October journal No.28 Spring (1984) - Discipleship, A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis

Art I Theory

I Criticism I Politics

OCT Discipleship A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis

Jean Laplanche Leo Bersani Perry Meisel Joan Copjec FranCoisRoustang Jennifer Stone Homi Bhabha

$5.00/Spring 1984

To SituateSublimation SexualityandAesthetics Freud'sReflexiveRealism Lettersand Transference: The UnknownWoman Uncertainty ItalianFreud:Gramsci, GiuliaSchucht,and WildAnalysis Of MimicryandMan: The Ambivalence of ColonialDiscourse

Publishedby theMIT Press and UrbanStudies for theInstitute for Architecture

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editors Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson executiveeditor Douglas Crimp associateeditor Joan Copjec

special issue editor Joan Copjec consultingeditor Perry Meisel

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2870) (ISBN 0-262-7517-8X) is published quarterly by the MIT Press for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Subscriptions: individuals $20.00; institutions $48.00; students and retired $16.00. Foreign subscriptions outside USA and Canada add $4.00 for surface mail or $18.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. Manuscripts, accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, NJ 07110. ? Copyright 1984 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its editorial contents.

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Joan Copjec Jean Laplanche Leo Bersani Perry Meisel Joan Copjec FranCoisRoustang Jennifer Stone Homi Bhabha

Discipleship To Situate Sublimation Sexualityand Aesthetics Freud'sReflexiveRealism Transference.Lettersand The Unknown Woman Uncertainty Italian Freud. Gramsci, Giulia Schucht, and Wild Analysis Of Mimicry and Man. The Ambivalenceof Colonial Discourse

Coverphotograph.Freud and disciples at Worcester, Mass., September 1909. Standing: Brill, Jones, Ferenczi; seated. Freud, Hall, Jung.

4 7 27 43 61 91 105 125

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HOMI BHABHA is Lecturer in English at Sussex University in England. His book, Power and Spectacle:Colonial Discourseand the English Novel will be published by Methuen. LEO BERSANI, Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of several books, including the recent The Death of StephaneMallarme (Cambridge University Press). His A Futurefor Astyanax. Characterand Desire in Literature(Little, Brown) is being reissued by Columbia University Press. JEAN LAPLANCHE, a French psychoanalyst, has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He is best known as the author of Life and Death in Psychoanalysis(Johns Hopkins University Press) and as the coauthor, with J.-B. Pontalis, of The Languageof Psycho-Analysis (Norton). PERRY MEISEL is Associate Professor of English at New York University. He is author of The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and WalterPater (Yale); editor of Freud: A Collectionof Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall); and coeditor of the forthcoming Lettersof James and Alix Strachey. FRANCOIS ROUSTANG is a French psychoanalyst and Visiting Professor of French at Johns Hopkins University. His books, Dire Mastery: Discipleshipfrom Freud to Lacan and PsychoanalysisNever Lets Go, have been translated and published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. JENNIFER STONE is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has served as editor of The Yearbookof the British PirandelloSociety and as coeditor of The Universityof Essex Sociologyof LiteratureSeries.

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HOLLIS FRAMPTON 1936-1984 We at OCTOBER mourn the loss of Hollis Frampton, poet, fabulist, filmmaker, and photographer. He was for us a central figure in the culture of our time, a friend and frequent contributor to this journal. We shall publish in the coming year a special issue devoted to the documentation and assessment of his work.

Discipleship Mable Dodge Sterne called it "tattletaling." In many ways she was its emblematic American hostess, accepting psychoanalysis easily and graciously. She was the analysand of one of Freud's first American disciples, A. A. Brill, and the actual hostess of intellectual "evenings" where Greenwich Village artists and literati gathered, embraced the new theory, and applied it in interpretations of art. To say that they "tattletaled," however, is more accurate-telling on a repressed sexuality which contained, they thought, the tale of a text's meaning. Sterne's designation - like Anna O's "talking cure"- might from our perspective seem prescient for the way it grasps the importance of speech, the verbal narration of the symptom, for psychoanalysis. But it is problematic in that it also implies that this speech is merely garrulous, that it is in excess of a more

essential text, a content, already inscribed elsewhere. Such speech would simply translate this silent sexual text, speak from a point outside yet contiguous, and intimately so, with sex and the symptom. We have begun to understand that the speaking subject can not be separated out from its speech, its symptom, or its sexuality. We are inhabited- we sometimes say in response to the teachings of Lacan -by language. And so we should, like Freud, be suspicious of the familiarity which America assumed toward his theory, settling into it more quickly than he thought advisable, and of the way things are turned around by some Lacanians who say rather that the subject inhabits language. Language is uninhabitable. Although we constantly try to find our place in it, it constantly refuses to house us, fissuring and displacing us endlessly. By titling this issue "Discipleship," we call attention to the fact that the privileging of language in Lacanian theory was combined with a privileging of the transference, defined by Lacan as a relation with a subject supposed to know, a master. This latter emphasis is what proscribes our taking on a fondling and fetishized relationship of intimacy with language. Our speech is not our communication with or of our own innermost being, but an address to some Other who supervises our discourse and decides our meaning. There is in the transference no sexual knowledge- for Freud this was a moral law, for Lacan it was structural- and meaning, thus, does not adequately translate the sexual, but arises in its stead. This special issue of OCTOBER, produced streets away from the location of the first jubilant reception of psychoanalysis by literature and art, is designed to mark the distance traveled from these beginnings as a result of our reconsideration of our discipleship to Freud. The texts printed here do not evidence the change in a uniform manner, nor do they exhaust the possibilities of psychoanalytic readings at the present time. Each text, however, participates in the new direction in at least one of the three ways implied by the following observations: (1) The transference and Freud's essays on therapy and technique, formerly of little concern to those who analyzed artistic or literary texts, are now assuming a new importance. Once the relation of the subject to systems of representation is taken as the crucial point of analysis, the transference becomes a concept of unavoidable consequence in theorizing this relation. (2) The objects of analysis for those in the disciplines of literature or art have been, predictably, literary or art texts. Recently, however, a new object has become available to those who practice in these fields: the psychoanalytic texts of Freud. Indeed, some of the most interesting work now undertaken in these fields are rereadings of Freud's essays and case studies. Lacan's insistence on a structure of analytic training, in which a "master" analyst oversees the training-analyst's cases, forces the recognition that our relation to psychoanalytic material -the unconscious -is always indirect. The unconscious can never

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be a direct, lived experience. The analyst, like the master analyst, is, through the narration of the case, given only a mediated access to the unconscious resistances. The acknowledgment of this fact gives more credence to the "secondhand" analyses of texts than was previously permissible. The most valuable rereadings of Freud, however, are not attempts to turn the tables on him, to master him, by turning his text into "mere" literature which can then be deciphered from a superior position of knowledge. What emerges in this work is emphatically not a Freud already known and mastered, one who can readily and unproblematically be used as a source of knowledge for the analysis of other texts. Rather one confronts a Freud who must be "discipled," one who represents a knowledge in which we must still struggle to find a place. These rereadings produce a Freud not familiar, familiarly literary, but one de-familiarized, less an imitable father and more a deceiving other, a text full of traps, contradictions, and uncertainties. The theorist of literature, art, film who takes up psychoanalysis as a methodology is one who becomes more and more estranged from his or her own home discipline. (3) The relationship of disciple to master is the relationship which (problematically) founds a society, the individual subject coming into being and assuming an unsure identity in an antagonistic struggle with the master society which preexists and excludes the subject. Psychoanalysis as a political analysis engages this relationship. Since the excluded position of the disciple is one that is underscored both for women and for colonials, who are subjects of additional structures of exclusion, the work of feminism and the work on the colonial subject have both explored this relation with particular interest. These different labors, of course, are not to be collapsed, nor the specificity of separate subjectivities denied. The master-disciple relationship is not an analogy which reduces all the political work of psychoanalysis to the same analysis. Rather, it is a model that is enriched and transformed by specific studies which also enrich the theory of psychoanalysis in general, contributing to radical reconsiderations of its objects and aims. not Psychoanalysis--as we hope this issue will help to demonstrate-is something one does "of an evening"; it is not a "tattletaling" in a cozy drawing room among members of a closed society. Mable Dodge Sterne's antique term can serve again, however, now in the context of current theory, to allude to the delirium which is awakened by the psychoanalytic project, the attempt to make audible the fundamental distance between us and the point from which we speak. For it is in this suspending distance that the threatening truth of tattletaling, of the exteriorizing tale of our own existence, begins. JOAN COPJEC

To Situate Sublimation*

JEAN

LAPLANCHE

translated by RICHARD

MILLER

Everything in Leonardo da Vinci's childhood "memory" denotes a symbolic figure of seduction(what better parable could there be?), of the implantation of the maternal desire that is destined to mark the child and, ultimately, the adult. This is what Leonardo means when he says that his preoccupation with the flight of birds had been preordained by destiny. And how is it possible, as we witness the beating of the kite's (to give it its true name) tail, to mistake the sexual play to which Freud here makes direct reference: the interaction between breast and mouth (an act in which we all too often overlook the role of the breast as one of the mother's erogenous zones); and of course, and Freud stresses this, the interaction of lips with lips, "impassioned kisses." Through the autoerotic/narcissistic image of lips touching lips what we have denoted here is the fact that the moment of seduction is - or immediately becomes - a moment of turning in on oneself, of retrogression into fantasy; in seduction it is the mark of what I have called self time, auto time. Lastly, when we gaze back upon this childhood memory we realize that it is obviously here that we must locate the role of the mother's fantasy penis. But we must now take into account the objection raised from the genetic viewpoint (which makes the "phallic" operative at approximately four years of age, considerably later than orality and anality): the mother's fantasy penis is not the one the child imagines

* This essay is an excerpt from Laplanche's lectures published in ProblematiquesIII: La Sublimation, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1980. [The Strachey translation, which conflates instinct and drive under the same term, instinct, has not been altered when cited. By now the criticisms of this translation are well known. The distinction between drive and instinct, however, is fundamental to the work of Laplanche and is, therefore, respected in the translation of his text. In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis,Laplanche redefines Anlehnung(Strachey's anaclisis) as "finding support" or "propping" and gives it a conceptual value it does not have in standard translations of Freud. Laplanche shows that Anlehnungdescribes a structural relation in which the sexual drives lean, or are propped up, on the biological instincts. A massive deviation, which takes place through a metaphorization of the instinct's aims and an internalization and metonymic displacement of the instinct's objects, detaches sexuality from the vital order of self-preservation. -Ed.]

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around the age of four, it is the one the mother continues to envy, particularly during nursing, the one that will sometimes be the focal point on which the gamut of her inchoate desires, unified and perhaps solidified, will be directed. Lacan's formulation, a reprise of Freud, at once springs to mind: the child is the mother's phallus. Things, however, are much more complex in the sense that the phallus is now not embodied solely in the child. The breast itself, alternating with the child, oscillating with it, we might say (to pick up the image of beating wings), also occupies this fantasy site of the phallus being thrust between the lips of the suckling child. Around 1897 Freud, coming to grips with what we now call the seduction theory, expressed its essence in the following equation: adult perversion = childhood neurosis; whence this autocriticism: given the fact that there are so many neurotics, can it be conceivable that there is really such a large number -necessarily even greater- of perverse parents? This objection breaks down if we agree to replace the overt perversion of an unsatisfied female with this quasi-structural datum of the mother/penis relationship. In Leonardowe have a return to this seduction theory in which we have found the truth of "propping." And the seduction fantasy, the "childhood memory of Leonardo," brings us closer to what I have called the object-source. In any event, if we cannot be certain (who would dare?) that Leonardo's fantasy is itself the object-source, we can posit that it is one of its closest preconscious figurings.1 Thus, going perhaps a bit further than did Freud, we have singled out the essential element that makes this fantasy a kind of paradigm of seduction. The scenario represents seduction, but it itself is close to what is laid down by seduction, the object-source. Which brings us to the self-representative character of fantasy, fantasy representingnot only a contentin a scenebut the way in which it is itself produced. We can say, although this kind of word play is subject to examination, that thefantasy of implantationrepresentsthe implantationoffantasy. We can read in Freud a fairly lengthy discussion of the reality contained in this scenario: is it really a memory? Or is it, purely and simply, an a posteriori construction? Is it a mixture of construction and mnesiac elements? The discussion is not unique to this essay; we can find it set forth at least at equal length, for example, when we come to the primal scene in The WolfMan. It is a problem Freud never quite worked out, particularly when it came to invoking a pure and simple adult reconstruction. This position, which is that of Meyer Shapiro and also of Viderman (and also of Jung), the thesis of a complete inadequation of the infantile elements when it comes to constructing the analytic interpretation, is one of which Freud is quite well aware, and he rejects it only after having gone to great lengths in his attempt to refute it. For Freud, if there I note that since L'inconscient, une etudepsychoanalytique,1961, the path followed by Serge 1. Leclaire has often paralleled my own. Here, I would refer to his notion of "representation of the representative" in his On tue un enfant, Paris, Le Seuil, 1975, pp. 62 ff.

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is construction it is important that such construction express in some way a profound truth, one present very early on, from childhood: If, then, Leonardo's story about the vulture that visited him in his cradle is only a fantasy from a later period, one might suppose it could hardly be worth while spending much time on it. One might be satisfied with explaining it on the basis of his inclination, of which he makes no secret, to regard his preoccupation with the flight of birds as pre-ordained by destiny. Yet in underrating the story one would be committing just as great an injustice as if one were carelessly to reject the body of legends, traditions and interpretations found in a nation's early history. In spite of all the distortions and misunderstandings, they still represent the reality of the past: they are what a people forms out of the experience of its early days and under the dominance of motives that were once powerful and still operate today; and if it were only possible, by a knowledge of all the forces at work, to undo these distortions, there would be no difficulty in disclosing the historical truth lying behind the legendary material. The same holds good for the childhood memories or phantasies of an individual.2

Freud, then, to the eventual advantage of the theory of drives, goes beyond this opposition between memory and reconstructed fantasy. For him, this truth is the same as the fantasies of origins and myths of origins, like that of the founding of Rome: oracles, divine interventions and, at the very foundations of artistic or scientific interest (here we again run up against the problem of sublimation), as a basis for reference and outside stimulus with regard to the subject, as an avatar of the "inner foreign body," that which we call "vocation" or "inspiration." Having taken a detour via seduction, are we now so far from the problem of sublimation? Not very, because in both instances we have a question of a sexual and nonsexual relationship: on its first level seduction can be described as the eruption of sex into the so-called asexuality of the child, an eruption into self-preservation; inversely, sublimation can be regarded as the path of energy of the sex drive or impulse towards nonsexual activities. Yet in Freud's Leonardo this problem of sublimation, a major theme in Freudian thought, is far from being univocal, and this adds to a number of the difficulties that arise. First, although sublimation is most often regarded as a transformation of some sexual activity into nonsexual activity, as a "destined impulse," we find several passages where what is in question is the genesis of objects,of myths or illusions. Thus the gods are said to have been born out of a sublimation of the genital 2. da Vincianda Memoryof His Childhood Edition Sigmund Freud, Leonardo (1910), TheStandard Works,ed. and trans. James Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press, of the Complete Psychological 1957, XI, p. 84.

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organs, or that God and Nature (basic coordinates in Leonardo's work) are sublimations of the parents.3 Thus duality between impulsive sublimation and what we refer to as the symbolization of objects "from above" seems less important to me than another duality, namely, that in Leonardo we are dealing not with a sublimation but actually with two major activities in which an enigma is posed at the outset: on the one hand, the activity of pictorial creation and, on the other hand, the activity of scientific investigation. In Leonardo these two activities are very intricate and frequently shore each other up; thus, Leonardo's drawings are props for his anatomical investigations or his researches into flight; inversely, scientific anatomical research or a broad-based investigation of nature itself sets as its goal or its alibi the desire to succeed in creating a painting more faithful to the truth. Freud, however, along with many other authors, stresses this antagonism. He dwells-at the very beginning of the article-on the braking of the pictorial activity by an increasingly to say obsessional-intellectual intense-not research, so that almost all creative energy finally comes to be channeled into knowledge without any possibility for possible reconversion. "Nothing," Leonardo wrote, "can be loved or hated if you do not first know it." Which Freud interprets thus: it is obviously a theoretical error to say that one cannot love and hate without knowledge: all our experience of emotional life proves the contrary. However, it is true with regard to the development of Leonardo himself to say that he finally made love and hate subordinate to knowledge. "Leonardo, then," Freud writes, could only have meant that the love practised by human beings was not of the proper and unobjectionable kind: one shouldlove in such a way as to hold back the affect, subject it to the process of reflection and only let it take its course when it has stood up to the test of thought. And at the same time we understand that he wishes to tell us that it happens so in his case and that it would be worth while for everyone else to treat love and hatred as he does.4 Here I must dwell on this notion, so crucial in psychoanalysis, of an impossibility of transformation,i.e., the fact that in certain areas the passage from, the conversion of, some site into another, some psychic reality into another, is not possible in both directions. The major instance of this impossibility or this great difficulty of transformation is offered by the anxiety theory: the conversion of libido into anxiety is, if not in one direction, at least very difficult to achieve in the other; the transformation of anxiety into libido calls for a much greater effort than the libido's passage to anxiety. Here we have an energy

3. 4.

Ibid., pp. 123 ff. Ibid., p. 74.

Leonardoda Vinci. A Study of a Deluge.

model that Freud does not develop, a typical model of entropy.5 Of course, psychoanalysis plays metaphorically with quantums of energy, but it would be appropriate to rely not only on the law governing the transfer of energy but also the second law of thermodynamics, namely, the fact that certain types of energy represent a degradation of other types and that we cannot retrace our steps to the source without making an additional effort and with considerable loss. With Leonardo, Freud detects such an impossibility of transformation between pictorial activity and the activity of intellectual research. If we read on, however, we find that the analysis is based upon two slightly different points of view:

5. "A conversion [ Unsetzungen] of psychical instintual force into various forms of activity can perhaps no more be achieved without loss than a conversion of physical forces" (Ibid., p. 75).

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Because of his insatiable and indefatigable thirst for knowledge Leonardo has been called the Italian Faust. But quite apart from doubts about a possible transformation of the instinct to investigate back into an enjoyment of life-a transformation which we must take as fundamental to the tragedy of Faust [because Faust, after having been a scientist into his old age, reverts to youth and to direct instinctive satisfactions] - the view must be hazarded that Leonardo's development approaches Spinoza's mode of thinking.6 What Freud means here is that with Leonardo we go from knowledge of the first type to that of the second and then on to a third- in other words we move toward a knowledge that is increasingly more pure, increasingly removed from the emotions. The impossibility of transformation is made very clear, as is the impossibility, or the extreme difficulty, of the return of the sublimated to the active (Lebenslust,joy, desire or pleasure of living). Further on, a clear difference is made in characterizing the two activities in question: Then, when he made the attempt to return from investigation to his starting point, the exercise of his art, he found himself disturbed by the new direction of his interests and the changed nature of his mental activity. What interested him in a picture was above all a problem; and behind the first one he saw countless other problems arising .... He was no longer able to limit his demands, to see the work of art in isolation and to tear it from the wide context to which he knew it belonged.7 The major problem in Freud's Leonardo,from the viewpoint of sublimation, is that although two activities (painting and intellectual investigations) are presented to us, both sublimated and struggling against each other, sublimation is also, and most frequently, evoked only for the intellectual activity, and the struggle between the two activities is in the end an inability to "desublimate," to return, even partially, to the instinctual-to the point that the pictorial activity becomes something much closer to the instinctual, to what Freud calls "enjoyment of life," than to intellectual activity. One of the reasons for this difference is obviously the fact that research activity lends itself to the schema of sublimation much better than does the genesis of plastic activity. We have already made a rapid survey of this when considering the fate of the notorious "drive to know" (Wisstrieb). We should recall first that Freud himself spoke out on occasion against the endless multiplication of the number of "drives": creating a particular drive for each 6. 7.

Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 77.

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and every activity is eventually tantamount only to an increase in purely verbal solutions. And what is this drive to know? Is it a drive? Is it a sexual drive? What can our schema of reinforcement- or, as I have called it, propping-and seduction contribute to this problem of knowing? Here I turn to the text of the ThreeEssays on the Theoryof Sexualityand, in particular, to Chapter V of the second essay, "The Sexual Researches of Childhood," a chapter written in 1915 and thus added to the ThreeEssays after the publication of Leonardo: At about the same time as the sexual life of children reaches its first peak, between the ages of three and five, they also begin to show signs of the activity which may be ascribed to the instinct for knowledge or research [Wisstrieb: instinct for knowledge; Forschertrieb:instinct for research]. This instinct [for knowledge] cannot be counted among the elementary instinctual components, nor can it be classed as exclusively belonging to sexuality [which means that it is thus a decomposable instinct and that its components are not solely sexual]. Its activity corresponds on the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia. [Here other elements are being introduced: Bemiichtigungor "mastery," and Schaulust (Freud sometimes uses the word Schautrieb);we use the word "scoptophilia," even though it is a fairly recherche translation of a term that is very common in German: Lust, combining as it does both desire and pleasure, is almost untranslatable in either French or English.] Its relations to sexual life, however, are of particular importance, since we have learnt from psycho-analysis that the instinct for knowledge in children is attracted unexpectedly early and intensively to sexual problems and is in fact possibly first aroused by them.8 A short text that appears to be quite precise but that can nevertheless plunge us into confusion. Why? First, as a general rule Freud speaks of Bemichtigung and Bemiichtigungstrieb,the drive for mastery, as one with a nonsexual basis. In placing it in our dihedron, we would set it on the left-hand side, the side of self-preservation. But then, isn't it in a way absurd to say that the drive for knowledge is a sublimation of the drive for mastery if the drive for mastery is not sexual and therefore, by definition, cannot be sublimated? Going a bit further than this somewhat categorical contradiction, we perceive that this is perhaps merely an ellipsis in Freud's thinking. The "drive for mastery" makes its appearance in the ThreeEssays a few pages earlier with regard to sadomasochism, also in a text that does not date entirely from either 1915 or 1920,

8. ThreeEssays on the Theoryof Sexuality(1905), S.E., VII, p. 194; comments in brackets byJ. L.

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but which has been profoundly reworked. There, Freud sets forth an analysis of sadism and suggests a genesis for it in line with the propping schema. And he tells us that sadism, as a sexual impulse, derives from a drive or nonsexual activity that strives simply to extend the ego's mastery over the object. At the outset, therefore, there must have been some activity of mastery that did not derive pleasure from the destruction of the other and that transforms itself sexually only through propping and repression.9 "Cruelty in general comes easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a a capacity for pity-is developed relahalt at another person's pain-namely At late."10 its outset the drive for tively mastery in the child does not stop short at the pain of another person but, and this is a crucial fact, neither does it seek out that pain: pity and sadism go together,but there is an activity that consists in establishing domination over the outside world, destroying it if need be, an activity that, in itself, is not sexual. Here is how Freud completes the passage in 1915: It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty [and here, therefore, a sexual impulse] arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role. 1 What I should like to stress here, in addition to the commentary accessible to everyone, is that a propping relationship exists between self-preservative mastery, the adaptation of the outside world, and sado-masochism. When Freud tells us later - this time with regard to the drive for knowledge - that that drive is a sublimation of mastery, we can attempt to apply that schema to our dihedron reciprocally:

To interpret sublimation in this way as the inverse of propping is of course to apply a somewhat mechanical schema, the very one Freud himself suggests 9. Cf. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 10. Freud, ThreeEssays, pp. 192-193. 11. Ibid., p. 193.

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in his short text on "Pathways of Mutual Influence" (in ThreeEssays). However, without abandoning our dihedron model, there may be another, non-"mutual" way of understanding the return from sadism toward sublimated activities. For example, we can imagine something that would resemble a refolding of the sexual level back onto the level of self-preservation.

In any event, what we do grasp is the special link between knowledge and the drive for research and between sadism or sado-masochism. Which is obviously in line with the analysis of Leonardo as well as with the analysis of a condition very like obsessional neurosis: the obsessional character of Leonardo's relationships with intellectual investigation. The other meaning of this text is that the drive for knowledge "works with the energy of Schaulust,"the drive or desire to see. Earlier, I asked a question: Freud often stated that it was not a matter of multiplying drives willy-nilly, of singling out a drive anywhere one chanced to note some specific activity. So what about this "drive to see"- is it another partial drive but one with what apdrive for pears to be a very special status? Mastery and sado-masochism-the cruelty-can be connected fairly clearly to anality, particularly via mastery of the sphincter. What makes the drive to see in a way special is that in Freud it always appears independently of precise reference to any given libidinal phase. The drive to see cannot be assigned to the oral phase, the anal phase, the phallic phase, etc. Nevertheless, it too evidences this propping movement, and the elements of a description of the propping up of voyeurism-exhibitionism -in other words, the sexual drive to see- on the activity of seeing- appear in the text of Instincts and their Vicissitudesas well as in the article The Psycho-analytic View of PsychogenicDisturbanceof Vision. The activity of seeing is thus considered to consist of two sections, one nonsexual and self-preservative: after all, sight enables each creature endowed with it to orient himself in the world, quite apart from any question of sexual pleasure, and from this point of view Freud links it directly to touch: the act of seeing is an extension of the act of touching. This is linked to the whole Freudian theory of perception, which views perception as consisting of a sending out of feelers, of sensitive tentacles, at rhythmic intervals. Imagine the cilia of a protozoan or the horns of a snail endowed with

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a kind of in and out movement . . . indeed, the snail's horns do bear sight organs. That is the image Freud has in mind when he connects sight to touch and compares it to a gathering in of samples from the outside world. The nonsexual activity of seeing, in the propping process, becomes a drive to see as that is, the interiorization of a scene. I am thinksoon as it becomes representative, of of the preeminence ing seeing in the theory of dreams, as well as in the theory of the unconscious, of what Freud calls thing-representations, that which forms the material of the unconscious, which are for the most part conceived on the visual representation model. Thus the drive to see is made up in part of control or mastery and in part of the energy of the vision, both of which occur in interiorization, for to interiorize is also to master (as in such notions as that of the "omnipotent" control of the object). Mastering and seeing have a nonsexual aspect, and in Leonardo Freud rapidly constructs a theory entailing the propping of the drive for sexual investigation on those nonsexual activities. Here is his conclusion: "The instinct for knowledge in children is attracted unexpectedly early and intensively to sexual problems and is in fact possibly first aroused by them."12 Which means: the drive for sexual investigation, which we know led to the investigation and creation of the theories of infant sexuality, is founded in a nonsexual activity; however,perhaps in the end its bases did not exist prior to the awakening of sexuality. Here we have what I was trying to indicate with regard to the dihedron schema, namely, that the plane of self-preservation is so defective that in certain cases it can be almost virtual and cannot be made active other than at the moment when the right-hand plane (sexuality), as it is called, arouses it. Thus we have a propping reinforced or buttressed by something it has itself brought into being. In other words, the notion of propping still holds surprises. Let us return to the drive to know and its two components as set forth in the ThreeEssays: the drive to see and sado-masochism derive from the drive for mastery. This breakdown, schematic as it is, can easily be discerned in the case of Leonardo. In fact, the visual component makes the opposition between the two areas of sublimation Freud indicates less abrupt: on the one hand Leonardo's intellectual activity and, on the other hand, his activity as a draughtsman and painter. And indeed, everyone at all interested in his work has noted the profoundly visual, machine-oriented, constructivist character of Leonardo's intellectual investigations, his constant reliance on schemas. I recall the following typical aphorism: "Since the eye is the window of the soul, the soul always goes in fear of seeing itself deprived of it."'3 The eye is the window

Ibid. 12. K. R. Eissler, Leonardoda Vinci. PsychoanalyticNotes on the Enigma, New York, International 13. Universities Press, 1961, p. 243.

Leonardoda Vinci. Helicopter or Aerial Screw.

of the soul, and it can also be said that the eye is the window of intellection: there can be no intellection other than through the visual, and, as has been noted, every time Leonardo in his research arrives at the limits of the representable he falls back upon the most banal, traditional medieval theories. To the extent that estimations of the true value of Leonardo's scientific activity differ widely (an argument that can be found more fully set out in Eissler's book). In a way, Leonardo's work can be said to live on his acquired reputation, but his place in the advancement of the sciences is extremely problematic: for some - and not without reason - Leonardo is an extraordinary observer, a technician of genius, but one unable precisely to liberate himself from his sight. But I merely wanted to mention this debate, and I shall not dwell on it. The components of mastery, linked to sado-masochism, are also clearly set forth by Freud in both their direct expressions and their more often neutralized aspects. Freud lays stress on such extraordinary features as the following: a gentle man, filled with pity, who follows condemned men as they are being led to the torture in order better to study their features and thus be better able to render reactions of pain and terror in his drawings. Leonardo was an extremely gentle man, which did not prevent him from accompanying Florentine princes to war and from inventing implements of war for their use. In short, the sado-masochistic origins of Leonardo's researches and machinery are easily traced. However, my time for this lecture is drawing to its close, and I should like to go back to Freud's development of sublimation, to the passage that lies at the center of our interest-and of our perplexity as well. We consider it probable that an instinct like this of excessive strength

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[in the life of an individual] was already active in the subject's earliest childhood, and that its supremacy was established by impressions in the child's life. [This is the first part of the hypothesis underlying sublimation; now for the second:] We make the further assumption that it found reinforcement from what were originally sexual instinctual forces, so that later it could take the place of a part of the subject's sexual life.14 In the case of Leonardo, Freud tells us very little about the nonsexual bases of sublimated activity, of this "excessively strong instinct," or "preponderant tendency." What interests him is not the child's investigation prior to the precise moment when sexual investigation enters the scene, is grafted on. Grafted? In the ThreeEssays we have seen that it is more than that, since there the question is whether or not it is purely and simply a matter of the awakening of the drive for investigation itself. From that point of view there is not, in action, any nonsexual investigation that is enriched by infantile sexual research, but all research activity begins at the moment it is aroused by sexual activity. What is the activity of investigation, after all? Is it the same thing as intellectual activity, as the functioning of the intellect? Here too, distinctions must be 14.

Freud, Leonardo,p. 77.

Leonardo da Vinci.Great Crossbow.

To Situate Sublimation

19

made. Obviously, we know that the intelligence is not a function proper only to man; numerous investigations have enabled us to acquire a precise knowledge of the development and limits of animal intelligence as a function of adaptation. It is obvious that such intellectual activity (the development of intelligence) is not libidinal (using that term in its strict psychoanalytical sense). It is neutral. Obviously, it can be put at the service of sexuality, but more often it operates in the service of instincts for self-preservation. I would say that there is a difference between intelligence,as an adaptive combinatory activity, and investigation, and that that distinction operates through sexuality. With investigation we go from a potentially complex research, from a "misleading" but one that does not posit an object, one that is not "thetic" (to borrow a philosophical term), to the search for something hidden, something necessarily capable of representation, beyond appearances. It is not surprising that the "hidden" and "representable" should be linked to the emergence of the sexual. To it we should, in an absolutely correlative manner, add that it is a matter of something interiorized, a kind of representative schema that is already no more than fantasy. Here I am referring to one of Freud's texts I have already alluded to, On theSexual Theoriesof Childrenof 1907. These "theories" are those elaborated by the child to explain a certain number of puzzles within the strict framework of some investigativeactivity. What initiates them, the source of their itch, one might say, is always a puzzle posed by the parental world, some concealment, some seshort cret, some private conversation, some reserve or stand-offishness-in something real, something material, supposed to be hidden behind appearances. I have already had occasion to emphasize a kind of. paradox Freud sustains, both in the text of On theSexual Theoriesof Childrenand in ThreeEssays. The text of On the Sexual Theoriesof Childrenbegins something like this: if someone from another planet, a Martian for example, came down to earth, which of his observations of human beings would strike him the most forcibly? The most outstanding and striking puzzle, the one requiring the most explanation, would be the difference between the sexes, between men and women. If he had to draw up a system of signification he would be forced to take this distinction between men and women into account. I dwell on this because here (the Martian and the child are obviously the same) Freud is positing precisely the notion that male-female distinction is not only sexual difference, as has since been maintained, but also a more general distinction, the habitus, social functionings, ways of dressing and behavior, in short what from a certain viewpoint we call "gender" as opposed to sex.15 Freud goes on (I shall paraphrase) to say something like: You will say that I am obsessed by sexuality and the phallus, and that I'm going to tell you that for the child the number one puzzle, the one that initiates the earliest childhood sexual theories, is the difference in genders. But that is not what I am going to say! For the child the prime puzzle, the one that 15.

Cf. ProblematiquesII, note, p. 33.

