especially to Cecilie with whom he had wanted to live. The incest, Rank continues, is complicated in Siegfried (the third part of the Ring) when Siegfried, the heroic progeny of the twins’ incest, bonds with Brünnhilde, another child of Wotan’s, and thus a kind of aunt. When Siegfried has to rouse Brünnhilde from a long sleep, Rank observes that ‘the image of the sleeping woman awakens in him the memory of the beloved mother [Sieglinde] whom he had never seen’. That is to say, Brünnhilde becomes foster-mother and lover all in one: the sleep (of twenty years or so) ‘as it were preserves the image of the mother for the son’. Rank detects incest between the generations, and not just within them. In 1963, the British musician Robert Donington (1907–90) also turned to sibling-incest in the Valkyrie. His Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols (Donington 1963) is steeped in myth and composerbiography, as was the work of Rank, though it also draws on music and promotes a distinctly 395

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personal world view. Unlike Rank, though, his approach is broadly Jungian. Incest, he maintains, is paradoxical. Though always a ‘problem’ in life, it is condoned if not exalted in art: The emotional intensity of the literal incest-longings which the earliest human cultures found it so necessary to sacrifice was transformed over into the sanctity attaching to so many instances of mythological incest. — 116 It is ‘a subtle interplay of these two aspects going on in the Valkyrie’, he continues, that ‘helps to shape the very moving events in the foreground’. Central to Donington’s argument is a differentiation between the father-principle, which he equates with evolving ‘culture’, and the mother-principle which he sees as perpetuating itself with ‘minimum change’. To advance culture, men have to break away from women – be they mothers, daughters or sisters – and the incest taboo is there to prevent them from slipping back into the ‘animal state of unconsciousness’ represented at the opening of the Ring, where Rhinemaidens guard the precious gold deep in the Rhine. So when, in the Valkyrie, Siegmund pulls his father’s sword from the tree (thereby culturally stepping forward), he admits that his needful deeds might lead to death (and thereby renounces ‘escapist fantasies’). He has the makings of a true hero. Donington argues further that his subsequent incestuous mating with his twin-sister Sieglinde is a union within the psyche of complementary masculine and feminine principles (animus with anima. For the discussion of incest, see: 116–19, 128, 139–40, 143, 152–4, 268–9, 272–3). In his support he cites a letter of 1854 in which Wagner writes ‘Now a human being is both man and woman, and it is only when these two are united that the real human being exists’; such a union involves ‘sensuous and super-sensuous’ love. Similarly at the end of the Ring, the immolated Siegfried and Brünnhilde are ‘not going to be united outwardly by fire and water, but inwardly’. The cycle thus unfolds on two concurrent planes, the outer and the inner.

LATERAL RELATIONS Donington wrote on the Valkyrie half a century after Rank. Half a century after Donington, we may not have a psychological study to set beside his, yet we can trace a deepening interest in siblingincest among modern object-relational analysts and relate it to Wagner’s stage works. The interest came to a head with the publication of Siblings by Juliet Mitchell (Mitchell 2003. Mitchell was born in 1940 and famously brought together feminism and Freud). As in her Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relationships on the Human Condition, the author stressed the importance of lateral relations – siblings (and by extension peer groups) – alongside vertical ones – parents and offspring (and their surrogates) – though not wholly in place of them (Mitchell 2000: 80). For her, the issue finds its locus classicus in a passage from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Oedipus has had two daughters by his wife Jocasta: Ismene and Antigone. (He has also had two sons.) Having discovered that his wife is his mother, and that he has therefore committed the heinous crime of maternal incest, he has blinded himself. Creon brings him his sobbing daughters. ‘Where are you, children?’ asks Oedipus with self-lacerating irony, ‘Come feel your brother’s hands’ (italics added). Of this the author comments (Mitchell, 2003):

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Oedipus’s crime of sleeping with his mother confuses generations, but in the play, as in its deployment of ‘the Oedipus complex’, the central paradigm of psychoanalysis, the axis of son to mother overshadows, or all but obliterates the lateral dimension. We completely forget that Oedipus and his children are [half-] brothers and sisters. — 32–3 The example shows that Mitchell blends psychoanalysis with anthropology and literature just as did Rank and Donington. But Mitchell was by no means alone. In her study of The Importance of Sibling Relationships in Psychoanalysis, the retired psychoanalytic psychotherapist Prophecy Coles first casts her net back to 1926, when it seems that Melanie Klein, like Rank, was ‘repositioning herself ’ with the early Freud of 1895 (Coles 2003). She then moves to 1932, when Klein ‘is quite certain of the efficacy of sibling love on the development of the psyche’ and ‘puts much greater emphasis upon its importance than does Freud’. (Klein herself had bonded intensely with her older brother, who had died as a young man.) Coles writes: [Klein’s] sympathy for siblings leads her to suggest that they promote emotional development and help in the task of distancing the child from its parents . . . It is precisely because of the fact that Klein believes that ‘it is impulses of hate that initiate the Oedipus conflict’ that she counterbalances this hatred with sibling love. — 53 Klein (Coles continues) also probes sexual relations between siblings: Ilse and Gert were brother and sister who engaged in ‘coitus like acts’ in early adolescence, and in earlier childhood they had also had sexual relations. Mr B and his two brothers had sexual relationships from early childhood and practised fellatio [etc.]. — 54 These cases Klein sees as destructive. But not every case need be: such relations, she argues, can serve to reduce an ‘excessive sense of guilt’ over ‘proscribed phantasies against his [or her] parents’ through ‘the feeling of having an ally’. She concludes that From my knowledge of a number of cases, I should say that where the positive and libidinal factors predominate, such a relationship has a favourable influence upon the child’s object relations and capacity to love. — 55 Here, the positive factors include a relative absence of bullying or violence by one sibling against the other. For the girl, the fact that she had sexual relations with a brother or brother-substitute in early childhood and that that brother has also shown real affection for her and has been her protector, has provided the basis for a heterosexual position in her and developed her capacity for love. — 55

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Klein’s is a radical view, and one that Coles finds challenging: if successful adult sexual attachment involves the ‘secret complicity’ of sibling sexual attachment, then we need to reconsider the theory that it is only through the resolution of our sexual desires for our parents that sexual maturity is achieved. — 57 And in all this, obviously, there is a qualitative difference between entertaining fantasies and acting them out. But if sibling sexual fantasies are acted out, then, say, ‘the girl will have other and perhaps more perplexing experiences’ that arise precisely because she has bypassed ‘her oedipal task’, and avoided ‘the terrifying parents’. [62] Coles turns to a further source, The Sibling Bond (Bank and Kahn 1977). This argues that brother and sister incest [which has been ‘dramatically under-reported’] has played a potent part in myth and literature because it describes, psychologically, a failure of parental care and attention. The children’s need for affection and attachment have not been met, and as a result they have had to turn to each other. — 168–9 But there is a price to pay: the consequence of sibling-incest is almost always ‘traumatic’. But Coles insists that it is not invariably so (Coles 2003): The experience of sibling incest, by those who engage in it with loving co-operation, is most often described as beneficial. Byron and [his half-sister] Augusta, Freud’s patient ‘the Wolfman’, the analysts Melanie Klein and Marie Bonaparte, all, in their different way, assert that incest provides love . . . in the cases of the Wolfman and Byron, both insisted that their relationships with their sisters were the most important ones in their lives. — 65 And in Siblings Juliet Mitchell assesses the ‘the determining role for sibling incest’ (Mitchell 2003): The early parent-infant relationship sets a ground plan, the advent [or recognition] of another child . . . sets up the need to demarcate sameness and difference, to balance love and hate, to find a place in a series. These themes are aspects of the first intellectual question – where does another baby come from? To which I emphatically add – or even place first – where does that leave me? If this scenario does not work out more or less satisfactorily, there will be the murder of Abel [by Cain] or the should-be-forbidden sexuality of [a sister] and her brother. — 80 As is obvious, Coles and Mitchell refer widely to myth and literature. But neither refers to Wagner, or through the Ring to Thomas Mann’s ‘The Blood of the Volsungs’, a related story of

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sibling-incest between ‘poor little rich-things’. Yet the Ring raises a burning issue that neither address: what impact does an incestuous union have on its progeny (if any)? Earlier, we saw how Donington discerns two related but opposed tendencies (Donington 1963): Incest between men and women has been prohibited since the earliest human cultures; incest between mythological beings was at least condoned, and at the most endowed with the highest sanctity possible. — 116 The prohibition acknowledges the possibility of genetic disorder in the progeny; whereas the exaltation in powerful families or among mythological figures serve to promote authority (Wikipedia: ‘Incest’). But there are positions between these poles, and it is one of these that Wagner adopts.

