2-26-11 Phillips: Promises, Promises

Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises

Summary: Phillips collects a variety of essays, lectures and book reviews to demonstrate psychoanalysis’s intersections with literature and the ways that they mutually enrich and engage each other; while doing so, he manages to complicate and challenge the orthodoxies of each discipline and to explain the process of and pleasure in reading stories.

“In translating a person—if the analogy is to be of any use—we have to do something different.” (147)

I chose this passage because I think Phillips is analogous without being analogous.

It’s clear in this book that Phillips’s psychoanalytic practice is inflected with his literary training, and it’s also clear that Phillips’s reading practices will be forever inflected with psychoanalysis.  In the relationship between the two, somewhere in the middle, Phillips  manages to challenge the orthodoxies of both disciplines while their practices even richer; he brings them out of themselves and allows each to influence and develop the other.  This is what we have been doing all semester. 

First, I want to attend to Phillips’s inclusion of “analogy.”  Enclosed within dashes, it is both set off (to some extent relegated) and emphasized.  Starting the phrase with “if,” Phillips calls into question the status of the analogy’s use.  We’re not quite sure if the analogy that he sets up is useful or not, but I don’t think that is what matters here.  Of course, analogies, by definition, are useful in that they clarify a difficult concept or draw out the resemblances between two things, which on first glance, don’t seem all that similar.  In this sentence, analogy is not defined, and it’s not meant to clarify, not only because the status of the analogy as such is called into question, but also because we’re not really sure what is being analogized in the first place.  We could infer that translation is an analogy for psychoanalysis from earlier in the lecture, but this sentence blends the two in such a way that they’re unable to be separated out.  “Translating a person” is presumably the analogy, but for what?  The dashes distance the word “analogy” from “translating a person”, setting them off from each other while emphasizing what is within the dashes.  The ambiguous status of the analogy is what is emphasized within the dashes, while the idea that there is a definite analogy, that we can identify what is being analogized, is what is being relegated.

The thing that is being emphasized, then, is the process of analogizing.  Here, it would be instructive to look at two places: what analogies do and the etymology of the word “analogy.”  If the use of analogies is to clarify something by comparing it to something else, the process of analogizing often does the opposite. Analogies that are intended to clarify often end up proliferating meaning rather than shrinking it to something containable.  The worst kind of analogies is the kind that tries to shrink down broad concepts into pithy statements, easily digestible, didactic.  At their best, analogies demand explanation or working with proliferation, which is something that Phillips does in this lecture.  It is a working “in”.  Inside of the idea of “translating a person,” Phillips demands that we “do something different.”  The analogy itself isn’t useful, but the operation of the analogy is.  What’s more, the etymology of “analogy” shows that it has been used to describe the process of word formation over time, tracking a word’s derivations and inflections.  In a sense, the process of analogy is analogous to the process of etymology—it’s a tracking of the way that similarities between two things inflect and enrich each other.

Yet the use of the analogy is not conditioned upon its doing something different.  The “if” is not a conditional statement, indicating that analogies can only be useful if they do something different; rather, the sentence indicates that the idea of translating a person is already conditioned to do something different.  Different than what is not quite as clear, but in the following sentence, Phillips says, “We have to translate while suspending our belief in an original; and in the full acknowledgement that we could never get it right” (147).  If the definition of translation requires an original to translate, we have to do something different by acting as though there is no original.  Phillips suspends the definition of “translate” and sets up a paradox that we have to work out of.  We have to be willing to accept it as such and go from there.  It’s not as if he leaves it at that, though.  He leaves this more open than we would be comfortable with, perhaps, but the paradox doesn't leave us at an impasse.  By putting “translating a person” together, Phillips doesn’t emphasize literature and psychoanalysis as two separate units to be analogized.  The condition of this particular text is such that doing something different is not doing literature, or psychoanalysis, or analogies, or translation.  What it’s doing is putting those things in relation to each other and inviting us to work through the process of this inflection, or “mak[ing] it up together” (147).