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triggers the earliest childhood sexual theories, is not the male-female distinction but rather the question: "Where do babies come from?" It is the mother's bearing (or even expecting) a child that most usually serves as the point of departure for such childhood investigation. I would go so far as to say that the element of seduction and intrusion is clearer in investigations involving birth. After all, from the outset the child regards the world of genders as a natural given, as natural a given as are the distinctions that gradually emerge between animate and inanimate. But the arrival of another child is always somehow an event that seems to spring from nowhere, from nothing. The other important aspect in the panorama I am attempting to fill in (that of investigation linked to fantasy construction) is the parents' refusal to put forward any adequate explanation. Instead, there are false explanations that are proffered in the form of "sexual theories" of fecundation, gestation, and childbirth. So that-as Daniel Lagache has demonstrated in this regard -Freud is here describing the primal psychic conflict, the first "Oedipal" conflict, centered around this struggle for of course, for power-between the parents, who deny adeknowledge-and, and and the child quate theory representation, seeking to acquire them. The first as Freud tells occurs here. Is it us, split, wrong to speak of seduction with on to this situation the birth of another child? I would say brought regard by that here perhaps there is not necessarily an event that pinpoints seduction but, rather, a situation or a structure of seduction. In such a situation seduction is not the contribution by the parents - albeit alien, outside - of theories -that of the stork, for example -to fix notions. For something to function as an element for traumatization and seduction it is not enough for it to come to the child from outside. The theory of the stork is not a childhood sexual theory. In the end it plays a very small role in the child's development, other than as additional proof of the duplicity, of the basically deceitful nature, of parents. However, in such a situation we can pick out what is traumatic in the proper sense of the term. From a quantitative viewpoint I mean by traumatic an external contribution that provokes an excitation in the child that is too strong for him to connect with; qualitatively, I mean a lack of proportion between, on the one hand, the child's capabilities of elaboration at the moment, his available intellectual equipment, and, on the other hand, the level of the problem with which he is confronted. In the last analysis, this situation, which I do not shrink from calling seduction, or a propping situation, poses a "selfish"problem of survival: will this other person who is going to be born take my place? How can other people be made on the same model, out of the same mold, as I? Am I not the only one, unique? Will the other one be preferred over me? A problem of survival, in line with the instincts for self-preservation, that can also be found fully set forth in another text dealing precisely with propping up, A Child is Being Beaten(where, too, the problem of the other child that leads to the fabrication of the whole gamut of fantasies, leading up to the sado-masochistic fantasy "a

To Situate Sublimation

21

child is being beaten"). On the one hand, therefore, we have a problem of selfpreservation and, on the other hand, through it, mysterious questions about the link between the parental couple which eventually come to include a dimly comprehended bodily topography. In the notorious theories of childhood sexuality all that can not be reformulated other than through the child's actual first-person erogenous experiencing: whence the innumerable theories every child is led to develop regarding copulation and childbirth. Propping in the drive to know, the Wisstrieb. The first paradox of this propping is (and we have stressed this) what is being propped up, i.e., sexual is, prop up in another investigation, will arouse and then support-that sense - that upon which it is supposed to rest, i.e., self-preservation. Here then we have an inverted relationship that impels us to consider the whole of the theory of the relationship between our two "drives"- self-preservation and sexual-in a highly relative perspective. The second paradox is that, in sublimation at least, what is being propped up, sexual investigation, is not subject, or at least not completely, to repression. There seems to be a kind of subtle game being played here at this moment between sublimation and repression. Thus I come to the final passage in Freud's argument, in which, jumping over intermediate, so-called "neurotic" solutions, he arrives at the type proper to sublimation. His argument goes something like this: the third type, the rarest and most perfect, eludes, thanks to its special qualities, both thought inhibition and thought compulsion [which were both neurotic results]. Sexual repression also occurs, but it does not result in the emergence of a partial drive of sexual desire in the unconscious. On the contrary, the libido stands aloof from repression, it is sublimated from the beginning [this "from the beginning" is highly important, and it is what I should like to bring out here (von Anfang an = from the beginning): from the beginning, it has escaped vis-a-vis repression] into the desire to know and reinforces or buttresses the already powerful drive to investigate. Here too, investigation, research, becomes to a certain extent compulsion [Zwang] and substitution [Ersatz] for the sex act, but because of the radical difference in basic psychic processes (sublimation rather than emergence from the depths of the unconscious) [sublimation thus forestalls the formation of a symptom arising from repression] the characteristics of a neurosis being absent, the subjection to complexes arising out of childhood sexual investigations does not occur and the drive can freely work actively in support of intellectual interests. However, sexual repression-which, through the sublimated libido, has been strengthened- continues to mark the drive by forcing it to eschew sexual subjects. Here we have something that is truly very subtle: sublimation is not a repression and yet there is still a turning back! Schematically we have: it is not a repression, i.e., that at the very site where something has been repressed some Ersatz does not emerge in the form of symptom; nevertheless, there is

Leonardo da Vinci.A Study of the Anatomy of Legs. repression of part of the instinctive action, notably and namely, repression of the part that was an investigation aimed at a properly sexual object, and thus repressionwith regardto the object,a barred route. And there is still an Ersatz, but, if we may use the term, through derivation, collaterally, and not as neurotic symptom produced at the site where the repression occurred. I know that all this may seem a bit far-fetched, but this is the problem of sublimation in Freud-and, I might add, even more so because, to be precise, the so-called avoidance of the sexual object in the course of intellectual investigations is not all that clear in Leonardo's case because in all his famous drawings we can see him carrying out a kind of investigation into the anatomy and physiology of the sexual relationship. In bringing my course this year to some kind of (provisional) conclusion, in ending my research into this problem of "sublimation," I should like to set up a marker here to indicate the path along which one might at some future time go further into this question. I have indicated that I found Freud's notation suggestive, of course, for bringing sublimation into rapport with propping, but, on the other hand, how insufficient I have found the notion that that relationship would be quite a simple one, namely, that sublimation is nothing but propping in reverse, the return of the sexual to the nonsexual. Now we can see

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23

in what way that schema is insufficient: it is because it does not take into account the element of repression. In fact at least for some part of the drive, sublimation is certainly one means through which it can escape repression. However, in spite of everything it is correlative to a repression, and in particular to a repression having to do with a certain type of object, the properly sexual object. If we preserve the notion that sublimation is very close to propping, we will probably have to understand the notion of an Anfang, from the beginning, in a special way. Sublimation is not a retrogression, a second retrogression relative to the earliest period of sexual awakening: propping and sublimation, in a way, may even go together. "From the beginning" there is a kind of coupling when something is being sublimated. True sublimations are "precocious"; Freud makes this very clear, particularly with regard to the vividly solid case of sublimation in the mind of Leonardo. I believe that we must attempt to conceive of sublimation as occurring at the very same moment as the first incidence of sexual excitation, at the moment of the emergence of the first vague or partial sexual drive. However, the term precocioushas a temporal, chronological connotation that risks implying that sublimations occur only in the very earliest years of life. Are there not, however, occasions (admittedly rare) when a "delayed" sublimation might occur, and, in particular, must we abandon the notion of any sublimation occurring during the course of an analytic cure? If I substitute for the adjective precociousthe adjective original, it goes without saying that the notion of original does not apply solely to the years of one's origin. We must therefore entertain the notion that the sexual instinct is not something that springs into being once and only once, but that, taking this Freudian theory as being valid, there is in the human being (essentially, of course, but not solely, in the child) a capacity unceasingly to create the sexual, almost from the commencement of life, on the basis of all kinds of external shocks, beginning with the new, of which the traumatic represents only the most striking paradigm. And here we come to yet another question that I would like to mention in passing, one whose elements - for Leonardo - can also be found in Eissler: this is the question of knowing, almost "quantitatively," whether or not the activity sublimated in the life of an individual is concurrent with actual sexual activity or if, on the contrary, they should both be considered as progressing parallel to each other. If, on the one hand, we agree that the sexual drive is from the beginning a given qua sexual drive, like a quantity of unalterable libido,'6 and if, on the other hand, we agree that sublimation is a way of diverting a part of that sexuality, it seems obvious that we would therefore regularly find in the "creator"- and, more generally, in anyone who devotes himself to a sublimated activity - a lessening of sexual activity. Eissler - among others - shows us how 16.

Not taking into account modifications arising from physiological age differences.

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much more complex this all is: sometimes, indeed, sublimation does work in opposition to sexuality, but sometimes, on the contrary, the two complement each other, work together; which is along the lines of what I am attempting to suggest today, namely, that sublimation can be linked to a kind of neogenesis of sexuality. A few words about the other field of Leonardo's activity, painting. We was not quite sure how have noted the paradox in Freud's theory-Freud to deal with it: sometimes he considers it as directly instinctual (Lebenslust, and pleasure in living), in contrast to sublimated-theoretical-investigation, sometimes, on the contrary, he sees it as a sublimation in contrast to some other sublimation. It is the second viewpoint that finally wins out at the end of the essay, when pictorial sublimation is deemed to be more retarded, later, like a second wave, occurring basically during puberty and linked to genital development, linked a great deal more directly with homosexuality, but in the end obscure in origin: Leonardo emerges from the obscurity of his boyhood as an artist, a painter and a sculptor, owing to a specific talent which may have been reinforced by the precocious awakening in the first years of childhood of his scopophilic instinct. We should be most glad to give an account of the way in which artistic activity derives from the primal instincts of the mind if it were not just here that our capacities fail us.17 One can see that Freud, more clearly here than with the drive for investigation, hesitates to assign instinctual sources to the "representative" activity par excellence(and which I myself would perhaps qualify as sexual activity par excellence), the artistic or literary creation evidenced in Leonardo-even if, after all, here too partial sources may be assignable to the instinct to see and to anality (since the anal components in Leonardo's life are easy to detect). The difference, the contrast, between intellectuality and artistic creation is one of the basic arguments of Freud's Leonardo,an argument to which Freud probably preferred not to posit any overly hasty - and particularly overly comprehensive- solution.18 In this discussion today I am leaving many questions and many areas unexplored. Creation and perversion, for example: for what is basically being

17. Freud, Leonardo, pp. 132-133. 18. In the file dealing with this question we shall insert a passage from "Civilised"SexualMorality and ModernNervous Illness: "An abstinent artist is hardly conceivable; but an abstinent young savant is certainly no rarity. The latter can, by his self-restraint, liberate forces for his studies; while the former probably finds his artistic achievement powerfully stimulated by his sexual experience. In general I have not gained the impression that sexual abstinence helps to bring about energetic and self-reliant men of action or original thinkers or bold emancipators and reformers."

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25

sublimated--and Freud put great stress upon this--are polymorphously perverse impulses, each working on its own behalf, the so-called pregenital impulses, and not genital sexuality. However, there is also a second aspect (and it is perhaps the paradox of perversion that it is understood both in the sense of polymorphous childhood perversion and in the sense of a working out of a proof for the Oedipus complex and the castration complex in adult perversions): Freud does not fail to note the connection between certain sublimated activities and perversion, understood in the sense of separate psychopathological structures. Leonardo and homosexuality: we are obviously dealing with something that is transposed almost directly into his painting. And, oddly enough, nowhere is there denial or disavowal (the key term for Freud in the theory of perversions) of this with regard to Leonardo's painting. Lastly, a third point in this rapid inventory of the relationships between sublimation and perversion: if we agree with the hypothesis that sublimation accompanies, from the beginning, the emergence of the sexual drive, it seems to us that it must also be somehow linked to the act of seduction that characterizes the neogenesis of sexuality, that is, to what we are obliged to call a deviate version of self-preservation. Another question left hanging is not perhaps so far removed from this: the question of the object and the question of the ego, which we can temporarily bring together under the provisional title "synthesis." Here we find a very clear connection with one of Freud's followers, Melanie Klein, who in sublimation has laid stress on this aspect of totality. Any sublimation, she maintains, is reparation, linked to the depressive phase, to the threat of seeing the object and subject correlatively fall to bits, destroyed. All love, any relationship between real objects, is reparation, the creation of the object as a totality guaranteeing my own wholeness. That is a viewpoint essential for sublimation. On the righthand side of our dihedron there are only primary processes, more or less clumsy or more or less successful attempts at synthesis; there is the ego; there is what we call synthesis or genital primacy. Now, if we speak of genital primacy as a way to coordinate partial drives in this kind of unity created by adult sexual relationships, can we not also say of sublimated activity that it is in a way a substitution for genital primacy, another way of coordinating pregenital activities under a kind of primacy, that of a work, a task, a result to be achieved; but a synthesis which, unlike the genital synthesis, may perhaps emerge out of repression or rejection, rejection of the genital, for example? In the ThreeEssays Freud rather summarily sets forth his ideas on the "beautiful": beauty quite obviously has a sexual basis, the beauty of the body; but, he adds, you will note that in beautiful bodies the sexual, the genitalia, are always and universally looked upon as ugly. How universally applicable that statement really is, I am not sure; however, it seems obvious to me that if we go along with Freud's remark, at least as it applies to art up until a fairly recent date, the "fig leaf" is not only a sign of prudery, it may also point to one of the basic tenets of aes-

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thetics, that of a certain rejection of the genital as a condition necessary to the emergence of the beautiful. Above all I have attempted to eschew synthesis in a theme such as the one I have explored so cursorily this year because I have dwelt principally on the metapsychology of drives, which I believe to be an indispensable basis for discussing sublimation. At a later date I shall attempt to consider it as given, and I should like to hint at two areas of sublimation that I have more or less avoided and that I should like at some future time to go into more thoroughly. First I would mentionfire, referring you, for example, to a remarkable aside of Sandler and Joffe, the London pyrophile.19 What are the links between fire and sublimation: doesn't the term sublimation in itself imply a transformation of solids into gas through fire? We also think of those burned at the stake, tortured by fire, of the Prometheus myth -and I feel that there may be more than one interesting notion to be gleaned from an author who has utilized a psychoanalytical term in his own way but with such a wealth of connotations: I refer to Gaston Bachelard and his famous Psychoanalysisof Fire. The other area is that of cooking and gastronomy, taking in not only its hedonistic aspect, but its wealth of cultural and social ramifications and determinations: table manners, cooking rites and customs, gastronomic pleasure as the confluence and source of a multiplicity of discourses, relationships, inter-human linkages. It is striking to note that psychoanalysis has almost totally neglected this field, save to split it up into two domains: pleasure as "function," i.e., satisfying the basic drive of hunger and, in contrast, oral sexuality, orality as sexual pleasure. I would venture to say that the situation of this activity, of this site that is of such great social value in all civilizations, between self-preservation and sexuality, seems to me to call for careful examination in order to attempt to discern in it the elements that can enlighten us concerning the instinctual mechanisms involved. Thus, although we have not reached the point where we can posit the elements of a cohesive theory, we can lay plans for the step-by-step exploration -not of sublimation but, rather, of sublimations.

19. Cf. J. Sandler and W. G. Joffe, "A propos de la sublimation," Revuefrancaisede Psychanalyse, 1967, no. 1, pp. 13-14.

Sexuality and Aesthetics

LEO BERSANI

Does sexuality exist? And if it exists, what is its relation- if indeed there is one-to sex? These questions have recently been raised by Michel Foucault-not primarily, however, with the intention, or the hope, of answering them, but rather in order to define the strategic benefits derived from the failure to ask them, from the creation of sex and sexuality as categories of nature rather than of culture. "If sexuality," Michel Foucault writes in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, "was constituted as an area of investigation, this was only because relations of power had established it as a possible object."' Thus sexuality is the name given not to some hidden or profound human reality, but rather to a historical construct [un dispositif historique]organized according to strategies of knowledge and power. But if, for the past two hundred years or so, "sex has not ceased to provoke a kind of generalized discursive erethism,"2 the advertised secrets of sex are by no means the big prize in the power-knowledge game. "In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex."3 That is, what Foucault calls the creation of sexuality and of sex is, in a sense, nothing more than the strategic implementation of a more fundamental effort to control the definition of the human itself. Thus the gradual de-emphasis in Foucault's work of specific social techniques of domination and discipline, and a certain generalizing of the history of sexuality into a "genealogy of the subject in Western societies." The "first"or fundamental exercise of power over individuals is their own confessional interpretation of themselves. A study of the power-knowledge network must therefore lead to a dismantling analysis of "the technologies of the self." What is the position of Freud, and of psychoanalysis, in the history of these technologies? Foucault reminds us how little Freud innovated: certain 1. theon, 2. 3.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Pan1978, p. 98. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 78.

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aspects of psychoanalytic theory and technique (perhaps especially the notion of a normative psychosexual growth and the insistence, in treatment, on a total exposure of the "truth"about one's sexuality) merely update disciplinary tactics already laid out in the sixteenth-century revisions of the Catholic pastoral. Freud should neither be blamed for setting up the apparatus of sexuality, nor credited with finally giving sex its due; rather we should recognize "how wonderfully effective he was-[in a manner] worthy of the greatest spiritual fathers and directors of the classical period-in giving a new impetus to the secular injunction to study sex and transform it into discourse."4 This "new impetus" is, however, by no means negligible. Because Freudianism is-both from the point of view of theory and from that of social practice - the most pervasive, and the most prestigious modern form of a discursive technology of selfknowledge and self-creation, it is all the more interesting to note that Freud may have destroyed the technology which he brilliantly exemplifies by his very attempt to make its assumptions explicit, to ground that technology in a secular epistemology. The theoretical and therapeutic refinements which Freud brought to our confessional civilization are inseparable from an epistemological catastrophe: I mean, Freud's failure to define the relation between sexuality and the human subject. The whole apparatus of sexuality nearly collapses in an unprecedented self-reflexive movement. "Nearly collapses": psychoanalysis has nonetheless meant a certain gain in the efficiency of this apparatus thanks to a certain suppression of Freud-to the suppression of a certain Freud--in the history of the psychoanalytic movement, a suppression to which psychoanalytic theory in America has greatly contributed. I wish, however, to address myself here to what I take to be the beneficent discursive paralysis--or at the very least, a beneficent discursive the heart of Freudian discourse. Freud's major statement on stammering-at can be found in the ThreeEssays on the Theoryof Sexuality. Let's begin sexuality our reading of that work with a problem of compositional strategy. Why does a treatise on human sexuality begin with a chapter on "sexual aberrations"? The first essay--which has sections on homosexuality, fetishism, scopophilia and be understood in two radically exhibitionism, sadism and masochism-can different ways. On the one hand, the so-called aberrations are really not aberrations; they lose their "abnormal" character once Freud re-places them in a certain history of sexuality, in what I will call a teleological perspective on sexuality. This perspective is reinforced by (and perhaps ultimately dependent on) the "stages" of infantile sexuality which, however, are a relatively late development in Freud's thinking. The section on those stages in the second of the Three Essays was added in 1915. Freud seems first to have spoken of a pregenital organization (the sadistic-anal phase) in the 1913 paper on "The Predisposition 4.

Ibid., p. 159.

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to Obsessional Neurosis"; the "oral"or "cannibalistic" stage is first described in the 1915 addition to the ThreeEssays just referred to; and the "phallic" stage of organization is added to the other two only in 1923. The clinical observation of children appears to have had little to do with these "discoveries," which, Freud tells us, were inferredfrom the analysis of adults whose sexual lives were pathologically disturbed. The clinical "verification" of the stages of infantile sexuality will thus inevitably be guided by a theory which already assumes their existence. But if the reality of those phases as distinct historical organizations is therefore somewhat problematic, their strategic value in a general theory of human sexuality is immeasurable. Once the sexual aberrations are recognized not only as belonging to childhood but also as constituting what Freud calls "a sexual regime of a sort," they both lose their aberrant nature and reveal themselves to be "abortive beginnings and preliminary stages of a firm organization of the component instincts"5 of normal sexuality. Heterosexual genitality is the hierarchical stabilization of sexuality's component instincts. And the perversions of adults therefore become intelligible as the sickness of uncompletednarratives. But this narrative of sexual development is only half the story. The early section of Freud's third essay is an interesting and tortuous attempt to define the nature of sexual pleasure and sexual excitement. First of all, the presumed goal of sexuality turns out to be discontinuous with its history. The pleasure of genital orgasm, Freud writes, "is the highest in intensity, and its mechanism differs from that of the earlier pleasure. It is brought about entirely by discharge: it is wholly a pleasure of satisfaction and with it the tension of the libido is for the time being extinguished" (p. 210). Given the amount of criticism to which Freud's economic theory of pleasure has been submitted (especially during the last twenty years in the United States), it is, I think, important to note that in the ThreeEssays, only genital pleasure is defined as the pleasure of discharge or released tension. Adopting a teleological point of view, Freud does make a distinction between "fore-pleasure" (that pleasure which is due to the excitation of erotogenic zones) and "end-pleasure" (that which is due to the discharge of the sexual substances). This distinction has become a familiar one, but what has perhaps been insufficiently emphasized (a somewhat problematic exception is the work of Balint) is that since the so-called forepleasures do, after all, exist independently of end-pleasure until-to use the title of Freud's third essay--"the transformations of puberty," the distinction between fore- and end-pleasure really amounts to a delineation of two distinct

5. Sigmund Freud, ThreeEssays on the Theoryof Sexuality in The StandardEdition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey, London, Hogarth Press and the Institute for PsychoAnalysis. Vol. VII, pp. 197-198. All subsequent references to this work will be made within the text.

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ontologiesof sexualityitself. At the conclusion of the ThreeEssays, Freud complains of knowing "far too little of the biological processes constituting the essence of sexuality" (p. 243), and of having consequently been unable to explain satisfactorily the relation between sexual satisfaction and sexual excitation. But this confession of failure should logically apply only to the ontology of pregenital sexuality. In end-pleasure there can be, strictly speaking, no relation at all between satisfaction and excitation since that form of pleasure consists simply in the extinction of excitement. And this leads us to ask if the end of sex, its goal, could also be its own end, its extinction. In speaking of the difficulty which psychoanalysis has in defining sexuality, Freud writes - in spite of himself?as if infantile sexuality were sexuality itself, as if he had forgotten its presumably preparatory, subordinate role in leading to the "principal act" of human sexuality. Indeed, things are quite different-and much more problematic-when Freud tries to define the pleasure of the erotogenic zones. "The fact," Freud writes, "that sexual excitement possesses the character of tension raises a problem the solution of which is no less difficult than it would be important in helping us to understand the sexual processes." The "problem" arises from Freud's insistence, "in spite of all the differences of opinion that reign on the subject among psychologists, . . . that a feeling of tension necessarily involves unpleasure." The "decisive" fact here, Freud goes on, is that such feelings are "accompanied by an impulsion to make a change in the psychological situation"; they operate, that is to say, "in an urgent way which is wholly alien to the nature of the feeling of pleasure." And yet sexual excitement "is also undoubtedly felt as pleasurable" (p. 209). How, Freud asks, can unpleasurable tension and pleasure be reconciled? Not only is sexuality characterized by the simultaneous production of pleasure and of unpleasurable tension; perhaps even more bizarre is the fact that the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual stimulation seeks not to be released, but to be increased! Generally, Freud tends to speak of sexual excitement as if it were something like an itch, or an urge to sneeze. But in sex preceding discharge, the analogy with the itch no longer holds. We scratch, after all, in order to remove an itch, but-to hold on one more moment to the analogy-now we are confronted with an itch that seeks nothing more than its own prolongation, even its own intensification. If, Freud writes, you touch the skin of an unexcited woman's breast, the contact will produce a pleasurable feeling that "arouses a sexual excitation that demands an increase of pleasure" (p. 210). The problem is in understanding "how it can come about that an experience of pleasure can give rise to a need for greater pleasure." The same question is phrased more sharply in the second of the ThreeEssays, when, in his discussion of infantile sexuality, Freud admits to finding it "somewhat strange" that "in order to remove one stimulus, it seems necessary to adduce a second one at the same time spot" (p. 185). How are we to understand this exceptional

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way of dealing with stimuli, as well as the wish to repeat and even intensify an unpleasurable tension? What would it mean to say that in sexuality, pleasure is somehow distinct from satisfaction, perhaps even identical to pain? Is all this difficulty nothing more than a symptomology of "saying" itself? Or, perhaps more exactly, are the difficulties of the Freudian text here symptomatic of the dysfunctional relation of our language to our bodies? One thing is certain: fifteen years before Beyondthe PleasurePrincipleFreud is already considering a problematic of repetitions. But in the ThreeEssays, the mysterious repetition (and even intensification) of something unpleasurable is explicitly seen as inherent in sexuality. Freud seems almost on the point of suggesting that beyond the pleasure principle we find- sexuality. It is, in any case, repetition- or what could perhaps be called an insistent stasis - which blocks Freud's attempts to define the sexual. The impossibility of definition appears to be inscribed in the very act of description. We never, as Freud admits, get to the "essence" of sexuality, but sexuality would be somehow connected to a pleasurable unpleasure, or the impulse to increase an already unpleasurable pleasure, or to remove a stimulus by replicating it. And we have not seen the end of these attempted replications. The entire teleological point of view is threatened by Freud's famous remark that "the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it" (p. 222). Those of us who pass the excruciating test of the phases of infantile sexuality, who manage to adjust hierarchically the component drives of orality and anality to the dominance of the genital, find ourselves-if we are lucky in our objects! - back at the very beginning of the whole process. "A child sucking at his mother's breast has become the prototype of every relation of love." The end of the story is already to be found in its beginning; the teleological movement goes into reverse at the very moment when it reaches its goal; and the narrative line of sexuality completes itself as a circle. To refind an object naturally suggests that there was an object. But nothing is less certain in Freud than the status of that first object to which we remain so remarkably faithful. Jean Laplanche has emphasized the reflexive nature of sexuality in Freud; he locates its origin in the subject's auto-erotic autoturning back to itself ("le temps du retournementsur soi," of "rebroussement erotique").Freud, in a discussion of the way in which "sexual activity in infancy attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation," (p. 182) makes it clear that the mother's breast, or more precisely, "the warm flow" of her milk, is merely the accidental cause of the child's discovery of its lips as an erotogenic zone. In this view, the refinding of an original sexual object would be much less important than the appropriation of any object capable of stimulating the lips in the same way. The child will suck on its tongue, its lip, even Freud adds, its big toe; and those people whose labial region has an exceptional erotogenic significance will become "epicures in kissing, will become inclined to perverse kissing [the allusion, I suppose, is to what is called in English a French kiss], or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking"

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(p. 182). The thumb and the toe provide a second and inferior erotogenic zone; and Freud interestingly suggests that if we kiss others on the lips, it is partly in order to make the object of our desire coincide with the source of our original pleasure. The importance of the breast as a real or a fantasmatic object is considerably diminished if the subtext of kissing is, as Freud puts it, "It's a pity I can't kiss myself." The ambiguous role of the continuously disappearing and reappearing object in the Freudian notion of sexuality may help to explain Freud's hesitation about how to "place" scopophilia, exhibitionism, and especially cruelty in sexual life. Freud begins by asserting that "from the very first" these drives "involve other people as sexual objects" (p. 192). They can be "observed in childhood as independent impulses, distinct in the first instance from erotogenic sexual activity." But on the very next page of the 1905 and 1910 editions of the ThreeEssays, Freud speaks of certain "mutual influences" between "sexual development and the development of the instinct of scopophilia and cruelty," influences which "limit the presumed independence of the two sets of instincts." The same passage gives us a hint of how those "mutual influences" may operate: "Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones." This cruelty may arise from intense infantile sexuality--which, as we have seen, may mean that it is a derivative of auto-eroticism. In one sense, the whole question becomes obsolete after 1920: a footnote in the first essay reminds us that the enquiry ending in Beyond the PleasurePrincipleled Freud "to assign a peculiar position, based upon the origin of the instincts, to the pair of opposites constituted by sadism and masochism, and to place them outside the class of the remaining 'perversions"' (p. 159). But the hesitations, and even confusions, of the ThreeEssays throw, so to speak, an anticipatory light on the great instinctual dualism of 1920. From Beyond the PleasurePrincipleto his very last works, Freud will never stop insisting (even as he himself accumulates evidence to the contrary) on the existence of a nonerotic destructiveness - first in the form of a "death instinct" opposed to Eros, and then, more and more, in the form of that aggressiveness which presumably derives from the death instinct and which, for example, sustains the opposition of the individual and civilization in Civilization and Its Discontents. But in the Three Essays, Freud clearly places cruelty--more specifically, sadism and masochism--at the heart of infantile sexuality. His hesitation, interestingly enough, has to do with the exact location of cruelty in sexuality. Is it a component instinct? Is it distinct from or independent of sexual activities attached to the erotogenic zones? And if it is independent of those activities, what are the "mutual influences" which somehow connect cruelty to sexual development? If Freud has difficulty placing what he at first thought of as the sexual aberration of sado-masochism, it is perhaps because of the unnoticed, and certainly unwanted, conclusion toward which his investigation might have led

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him. Could it be that this exceptional or marginal manifestation of sexuality more exactly, that it is the condition of constitutes its elusive "essence"-or, I have referred to Freud's severe judgment of the very sexuality's emergence? in final sentence: "We know far too little the work's of Three the purpose Essays of the biological processes constituting the essence of sexuality to be able to construct from our fragmentary information a theory adequate to the understanding alike of normal and of pathological conditions." In fact, a kind of conclusion is reached; it is even rather insistently made, and if it can easily pass unnoticed it is because it risks dissipating the specificity of the work's subject. "It is easy to establish," Freud writes in a section on the sources of infantile sexuality, "that all comparatively intense affective processes, including even terrifying ones, trench upon sexuality [auf die Sexualerregnung ibergreifen]"(p. 203). And two pages later: "It may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct." Almost anything will do the sexualizing job, as the which include intellectual examples in this section clearly suggest-examples strain, verbal disputes, wrestling with playmates, and railway travel. Finally, this idea is repeated in the concluding summary of the Three Essays, where Freud speaks of sexual excitement as a "by-product . . . of a large number of processes that occur in the organism, as soon as they reach a certain degree of intensity, and most especially," he adds, "of any relatively powerful emotion, even though it is of a distressing nature" (p. 233). In passages such as these, Freud appears to be moving toward the position that the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual excitement occurs when the body's "normal" range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow "beyond" those compatible with psychic organization. "Every activity, modification of the organism, or perturbation," Laplanche writes, "is capable of becoming the source of a marginal effect which is precisely sexual excitement at the point at which this effect [of perturbation or shattering] is produced."6 Sexuality would be that which is intolerable to the structured self. From this perspective, the distinguishing feature of infancy would be its susceptibility to the sexual. The polymorphously perverse nature of infantile sexuality would be a function of the child's vulnerability to being shattered into sexuality. Sexuality is a particularly human phenomenon in the sense that its very genesis may depend on the decalage,or gap, in human life between the quantities of stimuli to which we are exposed and the development of ego structures capable of resisting or, in Freudian terms, of binding those stimuli. The mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also

6. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 87-88.

Baltimore and

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to repeat, even to increase it. In sexuality, satisfaction is inherent in the painful need to find satisfaction. It is therefore not a question of deciding whether or not cruelty--or more specifically now, masochism as the "ground" of all the forms of the cruel -operates independently of the erotogenic zones, or even of seeking out the "mutual influences" to which cruelty and sexual development would somehow both be subject. Rather, sexuality--at least in the mode in which it is constituted-could be thought of as a tautology for masochism. I wish to propose that, most significantly, masochismserveslife. It is perhaps only because sexuality is ontologically grounded in masochism that the human organism survives the gap between the period of shattering stimuli and the development of resistant or defensive ego structures to which I referred a moment ago. Masochism would be the psychical strategy which partially defeats a biologically dysfunctional process of maturation. Masochism as the model of sexuality allows us to survive our infancy and early childhood. Little animals already make love; little humans produce sexuality. Masochism, far from being merely an individual aberration, is an inherited disposition resulting from an evolutionaryconquest. Thus alongside the teleological argument of the Three Essays, a wholly different argument runs its course -insistently yet almost invisibly. This second argument nearly dissolves the specificity by which Freud could expect his subject to be recognized. The investigation of human sexuality leads to a massive detachment of the sexual from both object-specificity and organspecificity. We desire what nearly shatters us, and the shattering experience is, it would seem, withoutany specificcontent- which may be our only way of saying that the experience cannot be said, that it belongs to the nonlinguistic biology of human life. Psychoanalysis is the unprecedented attempt to psychologize that biology, to coerce it into discourse, to insist that language can be "touched by," or "pick up," certain vibrations of being which move us backfrom any consciousness of being. But Freud also strenuously tries, in the ThreeEssays, to defeat or at least to control this argument. If, as I have been suggesting, human sexuality, as distinct from those experiences of bodily contacts which we share with animals, is a kind of functional aberrationof the species, then the abortive, incomplete, and undeveloped beginnings of our sexual life constitute and exhaust its essence. The ontology of sexuality is unrelated to its historical development. Sexuality manifests itself in a variety of sexual acts and in a variety of presumably nonsexual acts, but its constitutive excitementis the same in the loving copulation between two adults, the thrashing of a boundlessly submissive slave by his pitiless master, and the masturbation of the fetishist carried away by an ardently fondled silver slipper. Sexuality is the atemporal substratum of sex, although the teleological argument of the ThreeEssays represents an attempt to rewrite sexuality as history and as story by reinstating structures of organ- and object-specificity. Freud's work is a textual recapitulation of the psychoanalytic

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body's existence. The phases of infantile sexuality and the climactic Oedipus complex give a narrative intelligibility to a text otherwise tormented, so to speak, by knots of tautological and self-cancelling formulations. In the same way, the ego will domesticate, structure, and narrativize those waves of excitement which simultaneously endanger and yet also protect the first years of human life. That process is described and exemplified in the textual body- in corporefreudiano- of psychoanalytic discourse.

In what ways could it be shown that art takes into account the Freudian ontology of sexuality which I have just developed, and in so doing partially dissipates our potentially savage sexuality? How might the aesthetic be conceived as a perpetuation and replicative elaboration of masochistic sexual tensions? Or, in other terms, how may we recognize the traces of a prelinguistic shattering of the human subject in the most highly refined, most deliberately shaped forms of civilized discourse? The explicit support in Freud himself for the positions which I wish to propose is very slim. This is partly because of the absence in Freud's work of any sustained discussion of sublimation, and also because his own discussions of literature and the visual arts tend to stress either the compensatory or the symptomatic nature of art. Not only do the mechanisms of sublimation frequently seem indistinguishable from those of repression and symptomformation; the work of art is often "treated"- interpreted and, one might almost say, cured - as if it were little more than a socialized symptom. The few sublimation passages where Freud explicitly-and radically-differentiates from repression are therefore of particular interest. In a 1964 seminar, Lacan noted that in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Freud speaks of sublimation as involving the satisfaction of a sexual drive "without repression." More recently, Laplanche has drawn our attention to Freud's remark, in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, that in sublimation a component instinct of sexual desire escapes from the sexual repression and is transformed from the very beginning into intellectual curiosity. This libidinal energy, Freud suggests, is no longer attached to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, which means that the intellectual interests in whose service it now operates are not substitutive formations for those complexes. In this form of sublimation, sexuality would therefore providethe energyof thoughtwithout definingits terms.Or, to put this in another way, we would have a nonreferentialversionof sexualizedthought.What does this mean? Until now, the psychoanalytic criticism of art (including Freud's) has been very is, fundamentally adept at recognizing sexually referential expression-that symptomatic expression. We might now wish to devote our attention to those moments or modes of cultural discourse (and I think that we have generally referred to such moments or modes as signs of the "aesthetic") when the

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libidinal investment of consciousness becomes visible -as indeed it appears to become visible in texts by Freud himself- as a kind of arresting movement, or a mobility of thought which somehow makes the statements of thought impotent or inoperative. What is perhaps most interesting about Freud's essay on Leonardo -and I find this to be the case in much of Freud's writing- is a speculative turbulence which, for example, fails to define with any security the relations between sublimation as disseminated sexual energy and the presumed detachment of such sublimated activity from "the original complexes of infantile sexual researches." Freud calls Leonardo an example of genuine sublimation, and yet he tends to treat his painting as a fairly transparent repetition of those "original complexes," a repetition which, in the terms of normative development outlined here and elsewhere in Freud's work, can really only be considered as "neurotic," as somehow less desirable than the sublimations of someone whom a satisfying Oedipal development could have moved "beyond" those compulsive, anguishing, even traumatic pre-Oedipal questions. Officially, as it were, Freud is committed to what might be called an art of secure statement, or of serene "completeness," perhaps best exemplified in literature by Goethe, whom Freud frequently quotes for a kind of versified confirmation of certain doctrinal points. I would argue (this obviously requires much more development), first of all, that this ideal of aesthetic (and philosophical) expression depends on a post-Oedipal inhibition of sexual indeterminacy; secondly, that it manifests the paranoia inherent in those castration anxieties without which Oedipal desire would never be renounced (a paranoia which persists in the ego's relation to the internalized Oedipal father); and finally, that precisely because it posits itself as a kind of meta-discourse-- I'm thinking, for example, of a psychoanalytic or a philosophical discourse about desire which would claim to be free of the dislocations intrinsic to its subject -this sublime-sublimated form of expression is particularly vulnerable to a demystifying interpretation, to the sort of "symptom-analysis" with which psychoanalytic criticism has most frequently been associated. This discourse of transcendence is the discourse of repression. Indeed, it can be shown that to the extent that the Freudian text itself aims at theoretical security or finality, it becomes the object par excellence of those analytic techniques which it confidently elaborates for use elsewhere-for what are presumed to be less successfully de-sexualized forms of discourse and representation. And yet, in the case of Leonardo, Freud is obviously tempted to locate the interest of his painting in the very "problem" which presumably crippled his work. In a previous discussion of the Leonardo essay, I have emphasized Freud's hesitation between a paternally centered account of da Vinci's sexual, artistic, and scientific life, and a maternally derived traumatic model of sexuality. The absence of a father in the artist's early years meant, according to Freud, that no beneficently inhibiting Law put an end to the child's in-

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conclusive investigations of his mother's being. As a result, Leonardo is "condemned" to repeat those experimental and traumatic identifications which are so many attempts to repeat representationally the eroticizing shocks of his mother's love, to locate both her and himself in those experiences of shattering pleasure. And yet the unarticulated conclusion to which the Leonardo essay points is that sublimation as nonrepressed sexual energy in fact depends on the "absence" of the father, or more exactly, on a certain failure on the part of the father during the Oedipal period to crystallize into the prohibitive Law, that is, on the defeat or at least subordination of the so-called dominant Oedipal configuration. Thus the play in Leonardo's work of indeterminate relations between the indeterminate identities of mother and child, and of male and female. Freud's ambivalent study of Leonardo is almost querulous in its attitude toward da Vinci's inability to complete a scientific investigation or an artistic project, at the same time that Freud can't help but suggest that a certain kind of unsuccessful repetition, or of mistaken replication-the repeated attempts to identify an erotically traumatizing and erotically traumatized human subject -is in fact the source of Leonardo's aesthetic power, and that his artistic achievement therefore depends on (rather than is inhibited by) a certainfailure to represent. In my recent study of Mallarme, I have spoken of such a failure to represent in "L'Apres-midid'unfaune."7 The faun's musical sublimations are extensions of his sexual desires rather than repressive substitutes or symptoms of those desires. His efforts to repeat a sexual encounter which may never have taken place result, interestingly enough, in a productive dismissal of that encounter's importance. More precisely, they result in the inclusion of a certain irony in sublimated sexual energy-an inclusion which may be a crucial element in the aestheticizing of the erotic. The faun moves from wondering if he desired a mere dream to dreaming (in what he calls the long solo of his music) that nature was charmed by his confusion between his dream and her (that is, between his sexual desire for the nymphs and the "real"scene in the forest). Thus the faun ironically repeats his having been seduced or betrayed by his own desires in the form of nature's being beguiled by his credulous song's confusions. In a sense, that beguilement is the faun's ironic snapping back from his own naivete-that is, from his realistic ambitions, from his wish to reproduce exactly what "really" took place. It is the reservation hidden within the subsequent account of the faun's sexual assault on the nymphs, the potentially annihilating awareness of that assault as mere illusion. And yet nothing is annihilated. The faun's "remembered" erotic violence is somewhat modified by our own uncertainty about where or who the faun is. He is the perpetrator of violence, but he is also nature's having been charmed by the emptiness of that 7.