VERTICAL RELATIONS In the first act of the Valkyrie, we hear, significantly, of only one parent to the twins, their father Wotan: the mother, an unnamed mortal, is mentioned only briefly. Wotan is a composite figure: he lives above in Valhalla as law-giver and head of the gods, struts about the earth like a demi-god, but schemes like a mortal. As god, he may represent a dying epoch, but (along with his team) retains extraordinary magical powers – as did his mythic counterpart Odin, though differently (CrossleyHolland 1980/2018); as demi-god he can brazenly assert his omnipotence through word and deed; and as human he is as wily and self-interested as any – but not necessarily more adroit. Thus our understanding of Wotan must always come in triplicate. Now, by the start of the Valkyrie about twenty years have elapsed since the end of Rhinegold, the cycle’s first evening. Wotan has had time to act upon his human, fear-driven epiphany that emerged musically at the end of Rhinegold: he will breed an independent, fearless hero whose charmed, invincible sword will protect the gods from the forces arraigned against them. At the root of his epiphany are thus power-politics and hatred. That there is no feminine involvement here confirms the view of both Rank and Donington that ‘the father as symbol of will power . . . belongs to a wholly different psychological plane [to the mother], namely the sphere of conscious will’. (Rank 1936: 77) Nothing is left to chance. At the start of Act One of the Valkyrie, the magician in Wotan appears to have drawn Siegmund to the very hut where – coincidentally! – Sieglinde lives with her loveless husband Hunding. At this point, Wotan is grooming Siegmund as the free hero who will save his dynasty, and Hunding is Siegmund’s new foe. Wotan has undoubtedly raised the storm from which the battered, ill-fated Siegmund takes refuge, unwittingly to join his twin sister. Not for nothing did Nietzsche call Wotan ‘the god of bad weather’! (Clive 1965: 277) As the twins exchange backstories, Sieglinde describes the demi-god in Wotan: at her joyless wedding he had arrived as an old stranger dressed in grey with a hat slung over one eye. But the other eye had struck terror into all bar one – she alone felt sweet, yearning sorrow. Into a tree growing inside the hut, the stranger had plunged a sword, pledging that it would belong to whoever could extract it. At that point Sieglinde had recognized Wotan and grasped who, in principle, should win the sword. At this critical juncture in the siblings’ burgeoning love, Wotan the magician just as surely causes the hut’s door to spring open, admitting the bright spring moonlight that allows the pair ‘suddenly to see each other with

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complete clarity’. The twins duly launch into what becomes the impassioned duologue that precipitates their incest, though not before recognizing each other as siblings. Throughout this scene, Wotan’s invisible ‘presence’ as god is all the more acute for his absence as demi-god. We shall come back to Wotan’s humanity. But for now let us stick with the twins. In the first act Siegmund relates how Wotan had raised them both in the wild. Donington comments (Donington 1963): It seems that Siegmund’s father [Wotan] has planned that he should grow strong under adversity, as hardy characters, although not soft ones, can. Returning from a hunt, father and son had found their homestead burnt, the boy’s mother killed and the twin sister vanished. Thereafter they live the turbulent life of outlaws, until presently the father vanished too, leaving as token an empty wolf skin; for Wolflings was the name by which they passed. — 128 ‘Toughening up’ a son is a practice we find in the Eddas. (Morris and Magnüsson 1870/1980: 18) But in the Valkyrie the episode raises a profound question: why did Wotan leave Siegmund’s mother and sister so needlessly unguarded, why did he later abandon Siegmund without avenging the killers (as it was in his magical power to do), and why did he leave a wolf skin as a mark of identity if he wasn’t wilfully setting up the condition by which incest would flourish – namely a catastrophic, though identifiable, parental background rooted in utmost fear and hate? How successfully he has done just this will be clear from Sieglinde’s nightmare in Act Two: in an equivalently traumatic present she appeals to both ‘Mother’ and ‘Siegmund’ just as she had done when their homestead was burnt. For now we can only ask, how, with such a background, could any pair of siblings not try to reinvent their past, uniting in incestuous congress just as their parents had united in order to conceive them? Through Wotan, Wagner has pre-empted Coles’ insight by a century and a half. In Sieglinde, he is also giving Siegmund a partner of the same, exclusive stock. In turning to the wily human in Wotan, we have to integrate what Rank saw as the absent feminine view. The first three scenes of Act Two introduce two women. The first is Brünnhilde. She is the leading figure in the sisterhood bred by Wotan to protect Valhalla and attired as warriors (males). Her allotted task, at least initially, is to support Siegmund as he is hounded by Hunding. The second is Fricka. She is Wotan’s formidably outspoken wife and a fellow goddess. Her task is to uphold marriage, and she is fully informed as to her husband’s eugenically-motivated philandering. She upbraids Wotan for his countless adulteries; she scoffs at his attempt to create a free-wheeling hero to whom she certainly wouldn’t bow; and she demands that the sword Siegmund plucked from the tree will fail him in the impending battle with Hunding; and more still, she insists that Brünnhilde, the child of Wotan’s wishes, must not intervene. As god, demi-god and human Wotan is cornered. He buckles: Siegmund must die – as indeed he will. Psychoanalytically, this demonstrates that the oedipal challenge, the demands upon children to negotiate an affective path away from their parents cannot, in Coles’ terms, simply be bypassed if the parents are still ‘in the picture’. True, the twins have lost their mother; but Fricka has usurped her role and, as the unyielding, invisible stepmother is pulling their father Wotan back into line. The drama that plays out for the rest of Act Two of the Valkyrie turns out to be multiply ironic: Wotan is right to defend the gods against a terminal threat; Fricka is right to defend marriage; the twins are right to bond; and Brünnhilde is right to follow her female instinct for love by trying to defend Siegmund.

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VERTICAL INTO LATERAL RELATIONS In Woman’s Estate, a feminist study of the modern family, Juliet Mitchell relates size of family to social status: typically, the rich can have more children, the poor fewer, if any (Mitchell, 1971/2015: 59–60). In the Valkyrie, we meet eleven of Wotan’s children – the nine richly endowed Valkyrie and the poor twins who have only each other. The mutual dependency of the siblings thus seems all the greater. Mitchell also dissects the orthodox ‘oedipal situation’, which comprises ‘two parents of the opposite sex and their relationship to each other and their offspring’: The boy can’t continue to desire his mother because he realizes his penis can’t compete with that of his father. He fears castration. But the girl discovers that she can’t be castrated as she hasn’t a penis to offer, but then neither has her mother – there’s not much to choose between them. The girl will thus grow up like her mother but the boy will grow up to be another father. The girl has little need to leave the oedipal scene. — 170 At the end of Act Two we can indeed watch the father’s (metaphorical) castration in action: Wotan allows Hunding to destroy his son, Siegmund. Yet there is no comparable action against Sieglinde, though there will be consequences for her stepsister, the apostate Brünnhilde. Hitherto, Wotan’s actions have pushed the twins to extremes. Sieglinde is a wife with a husband and a home and is thus sexually experienced, whereas Siegmund appears to be a male virgin – he tells his sister how on his wanderings he was drawn to women but was forever treated as an outcast. Yet though the twins come to their incestuous union from opposite places, the heroic force and assurance of the sexual congress itself is in no way compromised. Quite the contrary. At the end of Act One, the curtain has to come down in embarrassed haste before congress begins, and it is left for the music to act out its four stages: (a) mutual excitement (blending his sword and her flight motifs) (b) arousal (a directional ‘dominant pedal’) (c) penetration (the high-point A five bars before the end) and (d) the moment of conception (the lower A three bars before the end – an achingly long appoggiatura supported by taut diminished harmony, the fiercest dynamic and heaviest (brass) orchestration). At the point of resolution, the music breaks off abruptly, and we imagine Siegmund rolling off Sieglinde in a satisfied spasm (Figure 29.1). Sexually, the twins have made up for lost time. Yet – to think laterally – we are startled how differently each reacts. The later parts of Act Two (from scene 3) show how. We are in the mountains. Watched by Brünnhilde, the twins enter in flight from Hunding. Sieglinde races ahead histrionically with Siegmund trying to restrain her. She is gripped by dread, and her silence alarms him. They stop. The stage instruction reads: ‘Sieglinde gazes into Siegmund’s eyes with growing rapture and throwing her arms round his neck remains there; then she starts up in a sudden panic’. With utter vehemence she tells Siegmund to abandon her. While their bonding has been ecstatic, it has filled her with shame at her previously loveless union (with Hunding): she feels defiled, disgraced, stripped of her sacred dignity – reduced, in effect, to a corpse. It is not that she is adopting Fricka’s moralistic stance, but rather that in the face of Wotan’s deceitful fantasy, she simply ‘goes to pieces’. Psychoanalytically, she cannot negotiate the oedipal transition to becoming a fulfilled woman, let alone bypass it (as Wotan would have hoped). She has been betrayed by the absence of good parenting, thanks to a dead mother and a hostile invisible ‘stepmother’.

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FIGURE 29.1 Sibling-incest at the close of Act One of Richard Wagner’s ‘The Valkyrie’, showing mutual excitement, arousal, penetration and conception.

As said, Sieglinde reacts to her profound neurosis ‘theatrically’ by hurling herself at Siegmund with desperate object-love, and then springing back in abject self-hate. She is now gripped by anxiety-hysteria as she hears the baying horns and hounds that signal Hunding’s preparation for the manhunt against her brother: she imagines hounds tearing at Siegmund, felling him so that his sword shatters and the ash-tree from which he plucked it collapses. The dread induces paralysis and she falls into her brother’s arms, where she will remain throughout the next scene. Later we shall understand that her imaginings are proleptic – Siegmund will fall, with consequences for the order of the gods. The collapse of her entire security is a scenario she cannot face. As she now sleeps in her brother’s arms, Brünnhilde steps forward (scene 4). She advises Siegmund that he is to die and she must lead him to Valhalla. We shall return to this interview. But after Brünnhilde departs and storm clouds gather – raised, no doubt, by Wotan – Siegmund listens to his sister’s breathing: she seems magically protected from suffering, lifeless but alive, sad but still caressed by lovely dreams (we hear a memory of his ‘spring music’). Let her stay that way for now, he enjoins – and Brünnhilde, who appears to have bestowed the magic, will have guessed that that is what he wants. Siegmund places Sieglinde on a stone seat, kisses her and, hearing Hunding’s horn-call, flourishes his sword and departs. Left alone, Sieglinde stirs. But there is nothing lovely about her continuing dream. As we hear in the music, the magic that gave Siegmund the confidence to depart gradually falls away. Her previous

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anxiety returns in the form of a nightmare. Psychoanalysts have often noted that a distressed person will dive ever further into his or her past to retrieve a secure memory upon which to rebuild their present. Likewise, Sieglinde tries – but fails. In her nightmare she can only relive the pillaging of her homestead, the catastrophic absence of her father and brother and the desperate appeal to her ‘good’ mother in the face of hostile strangers. The re-enactment is intolerable (Wintle, 1992: 650– 91). She springs back to life, her dream cry of ‘Help me! Brother!’ turning into a waking cry to her sibling-lover ‘Siegmund’; and as thunder and lightning engulf the stage, she assesses the situation with a peremptory ‘Ha!’. Seeing Hunding and Siegmund doing battle, she tries to offer herself in place of Siegmund, an impulse that at once gratifies object-love and self-contempt. But she is sidelined by the appearance first of Brünnhilde and then of Wotan. After Wotan has ensured that Hunding kills Siegmund, Brünnhilde hoists Sieglinde onto her horse and hurries off. For Sieglinde the Act ends as it began, with flight – though now she has lost her sibling-lover and enraged her father. Laterally and vertically, it has been a disaster.

