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.

3-1-11 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race

Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief

Summary: Cheng works through the intersections of seemingly oppositional concepts (theory/practice, power/powerlessness, self/other, among others), seeking to develop a vocabulary to speak about the ambiguity of where they meet in order to work through questions of racial melancholia.

“The gasp reveals the spectators’ complicity in the very disguise they are there to see dismantled.” (116)

The process of self-building, for Cheng, lies in the structure of the in between, of the gap, of the disjunction, of the oxymoron.  Her project is to begin to find the vocabulary to talk about this structure, and one way she does this is by talking about fantasy.  It’s not the content of the fantasy that is telling; it’s the way that the structure reveals itself that matters.

What is a gasp?  For Cheng, it’s the language of the process of self-building.  The gasp is the revelatory mechanism, the thing that enacts the reveal.  But a gasp is a catching of breath, it’s an inhale without speech.  Usually, one makes a sound when one gasps, but that is because the intake of breath is so abrupt and quick that it makes a sound that just breathing usually doesn’t.  What’s more, the gasp is a result of surprise; it’s convulsive.  A person can gasp consciously and on purpose, but Cheng concentrates on the gasp that the audience made on impulse.  Their reaction to what was happening on stage was not studied or purposeful. They didn’t mean to do it, and in fact, Cheng says that they really shouldn’t have because the knew the “reality” of the situation already.  For her, the gasp gets at something deeper than the surface or the reality.  The gasp reveals the unconscious.

But if Cheng wants to develop a vocabulary for talking about the gap, then why does she focus on a gasp as the revelatory mechanism?  A gasp isn’t really language.  A gasp is ambiguous in that way, just like the gap, and this connection is supported by each word’s etymology.  Both gasp and gap originate in Old Norse, where gap is the root word for gasp.  The OED’s entry for gasp: “The root *gap- (see gape v.), whence German dial. gapsen to gape for breath, belongs to a different vowel-series, but the sense of ‘opening’ is apparently common to both.”  In this way, the vocabulary for the gap is the gasp, an opening.  It’s not the content; it’s the structure.

The ga(s)p, then, reveals because it is structured that way, as an opening.  It’s an inroads to the unconscious.  I say unconscious here because the gasp is coming from the spectators, but they have no control over it, as it arises from surprise.  It’s more like an impulse than an utterance.  According to the structure of the sentence, the gasp is also an opening to the complicity of the people who are watching the reveal happen.  But this spectatorship is not distanced or neutral, because the thing that the gasp is revealing belongs to the spectators (“reveals the spectators’ complicity”).  Interestingly, complicity doesn’t just mean being an accomplice; it also indicates a state of complexity.  The presence of the ga(s)p is a complication, something to be worked through.  Cheng’s project is to tease out the threads of this complication, and the way she does that is not by defining or uncomplicating, but by outlining the structure of the threads themselves.  What they actually are is less clear. 

The thing they are complicit in is the cover up, the disguise.  The spectators are complicit in the cover up, but their gasp is the revealing mechanism.  Teasing out the complexity of this structure, I’m lead to the idea that the spectators are actively disguising (they are accomplices in the disguise) but that they are unconsciously revealing their complicity through the gasp.  Yet, the purpose of their being there is to see the disguise dismantled.  Here, even though the spectators know what is hidden, and even though they are there to see the structure dismantled, their surprise (the gasp) reveals that they were involved in its construction.

What is at stake here is the way that the structure of language and narrativizing reveal the process of self-building.  The gasp cannot be identified as anything other than a sound (it’s not an utterance), but it nonetheless is an opening which reveals the methodology of hiding.  By focusing on this non-utterance, Cheng opens up her argument to an alternative way of looking at narrative. Narrative isn’t an identity but a process of identification.