4-19-11 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Summary: Dolar refocuses the psychoanalytic discussion on the voice by tracing the ways that the voice has always been backed up by a source (either the mouth or the letter), coming to the conclusion that the voice is untracable and unmediated.

“If disacousmatization posed the problem of pinning down the voice whose source is hidden, here we have the opposite problem: a source of voice to which no voice can be assigned, but which for that very reason represents the voice all the more.” (69)

I chose this sentence because I think it encapsulates much of what is going on in this chapter, where Dolar does quite a bit of foundational work, making minor arguments before getting to what he is really trying to say.  Throughout this chapter, Dolar says things like “We could argue” (67), “We can recall”, and “We could also read” (69), which operate in similar ways to the above passage by indicating that, yes, these readings are possible, but what they’re really getting at in terms of the voice is somewhere else.  I want to look at the methods by which Dolar diverts his discussion from the gap, by which he makes the gap resonate.

Rather than an “if…then” construction, Dolar uses an “If…here” structure.  This structure isn’t quite foundational, then; the “here” argument doesn’t rely on the “if” argument in order to constitute itself as such.  Instead, there’s a kind of deflection going on.  Dolar relocates the focus of his argument from disacousmatization back to the voice.  While that might seem obvious in that Dolar has been talking about the voice this whole time, the voice over “here” is the not-voice, or just a silence.  “A source of voice” points to the mouth of the scream painting, and so this voice has nothing to do with hearing and everything to do with seeing.  Indeed, Dolar’s imbrication of voice with the gaze is apparent here.  There is no voice that we can hear, and so Dolar’s entire discussion of the voice is not so much about hearing or locating a voice; instead, it’s about the source of the voice or representations of voices.  Dolar’s “definition” of the voice is the not-voice.

What’s more “a source of voice” renames “the opposite problem” due to the colon.  In his deflection of the discussion, Dolar doesn’t simply move it to another place; he moves it to the opposite place.  This new discussion becomes contrary to and different from the one that came before, indicating that the “foundational” work that Dolar did previously is not at all what he is trying to say.  The problem before was trying to “[pin] down the voice whose source is hidden.”  We can’t see the source of the voice at all in this problem, and trying to pin down the voice to a visible source was problematic.  But in his deflection, Dolar says that we needn’t worry about this problem, because the “here” moves away from this problem to a different one.

Where is here?  For that, we need to go to the previous sentence, which talks about Munch’s The Scream.  “Here” seems to be a different kind of text—it’s visual, not auditory, unlike the film discussion that goes along with the “if.”   The “if” of disacousmatization arises from the hidden source of the voice, which exists in a gap: “…the object voice emerges in counterpoint with the visible and the visual, it cannot be disentangled from the gaze which offers its framework, so that both the gaze and the voice appear as object in the gaps as a result of which they never quite match” (67).  The “here,” then, does not concern itself with this gap; rather, it concerns itself with the not-there.  The problem in the “here”, then, seems to be that, now, the heightened representation of the voice in the silent scream.  Even in silence, its “resonance is all the greater” (69).  What is the problem of voice, then?  On the following pages, Dolar, with the help of Zizek, suggests that the voice is forever separated from vision in that seeing the source of the voice only increases its mystery.  The problem is not that we’re forever trying to fill the gap; the problem is that the gap is unfillable, unable to be mediated, yet intensely resonate all the same.  It is the “a source of voice to which no voice can be assigned, but which for that very reason represents the voice all the more.” 

Here is where I want to put pressure on the term “represents”.  In this sentence, the source of the voice is representing the voice in a heightened way.  All the more than what?  Is the source of voice more able to represent the voice than the voice itself?  Or, outside of the “here,” does something else represent voice in a different way?  Is the voice representable as such?  Also, if the source of voice is a stand-in for the voice itself, is that what renders the voice silent?