Leo Bersani, The Death of StephaneMallarme, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

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violence. The irony of "LApres-midid'unfaune"is additive rather than corrosive. It both removes the faun from the nymphs and returns him to them, and far from undermining his desire, it both makes the objects of desire productively unlocatable and intensifies the faun's erotic and aesthetic appetites. The faun's music can in no way be thought of as a substitute formation, as the disguised symptom of his sensual impulses. On the contrary: it repeats those impulses with an increased visibility. And this visibility is the result of what I have just referred to as an ironic snapping away from the compulsion to represent a real scene. The faun repeats desire as the consciousness of desire, a consciousness which partially stabilizes the terms of a shattering erotic fantasy. In other terms, ironyacts as an ambiguouslyformalizing principlewithin theerotic.In a theory of sublimation as coextensive with (rather than "beyond") sexuality, the aesthetic would not be a formal achievement, but rather the continuously menaced activity by which an eroticized consciousness is provisionally structured by a perception of the relationsamong its terms. From this perspective, a psychoanalytic criticism, far from seeking keys to the hidden wishes and anxieties "behind" the text, would be the most resolutely superficial reading of texts. It would trace the continuously disappearing and reappearing of relations and forms. It would not be a question of identifying desires, for the work of art itself exists not in order to hide them, but in orderto makethemvisible. If the sexual is, at the most primitive level, the attempted replication of a shattering (or psychically traumatizing) pleasure, art- and I believe that this is quite explicitly proposed in "LApres-midid'unfaune"-is the attempted replication of that replication. That is, it repeats the replicative movement of sexuality as a domesticating, and civilizing, project of self-recognition. Art thereby transmutes biological masochism into ironic self-reflection. Art interprets the sexual by repeating it as perceivable forms; and what we call criticism interprets art by repeating its formalizing projects as ironic recognitions of their evanescent visibility. Critical interpretation would therefore be another exercise of self-conscious repetition, with, so to speak, an aggravated irony in the repetition. Curiously, the most abstract, refined, aggravated form of irony in this replicative process: criticism, is also the closest, in a sense, to the biological. For whereas we might say that the formalizations of art represent a nonrepressive transmutation of the sexual into the cultural, critical self-consciousness (which, I should of course add, exists within art itself: my distinctions are not generic but between stages of self-reflection) should constantly be aware of the problematic nature of the formalizing project itself. More precisely, a psychoanalytically-oriented criticism not only repeats those representational identifications of desire already present in art, but should also articulate the "de-forming," or "dis-formulating," effects of desire within those identifications. Far from naming desires disguised by cultural sublimations, criticism is that moment of self-reflection which locates the erasuresof form in art; or, to put this even more radically, criticism makes

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manifest the ontology of human desire by tracking down the threats to its visibility in art. From this perspective, the speculative psychoanalytic text-and in particular the speculative works of Freud--could be considered as the critical artistic textof our time. I of course mean "critical" both in the self-reflexive sense I have just proposed and in the sense of a crucial event in the history of textuality. It is perhaps something akin to this latter sense that Laplanche has in mind when he speaks of psychoanalysis as not only outlining a theory of cultural sublimations, but also of being a new moment, a new movement, in the history of the very forms of sublimation. In my recent work, I have been treating the Freudian text as if it were a work of art. By this I do not mean that Freud is "more interesting as a writer" than as a more or less scientific theoretician of desire, or that he "belongs" to the history of literature. I do not consider psychoanalysis as continuous with any literary tradition; nor would I argue that art has any priority over psychoanalysis. We are no more justified in merely applying the familiar techniques of literary analysis to the psychoanalytic text than we are in mauling the literary text with the diagnostic tools of psychoanalysis (and it makes little difference whether we diagnose, say, anality, repressed homosexuality, or Oedipal conflicts on the one hand, or, in a more sophisticated analysis, the formal characteristics of primary process thinking). Rather, Freud's work is a special kind of aesthetic text: it seeks to stabilize the perturbations of sexuality in a theoryaboutthe subversive, destabilizing effects of human sexuality on the human impulse to form. Consequently, there is no "moment" at which its formal replications of the sexual are not alreadya movement which reflects (on) the collapse of formal relations, the precariousness of representational discourse itself. But there is considerable tension within the theoretical representations themselves. On the one hand, we have what I take to be a repressive discourse, or what could be called Freud's narrativizing speculations about human desire and its antagonism to civilization. In this I would include the theory of a normative, teleological sexual development in the ThreeEssays, the reduction of pleasure to a deathlike stasis and the taming of sexuality by Freud's assimilating it to the integrative power of Eros in Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple, the topographical distinctions of The Ego and the Id, and the centering of the Oedipus complex. I take these aspects of Freud's thought not as "false" representations of desire, but rather as a faithful theoretical reflection of precisely those repressive movements in human growth which seek to erase the ontology of sexuality from the history of human desire. This movement corresponds to what I called earlier an art of post-Oedipal completeness. In more general cultural terms, the repression of the masochistic, nonnarrative, timelessly replicative grounds of the sexual is also consonant with the melancholy opposition between individual happiness and civilization in Civilization and Its Discontents, an opposition which should be understood as a return of the re-

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pressed, as the disguised reemergence of biological masochism in an anthropological fable about the oppositional, destructive nature of all confrontations between the claims of pleasure and the claims of history. There are, however, other representational currents at work, currents which are extremely hard to define but which, for example, can perhaps be located in the subversive effect of the footnotes of Civilization and Its Discontentson the text proper, and in the undermining of Freud's teleology in the ThreeEssays by a blocked, repetitive speculation on the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure. In both these cases, a kind of fragile, tautological reflection on sexuality disrupts a theorizing about human desire in which the sexual has alreadybeen domesticated and transformed into historical narratives about civilization and about the individual. Finally, as these two examples suggest, the conflictual models which textually represent sexuality in Freud can also be read as conflictual interpretative models of the collapse of representation itself. That is, each model implicitly offers a criticalprocedurerelevant, I believe, to the ways in which we may talk about art. On the one hand, Freudianism could be thought of as both justifying and promoting a tradition of derivative criticism-that is, criticism which has sought to explain art as an effect or precipitate of biographical or historical pressures, or of generic constraints, or, in the case of a critical tradition initiated by Freud himself, of long-buried desires. From this perspective, the psychological theories of Freud culminate a philosophical tradition which goes back to Plato, a tradition in which the visible phenomenon is devalued as a mere shadow of a hidden or profound or essential truth. The most extreme version of this tradition in psychoanalytic therapy is probably Melanie Klein's attitude toward children's games in analysis: the therapist interrupts the child's diversionary play with an interpretation as soon as she sees the "truth" behind the play. In all these cases, the collapse of representation is of course a pseudocollapse: a factitious discourse is merely replaced by a more authentic discourse, and any loss of textual intelligibility is more than compensated for by the superior intelligibility of the hermeneutic appropriation of the text. On the other hand, Freud also provides a very different sort of interpretative model. It is less explicit than the more familiar one I have just outlined, but this is perhaps because it manifests an attempt to speak what might be called the return to the unspeakable. Nothing is stranger (more unheimlich)than those moments when Freud's very attempt to explain the eruption of an unconscious violence into human life takes the form of an unintelligible textuality, of a failure to proceed, of a blocked, one might almost say anxious or anguished, argument. We have seen such moments in Freud's failure to conclude about the nature of pleasure in the Three Essays; we might also consider, from a similar point of view, his shifting definitions of the superego's aggressiveness in Chapter 7 of Civilization and Its Discontents,and the astonishing textual move by which he momentarily sacrifices the explanatory virtue of the Oedipus complex

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itself in Chapter 3 of The Ego and the Id. For a psychoanalytically oriented criticism, such passages can serve to alert us to what might be called the invasion of a general psychology by a psychoanalytic psychology, the coercion of a "central" text by a frequently unmappable and fierce marginal force. This invasion is, however, not reducible to the overly schematic terms of a confrontation between the intelligible and the unintelligible. As Ulysse Dutoit and I have tried to show in our study of late Assyrian palace reliefs, it can take the form of a subversion of narrative sequence by a kind of agitated, erratic formalism. And this formalism may be, paradoxically, a cultural analogue-but perhaps we should speak of a pastiche here -of that unrepresentable psychic shattering which, even when it is provoked by intersubjective "shocks," nonetheless plunges the human subject into the irremediable privacy of a masochistic jouissance. The formal refinements of Assyrian art "remind" us of thatjouissance. In so doing, they distract us from a historicalviolence which may be the catastrophic symptom of our refusal to recognize the violence in which our sexuality is grounded. The Assyrians elegantlyconstrain us to such recognitions by substituting the "violence" of multiple, constantly shifting formal contacts for the violence of narrativized history. Thus, totally devoid of what we have been trained to think of as "sexual content," this remarkable art teaches us to read the unreadable sexual by the excessive visibility of its subversion of narrative readability. If psychoanalytic criticism teaches us to locate textual blockages and representational failures, it can also be a self-reflexive move which detects in the heightened visibility of forms the imminent (if permanently deferred) collapse of form, or the unrepresentable nature of the Freudian Trieb. Freud's own text exemplifies the insistent replications of human sexuality in the very process of its both constituting and evading the theory of those replications. We should now be able to see that Freud's argument for the cultural nonviability of the sexual is nothing more than the consequence of a textual repression of the nature of the sexual. I naturally do not mean that this nonviability- the antagonism between civilization and sexuality- is "merely" a textual phenomenon. Rather, Freud's work textually recapitulates the processes of repression, symptomatic violence, and ascetic sublimation which, I believe, also unleash sexuality in human history as murderous aggression. On the other hand, the taming of our sexuality perhaps depends on the cultural "assumption," or replay, of its masochistic nature. The irreducibly dysfunctional relation between pleasure and adaptation in human life is, paradoxically, "corrected" only by our ironic reflections of, and on, the dysfunctional itself. Only through this process of ironic reprise- productively mistaken replications of consciousness -is the violence of our masochistic sexuality modulated into a product, or rather process, of culture. Cultural symbolization, then, would be nothing more mysterious than the workof this replicative process. More exactly, to the extent that cultural activities ignore the repressive message which Freud

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states most emphatically in Civilization and Its Discontents, they are free to, indeed they are compelled to, disseminate the insistent shocks of sexuality in the richly mysterious singularity of eroticized repetitions. Perhaps we can now see an extraordinary rightness in Freud's failure to develop a theory of sublimation. For that theory may be necessary only to the extent that the move from the sexual to the cultural must be accounted for by scenarios of repression and substitution. If, however, we insist on those productive continuities between sexuality and civilization which Freud, as he developed a more and more solemn view of the role of his own statements in a narrative of human history, tended to deny, then a psychoanalytic theory of culture is, in a sense, superfluous. Indeed, let us frankly express our relief at having found in Freud himself (and in spite of Freud himself) convincing grounds for dismissing our own thoughts about sublimation as nothing more - and nothing less - than the play of a consciousness resolutely attached to the always ambiguous pleasures of its own vibrations.

Freud's Reflexive Realism

PERRY MEISEL

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untroddenregionof my mind, Wherebranchedthoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Insteadofpines shall murmurin thewind.... And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuarywill I dress With the wreathedtrellis of a workingbrain. -Keats,

"Ode to Psyche"

Theframe of a repeatedeffect. . . It has a clear, a single, a solidform, That of the son who bearsupon his back Thefather that he loves. -Wallace

Stevens, "Recitation After Dinner"

The Belated Paradigmof the Wolf Man Any schematic account of Freud's career as a writer ought properly to begin in the middle. To see Freud at his most representative, we have only to turn to the most alluring of the case histories, now a classic of modern literature as well as of psychoanalytic literature, the 1918 case of the Wolf Man ("From the History of an Infantile Neurosis").' A text of overdetermined privilege in 1. Begun in late 1913 and finished in 1914, Freud waited four years to publish it, accumulating arguments in his revisions to refute Jung's biologizing notion of inherited tendencies to account for infantile sexuality. All citations and references from Freud are from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-74.

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psychoanalysis, it formalizes the structure of Freud's thought early and late probably more efficiently than any of his writings (even the 1925 "Negation"), and does so at an unlikely but in fact central moment in the plain chronology of his career as a psychoanalyst: following the 1914 essay on narcissism and just preceding the 1920 Beyond the PleasurePrinciple, it occupies the near-center of Freud's official middle phase. Like the belated emergence of the Wolf Man's importance in the history of Freud's reception, the belated emergence of its key term is itself the best example of the modality it represents. For not until Laplanche and Pontalis write in 1967 at some length about the case's premier notion (deferred action, aprescoup, Nachtrdglichkeit)2does it become genuinely effective, especially in Anglophone usage, and our view of Freud changed by its application. Even more ironically reflexive is that the case belatedly clarifies Freud's earlier intimations of the notion in the 1895 Project;in the structure of recollection adumbrated in "Screen Memories" (1899); and in the "Fausse Reconnaissance(Deja Raconte)" of 1914. Deferred action means that we know origins - "the primal scene" in the case of later on, by the distance that estranges us from it, by the Wolf Man-only virtue of what seems only to screen or obstruct our memory of it. Freud derives what will become the ineluctable modality of all discursive production from what his patient both declares and describes, thematizes and dramatizes. The Wolf Man's dream of the frosty white wolves in the tree outside his window as a four-year-old - the childhood dream around which the analysis centers, and whose interpretation is its driving desire or primitivist/ positivist grail-object- is, Freud tells us, the deferred and disguised memory of an event (the primal scene proper) that the patient experienced, or could have experienced, at the age of one and a half, that of witnessing his parents in the act of copulation. But because a child of one and a half does not yet possess the knowledge of sex required to interpret, or even to register, such a scene, it can not properly be said to exist for him at the moment of its "real"or chronological occurrence. It is only when the dreamer gains a knowledge of sex that the memory - the primal- may come into being at all. This "sexualization after the event" (17:103n.) is to be accounted for, says Freud, as follows: "He received the impressions when he was one and a half; his understanding of them was deferred, but became possible at the time of the dream owing to his development, his sexual excitations, and his sexual researches" (17:37-38n). They are, in short, "the products of construction" (17:51). Such a structure is a miniature of the modality of psychoanalytic knowledge/production at large, the rhetorical means by which Freud fashions the phantasms of his imaginative universe and the categories that define it. The See Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald 2. Nicholson-Smith, New York, Norton, 1973, pp. 111-114; Vocabulairede la Psychanalyse, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1967, pp. 33-36.

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figure "unconscious mind," of course, is Freud's enabling oxymoron, and, like Milton's "darkness visible," Conrad's "heart of darkness," or Levi-Strauss's la pensee sauvage, it is an educative or pedagogic oxymoron, a symptomatic and parabolic error required of rhetoric when it is asked to do unusual or inventive things. A mixed metaphor whose own transgressions according to accepted Cartesian usage ("mind" equals "consciousness") are what produce the newish space of Freudian hyperinteriority, "unconscious mind" signals that Freud's project is in fact posited on the self-contradictory implications of such oxymora. In the ThreeEssays on the Theoryof Sexuality(1905), for example, Freud begins with a familiar kind of psychoanalytic paradox: how can one know what happens in early childhood if one of early childhood's principal characteristics is that we regularly forget its history? Similarly, Freud assures us in The Interpretationof Dreams (1900) that "nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work" (5:567), even though such a statement requires us to ask in turn whether psychoanalytic thought itself is therefore no more than wish-fulfillment. The deferred action of the Wolf Man in short assumes the presence of the primal as the analeptically logical referent of what succeeds it. "Light is thrown," says Freud, "from the later stages of his history upon these earlier ones" (17:47). Like the goddess Psyche, Freud's psyche, too, is-like all Romantic idealities-produced after the fact, the seat of an ambiguous primacy, deferred and simultaneously present. Trace of a desire endemic to modernism at large (I take it as axiomatic that Freud is a modernist, and that modernism is itself a late Romantic formation), the unconscious and the primal scene are symptoms of Freud's desire to reach for the warmth and immediacy of beginnings in the face of his late position in history. This is a particularly northern European desire for parity with the southerly priority of the ancients, the Hebrews, even the Renaissance, and one presumably to be fulfilled by the search for the bedrock of drive ("instinct" in Strachey's bluntly Romantic English), a search that serves as Freud's particular version of a realm, to use Trilling's crisp definition of the will to modernity, "beyond" or "apart from culture." No wonder Huxley called Freud's discoveries his "America." In Freud's dark and ironic modernism, however, such primacy or origins emerge only belatedly, culture or symbol situating a nature preexistent to it as Keats does in the nightingale ode, or history situating its own beginnings ("Who himself beginning knew?") as Milton does in ParadiseLost. Indeed, in a paradigm equal to Freud's own, the early Romantic Milton rejects the truth of classical mythology (the best example is the early Nativity Ode)only to resurrect it with apparent unwillingness in the later poem. For without pagan representations, "erring" as they are, no such Christian poem can speak. The price of the poem's readability: that we know origins or primal scenes only through the belated technologies that obstruct our view of them, and, in so doing, construct whatever view we have. Much as the Wolf Man's primal scene emerges as a function of his later knowledge of sex, so Milton's Christian truth can only be ar-

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ticulated by means of pagan error. The primary event is known not despite but because of the distortion through which it appears afterwards. There is, properly speaking, no objective or original event as such (it is the "product ... of a construction"), only its (re)construction through the rhetoric of narrative or memory. If, moreover, the privilege of the Wolf Man case comes from its consummate representation of the structure of psychoanalytic knowledge and its objects of putative inquiry as equivalent, it is because Freud's narrational skill has reached a kind of technical perfection which silently doubles the structure of the patient's memory in its own operations as a text. Rather than simply assert what conclusions his evidence may allow and then document them in a linear argument doubtless more convincing than the sinuous one he gives us instead ("I am afraid," says Freud at one point, that "the reader's belief will abandon me," 17:36), Freud actually simulates the movement of the analysis itself as it produces explanations for fresh memories that in turn require fresh explanations, producing in turn fresh memories, and so on. Much as Freud's patient will lead him to momentary certainty only to disappoint it, so, too, will Freud lead his reader to high ground only to return him to the muddle. Freud sequentially revises his conclusions much as his patient's narrative habitually revises their evidences. Indeed, in the supplementary sections inserted between 1914 and 1918, the text even becomes a patently deferred elaboration of itself, allowing the implicit doubling to become explicitly reflexive. Freud's narration and his patient's memory may appear to be different, but their structures are surely homologous if not finally identical in their interdependent production one of the other. As a literary triumph, such a technique is best called reflexive realism, the secret of virtually all strong artistic discourse, and one in which narration and story coincide precisely but metaphorically, analogously rather than literally-the perfect adequation of recitand histoireeven as they are different. Reflexive realism narrates itself by narrating something else like it, much as Howard Hawks's films narrate the integration of a crew designed to function as a unit analogous to the filmcrew, or much as, say, John Ford's FortApachenarrates the mythmaking machinery by means of which its own historiography is produced. In reflexive realism, rhetorical and representational planes, recitand histoire,are doubles rather than twins (hence the novel of manners, for example, may be said to narrate the forms of life as a life of forms, and so find in its subject a reflexive counterpart for its own manipulation of literary manners). If the two planes coincide literally, as in Robbe-Grillet or Blanchot, the result is instead purely reflexive art, narration narrating itself exactly by making its readability its overt problematic. Reflexive realism, by contrast, is a doubling that is also a splitting. By virtue of accenting the figurative rather than literal status of the two planes' identity (an irony to which even "pure"reflexivity is ultimately subject), such a mixed mode actually avows the linguistic or semiotic scaffolding

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that sustains its illusionism in the very gesture of separation that seems only to conceal it. It is this silent but pervasive redoubling that is the hinge of Freud's triumph in the Wolf Man case. It tells us that our knowledge and the mode of its reception are the same, that there is no genuine subject/object relation between a past or histoire and a present or recit that may be said simply to transcribe or re-member it. To say all this, of course, is to bring Freud's realism under the jeopardy of its ultimate reflexivity. And, to be sure, a tilt toward pure reflexivity will in fact jeopardize the entire psychoanalytic project in Freud's middle phase. If Freud's reflexive realism is the secret of his power throughout the first two decades, most influentially in the epical Interpretationof Dreams, it is also what brings Freud to a crisis in his middle phase. Freud's career is, in short, a romance, so to chart its principal movements means to watch the reflexive realism of the dreambook deteriorate in "On Narcissism" and Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple, and to see it renovated in the triumphant (and covertly violent) Romanticism of The Ego and the Id. Final testimony to the power of psychoanalysis, it will allow Freud to exploit as well as to exemplify deferred action in his late, magisterial phase. ThreeMechanisms in The Interpretation of Dreams An early example of the reflexive realism that reaches its acme of execution in 1918, The Interpretationof Dreams features (at least) three devices (even more elementary than the Wolf Man's) for the production of psychoanalytic truth. Freud's representation of the dreamwork is, of course, the representation of a representation that bears an uncanny resemblance to the narration that appears only to report it. The dreambook shows us Freud, after all, reading the readings the dreamwork performs on its raw but absent materials; or, to put it another way, Freud's writing redoubles the writing of the dreamwork insofar as the dreamwork is a gloss or commentary upon a latent content deduced -like the purported objects of Freud's text -from the vestiges of the repression that defines it. In addition, these three devices correspond, as one might expect, to three of the four chief devices of the dreamwork itself as Freud will describe them in Chapter Six: (1) The manner of structuring the history of the literature on dreams in Chapter One. This results in a canny introduction that bears a far closer resemblance to the dreamwork than to the review of the scientific literature with which such studies in Freud's time are required by convention to begin. Freud employs a device similar to the psychic mechanism of condensation in order to clear a historical space for the newness of his invention. (2) The almost boistrous propensity throughout the book for confessing and, even more interesting, for not fully confessing. Freud often withholds not only his own dreams (as we know, of course, many of the dreams ascribed to others in the book are in fact Freud's own), but also the additional chains of association and

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passionate or intemperate implications they inspire in him, but which he is unwilling to follow out for reasons we can all too easily reconstruct. The psychic function that corresponds to this device is that of displacement. (3) A device laid out as the telos of Chapter Six, the strangely ignored sequence on the dreamwork proper, and a device that may be said to subsume all the others. It is in fact the central logical contention that Freud holds throughout his textthat the presence of dreams is known by the tokens of their absence. Here the corresponding psychic function is precisely that of Freud's own last element of the dreamwork (the fourth, though one that also includes the plainly reflexive third, the consideration of representability, that of secondary revision, the inevitable first interpretation which comes simply as the result of reporting a dream. Secondary revision is, in fact, an almost privileged model for the very existence of dreams and, by extension, the unconscious. For, like God, dreams and the unconscious that produces them are known only by the tokens of their disguise or departure. (1) Freud's initial problem in his founding masterpiece is the problem of clearing one's path, of swerving from the locus of a writer's anxiety, the reality of precedent and therefore of historical and epistemological belatedness. It is here that the crucial role of Chapter One is to be seen, even though (like Chapter Six, but with far greater apparent reason) it is a portion of the dreambook rarely discussed. Unlike either the traditional poet or scientist, Freud, in his role as dream-interpreter, finds little in the way of an orthodox tradition to sustain him; but rather than lament this lack, he sees the ironic advantages it bestows upon him instead. Compared to the history with which Freud's real precursors - the poets, acknowledged and unacknowledged, as well as nineteenthcentury German philosophers-had to contend, the history of dream literature is, of course, altogether more pliable. Strong enough to sustain him but also weak enough to do his taxonomic bidding, Freud will secure his release from this apparent tradition even as he inscribes his work within it. What is that bidding? The reader's silent preparation for what is to come in the book. There is probably no clearer way to see Freud's rather later only high-handed methods--and even more high-handed, if largely unconscious, motives this early in his career- than to note that the history of dreams presented in Chapter One is not only not the history it purports to be, but also that the admittedly synchronic structure Freud supposedly "finds" in his tradition turns out to be no less than the structure of the unconscious itself as it will emerge in Chapters Six and Seven (that Chapter One was composed after the rest of the manuscript had been completed simply aids our argument). Though there are of course innumerable ways of anatomizing the literature on dreams from antiquity down to the nineteenth century, the special way in which Freud arranges his evidence is symptomatic in the extreme. Freud begins with chronos-with a historical and, as a nineteenth-century reader might be led to assume, a developmental perspective on past theories of

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dreaming. But Freud soon abandons chronosin favor of topos, in favor of an attention to the recurrent sites -"the two opposing currents" of opinion "at every which this history that is no period" since "before . . . Aristotle" (4:3)-to his all tradition at returns. habitually Reducing by freeing it from the history constraints of narrative form itself, Freud puts in its place a nonhistory of conflicting opinion or enduring "contradiction" (4:9) which is nearly the same from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Freud, in short, removes all that is historical from his history, change and contingency alike, in keeping with a strategic intent, condensing temporality itself into a virtually synchronic state of duality or difference -to a state of simultaneous and necessarily interdependent tensions (dreaming as prophecy or remembrance, as daemonic inspiration or self-engendered illusion), much, in fact, as dreams themselves admit of no contingency, no past, no present, only a miraculous synchronicity in which everything and anything is possible at once. (2) Freud uses a more familiar technique for vouchsafing the existence of the unconscious, though its very familiarity is what tends to obscure its function as a rhetorical device. Consider, for example, the following apologia in Chapter Six for Freud's reticence in reporting fully to the reader the associations to one of his own dreams: I am forbidden to do so for reasons connected with the nature of the psychical material involved- reasons which are of many kinds and which will be accepted as valid by any reasonable person (4:310). Freud's famous reserve about disclosing the full implications or associations to which certain dream thoughts lead him has been taken not so much as hypocritical repression or even as stinging self-irony, though even these charges are not unreasonable. Instead, such hesitation is traditionally read as further testimony to Freud's Romantic heroism in revealing to us as much of himself as he has-we can only presume in such moments that even darker thoughts must lie still deeper. What we construe as the pressure of such repression causing Freud to halt, often a little too ostentatiously, is evidence not so much of Freud's hypocrisy as of a calculated rhetorical feint. For the effect of what seems to be a denial or copping out on the game-the emergence of repression in the midst of an argument intended to undo its thrall - in fact pushes the game even further along, giving it an inner tension or difference from itself constitutive of narrative desire in the usual ways, and redoubled in the text's explicit project of desiring the satiety of an explanation on the level of psychoanalysis itself. The result: the constitution of the unconscious negatively, its necessary emergence as something unconscious against or upon which Freud's hesitation must be propped. Such metonymic deduction, by which Freud's reader produces the unconscious as a category necessary for the text to cohere whenever Freud the dreamer blanches with shame, is required of us as a necessary and unconscious

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practice of psychoanalytic belief. Perhaps the very nucleus of Freud's inventive referentiality lies in this metonymic or, more exactly, synecdochic operation, a device common in Freud at large (Philip Rieff noted it in 1959), an operation that requires the reader of the dreambook, for example, to reason via displacement in order to produce the category of the dream proper from the narrative of dream thoughts, and (as the part-whole logic proceeds) the category in turn of the unconscious. A dream as such is always nothing more than approximate, a wishful wholeness imparted to the discontinuous report of fragments and montages in a reconstruction of something that never was but always shall be at the belated level of analysis. (3) Such metonymic displacement brings us naturally to the last of Freud's master tropes in the dreamwork, secondary revision. If the dream's difference from itself is what defines it as such - if its parts require a whole so as to be "parts""of" it-then the report of the dream is all-important, indeed decisive, in its (re)constitution as a referent. Secondary revision is, after all, no less than the first step in the dream's interpretation, its interpretation and its report already the same thing. In Freud's words in Chapter Six, secondary revision "subjects" the dream-the implications of the pun are also provocative -"to a first interpretation" and a consequent "misunderstanding" (5:500). Both interpretation and/or misunderstanding, of course, require there to be or to have been something present which has already been inadvertently or silently interpreted, and which has properties discernible enough by the reversal required by logic to be understood - to be produced - with varying degrees of analytic sufficiency. Indeed, such a structure is little different from that of Lacan's injunction to return to Freud, as though Freud's text were already there, in some original state, like its imputed unconscious; as though there were, for example, no influence of American ego psychology against which to react as an enabling polemic. Even to call secondary revision "secondary" is also already to presume a primary revision beforehand despite Freud's assurance that secondary revision is the dreamwork's very first operation. So it is from the recitof the dream's narration, belated by definition in relation to itself, that its histoire--its preexistence, its quiddity-can alone be constructed. Never discovered, since to call the report a distortion is already to require something more primary to have been there first. Distortion and repression are the very evidences of the dreamwork they are assigned to hide or dissimulate. Like that earlier interdependent emergence of folly and reason noted by Foucault, Freud's interpretative and phenomenal categories (an untenable and typically late Romantic distinction between the supposed and mere instrumentality of a text and the reality of what it describes) both emerge in a single gesture. The rhetoric of classical realism in The Interpretationof Dreams, only implicitly reflexive, cloaks its ultimate auto-referentiality by constituting its world and itself as dependent on one another, the joke being that it is the world that is

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propped upon the fiction rather than the fiction that is propped on the world. If secondary revision is Freud's definitive trope, it is, like the notion of mimetic representation itself, a repetition that only presumes what it repeats. Freud's unconscious and the psychic structures it produces, then, are the precise reverse of what they pretend to be. They are in fact exactly what they are: psychic structures as such, readerly ones requiring us to enact their truth simply by internalizing--by a simple act of reading-the operations by which Freud's text produces them. No discovery of a preexistent and genuinely "primal" state, psychoanalysis is hardly an original communion with nature. Freud's unconscious is, like the high Romantic subjectivity that enables it historically, poetically produced. Like Milton's "unpremeditated song" (even though, like Freud, the ironic Milton is "long choosing" and beginning "late"), like Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," like Keats's "full-throated ease," Freud's "primary" is the function of a rhetorical strategy designed to simulate what it cannot possess. Freud's is a literary language that produces the unconscious as an effect, as an analeptically constituted presence derived, as Nietzsche describes such a structure, by mistaking consequence for cause. The Crisis of Narcissism If secondary revision is the decisive trope of the dreambook, then revision as such, as Harold Bloom has noted, tends to become the master activity of Freud's enterprise in the years following 1910. With "On Narcissism," Freud has in fact grown so confident that he takes as his overt subject the very constitution of subjectivity, and so the very constitution of the ground or purported object of his own discourse. The result is a dangerous tendency toward the overt narration of psychoanalytic narration itself. Freud's realism-his ability to maintain the referentiality of his terms even though they are really no more than descriptions of the operations his reader must perform - has come round to meet its innate reflexivity a little too exactly. "Narcissism" leads Freud to describe not only the originary production of the subject, but also to scrutinize the terms by which psychoanalysis accounts for it. Too frank an inquiry follows, since it forces Freud to realize that the logic of narcissism fails to square with that of his earlier oppositions. In fact, the crisis of the essay lies in the confusion it bodes for Freud's hitherto organizing oppositions at virtually every level of his thought. For once it becomes clear to Freud that the ego is itself sexually cathected, that narcissism is our first mode of object-love (hence Lacan's mirror stage), the founding oppositions of psychoanalysis-chief to the ground. among them the clash between Eros and civilization-collapse With such a collapse, Freud has reached the horizon or limit of closure of the mode of knowledge he both invents and thereby fulfills or explodes. Hence the third and self-revisionary phase beginning with Beyond the

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PleasurePrinciplein 1920 may be seen as a solution, at the level of metacommentary and rhetoric rather than of empiricist science, of the loss engendered by the discovery of narcissism six years before, the loss of nothing less than the organizing categories of psychoanalytic inquiry itself. Indeed, the enigma of Beyond the PleasurePrinciple becomes easier to solve when considered from the point of view of rhetorical rather than logical necessity. It is probably even fair refusal to give up the to say that it was, ironically, Freud's humanism-his term life as necessary to any opposition he could think or imagine -that produced the most controversial and figurative of all his tropes, the figure of the death instinct. The death instinct is therefore finally an expression of rhetorical necessity as such (this, in addition to its reenactment of modernist desire in its wish to return to an "earlier state of things" [18:37]), the requirement of an opposing term to sustain thought or desire itself when the tension of difference threatens to vanish. So to balance the ravaged term life, no longer bound to Eros with the destruction in 1914 of the once-organizing difference between libido and ego, Freud must produce the only opposition left, the term of death. But if Beyondthe PleasurePrincipleis a solution, it also exacerbates the problem it means to solve. Even more than "Narcissism," Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple narrates psychoanalytic narration directly; it is arguably the most fully reflexive of all Freud's works not only in its admission that it is forever locked in figure (18:60), but also in the problem it poses to the security of Freud's illusionism when it strays into exposing its mechanisms far too openly to maintain the mimetic belief so successfully produced by the only covertly reflexive dreambook or the Wolf Man case. "Narcissism" and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, then, are really a kind of overt reflexivity. But while language referring only to itself may be the project of Robbe-Grillet, for example, it is the very reverse of what Freud needs to maintain his own project. The job of psychoanalysis, after all, is to produce and empower, not (as we think) to unravel and disassemble power. The very work of psychoanalysis is the maintenance of tension, the very category that produces a need for it, that allows it to document itself, that sells it. Freud must somehow readjust things after Beyond the Pleasure Principle so as to fortify a discourse that is becoming far too candid about its own limitations. The Ego and the Id: Resolutionand Independence "Dualistic" by temperament (18:53), Freud must look for fresh tension rather than resolution of the problems that both contaminate and expose his logic.3 Psychoanalytic knowledge, after Beyond the Pleasure Principle at least, If symptom-formation is dialectical in structure, then psychoanalysis must, by contrast, be 3. deconstructive. Symptoms are compromises between two opposing elements each dependent on the other for its respective meaning, while each element is at the same time apparently exclusive of the other. Neurosis is differance when it is required to compromise, to try to resolve itself in an

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seems at best capable of knowing only itself. Once the reflexivity of its purported realism threatens to become but one more modernist mise-en-abime, Freud needs to right the balance again, to introduce a securer mode of psychoanalytic knowledge that can pretend (for there is no more to do) to know something new all over again. This is the secret burden of The Ego and the Id (1923) as it formalizes Freud's third and last phase, producing an agency of sufficient power to prevent analysis from lapsing into pure reflexivity of the kind Freud himself will in fact adumbrate in the late "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937). It is no wonder, then, that it is the precariousness of the ego that is one of Freud's principal themes in a text whose task it is to reinvent the foundations of psychoanalytic- that is to say, Freudian- authority. Hence the attempt to write a genealogy of the ego even despite (or because of? as a function of?) the nowmassive contingencies that sap its originality. Hence, too, Freud's allegory again redoubles his narrative desire, making even this defense of his realism apparently reflexive as well, though in a suppressed key and with different aims. It is the introduction of the term superegointo the vocabulary of psychoanalysis in The Ego and the Id that promises more difficulty for the ego than does the perennially ambiguous id, the term (das Es) borrowed from Groddeck and perhaps best glossed as a combination of Lacanian "need" and the "it"of Pater's formulation, "it rusts iron and ripens corn." In fact, the two terms absent from the book's title - superego and Oedipus - are its most prominent players. If the ego is now driven into determinations more absolute than before, it is not just because much of it becomes unconscious in The Ego and the Id, but also because the very notion of superego (a social category, "the ideologies of the superego" as Freud calls its components in The New IntroductoryLectures[1933; 22:67]) directly implicates the world of social law into a psychoanalysis that finally overrides Freud's often undue biologism (Althusser's Lacan is its richest reading). Chapter Three formally introduces the notion of superego, a notion whose emergence in Freud's work lies in its earlier adumbration as the "ego ideal" (19:28), one of Freud's early terms for the status of the father-imago in particular. Reminding us that the biologistic connotations of the id need not interfere with the coterminously social (and equally unconscious) determinations

Aufhebung,a transcendent third term, as though a full and closed interpretation or cure were ever really possible. This is the mad dream of neurosis, which the late Freud comes to identify with civilization itself, perhaps because civilization has always been identical, at least since Plato, with the logocentric enclosure. Therapy - a term Freud himself never uses - seeks to resolve conflict (hence it is itself a symptom-formation reconstituted at a higher level, in this case that of ideology). Analysis, on the other hand, is diacritical, the purveyor of tension, difference, anxiety. Analysis implicitly considers dialectics and therapy alike to be the very structure of neurosis, and its teleology the peculiar advantage to be had from being ill.