Writing this post was at once frustrating and fascinating, because I know that there is much more going on in this passage (and in the book as a whole) than I can clearly articulate at this point.  I wanted to examine Cheng's methodology here, as it is repeated over and over in the book in multilayered and complicated ways.  I think this could be a matter of not choosing the best sentence to examine, but Cheng's sentence structure is pretty straightforward most of the time.  She indicates throughout the book her intention and outlines her project, but as we can see from this passage, intention is a cover up for complicity in building the very structure one is trying to dismantle.  I think my next reading of Cheng would look at how her methodology interacts with the gap between performance and performativity--where does Cheng have agency in dismantling this structure (performance) and performativity (the gasp).  In doing that, I might get to a performance of Cheng's methodology rather than the gasping my reading seems to be doing right now.

2-21-11 Freud, Mourning and Melancholia; Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel

Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

Summary: Melancholia is a pathological form of mourning, where the loss of the object causes a narcissistic identification with that object and self-hatred.

 

Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel

Summary: Abraham and Torok believe that the subject’s difficulties originate in the parent’s prohibition of masturbation leading to the failure to introject, which manifests itself in haunting, fantasies, and phobias, the secret to which can be unlocked through speech and expression.

“Only when its initial and precise meaning is restored will the concept of “introjection” reveal its effectiveness in clarifying the clinical facts noted above, as regards both their genesis and evolution” (111).

Torok begins this section by emphasizing the importance of defining a word that “has undergone so many variations in meaning that is mere mention is enough to arouse in me the suspicion of confused ideas, not to say verbiage” (110).  This single word is so incredibly important to the practice and performance of psychoanalysis that restoring its original meaning is the only possible way to clarify the raw data of psychoanalysis.  Rand makes this clear in his introduction to this section, saying that “Abraham and Torok found that patients suffering from a secret identification with a departed love-object invented particular forms of obfuscation in their speech.  The patients obscured beyond recognition the linguistic elements that might reveal their secret’s existence and contents to themselves and to the world” (105).  Obfuscation is a word that appears frequently throughout this text, and it is the thing that psychoanalysis, presumably, aims to remove from speech.  But I want to return to the word that I started out with at the beginning of this post: introjection.

Torok begins with “only,” which makes it seem like there are no other options than the one that she sets forth here.  Rather than close off other avenues to restoration, though, the word “only” emphasizes the process, because it is paired with “when.”  The temporal nature of the word “when” indicates that restoration will take time.  Torok could have presumably used the construction “only if,” which would make this restoration more absolute, more either/or.  Thus, in this sentence, there is a performance of the process of restoration and its movement over time, and presumably, language.

This process, at least in this sentence, is one of etymology.  Torok returns to Ferenczi, who coined the term then picked up by Freud.  It would be interesting and productive to do an etymology of the term through The Shell and the Kernel, but I don’t have the space for that here, so I’ll go to the OED: “A term used by S. Ferenczi … to denote the forming of a subjective image of an object and the transfer to it of emotional energy previously given to the object itself.”  That’s the definition, and the first usage noted is: ”One might give to this process, in contrast to projection, the name of Introjection.”  Incidentally, the first usage calls introjection a process.  When Torok says that we need to return to the initial meaning, it’s more clear that she is talking about the beginning of the term “introjection”.  Since she’s talking about a temporal process, the temporal word “initial” works well here.  It’s less clear, though, what she means by “precise.”  Precise is more spatial than temporal, and so there are a few connections I need to make to the rest of Abraham and Torok’s work to take away some of the obfuscation.  Just before this sentence, Torok mentions that interjection “gives shape” to Ferenczi’s discoveries about psychoanalysis.  Additionally, the process that I’m talking about has everything to do with speech, as Torok and Abraham emphasize over and over again in this book.  Indeed, the meaning of precise is “characterized by definiteness or exactness of expression,” “of the voice or tone of voice: distinct, clear,” “overly formal, fastidious”.  These definitions point to space (formal) and speech (expression, voice).  Presumably, the process of introjection needs to be precise before it can even become that process. 