Finally, I’d like to return to a post from February 8, where I discussed resonance.  Here, Lacan’s discussion of speech was a way of mediating in the gap between the self and the other.  Dolar’s discussion of resonance, then, intervenes in this discussion about the way that resonance functions in psychoanalysis.  It no longer mediates, it represents.

4-12-11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Parts 3 & 4

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (parts 3 & 4)

Summary Part 3: D&G set up their argument for the work of schizoanalysis by tying family structure to capitalist desire production, Oedipus being the link between the two.

Summary Part 4: The work of schizoanalysis is to deterritorialize the flows of capitalist production by upsetting the way that myths produce desire.

 “That is why, inversely, schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions.  Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes.  And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent.  Causing Oedipus and castration to explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back to the factory” (314).

I’ll be analyzing the last sentence in the series (in bold); I have the others up for context since the sentence I’ll be examining is incomplete.

What is schizoanalysis?  Or rather, what does schizoanalysis do?  The above sentence(s) don’t offer us an answer to the first question, and since D&G’s explosion of both psychoanalysis and capitalism is all about the process, it becomes less important to figure out exactly what schizoanalysis is than how it enacts this process.  Last week I was concerned with how Anti-Oedipus was different from the psychoanalysis that I’ve been reading thus far, and I think this sentence begins to develop this concern.  Obviously, Anti-Oedipus is anti-Oedipal because it rejects that myth as a structuring, universalizing category.  However, that doesn’t mean that D&G are ready to throw out this category entirely: “…we have envolved in Oedipus, we have been structured in Oedipus, and under the neutral and benevolent eye of the substitute, we have learned the song of castration…” (312).  Here, we’ve learned to live in a certain way because of Oedipal structures; they’ve structured the social world in such a way as to make it all about production.  Oedipus is the socius as we know it now, and structure is the problem.  While this is the most obvious difference between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, further differences become more subtle from there.  The main things that I’m concerned with are mediation and the way that schizoanalysis is concerned with literature (which might need to take a back seat in this post).

The bolded sentence elaborates on the “necessary destructions” to which schizoanalysis “must devote itself”.  The process of schizoanalysis (s.a.) is violent, destructive, and brutal, destroying the Oedipal structure.  Continuing with overtones of materiality, s.a. causes explosions.  The things that are actually exploding are songs and myths, which are not material, but because D&G connect them with explosion, they point to the way that these songs and myths act as structuring agents.  Weirdly, the latin root of “explode” means to drive someone off the stage in disapproval, which would indicate that s.a. doesn’t have much to do with fire or blowing something up.  It’s brutal in a more affective sense, where the person on stage is being driven away by shame and rejection rather than being killed or blown up.  Getting back to the way that these non-material things act as structuring agents, it’s not so much about destroying the materiality of the structure than just making it public how bad the structure is.  Boo, Oedipus, get off the stage.  D&G don’t like what is happening on the stage right now, all this myth and tragedy nonsense, and they want to see that the “representative series that psychoanalysis substitutes for the line of production” (305) are revealed for what they really are: horrible actors who are trying to cover up the way they produce capitalist desire by taking on the guise of representation.  To indulge my concern with literature here (and to simplify a whole lot): D&G aren’t rejecting forms of art or literature (after all, Watt is important to their own analysis); they’re instead asking what/who the art/myth/tragedy is serving.

Why isn’t s.a. just another way of structuring then?  In the sentence, this destruction is an effect of s.a..  Schizoanalysis isn’t directly exploding anything.  It’s notable here that the subject is completely missing from this sentence.  This could be an introductory clause, which we can imagine would be followed by the subject and then maybe a being verb, or the subject could start the sentence, which would mean the verbs would have to change.  But that’s not what this sentence does.  The subject doesn’t structure this sentence and so s.a. does not structure this new kind of process that is taking place.  Therefore, the process of s.a. is not only non-structuring in terms of displacing the structure that is there, but it’s also non-structuring in a way that it’s hard to place whatever comes after the structure.