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of "ego ideal" or "superego" (Freud in short simply brackets the id), it is largely the history of the birth of the ego out of its agon with superego that becomes the book's central allegory. "The character of the ego," says Freud, "is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes," and "contains the history of those object-choices" (19:29). Thus we have--or so it seems- an ego composed of the history of its (ego-) ideals, one of which, and only one of which, is the ego-ideal of the father. There is, of course, now narcissism, that first moment of identification that must, by definition, precede identification with the father. And yet Freud will insist that "the origin of the ego ideal" (19:31) is not narcissism at all, but remains identification with the paternal imago: "an individual's first and most important identification with the father in his own personal prehistory" (19:31; see 19:31, n.1 for Freud's deflection of any possible sexism in the remark). Freud even feels the need to reiterate his assertion in a redundancy that intimates overprotestation, especially the emphasis on the surety of immediacy: "it is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object/cathexis" (19:31). Earlier even than narcissism? The implications will not hold up the assertion: (1) If the ego is but a history of its ego-ideal "precipitates," and so adumbrates the structure of general social law to be called superego, why should one father's-be so privileged? (2) If the ego is, as ego-ideal among many-the "Narcissism" says (and as Freud's Lacanian intonations even here tend to reconfirm), premised on an initial identification with its own image, how can it be said to take the father's image as its earliest? For to do so means that one already has to have had a self-identification in place for such a paternal identification to occur in its theater. (3) To put it another way, the priority of the father depends on the prior priority of a successful narcissism; the subject must already be inscribed within the general laws of vision in order to be in position for what can only be a later introjection of a father imago- the father could not be recognized as such were not earlier determinations, such as those of shared, citizenly vision (e.g., the notion "father") in place beforehand. In the course of such discussion, however, emerges Freud's almost backhanded assumption of the enduring hegemony of the Oedipus complex (19:31), although the temporal questions raised by the superego are somehow out of time with it. Even despite the plain temporal priority of the mother (19:31) in the merest description of anaclisis (or propping-the production of drives and the embryonic ego derived from the career of weaning), Freud nonetheless insists that, for the child, "two relationships" (19:31)-one to the mother's breast, the other with the father-"proceed side by side" (19:31-32). (Hence, too, another example of the analytic advantage to be gained from positing primary processes as timeless, allowing Freud to repress the temporality of his childdevelopment schema by conflating two stages temporally separate by his own testimony.) Indeed, when Freud tells us how the Oedipus complex arises, his

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rhetoric forces him to admit that, even within the manifest terms of his own argument, it is itself a belated event, already preceded by an implicit inscription of the child into the laws of the polis-the laws that are now called a of formalization Freud's third and last model of superego. Though manifestly mind, The Ego and the Id is actually a silent maintenance of the Oedipus complex under the weight of a prophetic logic (Klein, Winnicott, Lacan) that makes this cornerstone of psychoanalysis almost insupportable (that Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan all nonetheless maintain Oedipus, too, is best read as a sign of orthodoxy).4 Freud has, in short, jeopardized his Oedipus complex in an attempt to straighten out his theory. Thus in Chapter Five, the expected problems in chronology rise to the surface as soon as Freud begins to summarize his new theory. The ego is "formed," says Freud, "out of identifications which take the place of abandoned cathexes by the id" (another mooting of the quantity/quality problem as old as the Project);and "the first of these identifications always behave as a special agency in the ego and stand apart from the ego in the form of a super-ego" (19:48). Clearly, then, the superego is the bed of social laws upon which the ego must rest-all this, it should be stressed, before the onset of the Oedipus complex proper. Incrementally, however, Freud will bring us to an absolutely scandalous conclusion despite the logic of his empirical scheme. The superego "owes its special position in the ego, or in relation to the ego," not to that series of "identifications" noted above; but, rather, to what Freud now, and rather suddenly, calls, despite the indefinite article, "a factor" (19:48) of special privilege. The superego is dependent not on all the "identifications," but on "one" alone, "the first identification" (19:48). And that "first identification" is not narcissism, the mirror stage, or even the mother, but Oedipus. But how do we know it is the "first"?How Freud can so surely sort out a "first"identification is, short of privileging, say, the weaning process, hard to see. It is especially hard to see when a term long absent from the argument is suddenly asked to play a decisive role in it, reemerging as Oedipus does in a fashion that will send all of Freud's developmental chronology into chaos. For the superego, we are now told, is in fact "the heir to the Oedipus complex" (19:48). This can be true, of course, only if the Oedipal ego-ideal- the paternal 4. To be sure, however, the maintenance of orthodoxy is not, for Freud himself, straightforward anyway; it is strategic, since Freud wished heresy. As the history of psychoanalysis attests, no single reading of Freud has ever- can ever- succeed in maintaining itself as wholly just or authoritative. Freud's own determination during his lifetime to preserve a theoretical orthodoxy, no matter what the personal cost nor the apparent expense in the repression of influences both local and European, disguises his arguably real wish to produce rival discipleships, a far more cunning means of securing immortality than mere assent, since it allowed for, indeed required, the expression of schisms inherent in the Founder himself, and, in the process, disseminated his teachings at increasingly diffuse levels of debate.

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imago-really is that "first"identification, a priority Freud's own description of the infant's already prior emergence into superego forbids (here analysis's later notion of the phallic mother is best read as a defense of Oedipus in the face of rival anteriorities). Thus when Freud tries to unfold his narrative fiction of the individual's development at the close of his discussion-of the relations between superego and Oedipus-the chronology of his schema begs for reversal: The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications [with the mother and the father] in some way united with each other. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego (19:34). It is at this point that the sheer duplicity of Freud's empirical or surface logic becomes too ludicrous to carry much further. The only way we can get the contradictions and reversals to make sense is to read them as they seem to wish to be read anyway-backwards. Narratologically rather than empirically. than positively. When we read, then, that Analytically- negatively-rather "the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex" (19:34), we can only read the formulation backwards for it to make sense empirically: the Oedipus complex in fact has the task of repressing the priority of the ego-ideal. Because once it is said-as Freud so easily admits-that the father-image is both one in a series of such ideals and a late(r) one at that, it becomes clear that the Oedipus complex is itself belated in relation to the superego despite Freud's protestations to the contrary. The image of the "protista" with which Freud figures the ego in the book's concluding pages also figures the text before us rather exactly: "The ego," like the text, "is meeting with a fate like that of the protista which are destroyed by the products of decomposition that they themselves have created" (19:56-57). Like the protista, The Ego and the Id can be looked at as itself "destroyed" by the materials it has created. That is to say, the very terms of the book put in question its own major, if secret, objects of defense.

The Figure of the Father Why does Freud repress this duplicity? Why does he not- as he does in recit and histoire? Rather the dreambook and the Wolf Man case-adequate than allow the modality of his narration to continue to double the purported story it tells, either covertly or overtly, The Ego and the Id appears to sever an otherwise habitual rapprochement by repressing its narrative mechanisms under a thematic token that the argument that secures it in fact disarms. After

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all, superego is, by Freud's own testimony, son to the Oedipus complex, and enacts its truth by slaying it. But we must remember that Freud has seen the dangers of a frank adequation of narration and story in the crisis of "Narcissism" and the desperation of Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple. Now, as he enters his late phase, he will instead maintain a strict tension or difference between them so as to maintain his own slippery authority, recontaining the argument of his narration with a thematic that it subverts (Oedipus in The Ego and the Id, the reliance on the alreadycancelled conflict between Eros and civilization in the 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents).The late Freud, it seems, becomes a strong allegorist in response to the disasters of pure reflexivity (although, to be sure, the late Freud also returns to direct reflexivity in the self-interrogative "Negation," or the 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms,and Anxiety). What in particular, however, does Freud gain in the repressive maneuvers of The Ego and the Id? Why does he wish to defend the priority of Oedipus despite its apparent demotion in the itinerary of individual development? Is there in fact still an adequation of recit and histoireunderway that escapes us under the appearance of (repressive) allegory? Is Freud, in short, still a reflexive realist? The evidence suggests that he is after all. For much as dreams precede their distortion at the level of histoirebecause they succeed it at the level of recit, or much as the primal scene precedes its remembrance because it follows it, so the Oedipus complex precedes superego at the level of histoirebecause it too succeeds it at the level of recit. The very emergence of the Oedipus complex is, in other words, also a retroactive production, another example of secondary revision or deferred action. In fact, the Oedipus complex-supposedly our greatest single danger to defend against-is in fact probably the greatest of Freud's own defense mechanisms. Defense is, in psychoanalysis, also an opportunity, and in The Ego and the Id's companion essay, the 1924 "Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex," we may find a clue as to how Oedipus works as a defense for Freud himself. In his remarks there on castration, Freud implicitly recalls the Wolf Man case by telling us that the reality of castration-anxiety occurs for boys only after they see the vaginas of little girls: "It is not until" such "a fresh experience comes his way," says Freud, "that the child begins to reckon with the possibility of being castrated" (19:175). It is, in other words, only through what happens later that we come to know, not just castration-anxiety, but, as our reading of The Ego and the Id should suggest, even Oedipus. And it is this belated authority that is, as it turns out, precisely where the strength of the ego comes from in an allegory that is actually as resolutely reflexive as that of the earlier Wolf Man. The retroactive production of the Oedipus complex-repressed by Freud so that he can exploit it--means that the father becomes a function of the son, that the past is the property of the future. To unwrite Wordsworth, the son is now father to the father. The in-

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eluctability of secondary revision in the (re)construction of paternity makes paternity, to use Joyce's reverberant phrase, a legal fiction rather than a natural fact. It is a costly loss in the power of the category of the father, although it is only such loss - in Freud's late Romantic logic - that can provide him, the son, the latecomer, with any power at all. As T. S. Eliot puts it in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), "the form of . . . literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities." Freud's Oedipal heir is the belated reader-the latecomer who has only a single power, the power to write (that is to say, to misread) the past. Though this is probably the only real claim to authority that psychoanalysis may be said to have, Freud himself must, of course, nonetheless dissemble it, since it is the very means of production of his own power as a writer, inserting himself so strategically among the scientists, poets, and philosophers that credible historians can only speak of parallels with psychoanalysis rather than genuine precursors of it (the first chapter of the dreambook is only a rehearsal for Freud's ultimate rewriting of history in Moses and Monotheism(1939), displacing the priority of Moses's status as a lawgiver and, by implication, taking it over himself). Although the Oedipus complex is a paradigm of nonoriginality as a notion (its very name is the graphic trace of influence), it is Freud who invents it, and who thereby becomes the father of the figure of the father. To be the father of the figure of the father carries with it, moreover, a simulated solution to the problem of psychoanalytic knowledge that Freud's earlier crisis has also required. Its mode cannot be subjective, of course, since to know as a subject is to be part of the capture psychoanalytic knowledge means to unravel. What (rather than who), then, is the agency that knows - or is supposed to know- in a discourse often precariously close to self-consumption? The structure of such a supposition is precisely that of Oedipus in its new articulation in The Ego and the Id- the latecomer with the perpetual advantage of rewriting the past rather than losing or suffering by it. It also provides Freud with the production of an agency that may not be construed as an ego in the first place, a transpersonal as well as transdiscursive agency because it carries all of history on its back, and so cannot be assessed as a single subject. Hence it removes Freud from any complicity in the game of subjectivity he is trying to describe even despite the enduring homology/identity of the structure of psychoanalytic narration and the structure of subjectivity itself in Freud's reflexive realism. One escapes determination by being overdetermined at the moment of one's enablement, a condition psychoanalysis fulfills at any one of its originary stations. Like that of Darwin and Marx, Freud's curricular transdiscursivity was the very condition that allowed his inventiveness to take place. It was just

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at this moment, around 1900, that the disciplines as we know them were being distinguished, coterminously, as it turns out, with the transgressive dialogism of evolution, Marxism, anthropology, and psychoanalysis-the breaking of rules aiding, then, in their very fashioning. Psychoanalysis managed to inscribe itself from the start in a myriad of systems, including that of literature. It is this multiple inscription which allows our notions of a literary Freud-among others. The expectation by which we tend to assess any discursive product as the univocal function of the determinations of a single tradition such as poetry or science proper, is an expectation that Freud exploits even as he violates. Silently using the priority over time granted him by secondary revision, Freud, in the name of Oedipus, alone fulfills the twin and impossible wish of modernism at large -to be simultaneously new and old, unique and recognizable, original and traditional. Situated as it is within the seam of a rhetoric that accounts for itself and its inventions in the same gesture, Freud's text produces its objects in a mode of reception that has insured their functional if not phenomenal reality. To make it new at so late a moment in history is doubly deceptive and so doubly impressive, since Freud must swerve from his object so as to fashion it, and from his tradition so as to escape it. Freud's reflexive realism is not only a representative modern structure, but very likely its single wholly successful one.

Transference: Letters and The Unknown Woman

JOAN COPJEC to my women colleagues

Esprit d'escalier This anxiety dream - one of his own - is reported by Freud in The Interpretationof Dreams: I was very incompletely dressed and was going upstairs from a flat on the ground floor to a higher storey. I was going up three steps at a time and was delighted at my agility. Suddenly I saw a maid-servant coming down the stairs - coming towards me, that is. I felt ashamed and tried to hurry and at this point the feeling of being inhibited set in: I was glued to the steps and unable to budge from the spot.' Earlier, in a letter to Fliess,2 Freud had reported the same dream, similar in all details, except that this time the woman is described as coming up behind him. This shift of the position of the woman parallels a shift in Freud's theoretical understanding of the problem of anxiety. In the earlier writings, those which develop the economic or transformed libido theory of anxiety, the' danger is "behind" in the sense that anxiety is seen as the automatic resultand subjective manifestation of the ego's inability to master the flow of excitations (because they are so much in excess and because repression has blocked the way of their complete discharge) which the danger has caused. This is the theory which operates in The Interpretationof Dreams and in Freud's analysis of the dream just cited as well as in "Delusion and Dreams," for example, and the analysis of Norbert Hanold's first dream: "The fear in the anxiety dream . . . like every 1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretationof Dreams, in The StandardEdition of the CompletePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, London, Hogarth Press, IV, p. 238. 2. Freud, The Originsof Psycho-Analysis.Lettersto WilhelmFliess, New York, Basic, 1954, Letter 64 (31 May 1897), p. 206.

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. II. 1912.

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neurotic fear, . . . has, through the process of repression, proceeded from the libido."3 Later, in 1926 with the publication of Inhibitions, Symptoms,and Anxietyand in his subsequent work, the danger might be said to be "before" in that anxiety is now construed as a signal of impending danger and as the motivating force (rather than the result) of repression. Castration anxiety is the prototypical form of anxiety according to this second theory and, in fact, the whole of Inhibitions, Symptoms,and Anxietyis an attempt on Freud's part to secure for castration this prototypicality, to safeguard it against Rank's theory that it is the trauma of birthwhich provides the model for all experiences of anxiety.4 Freud in this way ties his theory of anxiety to the question of sexual difference. For this reason we can say that the woman figures significantly(and not merely coincidentally) in the staircase dream and in any consideration of anxiety. In addition, this significance is not erased by the unflattering description of her as "older than [he], surely, and far from attractive," for, as Freud himself teaches, the term "sexual" has a profound sense not reducible to biological or historical determinations of chronological compatability or physical charm. Nor, for that matter, should we be misled by the term signal of anxiety. Anxiety, according to the second theory, belongs to a languagerather than a signal system. Emile Benveniste in his essay on animal communication- specifically the round and wagging dance signal system of bees which indicates the existence of food and its distance and direction from the hive - makes clear the distinction between this and the system of human language. A bee having received a message from the signaling bee who has spotted the food, cannot then go on to relay or retransmit this message to other bees in other hives. The signal can only be set up with reference to the actual experience of the discovered food and not with reference to another message. Human language, on the other hand, is a symbol system which enables the relay of messages in the absence of actual experience. This point is made much of by Lacan throughout his work and is especially crucial to his interpretation of Poe's short story which he puts forth in his "Seminar on The Purloined Letter." "The fact that the message is thus retransmitted assures us of what may by no means be taken for granted: that it belongs to the dimension of language."5 The communication "The Purloined Letter," that is, Poe's story about the letter, takes place even in the face of the total withdrawal of the object, that is, even though 3. Freud, "Delusion and Dream," in Delusion and Dream and Other Essays, Boston, Beacon Press, 1956, p. 84; S.E., IX, pp. 60-61. 4. The model of castration, of course, causes problems for Freud who recognizes that it will not work, strictly speaking, to account for the genesis of anxiety in the woman who has no penis and thus cannot be threatened by its loss. Michele Montrelay, working from this problem, finds the woman's presence with her body - her inability to experience the threat of castration - as the cause of her anxiety. 5. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" Yale FrenchStudies, 48 (1972), p. 48.

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the reader never gets to read, or experience first hand, the contents of the letter. Similarly, castration anxiety is the result not of an actual experience or this still sighting of castration, for women are not actually-unfortunately but is instead the result of a message about the needs to be said-castrated, castration of women. This distinction between language and the communication of bees, "a simple signaling of the location of an object,"6 plays suggestively throughout Lacan's essay. The police detectives who swarm through and comb the Minister's rooms, dividing up the entire volume "into compartments from which the slightest bulk could not escape detection,"7 can be seen, as a result of this analysis, as so many busy bees circling from left to right and right to left and wagging around in figure 8's making perfect spectacles of themselves as they trace a geometric space analogous to the one communicated by their directive. In the communication of bees there is a necessary,that is analogous, relationship between the objective reference and the linguistic form. In language, where there are no positive terms, only differences, no such relationship exists. It is also this distinction which explains this very controversial passage in the seminar: "Look! between the cheeks of the fireplace, there's the object already in reach of a hand the ravisher has but to extend .... The question of deciding whether he seizes it above the mantelpiece as Baudelaire translates, or beneath it, as in the original text, may be abandoned without harm to the inferences of those whose profession is grilling."8 In other words, Lacan is saying, it is none of our business where precisely in geometric space the letter was found, if our business is indeed psychoanalysis which is a linguistic science having nothing to do with the field of entomology (of insects or the division of space). The question of above or below is misguided because it assumes that language is ectopic, takes on meaning through its reference to a real whose existence is prior and elsewhere-to an anatomical woman, for example. I offer this reading to counter the accusations that Lacan is indifferent to the question of sex at this point in his analysis. It is not that he is saying that sexual difference is unimportant here, but that the question of language is important. His whole theory attempts to make the link between language and sexual difference infrangible, to show whence the question of sexual difference must be posed. I also offer my reading to counter the footnote to this passage provided by Jeffrey Mehlman: "The paragraph might be read as follows: analysis, in its violation of the imaginary integrity of the ego, finds its fantasmatic equivalent in rape.... But whether that rape takes place from in front or from behind (above or below the mantelpiece) is, in fact, a question of interest for policemen and not analysts. Implicit in the statement is an attack on 6. 7.

8.

Ibid. Ibid., p. 54.

Ibid.,p. 67.

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those who have become wed to the ideology of "maturational development."9 This reading, I think, takes liberties with Lacan's text, and makes a connection which the text does not make, although it is true that Lacan is directing his argument against ego psychology and does, in other texts, specifically oppose the geneticism of that school. We will investigate this argument later, for now let us say that "above," "below," "in front," or "behind" are inappropriate as answers to questions of direction if they are offered to define a space unoccupied by language. So, then, from above, below, in front, or behind, from wherever she comes, the woman brings anxiety. This much settled, we return to Freud, to the place where we left him before this digression into "The Purloined Letter"on the staircase, in a state of anxious abasia. It would be easy to use his own dream against him. If The Interpretationof Dreams is to be seen - as has so often been suggested by those who would simply repeat what Freud says about his own organization - as a journey through the unconscious with Freud as afldneur whose easy strolling reveals insight after insight, then the sight of him here, huffing and puffing, arrested by the presence not simply of another stroller, but more pointedly, of aflaneuse, could be taken as the failure of Freud's ambitions, his theory, in the face of the question of women. But this simple tu quoquedismissal is both uninteresting and unproductive. Freudian psychoanalysis has much to teach on the subject of women as well as on the subject of its own failures. Freud not only dreams this dream, he also analyzes it and reanalyzes it, returning to it several times. As part of his analysis, Freud establishes a connection between the day's residue (the maidservant of the old lady whom he visited twice a day in order to administer injections) and the prehistoric past (an old nurse he had as a child) by noting the similarity in their harsh rebukes for his lack of cleanliness. (This dream is obviously linked to those same unconscious thoughts which produced the dream of Irma's injection.) It is probably as a result of his identification with Irma as well as an economic yoking of crime and punishment that the dream gives, as the clearest sign of Freud's uncleanliness, his sudden desire to clear his throat and his spitting on the stair. After leading us through a narrow defile of interlocking signifiers, of women and uncleanliness, that never satisfies him as amounting to an adequate interpretation, Freud "overinterprets" this same dream in afootnotethat he adds at the end of the second discussion of the dream: Since "spuken[haunting]" is an activity of spirits, "spucken[spitting] on the stairs" might be loosely rendered as "espritd'escalier."This last phrase is equivalent to lack of ready repartee . . - a failing to which

9.

Ibid.

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I must in fact plead guilty. Was my nurse, I wonder, equally wanting in that quality?10 This short explanation strikes one as bizarrely elliptical. The argument which guides it is obscure, as though Freud himself did not fully know what he was saying. Indeed, what is most striking about this footnote to the interpretation of the dream is the way it compulsively repeats the dream itself- finds too late that which it would have been necessary to say earlier. The repetition underlines the psychic ambiguity of espritd'escalierwhich disallows any mastery one might assume on the basis of one's own mot d'esprit. The footnote is inconclusive, raising questions for us that it makes no attempt to answer. What does a dream which is an esprit d'escalierimply for the wishfulfillment theory of dreams? Isn't such a dream out of step with the wish it is supposed to fulfill? Finally, what are the implications of the last question? Why does Freud want to link his failing, the belatedness of his own wit, with what the woman wants? In order to begin formulating an understanding of Freud's "overinterpretation," it is necessary to consider the way staircase dreams recur in The Interpretationof Dreams. Besides this one, all the others are reported in the "Representation of Symbols" section of Chapter Six. Although Freud argues against the possibility of a dreambook in which we can simply look up, as in a dictionary, the meanings of various dream elements, he does admit that certain elements do function as symbols, that is, they are habitually and commonly connected with a particular significance. Sometimes the connection between a symbol and what it represents is immediately obvious; sometimes it is not. The staircase is an example of the former instance-a very obvious symbol: "We were ... soon in a position to show that staircases (and analogous things) were unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison . . . the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs."" It is this generally assumed obviousness of its symbolism which has, for example, allowed the staircase to become a privileged location for the filmic display, the fetishization, of the woman, the camera often panning upward and culminating in a full-figure view of her at the top of the stairs. The significance of Freud's dream is determined by its differencefrom these other simply symbolic dreams. Where traditionally dreams of staircases, steps, and ladders mark the obviousness, the visibility of connection (in the sexual sense of copulation as well as the semantic sense of the symbol's relation to its referent) and the progression toward climax or wishfulfillment, Freud's dream (including his interpretation of it) is marked by a failure to connect, lack of cer-

10. 11.

Freud, The Interpretationof Dreams, S.E., IV, p. 240. Ibid., S.E., V, p. 355.

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tainty, and anxious repetition. The staircase, in short, and the sexual relation it symbolizes, is represented in Freud's dream as merely espritd'escalier.Though the man, in this case Freud, may be equally as desiring as the woman, in this case the nurse, his desire does not coincide with hers. There is between them, thus, no sexual relation. Many years later, Freud, in his famous observation that "a man's love and a woman's love are a phase apart psychologically,"12 would give what can be taken as another overinterpretation of his staircase dream. It is only since the work of Lacan, however, that this development in Freud's theory has been emphasized. Interventionon the Transferencei The intervention of Lacan in psychoanalytic theory is above all an intervention in the theory of the transference. The essay which he titled "Incritical rereading of Freud's Dora tervention on Transference" (1951)-a an early indication of how this primary intervention occasions case-is another, how the question of feminine sexuality arises in the field of the transference. This intersection of concerns as it operates in Freud's case study and in Lacan's rereading is elucidated in Jacqueline Rose's, "Dora- the fragment of an analysis."13 In this essay one finds not a merely scoffing and flat dismissal of Freud's failure in the Dora case (such dismissals tend to mystify error, to make of it either an inexplicable waywardness or a simple reflection of some other realm), but a more positive attempt to examine the structured overdetermination of his failure, the articulation of separate notions among themselves. In this way we are made to see Freud's "error"not as an accident that happens to his thinking, but as the directing force of his knowledge. Rose isolates the dependence in this case of a notion of transference-as-demand on that of woman-as-content. It was this interdependence she shows, which blocked the analysis. Eventually, of course, Freud would develop a critique of the notion of sexual identity as a pregiven content and would stress the very problematic and tenuous assumption of it as a position taken up by the subject. He would show that sex was ineluctable- one could not be a subject any which way-but also unstable and never exhaustive of the subject. He would also come to see the transference as the place where the desires which structured fantasies could be analyzed and not as the place from which to restore a forgotten event. Although memory might be the by-product of psychoanalytic work, remembers because one is cured, not the other way a certain effect-one around-it came to be seen less and less as its direct aim or assured victory. If we are to appreciate the full force of his intervention, however, it is best

12. 13.

Freud, "Femininity," in New IntroductoryLectureson Psychoanalysis, S.E., XXII, p. 134. Jacqueline Rose, "'Dora'-fragment of an analysis," n/f, 2 (1978), pp. 5-21.

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to begin with a history of the concept of the transference, to see how the contributions of Lacan in this area lead eventually to his contributions in the area of sexual difference. One soon discovers that historically the work on the transference neglected not only the question of sexual difference, but a good deal else as well. The history of the concept of the transference is in fact a history of exclusions so profound that the transference came to be conceived as a mere mechanical operation. A review of this theoretical history is facilitated by attention to two summaries: Ida Macalpine's "The Development of the Transference" and Daniel Lagache's "Some Aspects of the Transference."14 Macalpine's attempt to define the historical reasons for the lack of attention paid to the transference, and to technique in general, causes her to lay the blame for this neglect on the phenomenon of suggestion. In the history which she outlines, the foremost task of early psychoanalysis was to set itself apart from the dubious techniques of hypnosis and suggestion which tainted its origins and with which it was continually associated. At first this attempt at differentiation took the form of a more scientific and studied explanation of how suggestion actually worked, a distancing through objectivity. But gradually these studies began to stress and to analyze the patient's aptitude for suggestion. This resulted in an even more effective distancing; henceforth suggestion was the patient's problem, not the analyst's. Once suggestibility, rather than suggestion, became the area of investigation, the transference, homologically "came to be considered a spontaneous manifestation to the neglect of precipitating factors."'5 Technical discussions about the transference have developed nevertheless, but these have always focused on the instances of resistance and on mechanisms of defense. As a result of its history of aversions, the transference suffers from a lack of even a rudimentary definition which Macalpine demonstrates by listing questions which are still unanswered. For example: What should be considered as part of the transference, the entire affective relationship between analyst and patient, or simply the neurotic reactions? What is transferred in the transference? In addition, she points to a renewed urgency in defining the transference posed, since 1946, by developments in areas in which the transference was believed to be partially or completely eclipsed: (1) child analysis, (2) attempts at treating psychotics, (3) psycho-somatic medicine, and (4) attempts to shorten analysis. Finally Macalpine undertakes to correct some misunderstandings which have developed through the motivated neglect of the transference's genesis and to offer some new understandings. She proposes that it is "far from being the rule that the analytic couch allays anxieties [and thus allows for regression] or that it is felt as a safe place"; [this had been the dominant view until this point and it is easy 14. Ida Macalpine, PsychoanalyticQuarterly,XIX (1950), pp. 501-539. Daniel Lagache, The InternationalJournalof Psychoanalysis, XXXIV (1953), pp. 1-17. 15. Macalpine, p. 523.

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to see how it could result from psychoanalysis's attempt to find for itself a safe place, out of reach of suspicions about the analyst's powers of manipulation] "the projection of a more or less severe superego onto the analyst is not conducive to allaying fears." In other words, she urges a development of the theory of the transference in the direction of an analysis of the power held by the analyst-the precise direction in which Lacan's work proceeds. Lagache's thesis is, in its main outlines, similar to Macalpine's. He too feels that explanation of the transference has been limited to seeing it as the result of an automatic mechanism which acts in the patient-the repetition compulsion - and that this has produced a "one-body psychology" in which the patient alone is made accountable for the transference. Lagache calls for a description of the mechanisms of the transference in more dynamic terms; notes the importance of defining the relation between "the need for repetition and the repetition of needs"; and suggests that the transference is dependent on the Zeigarnik effect (named after a woman analyst who noted that interrupted tasks are more readily taken up again than completed ones). Lacan takes up this last suggestion in order to question the very notion of Gestaltand its operation in the transference. Lagache begins his article by mentioning that the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris had proposed that its next conference (November 1951) be devoted to the problem of the transference. In fact there seems to have been an increased activity and general recognition of the need for work on the transference during the 1950s; the 19th International Congress (July 1955) gave itself over to this work. This is the period of Lacan's intervention, his lectures in Paris which began as and never stopped being an analysis of the transference. (The first seminar, 1953-54, focused on those writings of Freud that were gathered together under the title "Therapy and Technique.") All of Lacan's work, thenprecisely his return to Freud - is an investigation of the need for this repetition of Freud, for an analysis of psychoanalysis as a transference onto Freud. Freud, however, not as the primal scene, but the here and now of psychoanalysis. Even as this work makes the transference coextensive with the very field of psychoanalysis, it flies in the face of the limits which have always defined the transference as a concept. We are forcefully reminded of these limits when confronted by Lacan's observation that Freud's second topography was developed only afterhe had completed his writings on therapy and technique. (Lacan also argues that it is the misunderstanding of this topography, the privileging of the instance of the ego, which has had such a detrimental effect on subsequent developments in the theory of analytic technique.) We also have the reminder of FranCois Roustang--in his book, Dire Mastery--that the concepts of narcissism, the uncanny, the death drive, and group psychology were all elaborated as the extrinsic limits of therapeutic technique. The transference, which has never received the attention it wants, must be reexamined from the perspective of those concepts that have been developed as its outside.

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Esprit de Corps: The Communityof Brothers In this section I would like to consider the work of Roustang, a French analyst, and Harold Bloom, an American literary critic, both of whose work can be seen as taking up the direction of Lacan's intervention on the transference. As Roustang's work is dependent on many of its own literary insights and Bloom's on its own psychoanalytic insights, the two works overlap on a number of matters. Of central importance to both is the question of discipleship. The object of my investigation is to compare the ways in which these two theorists of the transference encounter one previously excluded area in particular, that of sexual difference. Roustang situates his investigation of the transference in a historical account. What he analyzes is the savage horde that surrounded Freud at the beginning of psychoanalysis and the transferences which defined not the therapeutic relationship of Freud with his patients so much as those that constituted psychoanalysis as an institution, an artificial group. Like all artificial groups, the psychoanalytic institution, Roustang argues, is doomed to fail, to destroy itself. But what is the principle of this destruction and what has it to do with this observation of Freud? "In the great artificial groups, the Church, the army, there's no room for woman as a sexual object. The love relation between men and women remains outside these organizations .... Even where groups are formed which are composed of both men and women, the distinction between the sexes plays no role."16 Roustang's analysis proceeds through an Rank, Tausk, Ferenczi, analysis of the transferences of several men-Jung, Groddeck-and none of the first women analysts, onto Freud. When it is a question of establishing the society of psychoanalysis, sexual difference must be ignored to facilitate that society's operation as a community of brothers. Roustang's project, to demystify the position of master analyst, to see the church of psychoanalysis as an institution (with rules, codes, a system of "passes"), an apparatus of social relations, is a necessary supplement to the work of Michel Foucault and Robert Castel,17 for example, who have studied the power relations upheld by institutions in general and psychoanalysis in particular. These studies, while inescapably valuable in many ways, can be faulted for failing to point up or analyze the acts of sexual indifference which found these power relations. I would like to try to avoid that terminal moraine on which the question of the relation of the social to the psychic strands us. I will say, however, against that project which gives psychoanalysis a history in order to uncover

16. Freud, Group Psychologyand the Analysis of the Ego, S.E., XVIII, p. 141. 17. Robert Castel, a member of the Foucault seminar which produced I, Pierre Riviere (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1982), contributed "The Doctors and the Judges" to that study. His major works are Le psychanalysme:L'ordrepsychoanalytiqueet le pouvoir, Paris, Maspero, 1973, and (with F. Castel and A. Lovell) The PsychiatricSociety, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982.