But I want to challenge and push the limits of “precise” here.  The process I just went through above was not precise, exact, or even overly formal.  In fact, I couldn’t just define introjection in order to get at its initial and precise meaning even in this sentence.  I had to point to context, to what came before this sentence, to things outside this sentence, and I had to make connections to other, seemingly unrelated terms in the rest of the book.  Indeed, the process of introjection is much like oscillation.  The verb structure is where I think oscillation comes out most clearly in the above sentence; much like the reading I did last week, the passive structure makes it hard to locate a subject.  The meaning of introjection is being restored, but then introjection can reveal itself.  What’s more, it’s interesting here that I am talking about the process of introjection, but I’m not really talking about introjection itself—I’m not really discussing its definition or what it means to psychoanalysis in the most “precise” way possible, yet I’m still talking about introjection by explaining how introjection looks like this sentence.  I focused my discussion around introjection, but it seems like I did anything but—I’m no closer to its initial and precise meaning than I was at the beginning of this post.

2-15-11 ed. Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis

Shoshana
Felman, “To Open the Question”

Summary: Felman seeks, through this anthology, to deconstruct the psychoanalysis/literature, master/slave narrative by saying that both are enfolded within each other (implicated), aiming to get away from the idea that literature is always interpreted by the knowledge contained within psychoanalysis.

Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation”

Summary: Felman situates the critical debates surrounding Henry James’ Turn of The Screw so as to demonstrate that criticism is a performance of the text’s ambiguity, and the unconscious is simultaneously that which reads and that which is read.

Gayatri Spivak “The Letter as Cutting Edge”

The autonomous self, or the “union of the subject and object in the act of the mind” as constituted in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria needs to be deconstructed, and psychoanalysis is a way to do that by attending to the unintelligibility of the text.

Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot”

Brooks discusses how Freud deals with plot and narrative in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, saying that repetition in the text mediates between desire for origin and desire for ending.

John Brenkman, “The Other and the One”

Lacan overturns philosophical idealism by making the argument that lack is inherent in desire—desire is not a condition for the development of completeness, which is in opposition to Socrates’ idea of desire in the Symposium.

Barbara Johnson “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida”

Johnson looks at the ways that Derrida and Lacan quote or paraphase Poe’s “Purloined Letter”, what they put into/leave out of the text to demonstrate how, in trying to correct or write over Lacan’s “wrongs”, Derrida only repeats them.

Close Reading from Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation”

  “The scene of the critical debate is thus a repetition of the scene dramatized in the text.  The critical interpretation, in other words, not only elucidates the text but also reproduces it dramatically, unwittingly participates in it.  Through its very reading, the text so to speak, acts itself out.  As a reading effect, this inadvertent “acting out” is indeed uncanny: whichever way the reader turns, he can but be turned by the text, he can but perform it by repeating it.” (101)

In this passage, Felman compares the text to the unconscious in many ways.  In my close reading this week, I want to plot the ways that she does this in the above passage.  Later on in her essay, Felman says that, “For Lacan, indeed, the unconscious is not only that which must be read, but also, and primarily, that which reads” (118).  By making this comparison Felman also says that the text has an unconscious, and so I’d like to track how that is operating in this passage. 

There are two subjects in this passage: the reader/critic and the text.  The text as subject is most apparent in the subject of the sentence “The text acts itself out.” The reader is a more implied subject, as readers are the ones that make “critical debate” and “critical interpretation” happen.  Additionally, the reader appears toward the end of the passage as he who is turned by the text and he who performs the text by repeating it.  Yet, the structure of that sentence belies the reader taking prominence as a subject in this passage.  The passive structure “the reader can but be turned by the text” indicates that the text is doing the turning, making it more apparent that the text outweighs the reader as subject.  In the next part of the sentence, the reader is the subject of an active structure, but the reader has no choice but to perform the text. 