My next concern is mediation.  I want to put stress on the word “intervening” in the above sentence.  It’s something that s.a. does (although not directly, as I’ve already established, even though this construction is more direct than the previous one).  Mediation and intervention are closely related in their etymology, and they mean basically the same thing.  What is being mediated, though?  In psychoanalysis, it’s the myth of Oedipus mediates the story of an individual’s life in service of capitalism.  Intervention can also mean to come between, though, and that is how it is working in this sentence.  The intervention is happening on the stage, where s.a. is coming between myth and capitalism and stealing from both their power to carry the subject back to the factory.  If we’re talking about the way that verbs structure this sentence, carrying is the most direct one in here, connected to myth and what it is doing.  The process of s.a. is to intervene in the process of capitalism and disrupt its flow.  It also matters when s.a. is intervening, and it’s when the myth gets up on stage and starts to sing; s.a. has to intervene in order to stop this process.

4-5-11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Parts 1 & 2

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Parts 1 & 2)

Summary: Deleuze and Guattari use schizophrenia to demonstrate that the Oedipus complex cannot be used as a structuring trope in psychoanalysis because it causes a tendency to blame everything on mommy and daddy; moreover, the subject cannot be divided into social realities and desire and fantasy because there is only the social.

“But group fantasy no longer has anything but the drives themselves as subject, and the desiring-machines formed by them with the revolutionary institutions.” (63)

These two sentences follow a passage in which D&G separate out individual fantasy from group fantasy.  Individual fantasy takes the ego as its subject, whereas group fantasy, as this sentence indicates, only has the drives as subject.  In that sentence, “them” refers back to the drives, so the drives are what form the desiring-machines.  I think this sentence is rather confusing, though, as its structure throws off meaning just a bit in two ways: the comma is used incorrectly, and the “with” right next to “by them” (passive voice) obfuscates what exactly is forming the desiring-machines.

First of all, the comma with the coordinating conjunction is used incorrectly, as the clause that follows it is dependent.  Without the “and,” the comma would perform a repetitive function, where “the desiring-machines” would rename the drives.  Without the comma, “the desiring-machines…institutions” would be another phrase parallel to “the drives themselves as subject.”  Both of these phrases would then be two things that the group fantasy no longer has anything but.  The former makes the two phrases closer to each other in meaning, as it performs a repetitive function.  The latter makes the two phrases parallel, where they are two different components of the same sentence subject.  Because both of these operations happen here, the structure is both repetitive and parallel. Whether or not this comma is a typo, intentional, or a result of translation, its presence along with the coordinating conjunction gives the structure of this sentence several layers that are at once conflicting and strangely similar.  I say strangely similar because, either way, the second phrase eventually finds its way back to “drives” as parallel to it (mirroring its shape and direction) or a repetition of it (a loop or a renaming).  In this way, drives acts as a sort of misplaced referent.  It’s not a very strong referent because of the comma mistake, but it’s not entirely misplaced, either.  I’m tempted to say that this sentence is schizophrenic.

Additionally, the structure of this sentence is just awkward.  The sentence says that the drives are the subject of group fantasy, but they’re not the subject of this sentence.  Group fantasy is.  The verb “has” indicates that group fantasy possesses the drives, and in that case, it doesn’t seem like drives has much subjectivity anymore.  Why don’t D&G say that drives are no longer the subject of group fantasy?  What’s more, this sentence refers back to a process of loss, as indicated by “no longer.”  Looking back through the text, this process began when D&G began mapping group fantasy onto the socius rather than the mother and father (62).  As a result of this remapping, group fantasy lost everything else that was attached to it, leaving only the drives as subject.  Whatever those other things were, they’re gone now.  This could have potentially been a violent loss, a ripping away (or maybe not), but the sentence doesn’t really tell us how that happened.  It's a reference to temporality without a view of what happened in between, like a before and after shot.  Group fantasy had more than the drives, but we looked away for a second, and when we looked back, it didn’t.  The structure of the sentence skirts around the process of loss by only naming what group fantasy has now.  There’s a trace of the before, but there’s mostly the after.  What’s more, the “as” makes it feel like the drives are just posing as the subject.  Is it just that group fantasy only as itself as subject, as the structure of the sentence would seem to indicate?  Even if this question doesn’t really take us anywhere, there’s another tricky part to this sentence.  Above, I talked about how the second part of the sentence either repeats or adds to the first part.  If group fantasy only has drives and nothing else, then why is there this repetition/addition tacked on to the end of it?