RELATIONAL CRISES As noted, Mitchell considers that with siblings of different gender ‘the girl will . . . grow up like her mother but the boy will grow up to be another father’. Back at the start of Act Two, this is how we find Siegmund. He has retrieved his father’s invincible weapon, he has found himself a woman (typically another man’s wife), and he has conceived a child by her – though he won’t live to see it. He is indeed ‘another father’. But no son can successfully negotiate the ‘oedipal situation’ without the support or tacit acquiescence of his parents. Contrary to expectation, Wotan is now Siegmund’s mortal enemy – thanks to Fricka – and his apparent treachery will destroy his son’s life. When, in the final scene of Act Two, Hunding kills Siegmund, Wotan, in a blend of rage and self-contempt, kills Hunding. The father – Wotan – has knowingly failed on his side of the oedipal challenge. Let us return to the poignant fourth scene of Act Two, in which Brünnhilde brings Siegmund news of his impending death. Their exchange is two-sided. On the one hand, Siegmund is unimpressed by Brünnhilde’s sweetening of the pill with kitsch images of Valhalla. He defiantly turns to Sieglinde, not just to deflect the impact of the dire news, but also to put her interests before his. That is to say, he rejects his father’s vicariously transmitted decree outright. On the other hand, Brünnhilde also has an oedipal crisis: she has arrived as an emissary of her father Wotan’s ‘will’, dressed (as a male) in armour, carrying shield and spear, and holding the horse intended to transport her and (her step-brother) Siegmund to Valhalla. But after Siegmund has threatened to murder Sieglinde (thereby securing their bond in death) she changes her allegiance: she vows to support him in his impending battle with Hunding. She too rejects Wotan’s decree. The dissolution of her severe ‘annunciation of death’ melody into wild closing figuration is one of opera’s fiercest representations of engulfing hysteria. Back in the second scene of Act Two we had heard Wotan trusting Brünnhilde as himself. His wish is her command, and she is blissfully happy with that: ‘Who am I if not your will?’ she murmurs appreciatively. Neither imagines that theirs is an oedipal relation that will shortly require negotiation: they are not ‘objects’ in each other’s eyes. Nor do they discuss Brünnhilde’s mother Erda, though Wotan includes her in his back-story. In fact, Erda, as ‘Ur-Wala’, stands above Wotan as representative of an eternal force, and already has three daughters, the Norns (who have the gift

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of prophecy). But in the Ring love is born of fear, and in Rhinegold Erda had already epitomized Wotan’s instinct for self-preservation by emerging dramatically to warn him away from Alberich’s ring (which promises world-domination at the cost of love). So by begetting a daughter with her, Wotan has inverted Erda’s warning into a protective shield, a pledge of unquestioning love, a narcissistic contract with a split-off mirror-image of the self he needs to be. Hence the extreme pain of the severing of the father-daughter bond at the end of Act Two. Both Wotan and Brünnhilde have had half of themselves torn away, and both now have to confront the other as ‘object’. It is something Wotan will never have to do with the remaining Valkyrie (who in any case have different mothers). Not surprisingly, the act culminates in Brünnhilde’s hasty flight with Sieglinde.

SIBLING-INCEST AS DRAMATIC TEMPLATE Neither incest nor even sibling-incest stops with the death of Siegmund. Far from it. The action up to the end of Act Two now forms a template for two further stages of the Ring: Act Three of the Valkyrie, and the whole of the third and fourth evenings of the cycle, Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods. The first stage concerns the vertical relations of Wotan and Brünnhilde, the second the lateral relations of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, though still including vertical ones. Indeed, the fourth evening is not called Siegfried’s Death as originally intended, nor even Wotan’s Death, with which it ends, but Twilight of [All] the Gods (The Prose Edda’s Ragnarok). Act Three duly opens with Brünnhilde in flight. She is leading Sieglinde, whom she dispatches to that part of the forest Wotan is most wary of visiting. But first she gives Sieglinde the shards of Siegmund’s shattered sword, and, with the gift of divine insight, tells her that she is pregnant. As Donington reminds us, the progeny of mythic incest will be no ordinary child: indeed, this one will be the world’s noblest hero whom Brünnhilde herself names as Siegfried (Victory with Peace). Sieglinde’s death-wish at once inverts into a radiant life-wish, and she hurries off. Now Brünnhilde has to face her father. For her treachery that has driven him to the brink of suicide, Wotan announces his plan to banish her from the immortals. Out of sight must be out of mind. But Brünnhilde objects: she was acting only according to his deepest wishes. Here, in Donington’s terms, we hear the voice of ‘the mother’, to which ‘the father’ in Wotan is deaf. And the mother matters: for an outcast though Brünnhilde will be, she will also remain Erda’s child, and thereby retain an inherited power of magic. But when Wotan declares, with searing contempt, that he will abandon her in some remote place for any man to take, the hard bargaining begins. ‘Let that man be a fitting hero!’, she pleads, adding manipulatively that Sieglinde already nurtures the most sacred of heroes in her womb. She goes straight to the core of Wotan’s longing. For Brünnhilde is planning a new incestuous union to replace both her quasi-incestuous union with her father and the incestuous union of the twins she so admired but saw destroyed. The hero, she continues, should rescue her from a hostile environment with an act of heroism (just as Siegmund rescued Sieglinde from her husband Hunding’s hut by pulling the sword from the tree). As we have noted, Sieglinde’s child will be a kind of nephew (Rank 1912/26: 587–94); and as she will be a ‘sleeping beauty’ protected by a ring of fire, she will preserve her youth for the twenty years or so in which Siegfried matures. We watch Brünnhilde scheming to be Siegfried’s bride and half-sister. Wotan’s narcissism is deeply stirred. He agrees. The hero will be exactly as envisaged in Rhinegold: one ‘more free’ to achieve what he, Wotan, cannot. However, the outward cost of this fantasy must be separation (to appease Fricka), and his farewell to Brünnhilde is proportionately overwhelming. We in the audience are

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left to admire Brünnhilde’s skill in negotiating the oedipal rapids. Outwardly she will leave her father, inwardly she will remain the loyal guardian and executor of his fantasy. Throughout Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods, we watch an enhanced re-run of the nurturing of Siegmund. Not only is Siegfried raised in the forest away from civilization, but he has also lost both father (Siegmund) and mother – he will learn that Sieglinde died in childbirth. He is nurtured by a treacherous dwarf Mime who claims falsely to be his father and mother in one. In order to ‘grow up to be another father’ he will have to reforge his real father’s sword from its shards (more challenging than plucking it from a tree), destroy Mime (whose closet hatred he faces down with open hatred), kill the dragon Fafner who guards the world-empowering gold, be guided to his sleeping bride by a Woodbird whom he understands through magic, chop down the authority of a tiresome old man who stands in his way (Wotan, his symbolic father but actual grandfather), pass through a ring of fire, and break open the armour of a sleeping figure who offers him his first glimpse of a woman. This time, neither Siegfried nor Brünnhilde has had sexual experience, so their move to union is marked by fear and hesitation as well as vehemence; their eventual congress will be a night of richly satisfying passion, conducted in a cave sometime between the end of Siegfried and the start of Twilight. The conquest that took Siegmund one act in the Valkyrie, takes the new hero three acts in Siegfried. Three issues emerge from all this. First, Siegfried remains unaware that he is a child of siblingincest. He learns the name of his mother from Mime, but not that of his father, and in Act Three of Siegfried he can no more understand the coded language of Brünnhilde’s back-story than he can respect the ancestral hints dropped by Wotan. This seems deliberate: by contrast, we learn that Siegfried’s nemesis, Hagen, a man marinated in hate, is the son of Alberich and Frau Grimhilde (whom we never see). Given his ignorance of the world, it is hard to know how Siegfried would have handled news of his origin beyond ‘so what?’. The psychoanalytic literature, too, appears to have nothing to report on what impact such news can have on patients (Michael Parsons: private communication). Second, we have noted that Siegfried is a typically heroic progeny of mythic incest: yet, like Adonis in Ovid’s tale of Myrrha, he is taken up by a woman with divine credentials (Brünnhilde in Wagner, Venus in Ovid) and is likewise gored to death (thanks to Hagen). But from the moment Wotan first thought of him, Siegfried, like his doomed father Siegmund, has been genetically engineered (or ‘wilfully disordered’). He has been bred to act impulsively and to fear nothing, least of all threats to his life: Siegfried is a case-study of a child born without a superego, and thus, in Juliet Mitchell’s terms, an actor of Wotan’s hysterical fantasy (Mitchell 2000: 6–7). As Twilight shows, such a child is vulnerable: in the world as we know it, he is easily duped – as Wotan too may have realized from the outset, albeit unconsciously. Third, the drama of the Ring arises from the polarization of the instincts. Where siblings have to reconstruct themselves from a catastrophic parental background, love and sibling-incest will prevail; but where they are motivated by rivalry and greed then, as Mitchell suggests, Cain will kill Abel. Over the Ring, we watch Fafner kill his brother Fasolt, Alberich laugh harshly at the murder of his brother Mime, and Hagen club to death his half-brother Gunther. The ‘Ring’ analyses the power of failed sibling bonds as closely as that of successful ones. During Twilight Brünnhilde switches from the superhuman love she bestows on Siegfried in Act One to the all-too-human hate of a woman scorned in Act Two (Siegfried has been drugged into betraying her with Gutrune). Only in Act Three, after Siegfried’s slaughter and her understanding of Hagen’s treachery, can she revert to a demi-goddess who finally puts wrongs to right.