However, I don’t wish to suggest that the text is the only important part of this passage.  Here, I do think the text is the subject both grammatically (subject of the sentence, also foregrounded as the thing with an unconscious), and psychoanalytically, but it’s more unclear if the text is the unconscious or if the text is the subject with an unconscious.  To start working through this question, I think we need to discuss how Felman is using repetition here. She makes it clear that the scene of both the reader and text is built upon repetition.  As I suggested last week, the relationship between the subject and the other is one of oscillation or repetition, and the thing that is being repeated is speech, not the unconscious.  What is being repeated in this passage?  The first sentence says that the scene of the text is repeated through the critical debate.  In terms of oscillation, the scene of the text bounces off the other of the text, the critical debate, and then returns to the text in such a way that it performs the text.  But I don’t think that it’s easy to identify exactly what the text is in this passage.  Is it the content or the “thingness” of the text?  Brooks gets at this when he says (particularly highlighting oscillation):

“Repetition is a return in the text, a doubling back.  We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed.  Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation which binds different moments together as a middle which might turn forward or back.” (Brooks 288)

I don’t really know how to answer the many questions that I’ve raised in this post.  Some of them are: is the text the unconscious or does it have an unconscious, and if so, what would that unconscious be?  What exactly is the text?  Does Felman say that the text works in parallel ways to the unconscious?  Here, I want to foreground the idea that ambiguity in this matter might be more beneficial to my reading than trying to figure out what each of these elements are in the text.  What matters is the process of oscillation (the process that Brooks says supports ambiguity).  I also was reading this essay trying to decide if Felman is successful at thinking about literature and psychoanalysis as more than just things that can be mapped onto each other (as she says in “To Open the Question”).  Felman is performing the scene of the text here by tolerating ambiguity in this passage.  She prioritizes the performance, and as my sort of circular and looping and questioning post has demonstrated, this ambiguity is what is being performed.

2-8-11 Lacan, Ecrits

“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”

Identification is one of the earliest processes of recognizing the other and provides a foundation for understanding the I function in psychoanalysis.

“The Signification of the Phallus Die Bedeutung des Phallus”

Lacan deals with the anatomical distinction that makes it difficult to interpret cases of women by arguing that the phallus is not a fantasy or an organ but a signifier of the Other’s desire.

"The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"

 “For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke.  What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question.” (247)

In the passage I have chosen, the use of “for” followed by several simple, declarative sentences signals that Lacan is making an important point here.  His use of declarative sentences stands out among the majority of the rest of his writing, as he does not use complicated clauses or piles of prepositional phrases.  I am struck here by this apparent simplicity, but I want to explore it further to tease out its complications.

The use of “for” refers to what has come before this passage.  This word does two things here: it makes the sentence into a very long prepositional phrase of sorts, and in doing so, it references what has come before it.  Immediately prior to “for,” Lacan says that “. . .what is redundant as far as information is concerned is precisely what plays the part of resonance in speech.”  Here, we can assume that “speech” in the first sentence of this passage refers to redundancies and resonances.  On the other hand, the use of “for” at the beginning of the sentence as a floating preposition unmoors it from context.  In the OED, it’s apparent that the meaning of “for” depends heavily upon context: its placement as a preposition, its situation within a phrase, and even the word that it substitutes.  In this case, it’s less clear what “for” substitutes in reference to the prior sentence, but it is clear that Lacan uses this word as a signal of emphasis, of substitution, and even possibly of transference.

Next, “the function of language in speech” acts as the sentence’s subject, and the construction of the prepositional phrases indicates that language, as a broader category, functions in specific ways when it is put into the category of speech.  Here, it is clear that Lacan is not talking about the ways that language functions in the unconscious or in writing; instead, he is referring to the ways that language functions in the act of expressing language vocally.  Here, I think it is important to consider the implications of the vocal act, where speech is considered to do something in particular ways.  For Lacan, speech evokes.  Speech, of course, can inform, but that is not what this particular verb is referring to in the sentence.  “Inform” and “evoke” both refer to the function of language, and so they are most strongly linked to language here rather than to speech.  Speech is an act, but it is active because of the way that language functions within it.  Therefore, language is evocative rather than informative.  It does not merely describe; it calls forth and makes associations.