If the first part of the sentence was awkward, then I think the second part is even worse.  The passive-voiced “formed by them” is probably referring back to the drives, but the passive structure makes that connection rather weak.  When the “with the revolutionary machines” is added, it gets worse.  Are the desiring-machines formed with (using) the revolutionary revolutionary institutions, or are the desiring-machines formed with (along with) the revolutionary institutions?  Additionally, when I read this sentence, I want something to be after “institutions”.  Because of the comma before the coordinating conjunction, I’m expecting the sentence to be finished out with a predicate.  “Formed” doesn’t really act as a verb here.

I picked these two sentences because they seem to describe the process of moving away from ego psychology, which focuses on the individual subject.  Since Deleuze and Guattari are all about process, it’s important to choose a passage for close reading that examines this process more closely.  What is striking about this sentence, though, is that I feel like I’m even farther away from a description of the process than I was before I started close reading this sentence.

3-29-11 de Lauretis, Freud's Drive and "Desire in Narrative"

Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative”

Summary: Narrative theory must be more concerned with narrativity, which is a process of narrative’s “work and effects,” troubling the notion of (particularly feminine) identification in narrative.

Teresa de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film

Summary: de Lauretis focuses her analysis around what she calls the “enigma of the now,” attempting to understand spaces of ambivalence that are not expressible through language and work through the complications of Freud’s death drive by arguing that Foucault and Freud must be read together, by queering Laplanche’s reading of Freud, and by arguing that Freud saw the psyche as text through a reading of Nightwood, among others.

 “The continuum of intimacy and abuse, eroticism, aggression and passivity that must have shaped the writer’s sense of self and her relations to others is inscribed in a writing which is both stark and intensely allusive, at once lucid and obfuscating, as if only style (I am paraphrasing Barnes) could dress life in the garments of the unknowable.” (122)

I chose this passage because it is rich in description and metaphor; I found the garment metaphor to be rather beautiful and complicated.  I am also interested in how it seems to do something that is slightly off-kilter in relation to the rest of the text—its insistence in identity formation is striking in a chapter that wants to situate itself comfortably in the space of ambiguity.  At the same time, though, de Lauretis backs off her insistence by using a metaphor to complicate the way that identity is constructed through the text.  There are two moves here that I’m interested in: one is the use of metaphor, and the other is the paraphrase of the author in a sentence about the author.

While de Lauretis insists that the continuum must have shaped Barnes, I don’t think this adds up to any kind of insistence on a solid identity that we can find somewhere in the text of Nightwood.  Even though de Lauretis also insists that the psyche is the text, she also insists on the process of that production rather than the product itself.  Here the continuum is an important part of shaping that psyche (and this text), and the continuum implies a rather diffuse and varying process.  This isn’t a binary system here, and what’s more, the second part of the continuum (“intimacy and abuse” being the first) is not two but three points.  Because of that, it isn’t easy to identity a beginning or ending point, and eroticism, aggression and passivity seem to go hand-in-hand with each other while at the same time being different.