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Indeed, it is the vertical relation with her mother Erda that raises Brünnhilde above her father Wotan. Wagner wrote of the close of the Ring (Spencer and Millington 307): Not even Siegfried alone (man alone) is the complete ‘human being’: he is merely the half, only with Brünnhilde does he become the redeemer: one man alone cannot do everything; many are needed, and a suffering, self-immolating woman finally becomes the true, conscious redeemer. This invokes Jung’s animus and anima avant le jour: Brünnhilde’s action is a sublimation of union per se, and not just a personal validation of Hindu suttee. But it is also a symbolic marker. Wagner continued: ‘for it is love which is really “the [Goethean] eternal feminine” itself.’ How such ‘eternal’ elemental love can be ‘redemptive’ for mortal men and women when the action of the cycle shows it can only fail, remains a problem that psychoanalysis of any kind should investigate rather than hope to resolve.

ADDITIONAL NOTES ●

The titles of Wagner’s works are given in English: The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen), which comprises four parts: Rhinegold (Das Rheingold), The Valkyrie (Die Walküre), Siegfried (Siegfried) and Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung).

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In object-relations, ‘object’ denotes the target of an instinctual impulse, be it a person or a thing (like a stuffed doll). R. D. Hinshelwood writes that ‘in the 1930s object-relations became the major focus for the school of psychoanalysis developed particularly within Britain’; for Melanie Klein, ‘the object is a component in the mental representation of an instinct’. (Hinshelwood, 1989/95: 362 ff.)

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Ernest Jones describes a ‘symbol’ as ‘a manifest expression for an idea that is more or less hidden, secret, or kept in reserve . . . symbols represent wit in being made spontaneously, automatically, and, in the broadest sense of the word, unconsciously.’ ‘The essential function of symbolism . . . is to overcome the inhibition that is hindering the free expression of a given feeling-idea, the force derived from this, in its forward urge, being the effective cause of symbolism.’ In the last part of Rhinegold, for instance, Wotan intuits the symbolism of the sword pre-verbally, through the ‘very energetic’ musical ‘sword motif ’ (Jones 1948/77: 90, 144). It is with the sword that Wotan will equip both Siegmund and Siegfried.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bank, S. P. and Kahn, M. D., The Sibling Bond, Basic Books, 1997. Clive, Geoffrey (ed.), The Philosophy of Nietzsche, Signet, 1965. Coles, Prophecy, The Importance of Sibling Relationships in Psychoanalysis, Karnac, 2003. Crossley-Holland, Kevin, The Penguin Book of Norse Myths. Gods of the Vikings, 1980. Penguin, 2018. Donington, Robert, Wagner’s Ring and its Symbols: The Music and the Myth, Faber and Faber, 1963. Hinshelwood, R. D., A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989), Free Association, 1995. Jones, Ernest, Papers on Psychoanalysis (1948), Karnac. 1977. Mitchell, Juliet, Woman’s Estate (1971), Verso, 2015.

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Mitchell, Juliet, Siblings, Polity/Blackwell, 2003. Mitchell, Juliet, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relationships on the Human Condition, Penguin, 2000. Morris, William and Magnússon, Eiríkr (trans.), The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (1870), Prior, 1980. Rank, Otto, Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage [The Incest-motif in Poetry and Legend] (1912), Deuticke; 2nd (rev.) ed. 1926, 587–94, excerpts trans. Negus, Anthony (2020). Rank, Otto, Truth and Reality (1936), Norton, 1978. Spencer, Stewart and Millington, Barry (trans. and ed.), Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, Dent, 1987. Wikipedia: ‘Incest: history, prevalence, types, inbreeding, prohibitions, religious attitudes, etc.’, [accessed 2000]. Wintle, Christopher, ‘Analysis and Psychoanalysis’ in: Paynter, John et al. (eds.). Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, vol. 2. Routledge, 1992.

FURTHER READING Donington, Robert, Opera and Its Symbols: The Unity of Words, Music & Staging, Yale UP, 1990. Vetter, Isolde, ‘Wagner in the History of Psychoanalysis’ in: Müller, Ulrich and Wapnewski, Peter (eds.), Wagner Handbook, Harvard UP, 1992 (trans. ed. by Deathridge, John). Wintle, Christopher, ‘Psychology ’ in: What Opera Means. Categories and Case-studies (ed. Kate Hopkins), Plumbago, 2018.

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘The Creature . . . Was . . . a MAN!’ Psychoanalysis, Freud and Animals NICHOLAS RAY

Over the last twenty years or so, the field of Animal Studies has become established as one of the most exciting areas of research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Cutting across disciplinary frontiers, it seeks to historicize, challenge, and reimagine the ways that human beings relate to the myriad forms of animate life around us. Animal Studies concerns itself as much with how we think about nonhuman animals (from children’s fiction to philosophy) as with our conduct towards them in the material world (from pet keeping to factory farming). It interrogates the assumptions that organize our attitudes to other species as well as the ingrained mechanisms through which human animals tend to position themselves as being ‘exceptional’ – somehow ontologically distinct from, and superior to, the creatures with whom we share the planet. At stake in much of its work is a double imperative to grasp the modes of kinship linking human and nonhuman beings, and to develop a renewed understanding of and respect for the alterities of different lifeforms. So, what might come of an encounter between Psychoanalysis and Animal Studies? More, certainly, than can be covered in a short chapter. As can be seen from the ‘Further Reading’ that follows, important interventions have been made in this area. But even this work has not exhausted the topic. A thoroughgoing examination of the question of the animal in Freud’s thought alone would have to reckon with a formidable range of material: his overt propositions about the delimitation between human and nonhuman life; his expository deployments of ethology, zoology, protistology, even animal mythology; his interpretations of animal symbolism; his account of flesheating and dietary taboos in human prehistory; his rhetorical embedding of animal metaphors, typologies, etc. The place of animals and animality could also be examined in psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud (exemplary work has been done on language and the human/animal relation in Jacques Lacan (Derrida 2009: 97–135), but the potential canon is more extensive). And a swarm of questions could be formulated to ask how the conceptual resources of Psychoanalysis – calibrated to grasp the enigmas of mastery, cruelty, and the ‘oral incorporation’ of others, to name some obviously relevant themes – might help us understand, and perhaps rethink, our treatment of nonhuman beings. This chapter, then, presents an indicative rather than a comprehensive account of Psychoanalysis and animals. Focusing on Freud, it will distinguish in his work two very different lines of approach 409

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apropos of animals and the human relation to them. I shall call the first line of approach one of hermeneutic suspicion. It plays a major part in Freud’s thinking, emerging most emphatically in the interpretation of patient discourse (dreams, symptoms, fantasies, etc.) where animals are seen take the place of some other – repressed – psychic content. For reasons to be outlined, from the point of view of Animal Studies its limitations are sufficiently marked that it may be considered as much a retreat from as an approach to the question of animals and the human/animal relation. The second line of approach, which I shall refer to as speculative, arises from a conjecture Freud proposes about human bipedality and the consequences of our adoption of the upright carriage for our relationship to ourselves and the nonhuman world. As we’ll see, despite the theory’s marginality in his work this second line of approach has much greater potentiality than the first and opens up a critical view of the ‘exceptional’ status of the human. I refer to this Freud-focused account as ‘indicative’ because although Psychoanalysis is not reducible only to Freud, it is his thought that laid the foundations for the discipline. Moreover, the two contrasting aspects of his work I shall address have a kind of exemplary significance: the ‘hermeneutic’ approach has exerted a strong influence in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud, while the ‘speculative’ approach, though underdeveloped and exerting little influence today, remains one of the most interesting attempts within Psychoanalysis to think the human/animal relation. In the chapter’s final part I turn to literature, offering a short illustrative discussion of the horror tale ‘The Beast in the Cave’ by H.P. Lovecraft. It’s from this text that the quotation in my title derives. Lovecraft’s fiction is notable for its exploration of encounters between human and nonhuman life, and one aspect of a recent upsurge of interest in his writing has focused on what Mayer (2016: 117) calls the ‘implicit challenge to human exceptionalism’ these encounters entail, their effect of ‘displac[ing] humanity from its self-proclaimed position of privilege’. Though Lovecraft was sceptical of Freud’s work – particularly its hermeneutic dimension – the counterexceptionalism in his fiction, I suggest, bears striking affinities with the other, ‘speculative’ component of Freud’s thought. Nowhere is this more the case than in ‘Beast’, where a confrontation with a mysterious quadruped becomes the occasion for an unsettling of the tendentious frontier separating ‘human’ from ‘animal’.

HERMENEUTIC SUSPICION: ANIMALS EVERYWHERE . . . AND NOWHERE One area of Freud’s work where animals show up with striking insistency is his clinical writing. Of his four major analytic case histories, ‘Dora’ is the only one in which animals do not play a significant part in the symptomatic picture.1 The case of the ‘Rat Man’ centres on a patient with obsessional thoughts coalescing around a gruesome fantasy of rats; ‘Little Hans’ centres on a young boy with a phobia of horses and an ambivalent fascination with a variety of animals encountered at the Vienna Zoo (elephants, giraffes, lions, pelicans, sheep); and the ‘Wolf Man’ features a central animal phobia as well as fantasies, memories and associations relating to an extraordinary range of other creatures: birds, beetles, butterflies, caterpillars, flies, foxes, goats, horses, pigs, sheep, sheepdogs, snails,

1 For reasons of space, I limit these remarks to Freud’s four ‘canonical’ case histories. A discussion of Freud’s earlier clinical work in the Studies on Hysteria (1895) co-authored with Breuer is found in Ellmann (2014).