The aural implications of speech are also evident in this passage, as the sentence to which the “for” refers makes clear.  Where information (the informing that language in speech does not do) seems redundant, it is this redundancy that transforms into resonance when put into the context of speech.  Resonance is the active part of repetition, as it also has implications of calling forth or evoking.  Instead of just a string of repetitions, resonances bounce back and forth, and the sound gets amplified as it goes.  The following two sentences (“What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question.”) achieve this resonance aurally in terms of their cadence and rhythm.  They are repetitive in that they are structured the same way and inform us as to what Lacan is saying, but they are resonant in that they act out what Lacan means about language in speech and the way that they call forth associations between the subject and the other.  Even though these sentences are written, they were originally delivered as a talk.  This complicates the idea that Lacan was only talking about speech here.   Can these categories be cordoned off from each other so cleanly?  Does language function differently in different contexts?

In this passage, the objects that amplify this speech, the surfaces that sound bounces between, are the subject and the other.  The idea that these sentences are not merely declarative (they don’t just inform) is evident when we consider the subjects of these sentences.  The sentences are not structured as questions, but the subject of both of them is “what”.  A simplification of what these sentences look like: “What I seek is a response.  What constitutes me is my question.” 

2-1-11 Lacan, Ecrits

“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud”

Lacan shifts the discussion of the unconscious from biological underpinnings to linguistic ones, primarily those of metaphor and metonymy.

“The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”

Summary: The subject and the unconscious are not unified totalities as Hegel would have us believe via the dialectic but is instead composed of a chain of signifiers.

Close Reading:


“An enunciation that denounces itself, a statement that renounces itself, an ignorance that sweeps itself away, an opportunity that self-destructs—what remains here if not the trace of what really must be in order to fall away from being?” (678)

Starting off with a series of four nouns with restrictive clauses attached, Lacan describes the utterance that brings one into being (“I can [peut] come into being by disappearing from my statement [dit].” (678)).  Yet, all of these “utterances” aren’t quite so, because of the fact that the restrictive clauses that are attached to them restrict their ability to utter.  The difference here between a noun followed by a verb and a noun followed by a restrictive adjective clause is important.  Instead of saying, “An enunciation denounces itself, a statement renounces itself, an ignorance sweeps itself away, an opportunity self-destructs,” Lacan says the above, which indicates that the utterances aren’t just doing these things, they are these things. If they are these things, then they aren’t the things we might expect them to be.  While both enunciations and denouncements are utterances, denounce gives more nuance to enunciation because it declares itself to be evil rather than just giving expression to itself.  The statement is also an abandonment, rejection, or refusal of itself, rather than just . . . a statement.  Ignorance/sweeps away is an interesting part of this series, considering that the couplet seems to reaffirm itself rather than repudiate itself as the previous couplets have done.  At first, an ignorance that sweeps itself away makes sense together because ignorance can be a lack of knowledge and sweeping away is getting rid of something.  In this sentence, though, ignorance isn’t so much a lack as a state of being, which asserts itself by getting rid of itself.  An opportunity that self-destructs is an opening or an advantage that can’t fully become one of these things because it is restricted by its tendency to destroy its own advantage.  Where it seems like these couplets negate or reverse each other, the restrictive adjective clause construction tells us otherwise.  The noun retains its qualities even though it is being restricted by the adjective clause, but it also can’t fully attain those qualities because it is restricted.  The noun’s being is simultaneous and multiple, not a totality or unity.