This is, in turn, what “shape[s] the writer’s sense of self.”  First of all, “shapes” is a different kind of verb from one like “constitutes” or “creates.”  In a sense, to shape is to create, but there is no origin.  Shaping is working with material that is already there.  This connects back to de Lauretis’s discussion of construction vs. essentialism, where she says that the self is always constructed, but it can be implanted and become an important part of the self (46).  What’s more, the “sense of self” seems similar to de Lauretis’s discussion of the “sensation of a thought” on pages 130-31.  If I were to summarize that paragraph very briefly, I would say that it is about the ways that the self is shaped through thought, particularly through the text’s function as memory of experience.  That is what I think de Lauretis is talking about in this sentence, particularly where she says that “her relations to others is inscribed in a writing.”  If writing is memory of experience, then writing is a reconstitution of the self in its most unguarded moments. (or at least an attempt at this).

Next is the metaphor.  Dressing is a particular act, one that is fraught with social decisions, directed by the mode du jour.  It’s something that one has to consciously do every morning, and it’s a choice, but not really a choice, as there would be an intense amount of consequences for leaving the house naked.  I think this particular choice of metaphor reflects upon de Lauretis’s concern with the “enigma of the now,” where she can’t quite find a way to express why and how she is troubled by the current events which have inspired her to revise her ideas and her former militancy.  There is a sense that she can’t quite be as militant as she wants, she can’t leave the house naked, because la mode du jour insists that she put on some clothes or requires that she deal with a certain level of ambiguity.  I find it interesting also that, in this analysis, I am directly talking about the author’s sense of self—this is a performance of this move in ways similar to de Lauretis’s paraphrasing of Barnes.  Also, this metaphor for dressing is a performance of guardedness, which relates back to my discussion of “shaping.”  In that same place where de Lauretis talks about essentialism vs. construction, she says “How else could they penetrate the body in depth, as Foucault said in a perhaps unguarded moment, even without the mediation of consciousness or of the subject’s own representations?” (46), implying that even identity is mediated and is constituted by representations.  Clothing acts as a mediator here; it’s also a representation of the self.

What’s more, the metaphor itself is a particularly beautiful illustration of the way that language obfuscates the experience of the Real.  In a sense, the unguarded militancy that de Lauretis feels she can’t sustain any longer is now being clothed in the “enigma of the now,” or the garments of the unknowable.  Yet, I’m struck here by the “as if” which all of the sudden seems to turn all my prior analysis on its head.  What I have previously described in the sentence leading up to “as if” seems to constitute a certain desire to inscribe the self in writing, as if we could mediate our experience of the Real into writing somehow.  But it’s more complicated than that: the garments are that of the unknowable, and the process of getting dressed in something unknowable is rather hard to describe.  That is where we run into the problem of Barnes’s style: at once lucid and obfuscating.

Finally, de Lauretis not only uses a metaphor to overturn this idea of “sense of self,” but she also paraphrases Barnes, once again performing the allusions of Barnes’s Nightwood, her style, and her process of dressing.  She shapes her own text with Barnes, performing a complicated mediation.  What I have done here is to set up a web of relationships within the text: if there is no clear narrative strand that runs through this post it’s because I found that each piece of this sentence performs another part of the text.

3-22-11 Freud and Bersani

Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art

 “The social function of literature—its critical power—consists in its demystifying the force of argument, argument’s claim to truth.” (67)

In the pages surrounding this sentence, Bersani attempts to unpack literature’s connections to psychoanalysis.  While he doesn’t hierarchize the two or attempt to link them in any coherent way (page 112), he does attempt to discuss the ways that literature reveals the function of language within psychoanalysis.  Seemingly, then, this sentence is about literature and what it is, but a closer examination of the subject of this sentence removes some of the validity of that statement.  The phrase “the social function of literature” can be culled down by removing the prepositional phrase “of literature,” leaving “the social function”.  As “social” is an adjective here, the subject of the sentence then becomes “function.”  Structurally, this word is a noun, but it takes on a connotation of a verb, as it is a noun that implies action.  It’s a doing verb, but it’s also a being verb, as function implies something’s basic operation.  When I hear the word “function,” I also think of math, where function connotes a connection between two variables, always in relation.  That makes this noun’s connection to its adjective even stronger, as both “social” and “function” connote relationality.  Thus, the function of “function” is inevitably social.  The way that the possessive works in this phrase is also interesting.  Instead of saying “literature’s social function,” the text makes the possessive slightly weaker here by using “of.”  “Literature” and “social function” are still highly connected, but not as strongly as they would be if they were constructed otherwise.