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the way it puts on its knowledge through relations of power, that the contents of a "science," that is, its theoretical concepts, are not reducible to the historical moment in which they were allowed to emerge. No matter how saturated the origins of psychoanalysis were with the discourse of the confessional, the practice of hypnosis, the "private" events of Freud's life, the struggles with his disciples, the concepts elaborated by Freud are not necessarily imprinted with, or molded by these "origins." There is no natural relationship of genesis, no relationship of homology, between a concept and its history. One will not evaporate the concept of the unconscious by simply revealing the history, no matter how prolix, of its discovery. What is also necessary is an account of the elaboration of the concept within the structure of the discipline that gives the concept its place, indeed its meaning. Sexuality, for example, as a concept of Freudian psychoanalysis is not simply the nineteenth-century social, legal, or literary notion of sexuality since within psychoanalysis it is defined by its relation to the concepts of the unconscious, repression, psychical conflict. It can not then be extracted from these and examined separately. This is not to deny a relation between a discipline (or "science") and its conditions of existence, but to rid the notion of history of that of the "essential section," to think of these separate terms as other than expressions of each other, and to question the possibility of absolute self-knowledge eitherfrom the point of an "external" history, or from the "internal" position of the discipline itself. Roustang's historical account of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis should be read in the light of these considerations. The English title of Roustang's book -Dire Mastery- is substituted for the French, Un destin sifuneste. The title might very well have been left untranslated, however, for in French it contains a reference to a (French) phrase in an English text, Poe's "The Purloined Letter." In Poe's short story, Dupin leaves as his signature this message for the Minister D - (who has stolen a letter from the Queen): "Un desseinsi funeste/ S'il n'estdigne d'Atreeest digne de Thyeste."The line is borrowed from Crebillon's Atree. Lacan, who makes much of this message in his "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' himself ends up stealing a letter and replacing it with another so that the message which concludes the seminar becomes instead "Un destin sifuneste." Roustang, then, places himself with Lacan (and not insignificantly for, as we know, this seminar is particularly prized by Lacan, placed at the beginning of his Ecrits) and within a chain of thefts. But in setting this quotation out at its beginning, as its title, Dire Mastery does not repeat a simple message from Lacan. Rather it retransmits, or puts back into circulation, his text. Roustang is here confronting his transference onto Lacan, recognizing the power of Lacan's dire mastery, in order eventually to resist submitting to it totally. We find only one other direct reference to the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'," but it is in the central chapter of the book,

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"The Transmissability of Analytic Theory," which contains the main argument of Roustang's polemic: If psychoanalysis were to renounce its efforts to be a transmissable science . . . it would inevitably fall into occultism and magic .... This practice would fall back into the unsayable and the ineffable . . any therapeutic effect would be reduced to personal power, to the qualities of the analyst, and one would never get beyond the level of faith healing and witchcraft. . . . The transmissability of psychoanalysis is based on the fundamental discovery of the transference, that is, on the fact that the psychoanalyst is an other, that the analysand's rage or outbursts are not directed at the analyst.18 *

This Lacan has taught, and yet analyses at the Ecole freudienne stumble always on the "apparently unanalyzable transference onto Lacan ... as though he were the one who knows."19 That Lacan is the subject of knowledge is, of course, not possible since there is no subject of knowledge; no one who knows. Instead it is true that "no psychoanalyst will understand anything of psychoanalytic theory without taking Freud's personality into consideration."20 What sort of logic is this? The same, it seems, that informs similar statements by Lacan: no one knows; Freud is the only one who knew. The only way to understand this apparent illogic is to refer to Frege's theory of integers or to what Lacan is fond of summarizing as the fact that the signifier cannot signify itself. Freud as the signifier of the one (who knows) refers not to himself, the complete self-identity of his knowledge, but to zero, to the fact that there are none who know. Not even the lack of absolute knowledge is self-evident; and since this is so, since absence itself cannot be grasped, those who would be analysts can learn this lesson only through their transference onto the integrity, the presence of the one who indicates this lack. The institution of psychoanalysis is formed, then, through this connection with its oneleader, Freud. Yet, as Freud has said, this social phenomenon is connected with hypnosis and brings with it the threat of psychosis. (One of the most important contributions of Roustang is this refocusing on the phenomenon of hypnosis which psychoanalysis has avoided for so long. As a result, he is able to make a distinction between an "immediate transference" [one which resembles hypnosis] and the transference mediated by language. All therapeutic work will fail, he argues, that does not work on the symbiotic-hypnotic relation that threatens to silence the speech of the mediated relation. In this Roustang engages with Lacan's theory of the primacy and 18. Frangois Roustang, Dire Mastery, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 60-61. 19. Ibid, p. 60. 20. Ibid.

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effectivity of language and finds that though everything is, as Lacan says, invaded by language, language is not everything. Freud, one recalls, made an equivalent observation about sexuality. Since language and sexuality are indissolubly linked, for Roustang and for Lacan, one can see the usefulness of this important distinction for a theory of the resistance to language's perpetual reproduction of the same. Although this argument is presented as a central quarrel with Lacan, it is possible to see it as taking a direction which Lacan indicated as he began more and more to question the possibility of communication, full speech, and the sexual relation and to examine the ways in which language failed. It is, however, at this point a direct - and if not very carefully elaborated and understood, extremely risky- challenge to Lacan.) "Strangely Familiar," the most dramatic chapter of Dire Mastery, deals with the psychotic "transference" between Tausk and Freud. This relationship is the most dramatic partially because it was the most evenly matched - it was Tausk alone among all of Freud's disciples, Roustang tells us, who respected the specificity of Freud's theory. One expects that this fact has to do with Tausk's psychosis which made him prey to language. Freud, then, who stole his theory from others, from his own as well as the unconscious of his patients, became between deliria of engaged with Tausk in a battle so elemental-fought influence and fantasies of theft- that the only possible outcome was the annihilation of one of the two. Yet in this chapter and in the last ("Toward a Theory of Psychosis"), where analyst and patient are so manifestly involved, perhaps because the sides are so symmetrical, in a symbiotic relationship, Roustang introduces a third term and suggests that any analysis of the transference must also introduce this term. Between Tausk and Freud there was Helene Deutsch, Tausk's analyst and Freud's analysand. The relation between the two men was established through the enabling fiction of the unalterable woman, a fiction in which Deutsch was unfortunately complicit. Tausk was unable to protect himself because he could not struggle with Freud who was for him the unalterable woman. If Deutsch had inserted a space between herself and Freud, Roustang speculates, this might have allowed Tausk to establish his distance from Freud. This is a very sketchy and speculative prescription as a cure for psychosis, but it does at least suggest an intervention at the point where the problem emerges. The psychotic suffers, if we accept Lacan's theory, from a foreclosure of the symbolic which returns as the suffocatingly present Real. The entry into the symbolic would entail, then, as Lacan has said, a placing of something into the "letterbox" of the unconscious by establishing the possibility of something's being missing. The psychotic, for whom sexual difference does not clearly exist, for whom nothing is significantly missing, is constantly at risk of being absorbed into the Other. Freud, on the other hand, was able to survive the assaults of his uncanny assailant, Tausk, because he had on some level denied the uncanniness, that is

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the difference, of woman. The threat to his own unalterability, which sexual difference posed to him, was warded off by his rendering feminine sexual pleasure "divine," by reducing it "to the coldness of marble breasts,"21 setting it up as an absolute behind his ego which was threatened. We recognize in these phrases a reference to Lacan's seminar on "God and the Jouissance of The Woman." Whether or not this is fair to Lacan, we will have to consider later; for now it is sufficient to say that he has himself taught that the category of woman has served for man as the support of the fantasy of his own unity, the (imaginary) unity of the (male) ego. It would appear, then, that Roustang is joining the attack on ego psychology. And yet if there is anything troubling about Roustang's extremely interesting and timely analysis of the transference, it is the way its resolution is formulated, as though what were returning was the repression of the repressed -ego psychology. The aim of the analysis, Roustang believes, is to allow the patient to give free expression to his/her desires, the patient must become a "novelist," and analytic theory must proceed not from some preexisting theory, but from the unconscious. Now while it is one thing to say that we must not accept the theory of another as dogma, or to say, after Lacan, that psychoanalysis is the site of listening attention where we learn to read the unconscious, it is quite another to say that we can invent our own theory by reading it off directly from the unconscious. We can only read the unconscious Other as it emerges, or becomes caught, in the interstices of the symbolic (the language of the) Other. What is sometimes unclear in Roustang is to which Other he refers and thus whether or not he always distinguishes them. Although in Lacanian terminology, the unconscious and the symbolic structure of language are both designated by the same term and it is important to recall that they are closely related -the unconscious being the effect of language-- they are nevertheless neither identical nor homologous. There is between them a constant nonconformity. It is just this fact which forbids a finalism to the theory of psychoanalysis and makes it impossible for the subject ever to master the Other. It is unclear, however, since Roustang is trying to draw these distinctions, how these difficulties arise and one expects that some of them are introduced either by the translation or by the context in which we here in America read Roustang's work. We who have grown wary of the notion of individualismmay become doubtful when Roustang calls for an individuation.Yet it is important to differentiate between these two notions- even though these differences cannot all be spelled out here. The American notion is attached to other notions of adaptation, of harmony, of a principle of invariance, and of the priority of the individual over the social. Roustang, on the other hand, does not see adaptation as the role of psychoanalysis, since there is no harmonious whole to which 21.

Ibid., p. 105.

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one might become adapted. In addition, individuation seems to be a secondary processof separation from the ego ideal, and one that can never be carried out once and for all, since to do so would require that there be an identity of difference. Individuation is a fundamentally unstable process, possible only through the transference which is simultaneously its greatest threat. In speaking of access to the symbolic order, psychoanalysis, since it keeps saying its aim is not adaptation, must be advocating the introduction of its patients, through discourse, to the plurality of their culture and society, to what in thefuture will become the motive force behind its own transformation.22 Because the symbolic process continuously displaces the subject, the patient can never be a writer who fixes the feature of his or her life into a narrative. And, in fact, the narrative Roustang writes in Dire Masteryreconfirms this. It is a narrative which refuses to protect a total Freudian ego. There is no attempt either to reduce Freudian theory to Freud the man, or to separate them absolutely. What emerges instead is a picture of Freud as an agent, rather than master inventor, of psychoanalysis.

What must be remembered is that the subject does not "accede to himself by designating himself in the statement."23 In America this has been most systematically ignored, from the beginning. We can regularly find such statements as this from the initial supporters of Freud in America: "For those who doubt Freud, just examine your own dreams and you will find you will come to know yourself as the proprietorof a busy theatre, owner, spectator, and critic in one [emphasis mine]."24 One still hears this argument today; the cure is evinced by the patient's being able to render a coherent narrative account of him/herself. The support for this argument is always given as the fact that Freud often presented his theory in the form of a case history as well as Freud's early observation that hysterics suffer from reminiscences, from a failure of the ability to construct a proper narrative. There are many things to be said against this argument, among them this: The case history form of the investigation had, to a great extent, the historic effect of counteringthe "ontological" approach which considered disease an independent entity that entered an organism and that could be totally removed, thus restoring the individual to a 22. Ibid., p. 24. 23. Lacan, "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious," Ecrits, New York, Norton, 1977, p. 315. Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State 24. University Press, 1945, p. 50.

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normal healthy state. The keeping of historical records of the patient led instead to the modern view that disease is a conditionof the living individual, that disease inhabits life originally and is in a profound sense the history of a perpetual illness. We can get a sense of what was at issue in the conflict between the ontological and narratological conceptions of illness from this witty summary statement: "Syndenham, the ontologist, lived at the time of the great plague of London, and the plague, I understand, has little concern with individual variations."25 America was able to resist the plague (which would have wiped out individuality), but not the case history (within which form individuality was made to flourish) to which Freud introduced us. The American version managed to turn the case history into an assurance of the rightness of the norm and the attainability of the cure, an assurance just as strong as that offered by the ontologists. Again, what is crucial is the way one conceives of narrative and of symbolization in general-as being consonant with a subject, or not. The American version was decidedly optimistic about the possibility of resolving the transference. It is not this version's optimism in itself that one should challenge (a purely deterministic position would exclude all possibility of change, would have to base itself on a reflection model of psyche and society-a politically regressive position, indeed), but its percipitousness and naive emancipatory zeal. Freud himself, when confronted with the question of whether analysis was terminable or interminable, had to admit that sexual difference shaped the psyche in such a way that its therapeutic progress could only ever asymptotically approach completion. The psyche, moreover, could never successfully defend itself against injury or illness, for even the very process of defense caused a split in the ego which could never be sutured. The unfinished fragment in which Freud proposed this last theoretical observation (on which Lacan would base his theory of the constituting, not secondary and thus eliminable, alienation of the subject), begins with a curious little prologue: "I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter."26 A little anxiety of influence can be, as it is here, easily allayed, but the gulf opened up by the rest of the essay-by the description of the consequences which are precipitated by the divestment of castration anxiety - takes away any security we may have about our own ingenuity or about our own safety from the cannibalism of history. It was to contravene the American position that Lacan proposed this con-

25. Owsei Temkin, "The Scientific Approach to Disease: Specific Entity and Individual Sickness," Symposiumon the History of Science, New York, Basic Books, 1963, p. 647. 26. Freud, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence," S.E., XXIII, p. 271.

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cerning the subject's relation to reality: "It is hardly a question of adapting [the patient] to it [reality], but to show it [the subject] that it is only too well adapted, since it assists in the construction of that very reality."27 American ego psychology, by taking the ego as the agent of adaptation and by leaving aside the question of the sexual, of sexual difference and the symbolic which splits the ego and keeps it from ever being able to carry out its synthetic function, confined itself to the imaginary realm. It is at this point that we encounter the work of Bloom. Bloom's stated aim and his accomplishment has been the defining of a particularly American tradition of literary influence, that is, of American literature's defense against its own belated literary condition. His theory, of late, has taken a more polemical stance against the incursions of French post-structuralism onto the American literary field -denying the appropriateness of that theory to this literature. Initially, it is true, Bloom posed the relationship of poet to precursor in Oedipal terms, as a family romance, but in Agon the Oedipal scenario has begun to recede into the background as Bloom begins to focus on the transference as the disciple's scene of literary instruction. It is unclear how this new analytic scenario will change Bloom's own elaborate system, a two-handed engine fighting against orthodox criticism on the one hand and "deconstruction" on the other. Already in Agon it has forced to the fore a certain recognition and appreciation of Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as an explicitly stated distrust of Lacan's attack on American ego psychology. No surprise, this. Bloom's is a sophisticated rereading of Freud and American literature, valuable in its opposition to traditional criticism. And yet the reservations one might have about accepting it are severe, for what it offers in its rhetorical defense of American specificity is an uncompromisingly masculine protest, an androcentric version of literary history that is catastrophic for American literary feminism. The chronicle of discipleship which Bloom details is one in which men occupy both sides of the transference relationship. This critical observation about Bloom's work has been made often enough, but it is usually made from an empirical position, as though Bloom's inclusion of a discussion of Emily Dickinson could in itself begin to absolve him from charges made against him. To counter Bloom's (or any other) history of the forging of a literary canon, his tracing of lines of filiation, of the transference of knowledge from one man to another, one cannot simply point to the many women writers in the attic of literature. What must be questioned is not the incompleteness of a list which can then simply be added to, nor, alternatively, the covering up of a separate and autonomous tradition of women writers (a feminine canon) which can then simply be uncovered. Instead one must analyze the way male-transference histories take their form (and not just their "facts") from their exclusions of women. The whole radical effect of feminism would not be the admitting of 27.

Lacan, "The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power," Ecrits, p. 236.

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women, finally, into existing disciplines, but the breaking up of the concordant epistemological fantasies which are their support and limit. The plain observation that a text takes up a sexist position is much less instructive (and much less effective) than the analysis of how this position is enabled from within the theory in which it arises. One of the cornerstones of Bloom's theory, from the beginning until the present, is contained in this proposal: "From the perspective of literary criticism, Freud's greatest advance is in his theory of the relationship between anxiety and defense

.... This anxiety is impossible

to distinguish

from defense,

for

such anxiety is itself a shield against every provocation from otherness."28 Bloom has also, by way of distinguishing apotropaic gestures, outlined a hierarchical system of defenses, of tropes, by which a strong poet misreads a precursor text in the creation of his own. It is this privileging of defense which is, I will argue, the most important theoretical support of Bloom's sexual indifference. As it is Lacan who has offered the most cogent challenge to the interpretation of defense in the transference, I will turn now to his critique. A concise and (for our discussion) appropriate illustration of this critique is found in "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power." Here Lacan reinterprets a case belonging to Ernst Kris, reported in his paper, "Ego Psychology and Interpretation in Psychoanalytic Therapy."29 A young scientist, fairly successful in his field, comes to analysis because of a writer's block. He finds himself unable to publish his research for fear of plagiarizing a colleague's ideas. This patient had previously been in analysis with Melitta Schmideberg who uncovered the fact that in his youth, the patient had had a certain propensity toward theft -sweets and books were the primary objects of this deviation. These crimes established a connection between an oral aggressivity manifested in both the acts of stealing and in his intellectual endeavors. It appeared that the only way to avoid the compulsion to steal was then to inhibit his intellectual production, his actual thefts. In the second analysis, Kris, building on the first, uncovers the mechanism of inhibition, the defense. Piqued by the paradoxical tone of the patient's description of his latest urge to plagiarize, Kris scrutinizes the "source" only to find that it does not contain the patient's thesis, that "the patient had made the author say what he had wanted to say himself." (In other words, the patient had performed a strong misreading, a misprision, of the precursor text.) Kris continues the analysis of the defense, interpreting the pilfering of books as part of the oedipal conflict in which the patient's unconscious wish was to devour the paternal penis. He continues with more of this sort of reasoning through a discussion of fishing trips, questions of who had the bigger fish, and so on. The patient, however, remains silent throughout the interpretation and for some time after. Finally he 28. 29.

Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 90. The PsychoanalyticQuarterly,XX (1951), pp. 21-25.

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ventures that when he leaves the analytic session, he would often walk along a street lined with restaurants. In one of these he could usually find his favorite dish- "fresh brains." Kris takes this statement by his patient as confirmation of his interpretation: yes, you are right; I do have an obsessional, oral aggressivity which does seem to be related to a search for a (grand, intellectual) father. Lacan, placing the patient's final statement back into the analytic setting, interprets it not as a reference to the father, but to the analyst, Kris, as the statement of a desire opened up by Kris's unsatisfactory interpretation. Where Kris believes his patient to have swallowed his analyst's fish story whole, Lacan sees that he hasn't even given it a nibble. The patient suffers, according to Lacan, from anorexia mentale- a refusal to think, to engage in the oedipal conflict. What he wants is not not to steal, but to withdraw from combat. The idea, then, that he is a plagiarist is not a defense against a drive, but a metonymy of his desire. Desire then is not hidden by the actions (and here we must include words) of the patient, but revealed by them. For desire, Lacan says in this essay as in many others, is something which must be "taken literally." It operates on the surface of the analytic session and is not to be analyzed secondarily as something buried beneath a pattern of defense. Lacan raises two related objections to the centering of an analytic intervention on a notion of defense. First, it interprets the actions of the patient as satisfyinga demand.Here it is the patient's demand for a grandfather which causes him to satisfy himself by successively turning each of his tutors into a grandfather. What is difficult to understand is why satisfaction would have to be incessantly repeated-rather it seems that it is the constant failure of satisfaction (since satisfaction is structurally impossible) which compels the patient toward repetition. In addition, Lacan says in his first seminar, in analyzing a defense as that which hides something behind it, the analyst can be guided by nothing other than his or her own conception, which is, in fact, his or her own ego. In Agon Bloom counters an objection of one of his critics who says that Bloom's theory "invites an interpretive anarchy: a programmatic subjectivism."30 Bloom in turn objects that by "misreading" he does not mean "dyslexia," but a pragmatic defense, an instrument for the strengthening of one's own criticism or poetry. Bloom, of course, is much more accurate than his critic-and much closer to Lacan's view of this interpretive method. Lacan also sees this method as the opposite of anarchy, but as resulting in a normalizinginterpretation, an interpretation according to a norm which is consistent with the analyst's own ego which then comes to serve as a (superior) model. This he calls ego to ego (or equal to equal) interpretation. The "weak" and "strong" in Bloom's vocabulary are surely the currency of the Puritan morality that informs ego psychology. Lacan undertakes the reinterpretation of Kris's case as part of his attack 30.

Bloom, Agon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 41.

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on the geneticism with which ego psychology is involved. The theory of geneticism, put forward initially and primarily by Anna Freud, correlates physiological stages of development both with the emergence of psychological drives and the erecting of mechanisms of defense by the unconscious ego. Bloom, of course, would want to distinguish himself from the biological conformity which this theory of the psyche entails, but he seems to embrace this system, nevertheless, with an enthusiasm that is at odds with "French Freud." Indeed a measure of the difference between Bloom and Lacan can be taken from their different responses to Anna Freud's catalogue of mechanisms of defense. Bloom sees the catalogue as being as "comprehensive a system of tropes as Western theory has devised."31 Lacan, on the other hand, sees it as a total confusion, as so heterogeneous as to throw into question the very usefulness of the concept of defense.32 Perhaps the main reason for Bloom's being able to see the concept of defense as more coherent than either Lacan or Laplanche and Pontalis do is that he has abstracted the notion of its mechanisms from any notion of content. As Laplanche has pointed out, even though Freud himself, in certain texts, divorced the mechanisms of conflict, repression, defense from any description of content, he always recalled that it was sexuality upon which these mechanisms bore. "Even though the broad lines of conflict and the mechanism of repression [or defense] can apparently be described in all their generality, how is it infact that one's sexual life constitutes the only weak poir t on which repression effectively comes to bear?"33As an example we might compare "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" to "A Child is Being Beaten." The more formal and abstract schema of the first essay is radically complicated in the second essay where the sexual content of the representation is made explicit and gender taken into account. Very different representations are thus produced. There is no such sexual content, no sexual difference in Bloom's system. Finally the danger inherent in giving priorityto defense, in "analyzing the defence before the drive,"34 is in its homogenizing effects. For Laplanche and Pontalis, this danger is defined as the possibility of the instinct's being thought of as "devoid of any dialectic of its own .... The upshot of this line of reasoning is that the instinct comes to be seen as a completely positive force, bearing no trace of prohibition."35 Bloom seems to avoid this particular pitfall by describing the drive itself as being, like defense, formed through flights and negations.

31. Ibid., p. 98. 32. Lacan, Le Seminaire(Livre 1). Les tcrits techniquesde Freud, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1975, p. 23. 33. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 29. 34. Lacan, "The direction of the treatment," p. 238. 35. Laplanche andJ.-B. Pontalis, "Defence Mechanisms," The Languageof Psycho-Analysis, New York, Norton, 1973, p. 111.

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Drives and defenses are, in fact, almost identical in Bloom's system; they are, in his words, "mutually contaminated." But there is a problem as Lacan sees it, in presupposing "that defence and drive are concentric, the one being moulded, as it were, on the other."36 The problem is that this homologous relationship reduces the conflictual condition of the psyche on which Freud's (and Bloom's, purportedly) theory is based. What is conservedby this reduction is the integrity of the ego. By giving priority to defense, setting it beforeall stimuli, one forestalls, or thinks one forestalls, the splitting of the ego. What one conserves is the we (that is men - "nor do I believe that sex ... can narrow this 'we' down"37) who are the majesty (his majesty, the ego) of the American literary tradition. It is beyond question that Bloom's theory happily serves his practical aim of delimiting this majesty and this tradition. I am aware that in a sense I am not confronting Bloom on his "own ground"--I am instead refusing to grant him this ground, questioning it from a position which he is attempting to exclude. For it is equally clear that his elimination of all otherness runs counter to the aims of feminism, the very belated and heterogeneous history which founds American literature, and the ever deferred resolution of the transference. For Bloom, "a poem is always theotherman, the precursor, and so a poem is always a person, always the father of one's Second Birth."38 It is only by giving priority to defense that one can disguise from oneself the fact that all defense is espritd'escalier,that all one can say in one's defense can neither delay nor detour the split which defense itself is complicit in engendering. All a good defense can do is to set up against the ego a determined (in this case, determined as masculine) otherness (a poem, a person, an object a) which can in principle be mastered and known (in a linear drama of anteriority,of influence and theft) while in fact it is an undetermined other, language itself, which determines and is the general condition of knowledge: the alteritythat allows and eludes "our" knowledge and speech. Interventionon the Transferenceii Lacan was not content to replace a "one-body psychology" with a "twobody psychology"- this was the direction taken by the object relations school. Rather he set out to question both the relation and the object itself. This was accomplished through the shifting of the focus of psychoanalysis onto the analytic scene of the transference, away from the family scene. The theoretical advantage of this shift stems from this: from the beginning the transference has been considered, in a defining sense, as a simulation. Freud refers to it as an "artificial illness" and says that the patient makes a "false 36. 37. 38.

Lacan, "The direction of the treatment," p. 239. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 19. Ibid.

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connection" with the person of the analyst. To make the transference one's field of operation is to place oneself squarely within an order of deceit-to make it and not reality the object of one's investigation. I say deceit because Lacan says over and over that the transference-to suppose to know, to love--is fundamentally a matter of deception and over and over, in various ways, he links desire and deceit together and sets up psychoanalysis as the search for their truth. Who can deny, he says, that there is truth about lying. Lacan links desire and deceit through a reference to Descartes's fiction of the evil genius (or deceiving Other). For Descartes, the act of uttering, even the act of speaking this hyperbolic doubt, that life is nothing but a dream, a total deception -is taken as the moment and the guarantee of the cogito. The cogito is while, in the act of, thinking (an interior speech). Thus even if everything it thinks is subject to doubt, the cogito's certainty of existence is guaranteed. It escapes all determined doubts which may be contained within it because it exceeds them in their totality. For Freud, on the other hand, saying or recounting (a dream, for example) is not simultaneous with being. One is also in the unconscious and it is in the obvious gap between the experience of dreams produced by the unconscious and our telling of them that doubt arises. Saying, then, does not contain doubt, but produces it as it produces desire in its aftermath. Desire and deceit are both marks of the failure of language to coincide with any totality of being, of the failure of the subject to recognize itself in language. As opposed to this, even now, studies are proceeding at the University of California to prove that facial expressions are linked to the nervous system, that a smile on one's face is a smile in one's nervous system. At the end of an article which reports these studies, the principal researcher is given the last word. Happily he cites Poe's "The Purloined Letter" in support of his study: In that work, Poe wrote that when he wants to find out how wise, stupid, good, or evil a person is or what he is thinking about at the moment, "I fashion the expression on my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thought or sentiments arise in my mind or heart."39 Clearly this statement demonstrates a lack of literary sophistication, since it does not even bother to distinguish Poe from Dupin let alone consider the gap which separates the statement from the act of uttering. Lacan has this same passage in mind when he offers, by way of undermining the certainty of this maneuvering mimicry, a "sceptical" joke from Freud's joke book: Why do you tell me you are going to Cracow so that I will think you are going to Lemberg when you are really going to Cracow? Such jokes, Freud says, attack the cer39. Harold M. Schmeck, Jr., "Study Says Smile May Indeed Be an Umbrella," New York Times,Sept. 9, 1983, Section C, p. 16.

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tainty of our knowledge for it reveals that truth is not the simple description of things as they are.40 Rather truth would be that description which takes the listener into account. But- and here's the rub-between the speaker and the listener, even when that listener is the speaker him/herself, there is a gap which escapes accounting. What matters is not that the speaker in the joke intentionally lied about his destination, but that speech itself--which cannot guarantee its own context - inevitably gives rise to deceit and that the attempt, in any verbal exchange, to eradicate deceit by inserting its statements into a totalized context, only trips off an "indefinite oscillation" and results in an effect of disorientation and anxiety.41The attempt to identify with one's interlocutor by duplicating his or her (facial) expression, fails because it takes expression as the repetition of some prior order of reference rather than as of the order of language, a missed encounter with any prior real or any totality. Given these developments in his work, how are we to take Lacan's difficult-to-countenance description of the statue of St. Theresa. Certainly not at face value: ... it is the same as for Saint Theresa- you only have to go and look at Bernini's statue in Rome to understand immediately that she's coming, there is no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coning from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it.42 After all of this? After, in the very same seminar, criticizing others because their understanding is a little too hasty, warning us to wait until he has explained further? "I believe in God," he tells us, repeating the beginning of the Apostle's Creed. A disciple of Freud? The reference to St. Theresa, then, can only be a (sceptical) joke. Where are you going/ Where is she coming fromwe know the answer will not be straightforward. Nor straightaway. This whole seminar, "God and the Jouissance of The Woman," as well as "A Love Letter," is replete with references to the mystic tradition, the metaphysical tradition of love, and Greek (particularly Aristotelian) philosophy. But it is Plato's Symposiumwhich provides one of the most useful collateral readings for these seminars. The relation between the Ecrits of Jacques Lacan and the ejaculationsof St. Theresa of Rome must be compared to the relation between the daimon of Plato-Socrates and Diotima of Mantineia. Diotima is not a guest, not present, at the symposium. Nor is she, unlike all the others in the dialogue, a historical figure. She is a "fictional" figure and can thus 40. Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, S.E., VIII, p. 115. 41. Quoted from Lacan (Ecrits, p. 60) in Barbara Johnson, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), p. 468. 42. Lacan, "God and the Jouissance of The Woman," in Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell andJacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose, New York, Pantheon, 1982, p. 147. (Much of my own text is dependent on the introductions to this valuable book, as well as the essays it translates.)

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appear when she is needed, at the beginning of Socrates' encomium, and disappear when she is not, at the encomium's close. That is to say, she can be sublated by the dialogue, as its own conception. What she has revealed to Socrates about love and the reality of beauty is not narrated, but quoted by him directly, that is, it is made present to the listener. It is this integrity of her speech, assured through mimesis, which guarantees Socrates' identity with her (her speech is his) and thus his knowledge. "For the soul to come into being, she, the woman, is differentiated from it . . . called woman [dit-femme] and defamed [diffame]."43 (Un destin sifuneste.) Diotima has taught Socrates, as he says, the art of love (ta erotica),yet by the end of the speech, eros has taken on a different meaning--the immortality it begets is not children, but fame, the securing of a name for oneself. In the end Diotima herself, the woman, teacher, disappears to be replaced by Socrates the pedagogue. It is he who is applauded at the end of the speech, the acknowledged master among his disciples. Socrates knows-this is the only time he will assert an absolute knowledgeabout love. The woman does not exist. How are we to read such a statement when we come across it in Lacan's seminars? Similarly, how are we to understand the passage that refers to St. Theresa? It is perhaps because the reference to St. Theresa follows a reference to Lacan's women colleagues (those who cannot tell what they have experienced), that we take St. Theresa as a real woman. The colleagues seem to lend her a reality. But what must not be forgotten is that St. Theresa is a statue, for God's sake, a symbolic representation of a woman. This observation retroactively reorganizes our understanding of the reference to the women analysts. Whatever we can say about them or they about themselves, will be determined by the symbolic order that displaces the order of the real. Never mind, then, for the moment, where St. Theresa is coming from; the difficulty of this seminar is in locating Lacan, deciding where he is in all of this. The criticisms that have been levied against him on the basis of this passage are all aimed at his being reduced to designating the jouissance of the woman as "vaginal and talking about . . . the uterus and other suchlike oddities,"44 in other words, of finding in this representation the essence of the woman as knowing(in some carnally experiential sense) and thus as the subject supposed to know, or as the reification of the impossibility of knowing (of not being able to say what she has experienced) and thus as the one who subverts knowledge. But Lacan can always answer that it is the representation's truth we refute, not his. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Lacan is hiding behind the statue of St. Theresa the way Socrates hides behind Diotima as he "takes his leave," 43. 44.

Lacan, "A Love Letter," in Feminine Sexuality, p. 156. Lacan, "God and the Jouissance of the Woman," p. 146.

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that is, leaves aside the authorial discourse before the figural speech of Diotima. Lacan does not hold apart these two discourses as it is recommended that one do in Book III of Plato's Republic. Rather he fuses them in a style called substitutionary narration or "veiled speech." The integrity of quoted speech is thus pierced by the narrating, authorial, discourse. This has the additional effect of undermining the authority of the authorial. We recall that in the Symposium, the quoted speech of Diotima was a necessary step toward absolute knowledge, that is the certitude of Socrates is made possible only by the loosening of himself as subject from the woman who is henceforth deemed merely an objectof knowledge. The woman, on the level of absolute universals, is in remission, as one says of disease and sin-and the man is absolved of her. The observation that the woman does not exist, then, is logical, not anatomical. If absolute knowledge exists, it is logical that the woman does not. Lacan does not refute this, rather he reveals it as an underlying premise of idealism, and he repeats it. Yet the repetition of idealism's message within this seminar which attempts to undermine the notion of absolute knowledge, turns it back on itself. Not in the sense of a simple reversal (the questioning of knowledge does not restore the existence of thewoman), the returned message a negation which cancels the sent. Rather the fact (and the statement) that the woman does not exist is a remainderthat will not be contained, sublated by repetition. What is at stake in the attack on the category of absolute knowledge is the totalized presence of both an object and a subject of knowledge. The sense of the statement "the woman does not exist" is not stable. Yet this is true, as Lacan says most clearly in "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' of any speech act or representation- it allows in its transmission more than a single meaning; it can and does say more than its speaker intends or knows that it says. Since it is a myth that the subject's knowledge adequates symbolic construction, it is possible and even inevitable that though women are constructed within a phallocentric order, this construction will not be limited to that which is comprehendible or foreseeable by the subject. That there are effects of symbolic construction that exceed the subject's field of vision is evident in any psychoanalytic discussion of desire as that which exceeds the signifying subject. By this account neither desire nor women are original forces which precede the symbolic, rather they are both produced within it even if they are not completely or immediately apprehended by it. Thus, the statue of St. Theresa does represent an otherness to the subject who looks at it, but it is the otherness of the subject's message returned to it backwards, bearing witness of the subject's lack (and not only assurance) of knowledge. This is not the natureof women, for as constructs they have no nature, nor are they eternal or self-identical, dependent as they are upon a changing symbolic. But they are points from which we may speculate on the ways the symbolic extends itself beyond its own rigid reaches. It is because of its supplementary productions that there is any movement within the symbolic and that it does not remain a

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constant or frigid system. It produces always more than its own reproduction, its self-coincidence; it produces, in short (and here the phrase takes on a more positive sense), esprit d'escalier. Gradiva, The Spirit of Pompeii The fact that Lacan undertakes his analysis of the woman in relation to the subject supposed to know by means of a reference to Bernini's statue in Rome, places him, rather complicatedly, in line as a disciple of Freud, especially that Freud who identified himself with Norbert Hanold. Hanold's peculiar illness, one remembers, was that woman did not exist for him except as a conception in marble or bronze. One remembers also Freud's seemingly infinite collection of bronze and marble statues and the privileged place accorded one of them in particular-that of Gradiva. The Gradiva relief-which Freud first spotted in Rome, inside the Vatican-was placed at the foot of Freud's analytic couch, next to a reproduction of a tableau by Ingres, OedipusInterrogatingthe Sphinx. In this configuration at least she is clearly a symbol of healing, of the answer at the end of the analytic search. Freud made plaster casts of her and distributed them among his fellow analysts; she became a sign of their discipleship. After

Plastercastof the Gradivareliefat thefoot of Freudscouch.