The dash breaks into the sentence and renames the series with emphasis, with just a bit of violence.  The interrogative sentence that follows it emphasizes itself even more; it asserts itself by asking a question, calling attention to the answer that isn’t quite there or that lies just beyond its appearance on the page.  The subject of the sentence is an interrogative pronoun, which also calls attention to the “what” or to the unanswered question.  The remainder is the “what”, which is that which is left over after the denouncement, renouncement, sweeping away, or self-destruction.  That remainder is also the trace, which echoes back to what the interrogative portions of this sentence are doing.  It is the presence that is also an absence.  The sentence gets more complicated from there, as it follows with a a barrage of layered prepositional phrases.  Trace (of what really must be) (in order to fall away) (from being).  Here, there is a trace of what really must be, which seems to indicate that there is an authentic aspect to being, considering that “really” is an adverb that modifies “be”.  The next two phrases are closely connected, as something is falling away from being.  The key here is then figuring out what that something is. 

I picked this sentence this week because I really had no clue what was going on in it.  My confusion mainly comes from its construction rather than its idea, as I think the prepositional phrase sequence obfuscates what is going on.  I do, however, recognize that it might have a lot to do with this: “Their authors are now far too concerned with obtaining a respectable position to leave any room for the irremediable ludicrousness the unconscious owes to its roots in language” (687).  It might be fair to say that this construction is ludicrous in such a way that it calls attention to the unstable being of the unconscious.  Like Lacan says, it’s not a unity, so the difficulty of putting these phrases together

points toward the difficulty of defining being in the unconscious and what exactly the trace is.

1-25-11 Lacan, My Teaching

“So, You Will Have Heard Lacan”

Lacan works through the question of Freud’s influence by arguing that Freud broke with previous philosophers with his idea that thought was embodied, that the essence of thought is not a self-transparent act; for Lacan, thought does not work hierarchically, but instead, on three different registers: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.

“My Teaching, Its Nature and Its Ends”

Lacan responds to charges of structuralism, saying that his theory might seem like shit at first glance, but shit actually has a lot to say about history and culture.  Lacan also subtly makes his objectors feel like shit.

“The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching”

Summary: Lacan positions himself against the way that psychoanalysis is currently practiced as a cure, which is a misreading of Freud; instead, psychoanalysis is the practice of actively thinking up a new way of talking about something we seem to know intuitively.

Close Reading:

“It seems refutable, but it is irrefutable.  And that is precisely what the unconscious is.  It’s a fact, a new fact.  We have to begin to think up something that can explain it, can explain why there are such things as unconscious thoughts.  It’s not self-evident.” (8)

Lacan uses “it” frequently in My Teaching.  We could attribute this to the slightly more informal lecture style, but in this particular passage, placing a third person pronoun as the subject of the sentence three times distances Lacan’s final point from its referent.  If we trace “it” back to the beginning of the paragraph that this passage belongs to, “it” is the objection.  The objection is objecting to the idea of the thinking unconscious.  Psychoanalysis argues for the “unconscious that thinks hard” (7), while the objection argues that “you can’t think without knowing you are thinking” (7).  Then, Lacan goes on to say that this objection doesn’t really carry any weight anymore, but no one really knows why, which indicates that Lacan is arguing that Psychoanalysis’s argument for the unconscious that thinks hard has become part of our unconscious.  This subtle argument, immediately preceding the ramped up use of “it,” points toward a more strategic use of the third person here.  The debate going on is really a debate about whether or not the unconscious is a concrete noun, something that can be perceived by the senses, or an abstract noun, something that names a quality or idea.  “It” takes the place of “unconscious” because, in this particular passage, the debate hasn’t been resolved yet.

The sentence structure that Lacan uses in this passage is also notable.  There is repetition in three sentences, which mirrors, reinforces, or reverses meaning.  There is “refutable, irrefutable,” “fact, new fact,” and “think explain, explain unconscious.”  In the first sentence, the two clauses are independent and joined by the coordinating conjunction “but.”  The first clause of the parallel structure is reversed by this use of “but” and also by the negative construction of refutable in the second clause.  A closer look at the verbs, though, makes the parallel structure a bit uneven.  “Seems” and “is” are both intransitive verbs, but “seems” indicates sensory perception, while “is” indicates essence independent of sense.  Written another way, this sentence could look like this: “The objection to the thinking unconscious seems refutable, but the objection to the thinking unconscious is actually irrefutable.”  Because this sentence is structured in a parallel way, the “it” can seem and be at the same time, even though the sentence is weighted more towards being than seeming.