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snakes, and wasps. In short, animals seem to be virtually everywhere in the case histories, and a superficial glance at the texts might lead one to suppose that relationships between human and nonhuman beings occupy a prominent place in Freud’s clinical thinking. But what does Freud do, confronted with the animal figures that infest the symptoms and associations of his patients? As a rule, he looks past them. That is, he regards them as dissimulations, as manifest representations standing in for, and disguising, something else – other ideas that are struck out of consciousness by repression and which it is the business of analysis to bring to light. In the case of Little Hans, for example, the young patient is plagued by a fear that a horse in the street might fall down and bite him. But in Freud’s view, Hans’s fear of horses is not really a fear of horses at all. He argues that behind the acknowledged animal phobia there lies concealed from consciousness a determining complex of ideas and impulses that in fact relate to the boy’s parents. Unconsciously, Hans is, Freud proposes, ‘a little Oedipus’ with strong libidinal attachments to his mother and a correlative wish for his father to be ‘out of the way’ (SE 10: 111). The phobia is thus interpreted as an encrypted manifestation of Oedipal anxiety: the figure of the horse is a substitute for the father (a connection supposedly made possible by the noseband and blinkers on certain horses resembling the father’s spectacles and moustache); its falling down is an expression of Hans’s death-wish against him; its bite is the punishment he fears in return for the wish. Similarly, in the ‘Wolf Man’ case, what the patient experiences as fear of a wolf – or, specifically, of a picture-book image of a wolf walking upright – is really no such thing. The wolf is a substitute for the father at whose hands the patient unconsciously fears castration as a corollary of a latent wish to be penetrated by him. What is important to notice about these illustrations is that Freud does not take the animals to be significant qua animals but only insofar as they take the place of human referents. In this respect they are exemplary. In both cases here the creature in the symptom is really a disguised man – specifically the father, as is ‘most often’ the case in animal phobias (‘A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis’, SE 19: 87). But Freud also, and repeatedly, discovers different human referents lurking behind other animals. For instance, when Hans fantasizes about a tall and a ‘crumpled’ giraffe, Freud (SE 10: 37) regards them as dissimulations of the boy’s father and mother respectively; when the Wolf Man recounts the ‘uncanny’ feeling he had on seeing a butterfly, Freud (SE 14: 90) detects behind the animal the arousing figure of the patient’s old nursery maid, and so on. Of course, animals are also frequently more than mere substitutes for this or that human being: they can be overdetermined. However, the supplementary determinations remain unequivocally rooted in the human world. The Rat Man supplies a striking illustration. After an army captain tells him of a form of torture in which a pot of rats is held upside down against the victim’s buttocks until the creatures bore into the anus, he becomes obsessed with thoughts of this being done to the lady he loves and his (dead) father. First and foremost, Freud sees the rats as a substitute for the patient himself, who in a formative childhood scene bit his nurse, possibly on an intimate part of her body: the fantasies of torture which so horrify him are thus interpreted as veiled instantiations of his own unconscious hostility to the lady and the father. But rats take on further significance as the point of convergence of a network of highly charged mental preoccupations: for instance, their reputation as carriers of disease disposes them to become, in addition, imbued with the patient’s dread of syphilitic infection, while the very signifier ‘rat’ (German: Ratte) creates bridges between the idea of the animals and such disparate matters as the patient’s need to make certain payments (Raten: instalments), his father’s history as a gambler (Spielratte), and his dilemma over whom to

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marry (heiraten). It is not so much the actuality or alterity of rats in themselves that is clinically meaningful; the rats are a symbolic repository for displaced affects and ideas whose ‘proper’ points of reference are human. There are occasions when animals are seen to stand-in for generic rather than particular human referents, such as the small animals the Wolf Man tortures as a boy which Freud views as ‘representatives of small children’ (SE 14: 109). At still other moments, animals figure not as substitutes for human beings at all but as relatively neutral screens onto which human concerns are safely transposed. For instance, behind the Wolf Man’s fascination with ‘the different names by which horses are distinguished according to whether their sexual organs are intact’, Freud sees a covert preoccupation with the differences between men and women, and the classic psychoanalytic theme of ‘castration’ (25). But what these various instances all attest to is that in Freud’s account what possesses aetiological significance is not this or that creature so much as the anthropic preoccupations displaced onto it. By naming the approach I have been illustrating one of ‘hermeneutic suspicion’ I’m loosely recalling Paul Ricoeur’s classic work Freud and Philosophy ([1965] 1970). For Ricoeur Freud exemplifies a mode of ‘suspicious’ interpretation that regards the manifest text as something that masks the truth and misdirects understanding, a dissemblance that must be dispersed for the truth to emerge. (It is an approach Ricoeur contrasts with an older ‘hermeneutics of faith’, where the full meaning of a text may not be transparent but is nonetheless thought to be immanent and gives itself to be understood.) My intention in borrowing Ricoeur’s terminology is not to revive his general account of Freud but to underline the specific observation that when animals arise in the case histories, they tend to do so as masks to be torn away, as placeholders deceptively imbued with significances that are not inherent to them and that lack an essential connection to animals or animality. In Freud’s clinical writing, nonhuman animals are always so to speak red herrings, and it is the task of the ‘suspicious’ analyst to disclose the human grounds they supposedly conceal. I indicated at the beginning that this posture of suspicion may be considered as much a retreat from as an approach to animals and the human/animal relation. This is in part because it tends to foreclose the possibility that an animal might be just . . . an animal: that a wolf might be a wolf rather than a father, that giraffes might be giraffes, that the patient’s experience of certain creatures might really be an experience of the alterity of other species. This foreclosure has been given considerable emphasis by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, albeit within the framework of a more encompassing critique of psychoanalysis, which I shan’t attempt to detail here. Discussing Little Hans, for instance, Deleuze says bluntly that Freud’s attempt to see the phobic object of the horse as an image of the father is ‘a fucking joke’ (Sub-Til Productions 2020). The case history reports that Hans is terrified by drivers beating their horses in the street and that his illness began immediately after he witnessed a bus-horse collapse and thrash about, apparently in its death agony. Such spectacles, Deleuze claims, are ‘disturbing to the core’ (Sub-Til Productions 2020), yet Freud proceeds as though ‘seeing a horse fall under a whip and struggling back up with clattering hooves and sparks has no affective importance!’ (Deleuze, Guattari, et al. [1977] 2006: 96). Propelled by the assumption that affective importance is attributable exclusively to human relations – and, as Deleuze and Guattari see it, specifically familial or ‘Oedipal’ relations – Freud evacuates substance and meaning from the patient’s experience of the horses as horses and as objects of a cruelty that can be inflicted with impunity because they are horses. A similar emptying-out occurs each time a patient confronts Freud with reference to actual or fantasized encounters with other species (rats,

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wolves, butterflies . . .) which he interprets as a disguise for something anthropic. Depleted of all but referential value, animals and human/animal relations as such are never really permitted to become objects of the analysis at all. Nor is there any accommodation of the question of species difference itself as an enigma confronting the human subject. ‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Wolf Man’ circle back repeatedly to the discovery of the difference between men and women and thus to castration anxiety. But human/ animal differences are never substantively thematized, even when, as some commentators observe, they appear to be anxiogenic for the patient. Barbara Creed’s (2005: 117) provocative reading of the ‘Wolf Man’ case, for instance, argues that the patient’s illness has at least as much to do with species as with sex, and that where Freud identifies the patient’s fear of losing the male member, he ought to identify a fear of the loss of human specificity and of ‘becoming animal’. It is notable that Freud often claimed – including in his clinical work (SE 14: 98) – that young children feel a commonality with animals which undergoes an ‘estrange[ment]’ (‘A Difficulty in the Path’, SE 17: 140) caused by the subsequent apprehension of a ‘frightful gulf ’ (Introductory Lectures, SE 15: 209) between human and nonhuman beings – though when and in what terms the apprehension occurs is never addressed. In his Introductory Lectures, he describes this in the same breath as he describes the child’s original attribution of ‘the same conformation of the genitals’ to men and women, and the demise of this attribution thanks to the subsequent apprehension of sexual difference (209). But in contrast to male/female difference, the possibility that species difference or the prospect of indifferentiation (‘becoming animal’) might play a part in pathogenesis is never entertained. So, although animals are in one sense everywhere in the clinical writing, in another sense they are nowhere, tending to evaporate under hermeneutic scrutiny and to be emptied of relational and aetiological significance for the patient. It is not the creatures but what they conceal that counts.

SPECULATION: TURNING UP OUR NOSES The second – very different – line of approach derives from Freud’s speculative hypothesis on the deep psychic consequences of bipedality in the human species. It first shows up in a private letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in the 1890s (Freud 1985: 278ff) and receives its fullest expression in Civilization and its Discontents (1930). However, it is never systematically elaborated or integrated into the doctrine: one would search in vain in Freud’s synthetic overviews of his own thought for any reference to it, and while it makes several discrete appearances in his work between the letter and Civilization2 its implications are never permitted to interfere with the larger theory. Even the account in Civilization is relegated to a pair of dense, lengthy footnotes separated by a few pages, aspects of which are partly in tension with the book’s main thesis – to the point that, in Leo Bersani’s (1986: 18) view, they play the role of the ‘unconscious’ of the work itself. It is, in a word, a curiously sequestered hypothesis. It is also somewhat sweeping and extravagant. Here, I make no case for its objective veracity. My purpose is simply to show that it sketches a challenge to the notion of human ‘exceptionalism’, the pervasive assumption that we are ontologically distinct from and superior to other animate lifeforms and, in contrast to the hermeneutics of the clinical writing,

See Three Essays, SE 7: 198; ‘Rat Man’, SE 10: 248; ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement’, SE 11: 189–90; ‘Preface’, SE 12; Nunberg & Federn 1967: 323.