Marie Bonaparte translated Jensen's Gradivainto French (1931), the surrealists took up the celebration of Gradiva in their writings and in their paintings and sculpture. A small art gallery was even named after her in 1937.45 Lacan must surely have inherited, through his association with the surrealists, this fascinated interest in Gradiva. But what is remarkable is the way his discussion of St. Theresa escapes being a simple testament to this fascination and becomes instead an analysis of it. Jensen's Gradiva:A PompeiianFancy(1903) was received by contemporaries as "just one of those novels in the neo-Romantic style that illustrated the current theme of a man's infatuation on a woman's 'phantom.'"46 Ellenberger also tells us that "one favorite idea [in the last two decades of the nineteenth century] maintained that man, instead of seeing woman as she really is, projects onto her images classifiable into three categories: (1) the imaginary ideal, (2) images drawn from his own past, and (3) archetypal images."47 (There is nothing surprising in this list which begins to look like Freud's list of narcissistic object choices through which the ego is constructed. What needs to be examined is this relation between the construction of the ego and the fantasy of the woman.) Gradiva, clearly, was an example of the nineteenth-century notion of the femme inspiratrice.This is precisely the notion of the woman supposed to know that is the target of Lacan's attack. In order to undermine its idealizing 45. Pamela Tytell, La Plumesur le divan,Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1982, pp. 61-77. 46. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discoveryof the Unconscious,New York, Basic Books, 1970, p. 790. 47. Ibid., p. 293.

Left:AndreMasson.Gradiva. 1939. Door for the GradivaGallery. Right.MarcelDuchamp. 1937. celebration of the woman, in this case splendid in walking, Lacan makes explicit the sexuality which defines her splendor and the desire, the lack of the phallus, which she is designed to conceal. Lacan's work, like Freud's own later work, makes it possible to read "Delusion and Dream" (Freud's analysis of Jensen's novel) as an essay on the transference in which the love of Hanold for Zoe is seen as a transference effect, a deception and not a restoration of the real. Freud wrote his analysis of Gradivain 1906, one year after he finally allowed Dora to be published. After the long struggle with the analysis and with the text of Dora - which was seen by Freud himself as a fragment and a failure - he must have seen the coherent narrative Gradivaas an example of the successof psychoanalysis. Not only does the analysis terminate happily, but the eponymous heroine of this narrative, unlike Dora who walked out on Freud, is more than complicit in the analysis. She is, in fact, the agent of the cure, the analyst herself. As a successful analyst, a subject supposed to know, she offers Freud confirmation of his own validity and worth. Gradiva can be seen as truly a daydream (ready to hand like a kenning to an oral poet) which Freud could employ in the fulfillment of his profoundest wish-to be recognized as the father of psychoanalysis. Gradivaoperates as a symbolicstaircase dream, restoring the sexual relation upon which Freud's anxiety dream had already begun to cast doubt.48 48. In TheInterpretation of Dreams,Freud terms a dream in which the name Gradusappears a "modifiedstaircase dream," since the name means "steps."

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But as Lacan has told us, if in dreams wishes appear to be fulfilled, this is dreams lack the optative mood. We see in his analysis of Hanold's because only first dream, some of Freud's difficulty in reconciling wish with fulfillment. In this dream, Hanold sees Gradiva in Pompeii, in 79 A.D., the year of the volcanic eruption. Despite the rain of pebbles and ash which fills the air, Hanold has no difficulty breathing or walking. (Recall the lack of inhibition at the beginning of Freud's dream on the staircase.) The wish fulfilled in this dream, Freud tells us, is that of witnessing the catastrophe of 79 (this is Hanold's wish as both lover and archeologist), of being present with his beloved Gradiva. Freud also notes that this is an anxiety dream and, by way of explanation, outlines his first theory of anxiety. This explanation serves significantly to acknowledge the painful contents of the dream (the destruction of Pompeii and the loss of Gradiva as she turns, before Hanold's eyes, into a marble statue) as the manifest only. What is latent behind the anxiety is the fulfilled erotic wish to be in the presence of the beloved woman. But if we reject this interpretation, based on a theory which Freud would later overturn, we see that the dream constitutes Gradiva not as present, but as lost and thus as constitutive of Hanold's desire. As Gradivais a somnabulistic narrative, populated with figures like Lethe and Hypnos, "Delusion and Dream" is also a bit automatic, an optimistic transference essay that has not yet fully broken from the cathartic method. Rather than read the entire story, I will concentrate on one point at which Freud's failure to elaborate the transference and its effects contributes to a decided error in his own reading of the narrative. Interestingly enough, it is on the meaning of the reference to a woman colleague that his stumbling occurs. Hanold has this "strangely nonsensical" dream: Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat making a trap out of a blade of grass in order to catch a lizard and she said, "Please stay quite still-my colleague is right; the method is really good, and she has used it with the greatest success."49 The speech in the dream repeats, with some changes, a speech which Hanold heard during the day uttered by a zoologist whom Hanold had seen trying to catch lizards. This man spoke these words: The method suggested by my colleague, Eimer, is really good; I have already used it often with the best of success. Please keep quite still.50 What troubles Freud in his interpretation of this dream is the substitution of a woman colleague ("my colleague . . . she") for Eimer. He confronts the substi49. 50.

Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva:A PompeiianFancy, in Delusion and Dream and OtherEssays, p. 203. Ibid., p. 207.

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tution as a "puzzle" which he then sets out to solve. "Fortunately," however, the answer can not evade him long, since "only one girl can be meant by 'woman colleague"' and this is Zoe's friend, Gisa, who has come to Pompeii on her honeymoon. From this identification, Freud is able to understand the lizardcatching as a coded equivalent of husband-catching. This reading is quite simply wrong.51 First of all, Gisa is not the only woman who can be meant as the referent of "my colleague." Throughout the narrative, for example, there have been many parallels set up between Gradiva and science, represented as Hanold's traveling companion and as a woman with whom he has forgotten how to communicate. Hanold's journey is, in an important sense, the passing from a disenchantment with one system of knowledge to a recovery of fascination in another. Each system is represented by a woman and the transition is effected through a forgetting and subsequent remembering of language. The scene of the "cure"is pictured as a classroom in which Hanold signals the success of his instruction, his mastery of his material, by translating his instructor's name, freezing it on a signified. Etymology reconfirms archaeology, knowledge is guaranteed. Gradiva is indisputably a colleague of science. Yet it seems that only a very hasty reading would overlook the fact that the narrative demands that Zoe be the colleague to whom Gradiva refers. Certainly the tale sets out to confound these two women, to make them, finally, one. It is this, primarily, in which the "cure" consists. Yet at this point in the narrative, for Hanold, this destined identification has not taken place and the cure still lies ahead. Freud is here premature in his reading. The splendidness of Jensen's Gradiva is marred, Freud feels, by the arbitrariness of two narrative details: the coincidence of Zoe's being in Pompeii and the exact resemblance between her and the bas-relief. Freud sees these as exterior, authorial interventions which are not resultant upon Hanold's delirium. This is a very curious non-psychoanalytic reading indeed, for psychoanalysis teaches that it is the symbolic order that determines the subject and its reality and not the other way around. "A fictive tale has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its

51. It is perhaps necessary to justify my calling an interpretation wrong, since psychoanalysis appears to some to have opened interpretation to all possible meanings. The theory that a signifier has no meaning in itself, but is constantly assigned meanings retrospectively, by deferred action, may seem to imply a freedom of interpretation to assign away at will. But this is to give a value of zero to the signifier, to begin with a subject as a tabula rasa, and to fall prey to a belief in a voluntarism which would locate the power of the attribution of meaning in an individual subject. Instead Lacan specifies that the subject begins as a negativevalue, that is, not from nothing, but from a lack, a minus which the subject constantly tries to make up by becoming what the other desires. Although in principle any signifier is capable of assuming an infinite number of meanings, desire imposes limits on these at any given moment. Any analyst who ignores the finiteness of desire, engages in a blind formalism.

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conception arbitrary."52 It is this symbolic necessity which Freud ignores in his reading. It is the dream which establishes for Hanold the connection between Gradiva and Zoe, but it is not insignificant (as Freud's reading assumes) that this connection is made from the point of the fantasy of Gradiva. Zoe is not present in the dream even though she may be indicated by it. It is also clear that she takes her reality from this indication; Zoe has no reality for Hanold until the fantasy of Gradiva constructs her as real. In Freud's account, this process is reversed. It is the real Zoe, and Freud's reading from this assumed point of a prior reality, that establishes in the dream a "little kernel of truth." Zoe, then, the little kernel of truth, is assumed to be present in the dream and not constructed by it. The colleague, therefore, must be someone other than Zoe, someone on her same "level of reality." It is only through such a reading that Gisa can be considered the only possible answer to the puzzle. What is crucial is that however quickly the narrative closes the gap, for a time Gradiva is not Zoe, the two women are held apart. For a time Gradiva is an indeterminate other, connected not to Hanold, but to an infinite chain of other colleagues. As soon as she becomes confounded with Zoe, she becomes the determined other, the reality which secures his presence of mind. Where the journey had begun, full of anxiety, as the investigation of sexual difference (of whether or not a woman's manner of walking was different from a man's), it ends with an alleviation of anxiety's symptoms ("without knowing exactly why, he felt that he was breathing much more easily") and difference denied by love's deception. The final image is of Hanold's dropping back from his walk with Zoe so that he can observe at a distance the perfect perpendicularity of her fetishized foot. Rediviva, indeed. What is resurrected from the prehistoric past is the phallus-copula which makes that past simultaneous and disavows its difference. This is no cure, but the resistance side of the transference. In Freud's reading, the significant relationship is between Zoe-Gradiva and Gisa rather than between Zoe and Gradiva. This, of course, shifts the meaning of "colleague." Since Gisa's role in the narrative is so slight-she facilitates the transition between Hanold's being annoyed by houseflies and fly-like honeymoon couples and his falling in love and welcoming the prospect can only conceive of her collegiality with Zoe-Gradiva of marriage-Freud matter of choosing and hunting a husband. Appropriately, this a as literally, not only the "real," but also the insect imagery in the narreading privileges rative, making Zoe more an entomologist than an analyst. If Freud had instead directed his attention to the relationship between Zoe and Gradiva, he would have found that it is Hanold's demand for absolute knowledge which unites them as colleagues: femmes inspiratrices.It is only from this observation that it is possible to proceed to an analysis (rather than a paralysis) of the transference. 52.

Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' p. 40.

Uncertainty*

FRANCOIS ROUSTANG translated by RICHARD

MILLER It is not doubt, but certainty, that leads to madness. - Nietzsche

If we adopt the biological view, doubt would appear to be impossible. Darwinism, after all, rests on the incontrovertible fact that minute differences do exist among individuals of the same species. Why should the same not hold true in the field of sociology or of psychology? Why must we register an uneasiness, the torment of having to distinguish ourselves from the rest of our kind or, contrariwise, our incoercible need to melt into the mass? The difference man requires to maintain himself in existence is a thing he dreads utterly. Hence it seems his individuality can never be stable. The traditional questionwhat is the principle of individuation? - or the more recent historical questionat what moment and in what context did Western individualism emerge? - may be formulations created to avoid a question fraught with even more anxiety: what is the human factor introduced to forestall the reality of the definitive acquisition of individual differences so that free rein is given to uncertainty of distinction and, hence, to the threats brought to bear on existence itself? Classically, and with assurance, psychoanalysis would reply to the traditional and historical formulations of the question by stating that the individual's singularity is based on his recollection of his own, always unique, history. By recollecting or collecting for himself the events and relationships presiding over his birth and development, the patient restores or recreates his individuality. Hitherto he had been the impotent victim of his past, worked upon by mecha* This essay first appeared in Passe Present, 1 (1982), Paris, Editions Ramsay. 1. "In Germany, shepherds have won bets by recognizing each sheep in a flock of one hundred they had been tending for only two weeks." Quoted in La Recherche,No. 129 (January 1982), p. 11.

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nisms of which he was unaware and over which he could have no control. The inventory of his nature, a nature alien to him, enables him to achieve selfrecognition through an image prefabricated for him by other people or other factors. He can then become the other he has been and recapture himself in it. He is no longer an automaton, but a discrete living being. Things are not, perhaps, quite that simple. We know the problems Freud encountered in his practice. The labor of recall does not yield the expected results; symptoms recur and shift. Furthermore, recall itself is often blocked by the power of the transference factor, one the patient has no interest in overcoming. As Freud notes, he exchanges his neurosis for a transfer neurosis, in other words he rearranges his symptoms because of and thanks to his relationship with the analyst. Far from arriving at self-discovery, he embarks upon a path of increasing dependence that can give him the illusion of being; in fact, he mimes the other, of whom he becomes a colorless double. Or a garrulous talker who no longer knows how to use his own words and babbles analytical discourse, if he doesn't become a fanatic adherent of some cause or other. For one doesn't so easily become "the subject of one's own story"; more precisely, one does so, according to the most classical doctrine, only through recourse to transference. It is just there, however, that all the troubles arise. For this relational power that is supposed to lead to separation, distinction, individuation, is also the one that bars the way to them. This is not the place in which to dwell upon this point at any length. But since transference can be considered a fairly well defined, and thus fairly accessible, paradigm in any relationship, we must try to say something about it. Which may open up other prospects. Psychoanalysts are not overfond of talking about transference as a power because that notion becomes confused when removed from physics or mechanics and brought into the psychic field where it is no longer measurable; its clarity and effectiveness reside solely in that. Nevertheless, we must perforce employ it if we are to account for the effects of analysis. We cannot just keep repeating that psychoanalysis is a speech process, for although that is what makes it original, it is not what makes it effective. If speech is its operative element it is solely because it takes place within the transference, because it is supported by it and thus derives its strength from it. Lacan once posited a radical difference between replete speech and empty speech,2 but he did so with the ultimate intention of reducing everything to speech and of rejecting all attempts to spell out the reality set up between analyst and analysand. Both speech regimes in fact diverge through the status they do or do not enjoy in the transference as a specific relation. It is not true that psychoanalysis operates through speech alone, that it is of itself capable of bringing about the division necessary to the existence of an individuated subject. Its practicians know this: it is in and 2.

Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 247.

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through transference that the patient, projecting onto the analyst the elements of his story, can see them emerge and, in bringing them to bear upon himself, for and against himself, appropriate them unto himself. Speech is merely the medium that permits transference to emerge, develop, change form. However, in order for the patient to dare allow his history to emerge and to work upon it, he must - to use one of Freud's terms - expect3 something vis-a-vis the analyst, a pure expectation vis-a-vis the other qua other, and, inversely, the analyst must expect something from the patient, an expectation and trust that provoke his subjective response. Such reciprocal expectations, without fixed object, with no exterior task to perform, without social referent, furnish a basic definition of the constitutive relational power of the human individual, a power that they raise to incandescence. How further define that force, one of whose most striking characteristics is its ambivalence? Indeed, expectation can very quickly change into a reciprocal dependence that can extend as far as a yearning for the life-and, thus, the death - of the other. It thereby demonstrates that it is precisely the refined force of amorous passion which, in its desire for union, is both life giving and life extinguishing, what creates me through the other and what annuls me in him. In January 1907, at one of his Wednesday soirees, Freud remarked: There is only one power capable of surmounting resistances, and that is transference. We force the patient to abandon his resistances throughlovefor us. Our treatments are treatments through love. There remains for us only the task of eliminating personalresistances (to the transference). We can cure to the extent that the transference exists; the analogy with treatment by hypnosis is striking. However, psychoanalysis utilizes the power of transference to bring about a lasting change in the patient, while hypnosis is only a piece of sleight-ofhand.4 That is clear and explicit enough. We must add, however, that such love is special, that it is not hampered by any social exposure, that it is solely governed by subjective modification. It is a love experienced in vitro. Freud was later to revert to this aspect of analysis when he spoke of "transference love."5 However, he was then careful to hold himself somewhat aloof from the positions he had taken orally in front of the group. He was wary of love in analysis. So much so that the question of transference did not arise when he attempted to take into account the unifying motivations in groups; at that time he compared the state of being in love not to transference but to hypnosis (while avoiding 3. Sigmund Freud, GesammelteWerke, London, Imago, 1942, 5, p. 15; 7, p. 339; 8, p. 366. 4. The Minutes of the PsychoanalyticSocietyof Vienna, New York, International Universities Press, 1962, session of January 30, 1907. These remarks of Freud's are in no way original; they are commonly held by magnetists and hypnotists. Cf. L. Chertok, "Psychotherapie et sexualite, considerations historiques et epistemologiques," Psychotherapies,1981, pp. 215-222. 5. Freud, G. W., 10, pp. 306-321.

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any mention of their close relationship). Between the states of love and hypnosis, he was to write, there exists a fundamental difference: the second "excludes sexual satisfaction."6 This signal exclusion deserves some further examination. It may perhaps conceal some serious problem whose utterance seems to be avoided. Wondering why psychoanalysts must renounce the sexual end product of the love they arouse can seem ridiculously incongruous; the most elementary code of professional ethics demands respect for the patient seeking relief for his or her symptoms, not a sexual partner. However, such a professional response is valid in many other instances and ignores the contradiction inherent in a course of treatment that induces love but rejects its consequences. A second justification for the exclusion of sexual satisfaction resides in the fact that a passing to action, as we say, could compromise further treatment. How can one dream, associate, project, through someone else who has become a real person, who is no longer an undefined person capable of becoming many different people? And, moreover, it is not that certain that in this precise instance, as seems generally true, the sexual relationship would actually diminish the intensity of the liaison, since what is created on the stage of the fantasy is with difficulty denied by reality. We are shifting here onto a strange territory. Indeed, a very special interdiction hangs over the analytic relationship. In order to understand it we must refer to one of the most typical aspects of any analysis. Through traits that can be minor, anodyne, or in themselves devoid of meaning, the psychoanalyst in transference actually becomes the analysand's father or mother, sister, brother, or someone close to him; the analysand recognizes in the psychiatrist's office the aroma of some childhood dwelling, he hears there its sound, its music, he recaptures there the hues of some landscape of his infancy. In short, if he falls in love there, sometimes without realizing it, if that love is so intense and violent, if its other face, hatred, can become so terrible, it is because all of these sites, characters, characteristics, and details are part of the patient's earliest intimacies. With a power he has not felt since, the analysand loves in the analyst the faces of persons who are sexually taboo. The power of transference, the power of love that can cure, is here once again a passion unrivaled and unrivalable, but secretly, so secretly that one no longer knows it, stamped by the ban on sexual kinship, in other words by the incest taboo. So it is nugatory to mention as a part of professional or technical ethics the exclusion of sexual satisfaction. It exists in the love created by transference as the inherent contradiction that specifies it. Any overt sexual act between analyst and patient would thus be not only and primarily a moral failure or 6. Freud, GroupPsychology(1921), G. W., 13, p. 126. The text continues: "It is interesting to see that those sexual tendencies that are taboo because of their goal are precisely the ones that set up such lasting links between human beings."

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practical mistake, it would bring out the sexual taboo par excellence.Neither, were it to occur, would there be any reason for taking offense or for reprobation, or even for surprise, because it would only be the manifestation of the power brought into play. From this, one must draw an inverse conclusion. If transference is nothing other than reactualized incest, if the taboo that hangs over the analytic relationship reproduces the incest taboo, then the motive force of the analytic cure, the well-known power inherent in it, can be defined as the republishing of the incest desire, a desire that presides over the birth of every human being. A desire that is, perhaps, the prototype of all desire. Lacan has accustomed us to thinking about desire in terms devised to place the maximum distance between ourselves and the loathsome relationship between the object and its unpleasant emanations of gratification, frustration, adaptation, and oblectation. According to him, desire is to be posited as though it had no object, as though it could not exist without a lack, or as a supine, inactive object. However, isn't using an abstract, distanced, angelic formulation nothing but a way to speak of incestuous desire without naming it: the banned object finds itself transformed into an absence of object; the object rendered inaccessible by the ban imposed upon it becomes a pure impossibility. Everything occurs as if the banning of the object were unbearable and, instead of being able to play with and around it in that unusual situation, one gets around it by forging a celestial theory, one no longer wants to face it, it is eradicated, and we mark its empty place with a hole or put a rim around it. It is not at all surprising that, for some, psychoanalysis should be part of a religious or mystical tradition: the ineffability of masochism vying on every point with logic. This is a way of avoiding a great deal of twaddle, but a great many difficulties as well, because, for example, one no longer has to assign to psychoanalysis a precise purpose in culture or in society, which would entail the unveiling of a desire such as the desire for prohibited incest. Here one finds oneself back at the status of the politically and socially possible and, hence, of the individual within those spheres. That concept of transference is very closely bound up with the realm of education- if it is a matter not of turning out standardized individuals, but human beings with a capacity for change- and, for the same reasons, with the realm of politics. The power that continually tends toward realization, the power that is banned under pain of reabsorption into the origin and of temporal negation, is the primal source of all individuation to the extent that it is directed away from the inaccessible object, guided away from that realization and toward other, broader ones. Doesn't that, quite apart from idealisms, reinvigorate the Freudian hypothesis of the libido as the prime principle of human existence? Yet we must admit that in inventing transference, Freud was primarily creating the instrument for the analyst to achieve an extreme degree of withdrawal in order to enable him to avoid feeling himself involved with or implicated

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in his own sexuality and to allow the psychoanalyst to be a pure and unfeeling receptor or a pure, unflawed mirror. Transference is something else as wellthe purified site extending all the way to passion in which the power of incestuous desire is deployed, which places the analysand- and the analyst- in a state of extreme contradiction. Awakening incestuous desire, a desire that, redirected, allows for individuation, cannot occur without posing a serious threat to individual differentiation, since such an operation can always arouse the wish to efface oneself in the proximity of one's nearest kin. Whence no doubt blighted hopes and aggravated symptoms. Whence, too, those interminable analyses that never end because one is unable to tear oneself away from that site where one first encountered feelings of love, the most enticing or the newest for those who have not previously experienced them, while at the same time theoretically protected from their excesses by the distanced presence of the analyst. However, contrariwise, if that desire is not awakened the individual will not find the strength needed, not to survive, but to live. Transference is thus designed to be the reproduction of incest and the incest taboo. But is it really a question of incest? In order to see things a bit more clearly we must distinguish degrees of realization. When we speak of incest, in proper terms, we evoke sexual relations between parents and children: motherson,7 father-daughter, or between brother and sister, sometimes between cousins. Shouldn't we also speak of incest between parents and children of the same sex, between father and son or mother and daughter? If we don't, it is because most often we speak of incest only under the heading of a taboo, and because that taboo is supposedly the foundation of society, stress will be laid on what conditions group development, the sexed reproduction that posits the difference of sexes. Yet if we consider the sexed individual we are forced to note that the difference between the sexes is a factor as unstable as the individual himself. Just as incest can arouse and eradicate individual differences, it can also arouse and eradicate sexual differences.8 Yet incest can also exist where a real amorous passion exists between parents and children through looks, caresses, bodily attentions carried far

"Son/mother 7. (or mother/son)incestseemsto dependfroma muchmoreconcealeddiscourse and to presenta certainnumberof problemsthatwe can only evoke"(PatriceBidou,"Apropos de l'incesteet de la mort,"in LaFonction Paris,Gallimard,1979,p. 111).In particular symbolique, becausethe motheris not partof the father-children line, the only one to expressendogamy. 8. FrancoiseHeritiersuggestsa seconddefinitionof incest:"Itis no longera questionof the relationshipunitingtwo bloodrelativesof differentsexesin a forbiddensexualrelationship,but It is suchblood twobloodrelatives of therelationship ofthesamesexwhosharea samesexual partner. uniting relationrelativesof the samesex, in brother/brother, sister/sister,father/son,mother/daughter ships,whoenterintoan incestuousrelationshipbecauseof the factof theircommonpartnerand in LaFonction de l'incesteet de sa prohibition," whorunits risks"("Symbolique p. 219). symbolique, thatthe incesttaboois enacted"whenthe notionof identityvacillatesat Later,it is demonstrated the bordersof difference" (p. 232).

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beyond adolescence.9 This is no doubt why a very well known female psychoanalyst makes it a rule for parents not to kiss their children. At least such excesses have the benefit of showing that incest is so present in relationships that it must be kept down by taboos that go back to society's very beginnings. Finally, we can extend the idea of incest to the desire for sexual relations expressed in fantasies and dreams. Here the taboo can operate only through guilt and shame, which cause rejection of fantasies and the forgetting of dreams. This is not to say that they may not reemerge in the form of symptoms. The existence of incestuous fantasies or dreams causes no problems for psychoanalysts. They willingly admit, for example, that the little girl's desire to have a child by her father is, for her, a structuring factor. They may not even be overly disturbed if in such fantasies or dreams they themselves are substituted for the figure of parent or near relation. However, they deem feelings of love directed toward them, and even more so, seductions designed to lead to the sexual act, to be foreign to analysis or as tending to bring it to an end, and they will protect themselves against that by every means available. This, however, is to overlook the fact that the various levels on which incest can manifest itself are inseparable. If its realization is unthinkable it would not be able to be fantasized or dreamed. We must even turn the proposition around and state that incest can occur in the realms of fantasy or dream only to the extent that its realization is thinkable. And thinkable signifies that it exists on both sides, on the part of the father or mother and on the part of the child, and in analysis on the part of the psychoanalyst and on the part of the analysand. Shocking suggestions, but in the end extremely banal ones. People want to find them shocking only because they can thereby protect themselves -and very poorly at that- from impulses they would prefer to ignore totally. For is it conceivable that the little girl who wants to sleep with her father (note that prudish analytical literature prefers to speak of the fantasy of having a child with the father, something, let it be noted, that was much more serious in ancient civilizations because incest was thus made visible10) would express herself in such a manner if nothing had occurred between her and her father that enabled her to forge such fantasies? Such fantasies are not imaginary productions that emerge from nowhere. They have been inscribed in the body by the father himself. We note the opposite of this in persons for whom fantasies or dreams seem to be impossible: if such should be the case it is because in their infancy they were not surrounded by love and incestuous desires. The fact that

9. Georges Simenon, Memoiresintimes, Paris, Presses de la Cite, 1981, provides a good example of actual incest, albeit not realized sexually. 10. "The shame arises not out of the desire to sleep with his sister, or even from the fact of having actually done so, but rather from the fact that it happens at night. Or even that it (incest) emerges from the narrow framework in which it is defined: 'Incest is fine, as long as it's kept in the family,' as Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in a footnote in Secretsdefamille (Patrice Bidou, p. 121).

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parents, as well as psychoanalysts,'1 are unwilling to recognize this makes no difference. Where incest was never thinkable or possible, we find an absence of subjectivity, an abolition of the possibility of differences, and with that, a transformation of the individual into a machine that must realize its fate through another. This banality can be transposed in the analytic cure. When Freud says that psychoanalysis is healing through love, he is evidently thinking of the patient's love for the analyst. There can be no question of love by the analyst for the patient. It is forbidden, it is dangerous. He is to be nothing but a mirror, a receptor. And transference, the creation of transference as an operative concept, must stop there. However, this is false. How can this or that feature of the analyst, the color of his eyes, the timbre of his voice, the shape of his nose, a glimpse of his hand, how can all that become the point of anchorage for incestuous desires if the psychoanalyst himself were not seeking to seduce, were not in some manner "in love," were not inhabited by incestuous desires (and not by the Desire of Desire, with huge capital "D's")?An unwillingness to admit this is ridiculous. As if one could release someone from the state of morbid enjoyment from which all neurotic and psychotic mechanisms draw what they need to renew themselves, to shift ground, to invent new faces for themselves, without employing some power of an equal vigor, density, and speed! One must go even further. If the realization of incestuous desires is not actually possible, they are nothing. They exist only if they tend to satisfaction. Two perfectly distinct things have been confused, namely, the incest taboo and its impossibility. A friend who is neither stupid nor uneducated and to whom I remarked the other day that I was preparing to write something about incest interrupted me: "You mean the incest taboo." So one can no longer speak about incest other than under the heading of taboo, thereby blurring on the one hand its existence and validity and, on the other hand, its possibility. Prohibition in no way alters its real possibility. There would be no taboo, one continually reiterated, were incest purely and simply impossible. Certain ethnologists are less strict. "Incest is fine, as long as it's kept in the family," according to an epigraph in Levi-Strauss's book.'2 Which means that incest does well enough so long as society doesn't intervene to interrupt it, but it is also implicitly to recognize that incest must play its role within the family in order that society, through a game of derivation, can function. One usually says that the incest taboo is necessary so that society will not die; but one forgets that the same would hold true if incest were not practiced. The primal power is that of incest; the taboo that diverts that power onto other objects is incapable of producing it; 11.

Obviously not all of them. Cf. numerous articles in Etudesfreudiennes, L'amourde transfert,

a la sceneducrime."Also, Monique Schneider, May 1982, particularlythat ofJulien Bigras, "Retour

La Parole et l'inceste, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne,

12.

Cf. note 10.

1979.

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it can only utilize it. Everyone knows it because ethnologists state that exogamy's only goal is to arrive, through a detour, at a more or less manifest endogamy. This does not really elude psychoanalysts: marriages or sexual unions reproduce, as a positive or as a negative image, features based on the father, the mother, brother or sister. In a word, the realization of incest is not only possible, it is necessary, albeit through a third party, lest any form of relationship between human beings become exhausted. The crucial question is that of the detour, since, where incest is concerned, we are always faced with either an excess or an insufficiency. And obviously here is where we must seek one of the reasons for the radical instability of the individual conscience. When the incestuous desire is in play, how can it be made to perform correctly? Since it is the most forbidden primal violence, it can only err or deny itself. The child speaking in psychoanalysis always complains either of a lack of or an excess of affection and caresses. When Freud said that where education was concerned one could never win, he could have had this in mind. The female psychoanalyst who maintains that children should not be kissed may be thinking of the excessive physical contacts that create psychotics, but we can also suppose that she may herself fear those maternal invasions to which she was subjected or those she committed. For psychotics, devoid of any human individuality (or caricaturing it), are to be found just as readily among those whose bodies have not been coddled and who for that reason are unable to have a personal history. In addition, the excessive and the insufficient each permutate to yield identical results. Is it the incestuous mother or the frigid mother who forbids her son every woman or sends him off on a quest for all women, so that he can settle on none and she, the mother, will remain unique?13 Is it the incestuous 13. Everything derived from the category of the unique can be referredback to incest. Georges Devereux notes that in the case of the Mohaves the only marriage requiring parentalconsent, the only one requiring a ritual, the only one for which society attempts to ban divorce, is marriage between cousins, which "constitutesan act of incest, in the strictest sense of the word." Further on, the same author states: "Ifwe therefore admit that the only 'true'Mohave marriage, the only one that, as a rite, resembles marriage in other societies, is a totally taboo incestuous marriage, we are bound to conclude that the function of the marriage rite is to legitimize the illegitimate, to support the unsupportable, to substitute an apparent benevolence for a true hostility. Marriage is sacred, that is, dangerous, precisely because it allows what is forbidden; it consecrates sacrilege" Paris, Flammarion, 1972, p. 188). Whence it is easy to deduce (Ethnopsychanalyse complementariste, that the indissoluble monogamous marriage of our civilization is or strives to be a ritualizationof incest. Saint Paul, who is the real inventor of this form of marriage, sets up as a model the union of Christ and the Church. The Church, of course, is traditionally and constantly symbolized by Mary, the Virgin Mother. The model for ritualized, indissoluble monogamous marriage is thus the union of Christ with his own mother. Few religions would be so daring. Christianity cannot, therefore, be accused of disregardingincest; one of its strengths, indeed, is its daring assimilation of it: the oneness of the bond between son and mother as transformedinto a model for the link between man and woman must have been one of the bases of the unique oneness of the human individual in our culture. However, that religion has nevertheless gone a bit far in this regard, and this, perhaps, may also be one of its weaknesses.

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father or the father incapable of desiring his daughter who makes her into a frigid virgin for all men or turns her into a prostitute for any man? To answer these questions one must be able to return to a mythic time prior to the incest taboo, be able in other words to determine what in incestuous desire,derives from the incestuous object and what derives from its prohibition. In our time the lineaments of desire are indissociable, and that is why the greater power can always take the form of the lesser. The separation necessary to the individual joined to the no-less necessary linkage cannot operate other than through a fragile intersecting and criss-crossing of the excessive and the insufficient. A similar problem arises in the cure. If the psychoanalyst gives in to his desire and to seduction he creates an indissoluble link that can give the analysand the illusion of living, but which in fact chains him and forbids him any other life; if he is indifferent and cold toward his patient nothing occurs, even after years of purported analysis. However, the difficulty lies in the fact that the incestuous desire is no more perceived by those involved than it is between parents and children; only afterwards do they learn something from it. The psychoanalyst can attempt as he will to remain aloof through recourse to contraphobic practices, through silence, careful speech, chilly demeanor, but desire or the absence of desire will still pass from him to the other in a glance, an intonation, the slightest gesture. Let us suppose that a psychoanalyst totally convinced of the notions expressed here sets as his standard for accepting or rejecting someone for analysis the possibility of having or not having sexual relations with him or her. He would have as many chances of being wrong as of being right. Similarly, parents never know, even if they pretend that they do, what of this basic incestuous desire they pass on to any one of their children; let them read all the psychology books they like and adopt the most enlightened attitudes, there will always be something else, essential and unsuspected, that will pass between them and their children and that will be decisive for the latter. In behaviors the excessive can conceal an insufficiency of desire, while on the contrary a surface indifference can permit an overly violent desire to emerge via secret routes. There are stones that are burning hot and suns that freeze. At this point in the cure we come up against a basic difficulty: the impossibility of controlling the outcome, the impossibility of his knowing at the outset what his proper degree of self-investment, upon which everything will depend, should be. However, this impossibility of predicting whether the outcome of the analysis in any one case will or will not function (impossibility of prediction, which is an impossibility of mastering and thus guiding) arises out of the very essence of that outcome. The effectiveness of desire supposes the failure of mastery. Is there, can there be, any seduction, amorous state, passion (and thus transference), that is not immersed in uncertainty over the nature and effects of the relationship with the other? Is it a chain or a passport, a shackle or freedom? Can love give rise to some life, or will it turn into mortal hatred?

