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.