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introduces into Freud’s thought a perspective from which the human/animal relation might be addressed directly. Freud’s hypothesis is that in the course of evolution our sexuality was transformed by our adoption of the upright posture. On the one hand, the shift in humans from horizontal to vertical locomotion, and the consequent lifting of the nose from the ground, caused what he generally refers to as an ‘organic repression’ (organischen Verdrängung) of libidinal excitements linked to the olfactory sense. Whereas smell remains ‘the principal sense in [quadrupedal] animals’ (1985: 223), our vertical elevation led to a relative depreciation of its function in us. Libidinal pleasures derived by our quadrupedal ancestors from corporeal odours – genital and especially anal/excremental – became subject to disgust: they were in every sense now ‘beneath’ us. On the other hand – and this is something that only comes to the fore in later iterations of the hypothesis – since the upright posture exposed human bodies to sight in new ways, the libidinal organization of human beings became refocused around visual stimuli, though this very exposure also created the conditions for ‘feelings of shame’ (Civilization, SE 21: 99n1). From the earliest iterations of this theory, Freud argues that the psychical mechanism of repression is nothing less than a legacy of the organic repression laid down in human prehistory: ‘in the same manner as we turn away our sense organ (the head and nose) in disgust, the preconscious and the sense of consciousness turn away from [certain] memory [traces]. This is repression’ (1985: 280). By the time of its final iteration, in 1930, Freud’s vision for the theory is still more encompassing. Here, here argues that the whole of human civilization is rooted in the adoption of the upright gait: the depreciation of smell freed us from sexual periodicity and therefore created the conditions for continuous companionship that facilitate family life, and the emergence of shame and disgust paved the way for imperatives of cleanliness and instinctual renunciation that facilitate all other ‘developmental advances’ (SE 21: 100n1). The most germane implications of this hypothesis – its counter-exceptionalist intuition and its opening of a critical viewpoint on the human/animal relation – are clearest in the iteration that appears in the footnotes of Civilization, so I shall draw on this most extensively in what follows. I shall limit myself to addressing two overlapping aspects of the exposition, focusing on remarks in the first and second notes respectively. The first aspect concerns our relationship to the olfactory sense and to those other animals still deemed to embody it, though Freud’s privileged example is the dog. It emerges in the first note (SE 21: 99–100n1). To explain the point, it is helpful to mention a remark about Freud’s hypothesis by Animal Studies scholar Cary Wolfe (2010). Wolfe is critical of what he calls ‘humanist’ modes of thought which accord ontological privilege to the human being owing to its supposedly unique (i.e. ‘exceptional’) possession of qualities that elevate it ‘above’ animal life. One trope of such humanism is a valorization of ‘vision’: that is, both an insistence that vision is ‘the human sensory apparatus par excellence’ (162) and the assumption that it is not simply ‘the equal’ of, say, ‘the dog’s sense of smell or the horse’s sense of touch’ (134), but something distinct and superior, which is linked to our supposedly unique capacity for ‘reason’ (162) and for ‘survey[ing], organiz[ing] and master[ing] space’ (130). Citing Civilization – albeit briefly – Wolfe asserts that Freud’s hypothesis is a ‘canonical’ example of this humanist trope: a tale of man’s liberation from the low sensory apparatus of the quadruped and his embrace of ‘visual prowess’ (130). There is some merit in Wolfe’s claim; Freud certainly sees the shift in our libidinal organization from olfactory to visual as being foundational for the ‘advances’ of what is called civilization. But to give Freud his due, we can make some further observations. Firstly, his notorious ambivalence

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towards civilization – his acknowledgement of both its achievements and its capacity to make us sick (Phillips 2014: 39–40) – is nowhere more in evidence than in this text; and it inheres even in the account of the olfaction hypothesis: on the one hand, Freud insists that the depreciation of smell is a loss of sensory capacity, placing a repression and impairment at the heart of our erotic lives; on the other, the subsequent dominance of visual stimulation, whatever else it may give us, also lumbers us with shame. In short, the shift from the olfactory to the visual is not, as Freud presents it, an unqualified advance. Secondly, and more significantly, it is important to notice that Freud’s discussion in the first footnote differentiates between the ‘diminution of [. . .] olfactory stimuli’ caused by our bipedality and the ‘devaluation of olfactory stimuli’ correlative with it (SE 21: 99n1; emphases added). The italicized words in these phrases translate respectively two German terms that mustn’t be confused: Zurücktreten and Entwertung. The ‘Zurücktreten of olfactory stimuli’ describes the quantitative physiological decline in the human’s capacity for smell, caused by locomotive elevation. The ‘Entwertung of olfactory stimuli’, however, shifts to the qualitative valuation of olfaction as such insofar as it is affected by the physiological decline. In other words, Freud distinguishes between, on the one hand, an objective reduction in the functional significance of smell in human beings, and, on the other, the resulting effort on the part of human beings to devalue olfactory excitation per se. Having lost the delights of osmic libidinal stimulation when we first walked upright, that is, we devalue them in an effort to convince ourselves that what we lost wasn’t worth having anyway: we don’t reject the olfactory pleasures of quadrupeds because they are inferior; we dismiss them as inferior because we have already had to leave them behind. In this respect, Freud’s hypothesis is not an unconditional valorization of the ‘visual prowess’ of the human that supervenes once our sexuality is no longer centred on smell; it’s an acknowledgement of the factitiousness of our devalorization the olfactory sense. Significant also – particularly given Wolfe’s remark about the humanist privileging of vision above the canine sense of smell – are Freud’s remarks towards the end of the note where he addresses our ambivalent relationship with dogs. ‘It would be incomprehensible’, he says, that man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world – the dog – as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions. — 100n1 In question here is the relative inferiority of dogs within the material and symbolic universe of human beings. On the one hand, they have long served as objects of actual hostility owing to their exemption from civilized shame and disgust: one thinks, for example, of the influential scriptural traditions, such as those in the New and Old Testaments, that associate dogs with behavioural depravity and routinely designate them, and other highly olfactory animals such as pigs, as unclean (Breier 2017). On the other, their very name is a dysphemism used to designate a perceived lack of morality, decorum or other civilized standards among human beings (‘dirty dog’, ‘dog-eat-dog’, ‘gone to the dogs’, etc.).3 But Freud’s point is precisely that this inferiorization is tendentious: the 3 Pigs, again, are tarred with a similar brush: consider, for instance, Little Hans’s mother telling him that touching himself is ‘piggish’ (Schweinerei) because it is ‘not proper’ (SE 10: 19).

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dog is derogated as an object of contempt and a figure ‘uncivilized’ human behaviour, he insists, only as a function of our more fundamental derogation of the sensory organization that dogs happen still to embody. Their demeaned status is collateral damage in the human effort to abjure the exquisite value of what we lost when we stood up. Far from articulating a ‘humanist’ account of man’s ontological superiority, what Freud actually suggests is that a certain illusion of superiority or exceptionality is sustained only by the contingent devaluation of other lifeforms and – correlatively – by the metaphorical animalization of those human beings who are deemed not conform to the standards of so-called ‘human’ conduct. The second aspect comes into focus in the next footnote (105–7n3). It is not so much a fresh argument as a deepening, albeit rather terse, of the implications of claims made in the first note. After a discussion of bisexuality in human and some nonhuman animals, Freud returns to the theme of the upright posture. Amplifying his previous claims about shame and disgust, he avers that bipedality impaired ‘the whole of [human] sexuality’ (106n3) by marking it with a constitutive repugnance, aspects of which are writ large in some psychosexual pathologies. He then offers this compressed but fascinating claim: [T]he deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defence of the new form of life achieved with man’s erect gait against his earlier animal existence. This result of scientific research coincides in a remarkable way with commonplace prejudices that have often made themselves heard. — 106n3 Notice that Freud has substituted the phrase ‘organic defence’ (organische Abwehr) for ‘organic repression’ (organischen Verdrängung) used in the previous footnote, and in earlier iterations of the olfaction hypothesis. He gives no explanation, but the shift can be read in light of a terminological clarification introduced a few years earlier in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety: ‘repression’, strictly speaking, refers to the exclusion of something from the ego and its deposit in the id; ‘defence’, however, can be used generically to refer to any operation involving the ‘protection of the ego against instinctual demands’, including operations that might have existed ‘before [the] sharp cleavage [of the mental apparatus] into an ego and an id’ (SE 20: 164). Freud’s substitution in the note, however abrupt, indicates that the repudiation of olfactory stimulation caused by our vertical locomotion was not a repression in the strict sense. What we now recognize as repression (‘. . . the sexual repression [Sexualverdrängung] which advances along with civilization . . .’) grew out of this elementary, but still obscure, defence that took place in the immemorial history of the species as we were beginning to differentiate ourselves from other creatures. In tandem with this terminological nuance, Freud also now outlines a bolder framing of the implications of the first organic defence. Where previously he has described it in terms of particular examples – the devaluation of olfaction and the attendant devaluation of ‘olfactory’ species such as dogs – he now presents a consolidated characterization of its action: the foundational defence of the upright lifeform – and the ‘root’ of all other defences the latter might evolve, including the sexual repression of civilization itself – is nothing less than a defence against ‘animality’, against being ‘animal’. Unfortunately, Freud doesn’t elaborate on this claim here or elsewhere. However, one contextual point is worth underlining by way of clarification. In his preceding remarks about the impairment of ‘the whole of [human] sexuality’, he stresses a tension between our capacity for disgust and the