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Without such uncertainties nothing can ever really happen because without them there would be no risk; and without risk there would never be any chance for novelty and invention, there would never be desire, wagered and thus already lost. Psychoanalysts cannot continue to maintain that they play no active role in what they like to regard as a kind of theater. They say that because they cannot stand not knowing the part they are playing until after the fact, partially. Seduction, and therefore love, and therefore transference, function not on the basis of an object that satisfies or is meant to satisfy, nor even less on the basis of an absence that silence and withdrawal are supposed to represent, but rather on the basis of something undecidable: am I going to become the toy, the puppet of the other, will he become one, will he be one, for me? On the contrary will I, will he or she, be a bit more alive, a bit more distinct, different, free? So long as Nathanael loves the strange beauty of Olympia he believes her to be alive; the assurance that she is a doll drives him mad. The anxiety created by the unheimlich,the strangely familiar, is at the very heart of the human individual's existence. What is closest to him is also that which most eludes him and inspires the most fear. He cannot help but revert to it continually in an attempt to escape from it once again. And that is undoubtedly why incest, incestuous desire, the incest taboo, constitute a paradigm of this situation. How can one create distance out of such dangerous proximity? Why do the long journeyings of exogamy inexorably bring us back to the most blatant endogamy? If the individual were created once and for all, if separation were definitively established, if differences never threatened to bring the whole thing toppling, if we knew who the other was and who one was oneself, there would be no humanity - and hence there would not be the bittersweet savor of desire. Thanks to the conjunction of incest and its taboo, thanks to the intertwinof the excessive and the insufficient, thanks to the anxiety created by the ining timate and the distanced, the individual can create himself, but through an unending game that must continually be relearned and recommenced. In psychoanalysis, in education, in politics, the stakes are not laid down only once on the green felt of the gaming table, they are laid down every day. Incestuous desire is operative for the individual only if it actually remains a possibility, but that possibility, to remain valid, must be the effective deviation, the actual derivation, of incest. If incest is unrecognized, rejected, repressed, the individual will be left with nothing but the arid, closed field of some abandonment or deadly depression. If incest is overtly practiced and the individual has eyes, ears, and sex only for those closest to him or their surrogates, then he will always be on the verge of fragmentation and breakdown. All such hypotheses are based upon the disposition of each of us, and each of us makes use of them in his own way and according to his own background and circumstances. Yet none of us can ever stop clumsily combining those various parameters.

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The hypothesis according to which the incest taboo is the operator that brings about difference in cases where identity threatens to block the functioning of some fixed culture is an attractive one,14 but it does not perhaps take into account all aspects of the question. Another tendency emerges in many civilizations. These draw extreme conclusions from the incest taboo, conclusions that have an effect on identity. The separation of the political individual is not de facto more uncertain, but it is doubtless at the cost of a loss of differences that are no longer at stake in the risk of identity. From the Greeks, for whom women were not really members of the human genus (only the aneris anthropos),'5 to the Amazonian Indians who strive for "absolute endogamy" solely through the paternal line,'6 and to many others for whom the incest taboo ultimately serves to preserve male homosexuality,'7 culture seems unable to emerge other than by abandoning what creates nature-sexual reproduction: rejecting women, ignoring incest with the mother, repressing sexual differences. Ought we not regard this distancing of incest as one of the factors that make civilizations mortal? Like an individual, a society that turns its back on the sources of desire cannot help but become more and more anemic, more and more fragile. Having abandoned the site of its power it cannot subsist other than through constraint and by endowing political subjects with a pure abstract identity, prohibiting them from multiplying differences. Perhaps our civilization will proceed even further in its abstraction. The technological object still strongly dominates economics and politics.'8 The dream or nightmare of our era is not only of creating interchangeable individuals, of replacing man with machine, but of manufacturing life, of endowing an automaton with life. Everything that occurs, and in particular in the spheres of the reproductive process and gestation, is only the most spectacular aspect of an attempt to deprive nature of the limitations it sets for us and to wrest from desire its aleatory qualities and its lingering uncertainties. It is a question ultimately of ridding oneself of the humanity that continually interferes in every calculation. It is futile to indulge in nostalgia for the good old days or to lash out at scientific progress. We must admit, however, that in such an environment the political individual today-seems to have at his disposal only two correlative types of madness, that of the paranoiac convinced of his differences, that he is a great manipulator of the universe, and that of the subject lost in the mass in which he hopes to rediscover the life of which he is being deprived by all.'9 Is there still hope for a bodily revolt to halt such implacable logics? 14. Fran;oise Heritier, "Symboliquede l'inceste et de sa prohibition." 15. Nicole Loraux, Les enfantsd'Athena,Paris, Maspero, 1981. 16. Patrice Bidou, p. 111. 17. Georges Devereux, pp. 169-199. 18. In this connection, especially with regard to the strategic and logistic aspects, see the work dela disparition, of Paul Virilio, in particular Vitesseetpolitique,Paris, Galilee, 1977, and Esthetique Paris, Balland, 1980. 19. Elias Canetti, Masseet puissance,Paris, Gallimard, 1981.

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In that context, psychoanalysis probably owes its success to the fact that, with its modernized features, it is one of the very rare sites where sex, relationships of desire, subjectivity, are lived, relived, manipulated and, as it were, put into practice. From this viewpoint it is not dead, as some believe it to be or wish it were. It is, however, nonetheless caught up today in two contradictory temptations: either to withdraw to its own territory, to the psychic reality the cure is entrusted with introducing, but with the risk that it may become self-sufficient and lead to the isolation of a small world of initiates, or to proceed to the conquest of culture by dressing Freud's discovery up in borrowings from philosophy, linguistics, or mathematics, promoting the belief that psychoanalysis is the radical truth that endows all such disciplines with meaning. The individual who allows himself to yield to such temptations will obviously find certain of his uncertainties assuaged, but he will also probably lose what he set out to find: a bit more indeterminate and precarious difference in a world bound and determined to make everything identical.

Italian Freud: Gramsci, Giulia Schucht, and Wild Analysis

JENNIFER

STONE

Freud's Italy arouses images of genitalia. In the midst of interpreting a dream of his own which had derived some of its elements from his travels in Italy, Freud records a (geo)graphic association made by a woman patient: "A still deeper interpretation [of the dream] led to sexual dream-thoughts, and I recalled the meaning which references to Italy seem to have had in the dreams of a woman patient who had never visited that lovely country: 'gen Italien [to Italy]'-'genitalien [genitals]"' (SE 4:231-232).1 Italy is also the archaeological site of Freud's Christian wish-fulfillment. He fantasizes his triumphant arrival in Rome- a sign that the Jewish science of psychoanalysis has become universally acceptable. This end to exile would also signify that he had overcome the defeatist legacy of his precursors, his timorous father and the vanquished Semite, Hannibal.2 Freud's analysis of "the forgetting of foreign words" evokes his anxiety about the end of the Jewish line, what Umberto Saba called the decline of the "stagionedegli ebrei"[the season of the Jews].3 When a young colleague omits a word in a quotation from Virgil: "'Exoriar(e) ALIQUIS nostris ex ossibus ultor' [Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 625. Literally: 'Let 1. I am grateful to Giulio Lepschy for his comments on an earlier version I delivered at the conference, ItalyandtheCultureofModernity,at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 21-22 October 1983. I also thank Ernesto Laclau and Samuel Weber with whom I discussed some of the theoretical issues raised in the final section; all references to Freud are to the Standard Edition in 24 vols., of TheComplete Works,ed. James Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press and Psychological The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1978 [hereafter, following quotations, in parentheses (SE vol. no.: pp.)]. See TheInterpretation 2. of Dreams(SE 4:196-98); Carl E. Schorske, "Politicsand Patricide in Freud's Interpretationof Dreams,"Fin-de-siiecleVienna:Politics and Culture, New York, Vintage Books, 1981, pp. 181-207; Francois Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleshipfrom Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned

Lukacher, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; Aldo

Carotenuto, A SecretSymmetry:Sabina SpielreinBetweenJung and Freud, trans. Arno Pomerans et al.,

New York, Pantheon Books, 1982; and Jeffrey Mehlman, "The Suture of an Allusion: Lacan with Leon Bloy,"Legaciesof Anti-Semitism in France,Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 3. Umberto Saba, Prose,ed. L. Saba, Milan, Mondadori, 1964, p. 561; see Enrico Ghidetti, Italo Svevo.:La coscienzadi un borghesetriestino, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1980.

Giulia Schucht.

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someone (aliquis) arise from my bones as an avenger!']" (SE 6:9), Freud traces the revengeful "missing person"4 to an Italian woman whose periods have stopped (SE 6:11). Though Jung was not to disseminate Freud's theories through Christian Europe, as Freud had hoped he would, Edoardo Weiss and Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz) did-in the Italian peninsula, or in Trieste, at least-but both were Jews. In fact, in Trieste in the years 1909-14, Freud was "in fashion" amongJewish intellectuals, who circulated manuscript translations of his works. This is reported to us by Saba, who was analyzed by Weiss.5 At the age of 19, Weiss had studied with Freud in Vienna and became an eager disciple whose book, Elementidi Psicoanalisi(1930) contains a preface by Freud.6 When Weiss was asked to review Svevo's Confessionof Zeno (1923) for the Viennese InternationaleZeitschriftifurdrztlischePsychoanalyse,he refused, claiming that it had "nothing to do with psychoanalysis." Svevo, upset by Weiss's accusations of ignorance, joked that he would have liked Freud to vindicate him by telegram: "Thank you for having introduced psychoanalysis into Italian aesthetics."7 Although he may have been a model for Svevo's Dr. S., Weiss later denied that this could explain his resistance to Svevo's text.8 Such rivalry between disciples would characterize much of the history of the Freudian migration. The efforts of Trieste Jews to bring Italians the "plague" aside, it was Benedetto Croce who promoted the first full-length translation of Freud into Italian, the 1930 version of Totemand Taboo(1912-13), published by Giovanni Laterza. Croce's idealism is more customarily blamed for the delayed reception of the "psycho-analytic revolution" in Italy, yet his correspondence with Laterza reveals their project for further translations of Freud on themes of religion and civilization.9 In 1926, Croce had reviewed favorably a French translation of The Interpretationof Dreams(1900) and had endorsed Freud's views over more traditional medical and popular approaches which interpreted dreams as signs of physical excitation or of divine manifestations and prophecies. The fact that 4. Murray M. Schwartz, "Introduction,"New LiteraryHistory,vol. xii (1980-81), p. 2. 5. See Ghidetti, p. 331. 6. See Edoardo Weiss, Elementidi Psicoanalisi,pref. S. Freud, Milan, Hoepli, 1930; and see introd. Martin Grotjahn, Recollections his SigmundFreudas a Consultant: of a Pioneerin Psychoanalysis, New York, Intercontinental Medical Book Corporation, 1970. Italo Svevo, Racconti.Saggi.Paginesparse,Milan, dall'Oglio, 1968, p. 686; see Ghidetti, p. 7. 224 and p. 329; and Anna Laura Lepschy, "Lacoscienzadi Zenoe Lo scrutatore MLN, vol. d'anima," 96 (1981), pp. 152-158. 8. See Ghidetti, p. 232. 9. See Daniela Coli, Croce,Laterzae la culturaeuropea,Bologna, II Mulino, 1983; Michel David, La psicoanalisinellaculturaitaliana,pref. Cesare L. Musatti, Turin, Boringhieri, 1966, pp. 23-28 and pp. 144-148; and ContardoCalligaris,"Petitehistoire de la psychanalyseen Italie," Critique,vol. xxxi, no. 333 (February, 1975), pp. 175-179; the first two articles on Freud in Italian appearedin 1908 and were writtenby L. Baronciniand G. Modena who also publishedtranslaMethode(1904 [1903]), and in 1913, of his tions in 1912, of Freud's Die Freud'sche psychoanalytische Das Interesse an derPsychoanalyse (1913); and Jacques Nobecourt, "La transmission de la psychanalyse freudienne en Italie via Trieste," Critique,vol. xxxix, no. 435-36 (August-September, 1983), pp. 623-627.

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the translation project was not realized was the result of the publisher's financial difficulties and the commercial failure of Totem e tabu (only reprinted again in Italy in 1953) rather than any avowed hesitation on Croce's part. It is, moreover, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooksand Letterswhich contain the most valuable early Italian critical response to Freud.10 Gramsci's serious consideration of psychoanalytic theory was occasioned by his discontent with orthodox Marxism's failure to account for individualization and sexuality. Yet it was not political considerations alone which lead Gramsci to attend to psychoanalysis; personal considerations converged with the political. As his wife, Giulia Schucht, began a psychoanalysis in 1926, Gramsci's letters to her focused on the nature and the rationale of this type of treatment. Recent British interest in Gramsci has centered on his theory of hegemony and on his concept of national-popular politics. His work has been particularly important for theorizing strategies of cultural and ideological struggle and for an understanding of political domination by consent, as against coercion. Gramsci's readings of Freud have not, however, been assimilated into these discussions."1 This is unfortunate, as Gramsci provided, in Italy, a link between the theories of Marx and Freud (just as Louis Althusser did in France) and "Italian Freud" connotes a theoretical practice that is as foreign to the apolitical Lacanian tendencies of French Freud as it is to its United States counterpart, Yale Freud. Althusser, in his arguments with Gramsci and his politicization of Lacan, belongs more appropriately in the camp of Italian Freud. Both Gramsci and Althusser consult psychoanalysis to compensate for the neglect of the subject in orthodox Marxism. Gramsci's historicism and humanism is the terrain where Althusser, fascinated by the false antagonism between structuralism and humanism, takes up the new ter10. All references to Gramsci are to the critical edition in 4 vols. of Quadernidel carcere,ed. Valentino Gerratana, Turin, Einaudi Editore, 1975 [hereafter (QC no: pp., dates)]; and to the fifth edition of Letteredal carcere,ed. Sergio Caprioglio and Elsa Fubini, Turin, Einaudi editore, 1975 [hereafter (LC pp.)]; in English: Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971 [hereafter (H&NS pp.)]; and to Lettersfrom Prison in the collected edition of three special issues of New EdinburghReview, trans. Hamish Henderson (1974) [hereafter (HH no., pp.)] and to Lettersfrom Prison, trans. Lynne Lawner, New York, Quartet Books, 1979 [hereafter (LL pp.)]. Neither of the translations include all the letters and I have indicated my translations where they occur. Henderson, who translates the first edition of 1947, explains that excisions had been made in the 1947 edition of details of Gramsci's illnesses and treatment, "family matters which it was felt might prove contentious or embarrassing were also left out," (p. 2); politics and personal friendships were taken into consideration. As a result, many of the letters dealing with Giulia Schucht's psychoanalysis were omitted and Lawner includes only some of them, often with passages excised. 11. For European exceptions, see Christine Buci-Glucksmann, "Gramsci and Freud," in Gramsciand the State, trans. David Fernbach, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980, pp. 86-91; Adele Cambria, Amore come rivoluzione. la risposta alle 'Letteredal Carcere,'with the theatrical text, Nonostante Gramsci, Milan, SugarCo Edizioni, 1976; David, pp. 68-72; and Gabriele Carletti, "Antonio Gramsci e la critica della teoria psicoanalitica," Trimestre,xiii n. 4-xiv n. 1 (December 1980-March 1981), pp. 71-98.

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minology of psychoanalysis and develops his theories of overdetermination and interpellation. Althusser's legacy, the problem of the socialization of psychoanalysis and the provision of a theory of subjectivity for Marxism, remains fundamental to the aspirations of the new New Left. Yet the attempt, often analyzed as the result of the failure of'68, to link Marxism and psychoanalysis has become the almost illegible site of a theoretical impasse. In order to get some perspective on this current crisis, I will return to Gramsci, to the political meanings of his reading of Freud, and to his unfulfilled desire to reinsert the human subject into the social formation.

Gramsci's attitude to Freud goes through three separate phases: (1) Freudian theory is a revolutionary and useful tool for an explanation of mass culture and regulated sexuality; (2) Freud's is an idealist and ultimately reactionary doctrine; (3) psychoanalysis is suitable for certain subjects but one runs the constant risk of charlatan practices. That is, after an initial enthusiasm (1), Gramsci rejects Freud (2) as a result of the circumstances of Giulia's case history which led him to doubt the value of analysis (3). As a cultural philologist, Gramsci perceptively links the rise of psychoanalysis with the conditions of existence in modernity. He argues that the "freudian type" is a modern substitute for the "savage" [il selvaggio]of eighteenth-century literature: "The struggle against the juridical order is carried out through Freudian psychological analysis" (QC 1:26, 1929-30 [my translation]). But he immediately disowns any authority that this observation may imply by declaring that he has not been able to study Freud's theories and that he is not familiar with the other so-called "Freudian" literature, "(Proust-Svevo-Joyce)" (QC 1:26, 1929-30). Although he has not had direct contact with Freud's texts, Gramsci is alert to the diffusion of Freud's ideas. He repeats his observations in a letter to Giulia on December 30, 1929 and adds: "It's strange and interesting that Freud's psycho-analysis'2 is now creating, specially in Germany (as far as I can gather from the reviews I have read), tendencies similar to those which existed in France in the eighteenth century; it is well on the way towards forming a new type of "good savage" [buon selvaggio], corrupted by society-that is, by history. The result is a new kind of intellectual disorder which is really exceedingly interesting" (LC 314; HH, L 29).

Gramsci uses the diphthong "psico-analisi," which he later substitutes with psicanalisti 12. (1930-32) and "psicanalitica" (1934). David, in ch., "La lingua della psicanalisi in Italia," (p. 285), writes that the term, "psicoanalisi" is generally used by professional, "scientific" practitioners of the discipline, whereas "psicanalisi" is usually employed by the press and by nonacademic culture [Gramsci's later usage]. Svevo, he notes, wrote "psico-analisi" in Confessionsof Zeno, but "psicanalisi" in his writings of 1927.

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Gramsci's interpretation of Freud's work as a revision of Rousseau's narrative of corruption echoes the Marxist myth of alienation. In these early entries, Gramsci privileges the contestatory aspects of Freud's theory. His first appropriation of Freud is positive; he identifies psychoanalysis as a basis for a new revolutionary ethics and resituates struggle against the father within the terrain of social rivalry and emancipation: Freud's theory, the Oedipus complex, hatred for the father [padre]boss [padrone], model, rival, first expression of the principle of authority- positioned in the order of natural things. The influence of Freud on German literature is immeasurable: it is the basis for a new revolutionary ethics. Freud has given a new aspect to the eternal conflict between fathers and sons. The emancipation of sons from paternal tutelage is a fashionable thesis among contemporary novelists (QC 3:288, 1930 [my translation]). The novels to which Gramsci refers include the works of Hauptmann and Wassermann. These novels betray Freud's influence in their descriptions of fathers who abdicate their "patriarchy" and make amends to their sons whose ingenuous moral sense, states Gramsci, is alone capable of smashing "the tyrannical and perverse social contract, of abolishing the constrictions of false duty" (QC 3:288 [my translation]). Gramsci takes this filial revolt further in his discussion of "popular literature" and the "serial novel" [romanzo d'appendice],with Dumas perers Count of Montecristo(1845) as his example. He argues that the serial novel substitutes the fantasies of the common man for those of the upper classes and that its form is that of a daydream: "One can see," he continues, "what Freud and psychoanalysts maintain regarding daydreaming" (QC 6:799, 1930-32 [my translation]). Fantasizing depends on a "(social) 'inferiority complex"' and exploits ideas of revenge, of the punishment of those guilty of the evils one has had to suffer, and - in an echo of Marx on religious opiates - he argues that it also assuages one's sense of evil. In his note, "Freud and Collective Man" (QC 15:1833, 1933), Gramsci examines social conformism and argues that Freudian theory concludes the liberal age by shifting responsibility onto the group: an individual soldier, for example, does not normally feel remorse for war murders. While he argues that Freudian theory is more suited to those who live off their property incomes than to subaltern classes, he recognizes, nevertheless, that its explanations of religion, fanaticism, and social conformity are its sanest and most acceptable elements. He also wonders whether conformism can ever preclude fanaticism and whether mass society can evade taboos. Gramsci first analyzes sexual repression and the regulation of the workforce in a note on "the sexual question" in his discussion of Americanism (QC 1:72-74, 1929-30). A later essay, "Americanism and Fordism" (1934) ex-

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pands on this note. There he anticipates mental neuroses as a result of Fordism's intensification of moral and social conformity: "Psychoanalysis, and its enormous diffusion since the war, is the expression of the increased moral coercion exercised by the apparatus of the State and society on single individuals, and of the pathological crisis determined by this coercion" (QC 22:2140, 1934; H&NS 280). Any attempt to establish a new sexual ethic suited to the new methods of production, he warns, will be extremely complicated and difficult. The regulation of sexuality will affect the formation of "a new feminine personality" which, for Gramsci, "is the most important question of an ethical and civil order connected with the sexual question" (QC 22:2149; H&NS 296). In a criticism of the "romantic" reactions which every crisis of "unilateral coercion" unleashes in the sexual field, he argues for a regulation and rationalization of the sexual instinct: "The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalisation of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalised" (QC 22:2150; H&NS 297). Gramsci understands that psychoanalytic literature is critical of the social regulation of sexual instincts even if he cannot show how that discourse itself might be read as a blueprint for "normalization," or how his own endorsement of regulation for the sake of production reproduces the repressive hypothesis. It is crucial to note that in his theorization of the government of sexuality by machines, Gramsci, in contrast to the feminists, Alexandra Kollontai or Emma Goldmann, refuses the notion of sexual liberation. In "Taylorism and the Mechanization of the Worker," he refutes Taylor's definition of the manual worker as a "trained gorilla" and gives relief to the politics of leisure. He writes that "not only does the worker think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realizes that they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him into a train of thought that is far from conformist" (QC 22:2171; H&NS 310). Gramsci's insistence on the sexual nature of social relations had its effect on the artistic theories of other Italian writers, Pasolini most notable among them. Pasolini's heretical stance against contraception and abortion derives, as Maria Macciocchi argues,13 from Gramsci's exposure of power's control of reproduction. Pasolini defines his relationship to Gramsci and the "male" Communist party as ambiguous in his poem, Le ceneri di Gramsci [The Ashes of Gramsci](1954): "The scandal of contradicting myself, of being/ with you and

13. See Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, "Pasolini:Murder of a Dissident," trans. Thomas Reno. 13 (Summer, 1980), pp. 11-22; her "FemaleSexuality in Fascist Ideology," pensek, October, trans. Jennifer Stone, FeministReview,no. 1 (1979), pp. 67-82; and her "Quatre heresies cardinales pour Pasolini," in her edition, Pasolini: seninaire dirige par Macciocchi, Paris, Grasset,

pp. 127-158.

Ill

Italian Freud

PierPaoloPasolini.Oedipus Rex. 1967.

against you; for you in my heart,/ in the light, against you in the darkness of my guts;"'4 His indictment of Communist prudery is the logical extension of Gramsci's critique: in his film Uccellaccie uccellini [The Hawks and the Sparrows] (1965), he declares an end to "the age of Brecht and Rossellini" and sets an agenda for discussion -free love in the early years of communism, the renunciation of that theoretical position, Marxist morality, Stalinism, and the crisis of Marxism.15 Pasolini, in his attack on sexual Taylorism, goes beyond Gramsci as he focuses on the historic apprehension and confused hesitation of Italy under the regime of sexual tolerance. As Macciocchi points out, Pasolini positions himself against that loss of joy and of art and intervenes as "an artist against sexology, and in favour of sexuality."'6 His concern with the sexual 14. Pasolini, TheAshesof Gramsci,tr. and ed. Lawrence R. Smith, TheNew ItalianPoetry:1945 to thePresent,Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981, p. 81. 15. Pasolini in PasolinionPasolini:Interviews withOswaldStack,Bloomington and London, Indiana University Press, 1970, pp. 99-100; and Macciocchi,"Pasolini:Murderof a Dissident,"p. 17. 16.

Macciocchi, "Quatre heresies cardinales . . . ," p. 152.

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subject of Marxism is an inheritance from Gramsci which he pushes to its irrational, homosexual limit. Pasolini's heresy lies in his intersection of political protest with the sexual protest of the unconscious. Italy, a rationalist society unable to carry revolution into the sexual sphere, could not tolerate this dissident. Pasolini's murder, a ruthless sentence of aphasia (as Philippe Sollers has termed it), was a political crime which in broad terms signalled the end of an epoch. Whereas Pasolini consistently regarded psychoanalysis as crucial to the development of Marxism, Gramsci, after learning of Croce's approval of Henri de Man's influencial Au-dela du Marxisme [Beyond Marxism] (1920), retracts his support of psychoanalysis. De Man, Gramsci writes, considers "popular feelings" as "something negligible and inert within the movement of history," and "his position is that of the scholarly student of folklore who is permanently afraid that modernity is going to destroy the object of his study" (QC 11:1506, 1932-33; H&NS 419). As soon as he realizes that De Man, who shared with Croce an opposition to Marxism, is arguing for the substitution of psychoanalysis for Marxism, Gramsci rethinks his own relation to psychoanalysis and begins to regard Freud as the last of the great ideologues whose concepts derive from eighteenth-century sensationalism -a theory which argues that all ideas derive from the senses (QC 4:453, 1930-32; H&NS 376). Gramsci renews his criticism of the empirical beginnings of psychoanalysis and starts to display an orthodox Marxist suspicion of its practice.17 Yet no analysis of his doubts should end here, without a consideration of the way Gramsci reacted to Giulia's treatment.

Gramsci's correspondence with Giulia on the subject of her analysis helps to define his volte-face. A reading of this correspondence makes it clear that more is at stake in Gramsci's sudden apostasy than the idealist and empirical unacceptability of psychoanalysis: Giulia's undocumented case history reveals a problematic ambivalence rather than an outright and clear refusal on Gramsci's part. The peculiar circumstances of Giulia's treatment and Gramsci's resistance display a transference scenario that has been overlooked by historians. Michel David, for example, argues that one must conclude that Gramsci's was a simple refusal of psychoanalysis, even though Gramsci did sow the seeds for a conciliation between Freud and Marx.18 Nor did Gramsci's disciples during the years 1945-55 share in the attentive interest their master showed to17. See Buci-Glucksmann, p. 86. She skews matters by stating this later view of Gramsci first, and by arguing that it is most characteristic. 18. See David, p. 72.

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ward the sexual question, David adds, though he intends his own contribution as a rectification of this oversight. Regretably, David does not go nearly far enough in this direction, nor does Adele Cambria, who dramatizes a feminist version of the PrisonLettersin her Amorecomerivoluzione(1976).19 Cambria insists on Gramsci's "mental deafness" (to use Pirandello's phrase) to Giulia's illness, but she is content simply to document the effect of Giulia's mental state on Gramsci, and refrains from examining the sexual politics of this relationship and the effects it has on Gramsci's attitude to psychoanalysis. It is possible to reconstruct some of the details of Giulia's actual analysis not only on the basis of Gramsci's precise use of psychoanalytic terminology, but also on the evidence of the availability of psychoanalysis in Moscow as this evidence has emerged through the study of the case of Sabina Spielrein by the Italian Jungian, Aldo Carotenuto.20 Carotenuto usefully portrays the activities of the Moscow Freudians from as early as 1909 until the founding of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in Moscow in 1921.21 By the time Giulia was in analysis, Sabina was already a practicing analyst. It is quite feasible that the two women frequented the same psychoanalytic circles-Sabina having returned to Moscow in 1923 and Giulia in 1926. These two Russian Jewish women and "political Freudians,"22 on the edges of Italian culture, haunt the discourses of Italian Freud. The Schucht family were no strangers to so-called nervous disorders. To understand this is to understand, partially, Gramsci's later resistance to accepting Giulia's breakdown. Gramsci first met Eugenia Schucht, the sister of Giulia and Tatiana, in the SerebrianyiBor [Silver Wood] sanatorium on the outskirts of Moscow. Gramsci, according to his biographer Giuseppe Fiori,23 had arrived in Moscow in 1922 in a state of acute depression. Zinoviev had suggested that he take a rest cure since he was displaying nervous tics and was subject to convulsive trembling and "ferocious looking" fits. It was through Eugenia that Gramsci met Giulia in 1922. When Gramsci left Moscow for Vienna in 1923, he begged Giulia to join him; but she was pregnant and unwell, "suffering, in fact," writes Fiori, "the first symptoms of the psychic crisis which in later years, during Antonio's imprisonment, would drive her to the threshold of insanity."24 Once back in Italy,

19. See Cambria, Nonostante Gramsci [Despite Gramsci], Amore come rivoluzione, pp. 207-273. See Carotenuto, pp. 196-205. 20. 21. See Carotenuto, p. 235; Jean Marti, "La psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Sovietique de 1909 a 1930," Critique, no. 32 (March, 1976), pp. 199-236; and Michail Rejsner, Un giurista sovietico e Freud, introd. Fausto Malcovati, Milan, La Salamandra, 1979. 22. See Russell Jacoby, The Repressionof Psychoanalysis. Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians, New York, Basic Books, 1983, pp. 41, 44 and 148 for mention of Spielrein. 23. See Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci. Life of a Revolutionary,trans. Tom Nairn, New York, Schocken Books, 1973. 24. Ibid., p. 165.

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Gramsci kept company with Tatiana, who acted as a reminder of her sister, Giulia. Gramsci returned to Moscow in February 1925, after the birth of his and Giulia's son, Delio. Eugenia, meanwhile, cured of one ailment, had rapidly developed another: she had come to identify herself as the mother of Delio. Although this greatly distressed Gramsci, he agreed that when Giulia came with Delio to join him in Italy, Eugenia should come too. Giulia again returned to Moscow for the birth of their second son, Giuliano, shortly before Gramsci was arrested in 1926. (Gramsci was then thirty-five years old, Giulia was thirty, and they were never to see each other again.) In a letter to Tatiana of October 20, 1930, from the prison of Turin, Gramsci draws comparisons between Giulia's mental condition and Eugenia's condition of 1919. He complains that what was understandable in 1919 is nothing but absurd romanticism in 1930. One must force oneself to work under pressure, he argues, to "put in" as much as one "takes out" of one's system, and to adopt a regular rhythm of living. He then reiterates his argument concerning Ford's regulation of the worker's body and states that although mechanization crushes the European, he, in an effort to extricate himself from his bourgeois state, falls into Bohemianism, itself a form of bourgeois behavior: "We Europeans are still too Bohemian; we think we can do a certain job and live as we please, in Bohemian fashion" (LC 374; LL 182). Gramsci, having pieced together the facts of Giulia's nervous breakdown the end of 1930, begins in 1931 to urge her to be more frank and thus about by their relationship from becoming quite "conventional" and "byzantine" prevent 398 [my translation]). Gramsci oscillates, writes Cambria, between (LC tenderness and reproach in his letters to Giulia. Gramsci's thoughts on psychoanalysis, however, are more interesting than Cambria's militant charges let on. On August 31, 1931, Gramsci writes, "What you write to me about your health interests me a great deal, but I don't know whether you are still continuing with the psychoanalytic cure [la curapsicanalitica].... Since Freud observes that the members of one's family are one of the greatest obstacles to a cure by treatment with psychoanalysis, I have never wanted to insist on this point and neither will I now" (LC 477 [my translation]). Despite this disavowal of any intention to interfere, Gramsci then proceeds to diagnose her symptoms: Besides, you yourself recalled how often I referred to some of the principles of psychoanalysis in insisting that you should try yourself to "unravel" [sgomitolare]your true personality. I was convinced that you were suffering from what psychoanalysts call an "inferiority complex" which leads to the systematic repression of one's volitional impulses, that is, of one's own personality, and to the supine acceptance of a subaltern function in decisions even when one is certain of being right, except for having occasional outbursts of furious irritation, even for negligible matters (LC 477 [my translation]).

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He then describes how once in Moscow in 1922 he had observed her having one of these fits [scoppifuriosi] and how he had spoken to her about it afterwards, saying that she should correct her character, which although "meek and mild," sometimes became "a little cocky" [un po'galletto] (LC 477 [my translation]). Gramsci launches into a critique of psychoanalysis, in a letter to Tatiana, on February 15, 1932: the gravest symptom of Giulia's imbalance, he argues, is not the vague material she refers to in order to justify psychoanalysis, as much as her recourse to the therapy in the first place and her unwarranted belief in its efficacy as a cure. "My central impression is as follows:" he writes, "that the gravest symptom of Giulia's lack of mental balance is not to be found in the facts, all of these very vague, to which she refers -the facts which purport to be the reason for her embarking on a psychoanalytic cure. The symptom is the fact that she has had recourse to this cure and that she has such inordinate faith in it" (LC 572; HH, CX 10). Gramsci is virtually saying that psychoanalysis is the malaise it is trying to cure. He then admits that his knowledge of psychoanalysis is not particularly precise or wide but that on the basis of his studies he can draw some conclusions about the theory once he has got rid of its "phantasmagoric" and "witch-doctorish" elements (LC 572; HH, CX 10). Psychoanalysis is appropriate only for those members of society which romantic literature calls the "insulted and injured" [umiliati e offesi](LC 572; HH, CX 11). Such persons, he adds, are "caught up between the iron contrasts of modern life (to speak only of the present day, although every age has had a 'modernity' in opposition to a past)" (LC 562-73; HH, CX 11). These "insulted and injured" have no means of explaining these conflicts and of thus going beyond them towards a new serenity and moral tranquillity, in which their impulses would be in equilibrium with their goals. In certain historical moments, explains Gramsci, collective pressures affect individuals dramatically. These situations, while disastrous for the extremely sensitive and refined, are indispensible to the backward elements of society-the peasants, for instance, to whom he ascribes an elasticity and a capacity to tolerate tension. Peasants do not create for themselves insoluble problems and therefore do not despair about being unable to resolve them. Untouched by romantic fanaticism they do not "spit on themselves" (sputarsiaddosso)(LC 573; LL 223). He submits that Giulia is suffering from "unreal 'insoluble problems' and struggling against phantasms created by her own feverish, disordered fantasy" (LC 573; LL 223), and since she cannot possibly resolve by herself what cannot be resolved by anyone, she has sought an outside authority, "a witch doctor" [uno stregone]or "a psychoanalytic doctor" [un medicopsicanalitico] (LC 573; LL 223). Because Giulia is a person of culture, he argues, she must be and can be her own best psychoanalyst. In a subsequent letter to Tatiana on March 7, 1932, Gramsci adds insult to injury, as it were, as he tries to rationalize his diagnosis. He concedes that

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psychoanalysis's effectiveness in the cases of the "insulted and injured"25 has not been conclusively demonstrated, and although not in touch with all developments, he is simply trying to explain his attitude to Giulia's illness. Psychoanalysis, he explains, attends to the ravages caused by a discrepancy or contradiction between an ideal goal and the tendencies of sedimented habits. Moral discrepancy increases in times of crisis and leads to further State coercion; scepticism, obedience, or morbid outbursts against social hypocrisy are the responses to increased State control. Serenity, he claims, can be found even in the face of the most absurd contradictions and under the pressure of the most implacable necessity; it requires, however, that one succeed in thinking historically and dialectically, that one identify one's own defined and limited task with intellectual sobriety. "In this sense, as far as psychological ailments (malattie psichiche)of the above variety are concerned, one can and, therefore, one must be 'one's own doctor' (medici di se stessi)" (LC 585; HH, CXIV 13). On a later occasion, Gramsci applauds Giulia for having given up her "fixation" with a "psychoanalytic cure" (LC 649; HH, CXXXVII 23). In this letter of July 18, 1932, he passes judgement and displays a remarkable intuition of the way an analysis might fail: Although I can't say a great deal owing to the meagreness of my own knowledge it seems to me pretty thoroughly steeped in charlatanry [troppo imbevutadi ciarlataneria];furthermore I would say that if the therapist doesn't succeed in quite a short time in overcoming the subject's resistance [vincerela resistenzadel soggetto], and levering him out of his depressed state by dint of his own authority, a psychoanalytic cure may very likely aggravate nervous maladies rather than cure them; it will suggest fresh motifs for disquiet to the patient and induce in him a redoubled psychological confusion [raddoppiato marasmapsichico] (LC 649; HH, CXXXVII 23). Gramsci follows this sketch of the transference with the suggestion that Giulia's mother, who said that she would see to it that she became "'as strong as an elephant'" (LC 649; HH, CXXXVII 23), is the most reliable and trustworthy doctor of all. Gramsci has thoroughly revised the position he expressed in the letter of March 20, 1931, to Tatiana, in which he admitted that Giulia might benefit from analysis provided "her illness has purely nervous origins" and she had a good doctor (LC 428 [my translation]). Here Gramsci had contrasted the merits of psychoanalysis with the old psychiatry and had concluded that psychoanalysis was more concrete in that it forced the doctor to address the individual patient and not the malady.