This possessive structure is repeated in the sentence, with “force of argument”.  What is interesting about “force of argument” is that the possessive structure is repeated in a reversed form immediately after.  The two things that argument possesses, claim and force, are another two words with dual personalities: verb and noun.  Unlike function, though, they are violent words, conjuring a relation of power.  Where function connotes a strong relationality (and I think it’s important to note here that consists, the verb connected to function, means to hold together), claim and force connote a more resistant and hesitant relationality.  I say this because the object of claim does not have much agency, and neither does the object of force.  The function of literature makes clear this relationship.

Yet, what is strange about this sentence is that Bersani emphasizes literature’s power.  The dashes make this renaming stand out.  It seems like literature’s power, then, lies in its ability to make clear its own power.  But I don’t think this sentence is as circular as the previous sentence might suggest.  The two “its” don’t connect clearly to either “function” or “literature”.  I could argue that “its” is a replacement of the subject “function,” but I’m hesitant to do that because of the fact that its is possessive here, too.  Possessive structures occur frequently in this sentence, and in the same way that argument possesses claim and force, literature possesses function and critical power.  This sentence is rather mystifying, then, because it forcefully makes certain claims that, at the same time it thinks it shouldn’t be doing.  Rather than demystifying, it further obfuscates.  I think it is performing the function of literature, but at the same time, there is no easy possession.  Possession is reversed, turned back in on itself, making the possessor unidentifiable. 

Additionally, the ontology of the sentence is also rather confused.  Bersani claims frequently that attempts at locating (55) and defining (60) are problematic, actions that are clearly ontological.  On one level, though, this sentence is also ontological, as literature’s function is to consist, or to be.  In this way, I think the sentence fails.

I chose this sentence at first because I thought it made an interesting claim about what literature is and does in the context of psychoanalysis.  But as a I read it more closely, I realized that in many ways it fails to do what I initially thought it was doing; it also fails at the thing it claims to do.

3-15-11 Freud and Laplanche

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Freud explores the pleasure principle and its role in psychological development, where self-preservation is a mechanism of repression when one cannot achieve satisfaction.

Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis

Summary: Laplanche offers a reading of Freud that uses the seeming contradictions of Freud productively and intervenes in the debate surrounding the object (subject?) of psychoanalysis: the ego.

“Freud’s thesis, if we were to condense and, in a sense, radicalize it, would consist in three propositions: narcissism is a libidinal investment of the self, a love of the self—a thesis which is anything but surprising; but this libidinal cathexis of self occurs in man necessarily through a libidinal cathexis of the ego; and—the third thesis—this libidinal cathexis of the ego is inseparable from the very constitution of the human ego.” (Laplanche 67)

Here, Laplanche begins by attempting to cohere Freud’s ideas (assumably from Beyond the Pleasure Principle) into a condensed and radicalized version of the original.  Even though  “thesis” is a singular noun, the act of condensing is not an attempt at unification.  To condense means to decrease the volume of many different particles by bringing them closer together.  It is an aggregation, a process where different units come together to form a group.  Laplanche brings three propositions together to form a thesis. 

The other act that Laplanche claims to carry out here is radicalization.  Radicalization is typically used to describe a major change or a departure from what is usual or traditional.  The term “radicalization” is not just a shift or a departure.  It is a different kind of change from one that just moves in a different direction; it’s a return to origins.  The change influences the entire concept all the way back to its roots; it changes what is fundamental about the concept.  It is an all-encompassing change.  Laplanche’s use of “in a sense” seems to be ambivalent—why doesn’t he say just “radicalize”?  This phrase, though, is the opposite of ambivalent, as this phrase emphasizes what follows it.  It is a specification of radicalization.  This placement performs a further specification of the word “radicalize” in that it emphasizes the importance of knowing the meaning of the word radicalize, and it enacts that specification of meaning into the text itself.  Adding “in a sense” is an interpretation, having important implications for Laplanche’s overall project of interpreting Freud.