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reality of our anatomy. In regard to the latter, he cites the Latin phrase inter urinas et faeces nascimur (‘we are born between urine and faeces’). That’s to say that despite their locomotive elevation our bodies stubbornly retain the intimate connection between the sexual and the excremental we pride ourselves on having apparently relinquished. As Freud puts it in an earlier iteration of the theory, an aspect of our sexuality is essentially repugnant to us because ‘our bodies have remained animal [tierisch]’ (‘On the Universal’, SE 11: 189). The particular value of this claim is its clarification that the human ‘defence’ against an ‘earlier animal existence’ should not be understood only ‘historically’, as a once-and-for-all repudiation of our prehuman ancestors in the past; it is also an action that bears correlatively on our material selves in the present. Freud suggests, in a word, that by virtue of being upright human beings are constitutively defended against the idea of their own animality, marked by an impulse to abnegate something of their ineradicable kinship to prehuman and contemporary nonhuman lifeforms. They are not ontologically exceptional vis-à-vis other animals; rather, a determined misrecognition of their exceptionality – of being something other than ‘merely’ animal – lies at the very core of human inner life. We appear to be a long way from the approach to nonhuman beings that emerges in the clinical writing. There, we noted, animals and the human/animal relation are never really objects of analysis; their presence in symptoms, dreams and associations is only a by-product of repressions that bear exclusively on human objects and preoccupations, and the question of species difference is never thematized. Yet the olfaction hypothesis posits a certain tendentious reflexiveness about our own speciation at the very basis of being human. In doing so, it effectively reframes the work of the case histories within a diachronic perspective that inverts the priority of the terms in question: here the capacity for repression tout court is itself a by-product of a more elementary defence against animality. Moreover, by proposing that the psychic organization of the human being is evolutionarily marked in such a way, the hypothesis also introduces the possibility that our relationships to other animate lifeforms in the present – experienced by an individual patient or perhaps articulated in more ‘commonplace prejudices’ such as those against dogs, pigs, horses, or other creatures – might themselves be objects of conflict and defence and might therefore be susceptible of analysis as such. In other words, if the case histories suggest that psychoanalysis has nothing to say about animals except insofar as they are disguises for other things, the olfaction hypothesis, wayward and as questionable as it is, begins to suggest otherwise. I say only ‘begins’ because Freud himself is not concerned with following up those ramifications of the hypothesis which might be of more direct interest to scholars in the field of contemporary Animal Studies. There’s no thoroughgoing exploration, for instance, of the obvious correlation between the routine violence and exploitation to which nonhuman animals are subjected with impunity (such as the horses beaten in the Vienna streets before the eyes of little boys) and the exceptionalism that the hypothesis seeks to challenge; nor is there any sustained reflection on the ethical responsibilities towards nonhuman animals that this challenge might imply, or on the possibility of comprehending other ontologies in which the germinal defence of human speciation might be deactivated and the human abnegation of its own animality be surpassed. But as inchoate as it is, the olfaction hypothesis embeds in Freud’s work, and thus Psychoanalysis, a distinctive opening towards these complex questions. If it leaves them insufficiently thought through, it nonetheless indicates that they need not be considered heterogenous to psychoanalytic reflection. On the contrary, it suggests that Psychoanalysis can and should be interested in our experience of other creatures; in our capacity to derogate, exploit, and harm them, and to abjure

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forms of kinship with them; in how our relations to them might be more ethically calibrated; and in what it might mean for human beings to embrace rather than repudiate their own animal nature. It is reasonable to suppose that other sources of impetus to engage such questions, and important conceptual resources to address them, might yet be located elsewhere in Freud and psychoanalytic theory since Freud.

‘THE BEAST IN THE CAVE’ I want to conclude with a brief discussion Lovecraft’s ‘The Beast in the Cave’ ([1905] 2017). As I indicated at the outset, Lovecraft himself was wary of psychoanalysis and especially of what one of his characters refers to as Freud’s ‘puerile symbolism’ (Lovecraft [1919] 2017: 71),4 which we may take to refer in part to the kind of suspicious interpretation outlined earlier. ‘Beast’, however, is a tale that suggests an affinity with the other aspect of Freud we’ve outlined, one which Lovecraft was most likely unaware of, since there is no evidence that he was familiar with the olfaction hypothesis. This short tale is an exploration of the tension between the categories of ‘animal’ and ‘man’, the ostensible differentiation between them being marked in terms of locomotory orientation (horizontal/vertical) – a theme the story recurs to insistently – and olfactory sensitivity. An early work, ‘Beast’ has the distinction of being the story where Lovecraft ‘found his idiom’ (Joshi 2013: 116); in particular it’s the first in a string of texts where an encounter with some kind of living alterity destabilizes the ‘supposedly sovereign human self ’ (Mayer 2016: 119). Subsequent iterations will take on more ‘cosmic’ dimensions and will be energized by an increasingly pernicious political reactionism, for which Freud would have little sympathy. But for our purposes the value of ‘Beast’ in its own right lies in its thematic resonance with the terrestrial preoccupations of the olfaction hypothesis and its vivid fleshing out of the theoretical concerns we’ve identified in it. Whatever the disparities between Freud and Lovecraft, their critical attitudes to human exceptionalism show a marked commonality. The story’s narrator recounts being lost in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, having strayed from his touring party. Standing upright and shouting for help, he inadvertently attracts the attention of some living ‘visitor’ (Lovecraft [1905] 2017: 20). He is sure it is an animal, the sound of its approaching steps indicating that it is predominantly a ‘quadruped’, walking mainly ‘on four instead of two feet’, and its ability to find him in the dark indicating that it tracks his ‘scent’ (19–20). In mounting fear that its approach is ‘hostil[e]’, he mortally wounds the thing by throwing a rock (20). Shortly after, the tour-guide locates him, and the narrator prostrates himself at his feet. They then investigate the dying creature by torchlight. It seems initially to be some ‘anthropoid ape’ (23) with unusual characteristics. Then, just before expiring, it utters sounds – presumably words – which freeze the pair in horrified realization, expressed in the tale’s final sentence: ‘The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave was, or had at one time been, a MAN!!!’ (25). The creature is of course a figure of atavistic ‘reversion’ of a kind that crops up frequently in post-Darwinian Gothic (Hurley 1996: 63): someone lost in the cave for so long that his body has

4

That Lovecraft sympathized with this view is attested in a letter to Robert Bloch where he rejects what he sees as the Freudian approach to the interpretation of dreams (Lovecraft 1933). His remarks suggest limited knowledge of Freud’s work. On aspects of Freud’s interpretative method irreducible to hermeneutics or ‘symbolism’, see Laplanche (1996).

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somehow retrogressed in evolutionary terms, resuming the characteristics of prehuman ancestors and simian contemporaries. The concluding revelation thus retrospectively reconfigures the entire encounter. At one level, the beast is, as the narrator says, an ‘unnatural monster’ (Lovecraft [1905] 2017: 23), a horrifying aberration. But what it uncannily figures forth is an evolutionary past – quadrupedal, olfactive, ‘animal’ – shared by the narrator himself. The effect of the final sentence, then, is to reframe his antipathy toward the beast qua beast – his repulsion from it, wish to ‘defend’ (20) himself against it, and readiness to kill it – as manifesting a more fundamental antipathy towards a dimension of his own being. Significantly, the text makes it clear – and does so behind the narrator’s back, so to speak – that this dimension doesn’t simply belong in the prehistoric past but is immanent to him (such immanence being also of course the condition of possibility for the creature’s own retrogression). The man appears not to realize, for instance that when, at its first approach he refers to the beast as a ‘visitor’, he speaks as though he himself – by default, the host – somehow belonged in the cave. Nor does he acknowledge that when the guide arrives and he abandons his upright position to ‘[lie] upon the ground at [his] feet [. . .] gibbering’ (23), his own horizontality mirrors for a moment that of the beast, his articulation tellingly inhuman. At these moments the narrative betrays the existence of an unacknowledged kinship between the narrator and the creature in precisely the latter’s nonhuman aspect. As a result, by the time the narrator delivers his lurid revelation that the beast is, or was, a man, the reader has already understood fully the more significant revelation which the man (the narrator) apparently has not: that he is himself a beast. Critical here are the differential perspectives from which we witness this double revelation, that is, the fact that on one hand we share with the narrator the perception of a former humanity in the creature, and, on the other, we perceive the narrator failing to perceive the indications of his own kinship with the creature as creature. The affinity between the two figures – the fact they are both ‘the beast in the cave’ – is patent to the reader, even as the man turns up his nose in revulsion at the beast’s supposed monstrosity. The effect of this differential is to leave us in little doubt that the story is as much concerned with the essential animality of the man as it is with the man’s (or perhaps simply: ‘man’s’?) incorrigible tendency to abnegate his own animality. Estranged correlatively from the animal he encounters without and the animal he is within, Lovecraft’s narrator emerges as a kind of emblem of the defended human subject of Freud’s speculation – an everyman captured in a misrecognition of his own exceptional being.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bersani, L. (1986), The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, Columbia UP. Breier, I. (2017). ‘ “Who is this Dog?”: The Negative Image of Canines in the Land of the Bible’, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, 54: 47–62. Creed, B. (2005), Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny, Melbourne UP. Deleuze, G, Guattari, F., Parnet, C, and Scala, A. ([1977] 2006), ‘The Interpretation of Utterances’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, 89–112, Semiotext(e). Derrida, J. (2009), The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: Chicago UP. Ellmann, M. (2014), ‘Psychoanalytic Animal’, in L. Marcus and A. Mukherjee (eds.) A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature and Culture, 328–350, Oxford: Blackwell. Freud, S. (1895), with J. Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, SE 2. Freud, S. (1905a), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE 7: 123–246. Freud, S. (1905b), ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (‘Dora’), SE 7: 1–122.