25. Umiliati e offesi"is the Italian translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Insulted and the Injured (1861).

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Gramsci's political rejection of the subjective revolt graphed in psychoanalysis is a symptom of his failing relation with Giulia. He was aware that the future of Italy was inseparable from questions of sexuality and feminism. When he makes his analysis of Giulia, he tends, however, to subordinate psychological considerations to biological ones. This leads him to concentrate on her defenses and to become deaf to the language of her unconscious. Although his resistance is part of the transference between them, it does not completely constitute an analyzable transference relationship, since his reactions collude with Giulia's "misrecognition." One could hardly have expected Gramsci to assume the "correct" position of an analyst-characterized by Lacan as a cadaverlike presence from which there issues menacing silences and timely interventions that draw attention to the resistances and the unconscious. Gramsci does, however, reveal an ambiguous fascination with psychoanalysis's procedures and an intuitive sense of its radical possibilities. His insight into how an analysis might fail, in both a scientific and a technical sense, is in accordance with Freud's own understanding. Yet in his insistence on somatic factors, Gramsci is led into a "wild" analysis of Giulia's illness. Freud defines the concept of "wild"analysis in the 1910 essay, "Uber'Wilde' psychoanalyse"(SE 11:219-227). Freud offers this definition in order to defend the legitimacy of the institution, the International Psycho-Analytical Association, founded earlier that same year. Although he finds it disagreeable to claim a monopoly on the use of medical technique, Freud argues that it is more important to protect the cause of psychoanalysis, than its patients, against "wild" analysis, because its practice is more potentially harmful to the cause than to individual patients (SE 11:227). Thus, even a little "wild" analysis of the Gramscian type is better than none at all, since a "wild"psychoanalyst, "despite everything," can do more for a patient "than some highly respected authority who might have told her she was suffering from a 'vasometer neurosis'" (SE 11: 227). The "wild" analysis which Freud discusses involves a recently divorced woman who suffers from anxiety-states. This woman's physician had informed her that her states, which had intensified since her divorce, were caused by a lack of sexual satisfaction and that she was incurable unless she "either return to her husband, or take a lover, or obtain satisfaction from herself' (SE 11: 221). None of these alternatives was acceptable to the woman. Freud accuses the doctor of an ignorance of both the scientific theories and the technical rules of psychoanalysis, since the latter, with his exclusive emphasis on the somatic factor in sexuality, oversimplifies matters. For, "in psychoanalysis" Freud adds, "the concept of what is sexual comprises far more; it goes lower and also higher than its popular sense" (SE 11:222). The physician's technical error is similar to Gramsci's. It consists in aimthe treatment at the patient's ignorance,in supplying information about the ing causal connection between her illness and her life in an attempt to remove that

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ignorance. The pathological factor, however, is not the ignorance itself but the inner resistances which are its roots. The task of a psychoanalysis is to combat these resistances. Clearly, supplying the analysand with facts is not sufficient, adds Freud, for if it were, "listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure" (SE 11:225) her. Instead, "such measures have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as the distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger" (SE 11:225). If anything, as Gramsci came to realize, the information the analyst gives will intensify the patient's conflict and exacerbate her troubles. In place of "facts," then, Freud privileges the analytic space and the relationship between analyst and analysand. It is only when "a sufficient attachment (transference)" (SE 11:226) is formed with the analyst that fresh flights from the repressed thoughts become impossible and analysis begins. Here Freud anticipates the later directions of his work, which he develops in the technical essays, "Remembering, Repeating and Working Through" (1914) and "Observations on Transference-Love" (1915). It is this shift from empirical observation and phenomenological cataloguing of symptoms in favor of an analysis of the transference which is the point of departure of psychoanalysis and which distinguishes it from the "sociology of the emotions" practiced by American ego psychology.26 It is the.destiny of the analysand's discourse of desire within the transference relation, not simply her somatic symptoms, which deserves the close attention of the analyst. If this early work of Freud was involved in defining the boundaries of the analytic space, subsequent work has found it necessary to extend and transgress these boundaries. Sand6r Ferenczi, for example, describes another form of "wild"analysis which is a kind of compulsive analyzing which may appear as easily within the analytic situation as outside it.27 Ferenczi calls for an elasticity of technique that would forestall the structuring of analysis according to a preordained plan. Lacan's practice of the punctuated session, with its long silences, is designed to compel the analysand to make associations between sessions.28 The effect of this technique is not only the analyst's avoidance of the imposition of interpretations, but also the blurring of boundaries of the analytic space. There is no outside of the analytic relation; such is the implication of Lacan's comment, "When you leave here, you become aphasic."29 (Lacan can 26. Juliet Mitchell, "Psychoanalysisand Child Development," a review of NarcissusandOedipus TheChildrenof Psychoanalysis, by Victoria Hamilton, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, in New LeftReview,no. 140 (July-August, 1983), p. 92. 27. See Sandor Ferenczi, "Introjection and Transference," published in the Jahrbuchder trans. Ernest Jones, New York, 1909, and reprinted in his Sex in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalyse, Dover, 1956, pp. 30-79. 28.

See Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an IntellectualHero, Cambridge, Har-

vard University Press, 1983, p. 136. 29.

Lacan, quoted by Catherine Clement, The Lives and LegendsofJacques Lacan, trans. Arthur

Goldhammer, New York, Columbia University Press, p. 155.

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thus claim that only his dog, Justine, "never took him for someone else";30 everyone else-and not only his patients-was subject to the transference.) The dawning realization that "psychoanalysis never lets go,"31 has serious implications for the therapeutic politics of Marxism. Gramsci's impatience with psychoanalysis was determined by his faith in historical materialism's promise of a universal cure. Orthodox Marxism can be seen as a "wild" form of analysis: it propounds utopian cures for social ills, supplies "facts"and direct causal connections, and fixes on a knowledge of the somatic materiality of the body, while its theory of subjectivity is bankrupt, and social resolution remains a chimera. Marxist "wild" analysis, in its theory of an integrated and unified social agent, demonstrates its failure in the face of Lacan's intersubjective "riddle: it is through you that I communicate,"32 where the subject always alreadycollapses into the other. Althusser's revision of Gramsci acknowledges this failure. The return of Freud via Lacan in Althusser's writings reveals "the impossibility of society"33which is guaranteed by the aggressive struggle for separation, the permanent rivalry of transferential intersubjectivity. The very notion of society,as Ernesto Laclau argues, implies a resolution of the antagonisms which constitute social relations. According to Laclau, "The social is not only the infinite play of differences. It is also the attempt to limit that play, to domesticate infinitude, to embrace it within the finitude of an order."34 The enduring fiction of a social relation deconstructs, however, in the wake of Lacan's observation that thereis no sexual relation.The crisis of the subject indicates that the only recognition possible is a recognition of the transference relation, for, as Jacques-Alain Miller writes, "The object is not what acts as an obstacle to the achievement of the sexual relation, as an error of perspective could lead one to believe. The object is, on the contrary, what closes the relation which does not exist [ce queobturele rapportqu'il ny a pas], and what gives it its phantasmatic consistency."35 The master-slave dialectic of Hegelian Marxism posits a fictive obturation,a relationwhich carries with it the promise of a transcendence of difference, a utopia of equal identities. What a psychoanalytic theory of the transference questions is this transcendental synthesis which both orthodox Marxism and "wild"analysis propose. Where a Marxist therapeutic politics believes it can achieve societyand resolve antagonisms, psychoanalysis points to the impossibility of such resolutions. The per30. Schneiderman, p. 130. 31. Francois Roustang, Psychoanalysis NeverLets Go, trans. Lukacher, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. 32. Lacan, "The Freudian Thing," p. 124. 33. Ernesto Laclau, "The Impossibility of Society," Canadian Journalof PoliticalandSocialTheory, vol. vii, nos. 1-2 (Winter/Spring 1983), pp. 21-24; and "La politique comme construction de ed. B. Conein et al., Lille, Presses Universitaires de Lille, l'impensable,"in Materialites discursives, 1981, pp. 65-74. 34. Laclau, "The Impossibility of Society," p. 22. 35. Jacques-Alain Miller, "D'un autre Lacan," Ornicar?,no. 28 (Spring, 1984), p. 52.

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manent contestations of intersubjectivity and the indissolubility of the transference postpone the prospect of revolution and substitute an interminable politics of deferral for utopian strategies. The war of position which the transference makes clear undermines any universalizing theory of social totality and underwrites the failure of any cataclysmic revolutionary maneuvretowards resolution. His dissatisfaction with Gramsci's Marxism caused Althusser to turn to psychoanalytic concepts which would forever impede his return to Marx. He came thus to realize that the romantic closures of utopian Marxist narrative rely on always absent causes, and tend to resolve political contradictions unitarily and to essentialize social practices. Gramsci's own discontent with economic determinism and with the mechanistic explanations which fix conventional Marxist discourse had led him to place a new theoretical stress on the concept of history. Althusser isolates the way this stress became both the promise and the failing of Gramsci's system of thought: (1) Gramsci's emphasis on the historicist aspects of Marxism acted as a refutation of the idealism of his contemporaries and as a polemic against the metaphysical and actualistic elements of Italian Croceanism. This is the force of Gramsci's assertion that "the philosophyof praxis is absolute'historicism,'the absolutesecularizationand earthlinessof (2) Gramsci erred in privileging the role thought,an absolutehumanismof history";36 of the human subject in history without examining the structure of absent causes. (This observation is founded on a doctrine of structuralism which Althusser subsequently rejected.)37 In the tradition of Italian criticism of Gramsci, Althusser insisted that "Marxism is not a historicism,"38 that the apparent plenitude of the concept "history" is merely a fantasmatic wish-fulfillment secured by totalizing social explanations. Arguing against an essentialist epistemology of historical time, Althusser reminds us that "the knowledge of history is no more historical than the knowledge of sugar is sweet."39 Gramsci's insistence on historicism reinforces the notion of successive linearity and the romance of social resolution. In opposition to this insistence, Althusser affirms the specificity of the peculiar (propre) time of different, variable histories, asserting the priority of dialecticalover historicalmaterialism. The return of Freud in the work of Althusser, however, will lead him beyond dialectical materialism and enable him to think identical and antagonistic features all at once -a kind of deconstructionist's having one's cake and eating it, too. By means of Freud's concept of overdetermination, Althusser develops

36. Gramsci, quoted by Althusser in "Marxism is not a Historicism," in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London, NLB, 1977, p. 127. 37. See Louis Althusser, "Structuralisme?" Elements d'autocritique,pp. 55-64. Louis Althusser, "Marxism is not Historicism," p. 143. 38. 39. Louis Althusser, "The Errors of Classical Economics," Reading Capital, p. 106.

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"the notions of unevennessof development,of survivals, of backwardness(in conin contemsciousness) in Marxism itself, or the notion of 'under-development' porary economic and political practice."40 He dispenses with the mechanical fatalism that troubled Gramsci and with the single economic determinant even in the last instance, for "from the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes."41 Althusser's Freud assists him in deconstructing Gramsci's Marx and in substituting a concept of the trace for Gramsci's concept of history. The theory of interpellated subjectivity developed by Althusser must be viewed in relation to his criticism of Marx's inversion of Hegel. In Hegel, wrote Marx, the dialectic is standing on its head; Hegel's idealism, then, must be turned right side up again and (since an inversion is not sufficient) must be peeled to expose the rational kernel within the mystical shell. Althusser contends, however, that it is unthinkable that a materialist dialectic can be conceived of as existing in Hegel's system like a kernel inside a nut. He accuses Marx of actually perpetuating Hegel's idealism through the use of a metaphor contaminated with mystical notions of miraculous extraction. "We must admit," Althusser writes, "that this extraction cannot be painless; in appearance an unpeeling, it is really a demystification,an operation which transforms what it extracts." Similarly, the introduction of the subject into Marxist theory will necessarily radically transform that theory. Althusser's theory of interpellated subjectivity is a result of his Gramscian analysis of the ideological hegemony indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist relations of reproduction. The task of the leftist intellectual (Gramsci's "permanent persuader") is to transform subjects who have been torn free from the ideologies which originally interpellated them-that is, from their originating fictions, their transference at the origins. This task is only conceivable if one can theoretically attack the notion of a transcendent and absolute subject and this attack is begun only through a recognition of difference, in this case, the production of sexual difference. Althusser, in fact, describes the site of the interpellation of the subject as a battleground; warring mechanisms battle to produce gendered subjects.42 Althusser thus recognizes the hegemony of Freud's castration theory, but he politicizes Freud's and Lacan's pessimism of the Phallus by asserting that although the Law cannot be "ignored," it can nevertheless be "evaded or violated." Current critiques of Althusser argue that the process of misrecognition in

40. Ibid., p. 105. 41. Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination," in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, Vintage, 1970, p. 93. 42. Louis Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," in Lenin and Philosophy and OtherEssays, trans. Ben Brewster, London, NLB, 1977, p. 195; and see p. 190: "the long forced march which makes mammiferous larvae into human children, masculine or feminine subjects."

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his theory of interpellation (1) posits a fully-formed, preexistent subject; (2) conceives of an "individual" before subjectification; and (3) collapses the subject into ideology.43 Yet they overlook the potential war of resistance to subjectification implicit in Althusser's theory and the way his work suggests how new political subjects can be "interpellated" or constructed in discourses that-to use Foucault's terms - resist individualization. Paramount for Althusser is "the like any other production of a new consciousness in the spectator-incomplete, consciousness, but moved by this incompletion itself."44He insists that the mirror the subject looks into for self-recognition is "precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself."45 Criticisms of Althusser give credence to Lacan's mirror stage model of misrecognition over Althusser's different elaboration of this concept and ignore Althusser's acknowledgment of the necessity of Marxism's deconstruction by psychoanalysis. What is at fault in Lacan's model and in theories of suture derived from it - attempts at an articulation of Marxism with psychoanalysis is the privilege that is given to passivity over aggressivity in the process of subject construction. Aggressivity is the structural correlative of misrecognition as "imagos of the fragmented body"46 accompany the fantasy of identity and wholeness. This "structural ambivalence" introduced in the mirror stage is not totally transcended, but partially carried over into the instability of the Oedipal positionality. There is an acknowledgment of this ambivalence in some of the theories of suture. Stephen Heath, for example, argues that "suture names not just a structure of lack but also an availability of the subject, a certain closure" and states that "the stake is clear: the 'I' is a division but joins all the same, the stand-in is the lack in the structure but nevertheless, simultaneously, the possibility of a coherence, of the filling in."47 Yet what is not acknowledged is the fact that suture,like society, is ultimately impossible. Not only can the analyst not be the "subject supposed to know," he can also not be, exceptionally,the person "who does not suture." The process of suture is always incomplete, always fails, even for the analysand. The antithetical senses of suture force the concept to unstitch and destabilize Lacan's mirror trope: the retroactive fiction of misrecognition is an enantiosemic myth of psychoanalytic origins.48 Lacan's catoptric gestures in43. See Stephen Heath, "On Suture," Questionsof Cinema,Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1981, pp. 76-112; Paul Hirst, OnLaw andIdeology,London, Macmillan, 1979, pp. 40-74. 44. Althusser, "The 'Piccolo Teatro': Bertolazzi and Brecht,"ForMarx, p. 151. 45. Ibid., p. 144. 46. Jacques Lacan, "Aggressivity in psychoanalysis," in Ecrits, New York, Norton, 1977, p. 19.

47. Heath, "On Suture," pp. 85-86. 48. See "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,"(SE 11: 153-161): G. Lepschy, "Enandesignates the tiosemy and Irony in Italian Lexis," TheItalianist,1 (1981), pp. 82-88; enantiosemy phenomenon of a word with opposite meanings; and see his "Freud,Abel e gli opposti,"Mutamenti nellalinguistica,Bologna, Il Mulino, 1981, pp. 173-98. di prospettiva

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dicate an anthropological nostalgia for presence, for an imaginary to which we can fully return. Yet neither the concept of suture nor that of the mirror stage can function successfully to unite the subject and the social order, psychoanalysis and Marxism. For psychoanalysis disallows the notion of a smooth, unruffled identity formed of a sure coincidence with an outside order. All the mirror stages is the permanent belatedness of the subject and its continual conflation with the other. The concept of misrecognition ignores all the difficulty of the social relation. If one were to substitute for this concept that of the transference, as Roustang has done, one would confront the radical resistance which threatens the social order. "How can one get away from thereis no other,thereis only roomfor one? Not by appealing to a third, because the appeal to a third always supposes that two are already there, which is precisely what is in question."49 Instead of a society of separate individuals, we tend inevitably toward the instability of subjectivity itself. A deconstruction of the ontological priority of the interpellated subject in Althusser's revision of Gramsci leads, in the end, to a problematizing and a delaying of political action through this concept of a subject at odds with itself, constantly under erasure. The surplus signification introduced by psychoanalysis - especially by the theories of the difficulty of gendered subjectivity - necessarily unsettle the certainties of orthodox Marxism. But once awakened to the inadequacies of its "wild" form of analysis, it would seem that Marxism has no alternative but to continue its inquiry into the unconscious which disturbs it. Marxism must take this risk of theorizing itself in relation to what it learns from psychoanalysis.

Incompatible meanings and residual traces in the texts of Gramsci and Althusser subvert the monologue of Marxism and Althusser's reliance on psychoanalysis serves only to enhance this process. The wager of psychoanalysis against empirical containment becomes brutally apparent in Svevo (even if all the transgressions do is reproduce in him a nostalgia for the scientific code). He describes Zeno's relief when Dr. Paoli decides to analyze his urine: Nothing took place in that retort to remind me of my behaviour with Dr. S., when to please him, I invented fresh details of my childhood in order to conform to Sophocles' diagnosis. Here was only the truth. The thing that had to be analyzed was imprisoned in the phial and, incapable of being false to itself [sempreugualea se stessa(always equal

49.

Roustang, PsychoanalysisNever Lets Go, p. 108.

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to itself, i.e., self-identical-my translation)], awaited the reagent. When that came it always responded in the same way. In psychoanalysis, on the other hand, neither the same images nor the same words ever repeat themselves. It ought to be called by another name: psychical adventure, perhaps. Yes, that is just what it is. When one starts such an analysis, it is like entering a wood, not knowing whether one is going to meet a brigand or friend. Nor is one quite sure which it has been, after the adventure is over. In this respect psychoanalysis resembles spiritualism.50 Deferred action is the adventure of narrative repetitions in difference and Freud is not a "scientist," "observer," "experimenter," or "thinker," as he himself wrote to Fliess, but a "conquistado'rand "adventurer" (if not a "merchant" who sor,ts things out).51 Curious, bold, and tenacious like his precursor Hannibal and excluded from Christian Rome, Freud, as Svevo reveals, does not discover the "timeless kingdom"52 of the unconscious but writes a psychical adventure story full of untimely surprises that defy the utopian dreams of incurable political romantics.

50. Svevo, pp. 378-379. 51. Freud to Fliess, February 1, 1900, quoted in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, London, The Hogarth Press, 1953, p. 382. Paul Ricouer, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation,trans. Denis Savage, New 52. Haven, Yale University Press, 1970, p. 443.

Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse*

HOMI

BHABHA

Mimicry revealssomethingin so far as it is distinctfrom what might be called an itself that is behind. The effectof mimicryis camouflage. . . . It is not a questionof harmonizing with the background,butagainsta mottled background,of becomingmottled- exactlylike thetechniqueof camouflage practisedin human warfare. -Jacques Lacan, "The Line and Light," Of the Gaze. It is out of season to questionat this time of day, the originalpolicy of conferringon every colonyof theBritishEmpirea mimic representation of the British Constitution.But if the creatureso endowedhas sometimesforgotten its real insignificanceand under thefancied importanceof speakersand maces, and all the paraphernaliaand ceremoniesof the imperial legislature,has daredto defythe mothercountry, she has to thankherselfforthefolly of conferring suchprivilegeson a conditionof society that has no earthlyclaim to so exalteda position. A fundamentalprincipleappearsto have beenforgotten or overlookedin our systemof colonial policy-that of colonial dependence. To give to a colonytheforms of independence is a mockery;she would not be a colonyfor a single hour if she could maintain an independent station. -Sir Edward Gust, "Reflections on West African Affairs . .. addressed to the Colonial Office," Hatchard, London 1839.

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The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, "human and not wholly human" in the famous words of Lord Rosebery, "writ by the finger of the Divine" 1 often produces a text rich in the traditions of trompel'oeil, irony, mimicry, and repetition. In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects, mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said2 describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination-the demand for identity, stasis-and the counter-pressure of the diadifference - mimicry represents an ironic comprochrony of history-change, mise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration,3 then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subjectof a differencethat is almostthesame, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence;in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which "appropriates" the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both "normalized" knowledges and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. The ambivalence which thus informs this strategy is discernible, for example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the limitations of liberty in his double use of the word "slave": first simply, descriptively as the locus of a legitimate form of ownership, then as the * This paper was first presented as a contribution to a panel on "Colonialist and PostColonialist Discourse," organized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for the Modern Language Association Convention in New York, December 1983. I would like to thank Professor Spivak for inviting me to participate on the panel and Dr. Stephan Feuchtwang for his advice in the preparation of the paper. 1. Cited in Eric Stokes, The Political Ideas of English Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1960, pp. 17-18. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 240. 2. Samuel Weber: "The Sideshow, Or: Remarks on a Canny Moment," Moder Language 3. Notes, vol. 88, no. 6 (1973), p. 1112.

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trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise of power. What is articulated in that distance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference between the "Colonial" State of Carolina and the Original State of Nature. It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalenceof mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely "rupture" the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a "partial"presence. By "partial" I mean both "incomplete" and "virtual." It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. A classic text of such partiality is Charles Grant's "Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain" (1792)4 which was only superseded by James Mills's History of India as the most influential early nineteenth-century account of Indian manners and morals. Grant's dream of an evangelical system of mission education conducted uncompromisingly in English was partly a belief in political reform along Christian lines and partly an awareness that the expansion of company rule in India required a system of "interpellation"--a reform of manners, as Grant put it, that would provide the colonial with "a sense of personal identity as we know it." Caught between the desire for religious reform and the fear that the Indians might become turbulent for liberty, Grant implies that it is, in fact the "partial" diffusion of Christianity, and the "partial"influence of moral improvements which will construct a particularly appropriate form of colonial subjectivity. What is suggested is a process of reform through which Christian doctrines might collude with divisive caste practices to prevent dangerous political alliances. Inadvertently, Grant produces a knowledge of Christianity as a form of social control which conflicts with the enunciatory assumptions which authorize his discourse. In suggesting, finally, that "partial reform" will produce an empty form of"the imitation of English manners which will induce them [the colonial subjects] to remain under our protection,"5 Grant mocks his moral project and violates the Evidences of Christianity-a central missionary tenet-which forbade any tolerance of heathen faiths. The absurd extravagance of Macaulay's InfamousMinute (1835)- deeply influenced by Charles Grant's Observations- makes a mockery of Oriental learn4. Charles Grant, "Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain," Sessional Papers 1812-13, X (282), East India Company. 5. Ibid., chap. 4, p. 104.

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ing until faced with the challenge of conceiving of a "reformed" colonial subject. Then the great tradition of European humanism seems capable only of ironizing itself. At the intersection of European learning and colonial power, Macaulay can conceive of nothing other than "a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern-a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect"6-in other words a mimic man raised "through our English School," as a missionary educationist wrote in 1819, "to form a corps of translators and be employed in different departments of Labour."7 The line of descent of the mimic man can be traced through the works of Kipling, Forester, Orwell, Naipaul, and to his emergence, most recently, in Benedict Anderson's excellent essay on nationalism, as the anomalous Bipin Chandra Pal.8 He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized, is emphaticallynot to be English. The figure of mimicry is locatable within what Anderson describes as "the inner incompatibility of empire and nation."9 It problematizes the signs of racial and cultural priority, so that the "national" is no longer naturalizable. What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable. Mimicry repeats rather than re-presentsand in that diminishing perspective emerges Decoud's displaced European vision of Sulaco as the endlessness of civil strife where folly seemed even harder to bear than its ignominy ... the lawlessness of a populace of all colours and races, barbarism, irremediable tyranny. . . . America is ungovernable. 10 Or Ralph Singh's apostasy in Naipaul's The Mimic Men: We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new. 1 Both Decoud and Singh, and in their different ways Grant and Macaulay, are the parodists of history. Despite their intentions and invocations they inscribe the colonial text erratically, eccentrically across a body politic that refuses to be T. B. Macaulay, "Minute on Education," in Sourcesof Indian Tradition, vol. II, ed. William 6. Theodore de Bary, New York, Columbia University Press, 1958, p. 49. Mr. Thomason's communication to the Church Missionary Society, September 5, 1819, in 7. The Missionary Register, 1821, pp. 54-55. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, Verso, 1983, p. 88. 8. 9. Ibid., pp. 88-89. 10. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, London, Penguin, 1979, p. 161. V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, London, Penguin, 1967, p. 146. 11.

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representative, in a narrative that refuses to be representational. The desire to a process of writing and emerge as "authentic" through mimicry-through of final the irony partial representation. repetition-is What I have called mimicry is not the familiar exercise of dependentcolonial relations through narcissistic identification so that, as Fanon has observed,12 the black man stops being an actional person for only the white man can represent his self-esteem. Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is not what Cesaire describes as "colonization-thingification"13 behind which there stands the essence of the presenceAfricaine.The menaceof mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double-vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object. Grant's colonial as partial imitator, Macaulay's translator, Naipaul's colonial politician as playactor, Decoud as the scene setter of the operabouffeof the New World, these are the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command, authorized versions of otherness. But they are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as "inappropriate" colonial subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence,which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial, and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority. It is a desire that reverses "in part" the colonial appropriation by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer's presence. A gaze of otherness, that shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze which, as Foucault describes it, liberates marginal elements and shatters the unity of man's being through which he extends his sovereignty.14 I want to turn to this process by which the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and "partial" representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence. But not before observing that even an exemplary history like Eric Stokes's The English Utilitarians in India acknowledges the anomalous gaze of otherness but finally disavows it in a contradictory utterance: Certainly India played no central part in fashioning the distinctive qualities of English civilisation. In many ways it acted as a disturbing force, a magnetic power placed at the periphery tending to distort the natural development of Britain's character . . 15 12. Frantz Fanon, BlackSkin, WhiteMasks, London, Paladin, 1970, p. 109. 13. Aime Cesaire, Discourseon Colonialism,New York, Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 21. 14. Michel Foucault, "Nietzche, Genealogy, History," in Language,Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, p. 153. 15. Eric Stokes, TheEnglishUtilitariansandIndia,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959, p. xi.

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What is the nature of the hidden threat of the partial gaze? How does mimicry emerge as the subject of the scopic drive and the object of colonial surveillance? How is desire disciplined, authority displaced? If we turn to a Freudian figure to address these issues of colonial textuality, that form of difference that is mimicry--almost the same but not quite-will become clear. Writing of the partial nature of fantasy, caught inappropriately, between the unconscious and the preconscious, making problematic, like mimicry, the very notion of "origins," Freud has this to say: Their mixed and split origin is what decides their fate. We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who taken all round resemble white men but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges.16 Almost the same but not white. the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction. It is a form of colonial discourse that is uttered interdicta: a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed; a discourse uttered between the lines and as such both against the rules and within them. The question of the representation of difference is therefore always also a problem of authority. The "desire" of mimicry, which is Freud's strikingfeaturethat reveals so little but makes such a big difference, is not merely that impossibility of the Other which repeatedly resists signification. The desire of colonial mimicry - an interdictory desire -may not have an object, but it has strategic objectives which I shall call the metonymyof presence. difference beThose inappropriate signifiers of colonial discourse-the tween being English and being Anglicized; the identity between stereotypes which, through repetition, also become different; the discriminatory identities constructed across traditional cultural norms and classifications, the Simian Black, the Lying Asiatic--all these are metonymies of presence. They are strategies of desire in discourse that make the anomalous representation of the colonized something other than a process of "the return of the repressed," what Fanon unsatisfactorily characterized as collective catharsis.17 These instances of metonymy are the nonrepressive productions of contradictory and multiple belief. They cross the boundaries of the culture of enunciation through a strategic confusion of the metaphoric and metonymic axes of the cultural production of meaning. For each of these instances of "a difference that is almost the same but not quite" inadvertently creates a crisis for the cultural priority given to the metaphoricas the process of repression and substitution which negotiates the difference between paradigmatic systems and classifications. In 16. 17.

Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious" (1915), SE, XIV, pp. 190-191. Fanon, p. 103.

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mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference, but a form of resemblance that differs/defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically. Its threat, I would add, comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory "identity effects" in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no "itself." And that form of resemblanceis the most terrifying thing to behold, as Edward Long testifies in his History of Jamaica (1774). At the end of a tortured, negrophobic passage, that shifts anxiously between piety, prevarication, and perversion, the text finally confronts its fear; nothing other than the repetition of its resemblance "in part": (Negroes) are represented by all authors as the vilest of human kind, to which they have little more pretension of resemblance than what arisesfrom their exteriorforms (my italics). 18 From such a colonial encounter between the white presence and its black semblance, there emerges the question of the ambivalence of mimicry as a problematic of colonial subjection. For if Sade's scandalous theatricalization of language repeatedly reminds us that discourse can claim "no priority," then the work of Edward Said will not let us forget that the "ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts can spring"19 is itself a theater of war. Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of thefixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge in the defiles of an interdictory discourse, and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorizationof colonial representations. A question of authority that goes beyond the subject's lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an objectof regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation. "This culture . . . fixed in its colonial status," Fanon suggests, "(is) both present and mummified, it testified against its members. It defines them in fact without appeal."20 The ambivalence of mimicry--almost but not quite-suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal. What I have called its "identity-effects," are always crucially split. Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a partobject that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at 18.

Edward Long, A HistoryofJamaica, 1774, vol. II, p. 353.

19. EdwardSaid, "TheText, the World, the Critic,"in TextualStrategies, ed. J. V. Harari, Ithaca,CornellUniversityPress, 1979, p. 184. 20. FrantzFanon,"Racismand Culture,"in Toward theAfricanRevolution, London,Pelican, 1967, p. 44.

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which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its "otherness," that which it disavows. There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles and that which Foucault describes as "thinking the unthought"21 which, for nineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of man's alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse that articulates an interdictory"otherness" is precisely the "other scene" of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. The "unthought" across which colonial man is articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described as the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist; one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates "reality" as mimicry. So Edward Long can say with authority, quoting variously, Hume, Eastwick, and Bishop Warburton in his support, that: Ludicrous as the opinion may seem I do not think that an orangutang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female.22 Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire--seen in racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, myths- are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of "civil" discourse. If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudoscientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry-a difference that is almost nothing but not quite-to menace- a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to "a part," can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably. In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objectsof the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objetstrouvesof the colonial discourse- the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of besti-

21. 22.

Michel Foucault, The Orderof Things, New York, Pantheon, 1970, part II, chap. 9. Long, p. 364.

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ality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body. And the holiest of books - the Bible - bearing both the standard of the cross and the standard of empire finds itself strangely dismembered. In May 1817 a missionary wrote from Bengal: Still everyone would gladly receive a Bible. And why? - that he may lay it up as a curiosity for a few pice; or use it for waste paper. Such it is well known has been the common fate of these copies of the Some have been bartered in the markets, others have Bible. ... been thrown in snuff shops and used as wrapping paper.23

23.

The Missionary Register, May 1817, p. 186.

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Chicago The World in a Frame What We See in Films

Leo Braudy

Braudyattacks the prejudicethat American popularfilms are less serious and valuablethan existential European"art" films. He traces the developmentof this prejudicethrough two centuries of cultural issues in the history of literatureand the visual arts, demonstratingnot only that both types of film have value but that they are part of the same cultural continuity. Paper $9.95 288 pages

Cinema and Sentiment Charles Affron Popularfilms of the 1930s and 1940s that we often labeled "camp," "kitsch," or "tearjerkers" were, and have remained,tremendouslypopularand affecting.This is the first work to consider with sustained seriousness how this genre drawsour strong emotional response. Cloth $20.00 224 pages 160 b&w photos

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Giuseppe Penone Jessica Bradley The art of sculptor Penone has developedfrom his deep roots in the geographyand traditions of rural Italy, where he was born. Penone uses classical methods of observationand simple materialsto explore the elusive boundary between nature and culture. Paper $15.00 72 pages 3 color, 36 b&w photographs

Cultural Engineering

Tom Sherman

Editedand with an Introductionby Willard Holmes For artist Tom Sherman,technology is second nature. His work, in the form of videotapes, audio tapes, performance,and writing based on works by other artists, links contemporary "high culture" and fine arts with the mass media and popularculture. Paper $20.00 204 pages * 41 b&w photographs

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An Anthology of Art Criticism Edited by Peter Frank

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Since 1972 Afterimagehas offered a forum for the discussion of video, independent film, photography, and visual books. Afterimagehas been a source of groundbreaking critical articles, probing interviews with artists, and timely news about the arts.

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The editors of OCTOBER wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Pinewood Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and the New York State Council on the Arts. The Institutefor Architectureand Urban Studies Trustees

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OCTOBER 29 & 30 Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss

A Conversationwith Hans Haacke

Jacques Chardeau, Jeanne Laurent, Pierre Vaisse

CaillebotteDossier

Douglas Crimp

The Art of Exhibition

Georges Didi-Huberman

The Index of the Absent Wound

Scott MacDonald

An Interviewwith Jonas Mekas

Georges Melies

CinematographicViews

Annette Michelson

The Eve of the Future

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Wop and Wog

Joseph Rykwert

On First Hearing about Hermeneutics