In the second repetitive structure, “it” refers to a new subject, the “unconscious” in the previous sentence.  The dependent clause after the comma reinforces, renames, and revises the first independent clause.  “Fact” can mean something that is actually the case, but it can also mean something that is done or performed.  In the first clause, “fact” refers to the idea that the unconscious exists or has being (“that is precisely what the unconscious is”), and the second clause reinforces the idea that it has being.  But the addition of “new” indicates that we weren’t always conscious of the unconscious as such, which is a performance of the way the thinking unconscious works.

We have to begin to think up something that can explain it, can explain why there are such things as unconscious thoughts.

In the third repetitive structure, Lacan again reinforces the first independent clause with the second dependent clause.  The “can explain” in each clause mirror* each other, but they are separated because each “explain” refers to something different.  The first “explain” is in a restrictive clause referring to “something”.  “Something” is part of a prepositional phrase connected to an infinitive adverb clause.  In this part, we are thinking of something, which becomes the explanation for the unconscious.  In the second half of the sentence, “explain” is immediately followed by another restrictive clause.  Instead of referring to a noun, it refers to the repeated verb explain, which reinforces what exactly we are explaining.  The reason why I use “mirror” to explain what is going on in this repetitive structure is because the different uses of “explain” reflect upon each other and illuminate how this usage is reinforcing Lacan’s idea of the thinking unconscious.

I’m interested in this passage because I think it demonstrates how Lacan uses repetition with a twist to explain how things aren’t as they seem.  At first glance, we may think one way about what Lacan is saying, but upon further examination, we change our minds a bit about the nature of the sentence, what it is trying to say.  There’s a constant revision going on, which makes Lacan’s writing slightly maddening, but also fascinating and fun.

*I realize that using this word to talk about Lacan is highly loaded, but I want to go with it for now and see if further reading will shed some light on and complicate this rhetorical technique.  Then again, it might totally destroy what I’m trying to say here.

1-18-11 Freud

“Introduction” to the Penguin Freud Reader (Phillips)

Summary Sentence: Philips focuses on two levels of reading—one, of reading the works of Freud, which inevitably changes how we read in general; and two, psychoanalysis as a way of reading our lives.  Ultimately, psychoanalysis is a practice of reading that focuses on how language both examines and obfuscates the way that we experience our lives.

“Fetishism”

Fetishism comes from the belief that women have been castrated; even though the man has seen that women do not have a penis, he still retains the belief that they once did but were castrated by his father and unconsciously, he believes that the woman’s penis has been replaced by something else.

“Family Romances”

The process of distancing oneself from the family involves erotic and ambitious daydreaming.

“Note on the ‘Magic Notepad’”

Sentence Summary:  Freud tries to imagine a device that would be similar to the sensory function of memory and that would overcome the problems of exhaustible recording surface and impossibility of a lasting trace; he gets close by discussing the magic notepad, a recording device that is similar to his Pcpt-Cs system.

“Lapses”

Small, seemingly incidental slips (misspeaking, misreading, mishearing) are actually highly significant, as they reveal the speaker’s unconscious or inner thoughts or reveal an experience that came before the lapse.

“Screen Memories”

A memory’s influence on a child is complicated, because things that seem important we forget, and things that seem trivial are what we remember the most; the work of psychoanalysis involves unearthing the original impression associated with these memories that was lost during displacement.

“Wolf Man”

Wolf Man’s neurosis stems from castration anxiety and watching his parents have intercourse, which made him desire to receive sexual satisfaction from his father and also manifested itself in his fear of seeing wolves.