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Freud, S. (1909a), ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy ’ (‘Little Hans’), SE 10: 1–149. Freud, S. (1909b), ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (‘The Rat Man’), SE 10: 151–318. Freud, S. (1912), ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, SE 11: 178–190. Freud, S. (1913), ‘Preface to Bourke’s Scatalogic Rites of All Nations’, SE 12: 333–38. Freud, S. (1915–16), Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE 15. Freud, S. (1917), ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’, SE 17: 135–144. Freud, S. (1918), ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (‘The Wolf Man’), SE 14: 1–124. Freud, S. (1923), ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’, SE 19: 67–106. Freud, S. (1926), Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, SE 20: 77–175. Freud, S. (1930), Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21: 59–145. Freud, S. (1985), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess: 1887–1904, Cambridge Mass: Belknap. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin-de-siecle, Cambridge UP. Joshi, S.T. (2013), I Am Providence: The Life and Times of HP Lovecraft, vol. 1, Hippocampus. Laplanche, J. (1996), ‘Psychoanalysis as Anti-Hermeneutics’, Radical Philosophy, 79 (Sept/Oct): 7–12. Lovecraft, H.P. ([1905] 2017), ‘The Beast in the Cave’, in Joshi, S.T. (ed.), HP Lovecraft: Collected Fiction, vol. 1, 1905–1925 [CF], 17–25, Hippocampus. Lovecraft, H.P. ([1919] 2017), ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’, in Joshi, S.T. (ed.), HP Lovecraft: Collected Fiction, vol. 1, 1905–1925 [CF], 71–85, New York: Hippocampus. Lovecraft, H.P. (1933), ‘H.P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, 1933, August 4’. Available at: https://library.brown. edu/create/lovecraft/case2/ [Accessed 22/11/21]. Mayer, Jed. (2016). ‘Race, Species, and Others: Lovecraft and the Animal’, in Sederholm, C.H. and Weinstock J.A. (eds.), The Age of Lovecraft, 117–132, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Nunberg, H. and Federn, E. (1967), eds. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Vol. 2: 1908–1910. New York: International UP. Phillips, A. (2014), Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, New Haven: Yale UP. Ricoeur, P. ([1965] 1970), Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Yale UP. Sub-Til Productions (2020), Gilles Deleuze’s Alphabet Book: D as Desire [online video]. Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLlSRFLThYw [Accessed 22/11/2021]. Wolfe, C. (2010), What is Posthumanism? Minnesota UP.

FURTHER READING Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. ([1980] 2013), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Bloomsbury. Derrida, J. (2009), The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago UP. Genosko, G. (1993), ‘Freud’s Bestiary: How Does Psychoanalysis Treat Animals?’, Psychoanalytic Review, 80 (4): 603–32. Gentile, K. (2018), ‘Animals as the Symptom of Psychoanalysis; or, The Potential for Interspecies Coemergence in Psychoanalysis’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 19 (1): 7–13. Pellegrini, A. (2018) ‘The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis after the Animal Turn’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 19 (1): 14–19. Ray, N. (2014), ‘Interrogating the Human/Animal Relation in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents’, Humanimalia, 6 (1): 10–40. Roof, J. (2003), ‘From Protista to DNA (and Back Again): Freud’s Psychoanalysis of the Single-Celled Organism’, in C. Wolfe (ed), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, 101–20, Minneapolis UP. Ryan, D. (2015), Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh UP. Snaza, N. (2018), ‘Animal Unconscious: Three Questions’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 19 (1): 20–27.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Machines of Delusion and Desire Literature, Media Theory, and Psychoanalysis ANDREW GAEDTKE

The rise of psychoanalysis was virtually contemporaneous with the emergence of radio, cinema, telephony, and the typewriter in what has been called “the first media age” (Trotter: 1). As a result, these new mechanisms for information storage, organization, and delivery became fertile metaphors for describing unconscious mental processes and their dysfunctions. Conversely, early efforts to evaluate the effects of these new media on the minds of their users drew heavily on theories of unconscious mechanisms. The histories of psychoanalytic theory and information media therefore constitute an uncanny doubling that cannot easily be disarticulated. This convergence of media theory and psychoanalysis is perhaps most evident in the work of Friedrich Kittler, who adapted psychoanalytic concepts to analyse the evolving media ecology of the last century while also proposing a materialist account of the emergence of psychoanalysis itself: Freud’s materialism reasoned only as far as the information machines of his era—no more, no less. Rather than continuing to dream of the Spirit as origin, he described a ‘psychic apparatus’ (Freud’s wonderful word choice) that implemented all available transmission and storage media, in other words, an apparatus just short of the technical medium of universal-calculation, or the computer. — Kittler, “World of the Symbolic”: 134 In his elaboration of the libido theory, Freud often adapts the language of hydraulics, electricity, and thermodynamics in order to map the dynamics of desire, repression, and enjoyment. In addition, Freud conceptualized the unconscious as a storage system in which nothing is ultimately lost, and combinatory logics enable the encryption of information according to cultural rules and protocols. A generation later, Lacan found in the emergent field of computer science and information theory conceptual resources for developing his own mechanistic account of the unconscious. It has often been observed that Lacan was a great synthesizer of the work of intellectual predecessors and rivals such as Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Less frequently observed is the extent to which he made frequent recourse to emerging technological frameworks to develop what Norbert Bolz described as a “media theory of the unconscious” (qtd. in Winthrop-Young and 421

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Wutz: xxviii). Lacan developed his theory of the Symbolic order in the context of the evolving discourses of information theory and cybernetics—frameworks that mathematically conceptualized the automatic, mechanistic processing of information without reference to a conscious, human subject. In Seminar 2, Lacan clarifies that “This discourse of the other is not the discourse of an abstract other, or of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links” (Lacan S2: 89, emphasis added). The information theory developed by Claude Shannon provided a way to conceive of a message as no longer dependent on a human interpreter but defined instead according to rules of logic and probability that could be implemented within digital circuits. Cybernetic theory as articulated by engineers such as Norbert Weiner introduced a medium-neutral framework for explaining the behavior of systems capable of exhibiting self-correction, homeostasis, and even purposive activity—dynamics that could be observed in humans, animals, and machines. These technical and theoretical developments in the late-1940s and early-1950s enabled Lacan to advance a version of psychoanalysis that turned away from the ego-psychology which had begun to dominate the field toward a theory of the unconscious which more closely resembled a distributed information-processing system. Following Lacan, Kittler conceptualized the analytic relation and the function of the analyst as primarily a circuit of technical transmission, processing, and retransmission: The transmission medium in psychoanalytic treatment was a telephony which transformed sound or the patient’s unconscious into electricity or conscious speech so that the unconscious could be transmitted, and then, through the synchronized vibrations of the attentive analyst, could be transformed back again into sound or the unconscious. These are almost Freud’s precise words [. . .] therapy as transmission was a wireless system, or more specifically, radio avant la lettre. — “World of the Symbolic”: 134 The scene of analysis is framed as a technical assemblage in which information is transmitted and transposed across a series of media—often without the intervention of consciousness. If media technologies became models for understanding the theory and process of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis in turn became a dominant framework for understanding the psychic effects of particular media technologies. In one of his more controversial arguments, Kittler would suggest that the qualities of cinematic, print, and audio media exhibit the dominant aspects of Lacan’s registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. The Imaginary, in Lacan’s work, is constituted by relations of identification and rivalry and is often signaled by phantasmatic images of wholeness or unity. By contrast, the Symbolic is associated with linguistic displacements of desire from one object to another as well as the subordination of the subject to the rules and protocols of discourses that she has inherited. Finally, the Real is the dimension of unspeakable, excessive enjoyment and suffering and which disrupts the apparent unity of the Imaginary and disrupts the smooth linguistic operations of the Symbolic order. Symptomatic phenomena can be observed in sites of mutual distortion among these registers. Kittler asserts that print media exhibits the combinatory logic of a finite set which Lacan associated with the symbolic order while film conjures a visual illusion of wholeness and coordinated stability from distinct fragments and frames of images—an effect that Lacan elaborated as a constitutive feature of the imaginary register. Finally, as Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz observe:

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The real is in turn identified with phonography, which regardless of meaning or intent, records all the voices and utterances produced by bodies, thus separating the signifying function of words (the domain of the imaginary in the discourse network of 1800) as well as their materiality (the graphic traces corresponding to the symbolic) from unseeable and unwritable noises. — xxviii This highly schematic differentiation and mapping of Lacanian concepts onto twentieth-century media technologies no doubt simplifies a great deal; many critics would object that cinematic, audio, and print works are not so easily classified according to this schema and that all exhibit the dynamic interaction of these registers. Despite its vulnerability to such critiques, Kittler’s argument may be understood as only one in a series of efforts to theorize the capacities of particular media technologies to interface with and even manipulate users at the level of the unconscious—a concern that has manifested widely in literature and cultural theory for several generations.

MODERNISM’S INFLUENCING MACHINES Prior to Kittler, the integration of psychoanalytic thought into the analyses of modern media was most potently developed by the members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. In his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin theorizes cinema as a medium which induces in its audience distinctly modern states of distraction and suggestibility. If Benjamin saw in cinema’s unconscious effects a nascent utopian potential for transforming the habits of the masses, his colleague and interlocutor Theodor Adorno regarded modern media technologies as instruments of psychological manipulation that accelerated the spread of fascism. In the 1930s, Adorno was employed by Princeton University to analyse the psychological and sociological effects of radio. In the essays that he produced for this project, Adorno repeatedly underscores the medium’s pernicious unconscious influences, arguing that, “The being unconscious of those characteristics is no argument against their effectiveness. It rather adds to it,” (368) and “[r]adio speaks to the listener even if he is not listening to the speaker.” (371) Psychoanalysis enabled Adorno to conceptualize what he regarded as a new form of technopsychic influence. The rise of mass culture and the politics of fascism were predicated, for Adorno, on modern media’s capacity to operate on users in ways that outstrip listeners’ attention or capacity for critical thought. “The radio voice, like the human voice or face, is >>presentbehind