This sentence acts as a microcosm for Laplanche’s project in that his interpretation is a radicalization of Freud in general.  By returning to the fundamentals of Freud, he radicalizes Freud’s work.  Laplanche changes the direction of the way that Freud has been read by others by returning to its origin.  Presumably, he is responding to the idea that the self and the ego are separate things: “The crucial point, however, which is already indicated by Freud and renders useless and even fallacious a distinction between an “ego” and a “self,” is the observation that the genesis of the ego itself is marked by the indissolubly linked image of self and other” (54).  Here, the stakes of the return lie in distinctions.  Complete and total distinctions distort the origins of psychoanalysis in such a way that requires a radicalization of the misreading of Freud. Yet, Freud and Laplanche make distinctions all the time (the different between fear and fright, for example).  What then becomes important is how these distinctions are made and the process behind differentiation versus unification.  This process, as Laplanche performs through this sentence, is condensation.  It is a balance between discrete units that are completely different from each other and an attempt to unify discrete units into a coherent whole.  The process is somewhere between these two extremes: it’s a recognition of the parts of the whole; it’s cellular.

The idea of parts of the whole is enacted in the structure of this sentence.  Laplanche uses semicolons rather than commas or periods to do this work.  Semicolons indicate that each of the mini sentences in the larger sentences are parts of the whole.  The condition of the use of semicolons, though, require that each piece set off by semicolons is a complete sentence and can exist on its own if it had to, but they’re also closely related more so than if they were just separated by periods.  They’re not quite discrete but they’re not quite unified either.  The pieces set off by semicolons are ambivalent that way.  Also, Laplanche calls each of them “propositions” which are part of the larger thesis that he is condensing.  Yet, he then calls each of them a “thesis” when he’s talking about them at the cellular level, performing the ambivalence of the semicolons in another way.  What’s more, these labels of “thesis” are enclosed with dashes, setting “thesis” off while at the same time emphasizing it.

Additionally, the colon joins the smaller cellular sentences to the larger sentence and to Laplanche’s acts of condensation and radicalization.  The colon requires that each thing that follows it be closely related to what precedes it.  This construction also requires a return to the origin.

Here’s a chart that illustrates how each cell of the sentence looks on its own and how the colon enacts a return:

Narcissism is a libidinal investment of the self, a love of the self—a thesis which is anything but surprising.

But this libidinal cathexis of self occurs in man necessarily through a libidinal cathexis of the ego.

And—the third thesis—this libidinal cathexis of the ego is inseparable from the very constitution of the human ego.

Freud’s thesis, if we were to condense and, in a sense, radicalize it, would consist in three propositions: Narcissism is a libidinal investment of the self, a love of the self—a thesis which is anything but surprising.

Freud’s thesis, if we were to condense and, in a sense, radicalize it, would consist in three propositions: But this libidinal cathexis of self occurs in man necessarily through a libidinal cathexis of the ego.

Freud’s thesis, if we were to condense and, in a sense, radicalize it, would consist in three propositions: And—the third thesis—this libidinal cathexis of the ego is inseparable from the very constitution of the human ego.

While my purpose behind separating these out was to illustrate how each cell can exist on its own and how the colon requires a return, actually seeing it written this way is strange.  By making each cell discrete from the larger context of the sentence, a few things stand out: the fact that “three propositions” is followed by just one and the fact that the last two cells following the colon start with coordinating conjunctions.  These coordinating conjunctions are unemployed, wandering around without jobs, unable to integrate themselves into the economy of the sentence.  This sentence is constructed as cellular, as a relation of parts to a whole.  It offers a way of reading relationality in psychoanalysis as a relationality of the middle or the gap: the ego and the self aren’t entirely separate but they aren’t entirely unified, either.