“Fragment of an Analysis (Dora)”

Summary: Freud works out the problem of fragmented analysis by doing work to fill in the gaps in both his (about the case) and Dora’s memory, which ultimately becomes the work of psychoanalysis in general.

In his introduction to “Fragment of an Analysis (Dora)”, Freud does three things: he responds to past criticism of his method, he anticipates new criticism to this particular analysis, and he justifies publishing an incomplete analysis.  In “Dora”, the fragmented nature of the analysis seems to be the problem at first, but it finally becomes part of the methodology of psychoanalysis in general and I think that much of the work of justification happens in the passage where Freud compares his analysis to archaeology.

“Given the incompleteness of my analytical results I had no other choice but to follow the example of those researchers who are so happy to bring the inestimable, though mutilated, remains of antiquity to light after their long burial.  Using the best models known to me from other analyses, I have completed that which was incomplete, but, like a conscientious archaeologist, I have taken care, in each case, to reveal where my construction added to the authentic parts.” (Freud, Psychology of Love 8)

Freud starts out by defining the raw data that he had after meeting with Dora as incomplete.  He recognizes that this presents a problem to his work in general, as incomplete denotes an imperfection or a defect in the analysis he ended up with after his three months with Dora.  He goes on to say that, as a result of this (“given”), he has no other choice but to follow a methodology of analysis that allows him to work with this incompleteness.  Obviously, he really does have a choice in the matter, so I read this statement as saying that he chooses the best model, that this is the best way to go.  On the other hand, he doesn’t really have a choice because he needs to follow other examples, since he is doing work that has not been done before.  This model is the archaeological one, which he uses as a metaphor to describe psychoanalytical work, where he is unearthing unconscious thoughts and piecing them together in order to make them more complete.  Far from being problematic in their incompleteness, these “thought artifacts” are “inestimable, though mutilated.”  On one hand, inestimable means that they have value, but inestimable also means that this value, essentially, can’t be determined at all.  “Mutilated” also denotes some essential incompleteness, so the analytical results are missing parts that are unable to be recovered.  Here, the analytical results are valuable because they are incomplete.  Most of the work, then, lies in merely unearthing the analytical remains and recognizing that they are valuable as fragments.

In the second sentence Freud presents the idea that the method of psychoanalysis depends upon incompleteness, or fragments, to do its work.  Taking on the role of the archeologist, Freud continues a piecing together (“using the best models known to me”) and he makes the role of the archaeologist/analyst central in this piecing together.  Then comes the “but.” The “but” sets up an opposition between the central role of the analyst (before the “but) and the nature of the work that he does.  He is careful to say that he has added to the artifact through construction (the artificial part of the work).  “Authentic parts” is a reference back to the essential qualities of the artifact in the first sentence.  But this binary between what is artificial and authentic isn’t so simple at first, as “reveals” adds a layer of complication to how Freud describes the work of analysis.  To reveal is to disclose something previously kept secret.  Freud finally reveals that what is essential, and it is not as problematic as it seemed in the beginning.

I chose this passage because I think it does two important things.  First, it demonstrates Freud’s rhetorical method of making something seem like a problem at first and then subtly walking through it to make it end up working in his favor.  As a reader, I can’t take what Freud is saying at face value, but I also have to be willing to go along with him and invest myself fully in what he is saying until he finally reveals that the essential qualities that seemed we couldn’t avoid, that were problematic, actually end up being the essential qualities that make the whole system work at all.  In a sense, I end up believing what Freud is saying because I don’t believe it literally.  I go along with Freud by not believing that everything he is says is complete and by looking for the moment he reveals what he is actually doing.  On one level, this passage demonstrates, through a metaphor, how one is supposed to read Freud.  It also demonstrates how the work of psychoanalysis is done.  The most important part of psychoanalysis is unearthing the things that we’ve forgotten.