Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises summary: Through a series of essays based around book reviews, puns, jokes, close readings and case studies, Phillips both posits a similitude between psychoanalysis and literature, and also complicates that conjunction.

Passage for close-reading: “Anyone, in other words, who prefers not to, once, very definitely, preferred to—and it got them into trouble. And it is this trouble that we always end up talking about, and they often don't” (295).

This passage serves as the literal last words of the essay, “On Eating, and Preferring Not To,” which itself appears quite late in Phillips' text. The essay as a whole has been musing on the connections between appetite and desire, and between the text, the case study, and the meal, through the apparatus of reading, side-by-side, Melville's tale “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the truncated tale of Chloe, Phillips' own anorexic patient. Chloe, in the narrative Phillips grants her, never quite gets her appetite back, but, in her only enlightening session, incites Phillips to think about what it means for him to have or lack an appetite, or for anyone to have one at all. In the paragraphs immediately preceding this passage, Phillips guesses that the anorexic's distorted appetite arises out of a wish to maintain a stridently pure hunger, the result of a trauma that forces the person, belatedly, “to restore the viability of appetite” (294). In the same sense that a traumatic occurrence might be unconsciously transformed into an expression of sexual fantasy, Phillips posits that an eating disorder is a similar form of self-cure in which the trauma has been “appetized” rather than sexualized. From this clinical setting, the last sentences of the last paragraph veer back towards Bartleby and the essay's opening, echoing the story's famously repeated line as well as, in the very seeming banality of its prose, complicates the relation between analyst and analysand, between desire and trouble, between text and food.

Although the essay revolves around the ways in which Bartleby might be read as a metaphorically anorexic subject through his apparently desirous refusal, the specificity of the connection between refusing food and refusing words remains to be filled in. Rather than putting the two stories in conversation, Phillips' essay revolves around parallel close readings of each, suggesting the reader construct the logical leap that seems to take for granted that Bartleby's lack of appetite is akin to Chloe's, with only the existence of each participant's leaden silence and the food metaphors surrounding Bartleby as evidence. If Chloe's problem, for her analyst and her parents, although not apparently for her, was a failure to eat, then Bartleby's parallel problem is an anorexic failure to write. Or rather, a binging cycle of writing followed by long abstinence and eventual hospitalization. In either case, the value of the comparison lies not in the thing rejected, but in the rejection itself and perhaps even more so in the recalcitrance and resilience with which that rejection is voiced. Despite the genteel conditional of “I would prefer not to,” or the patient quietude with which Chloe puts up with Phillips' attempts to cure her, each refuses to submit their bodies to processes that would, at least potentially, detract from the purity of desire. Although both food and text are prime candidates for consumption and ideally introjection, Chloe and Bartleby are united in the intensity of their appetite which values deferral over possession.

If the meaning of the essay as a whole is constructed in the gap of the unelaborated connection between Bartleby and Chloe, the sentence itself is similarly constructed around the importance of division. The first sentence in the passage in question is broken up by a plethora of commas into a series of tiny, fragmented phrases, of thoughts broken into bite-size pieces. Within the first half of the first sentence, no phrase is over four words long, with the subject consisting only of a pronoun, and another phrase consisting only of the adverb “once.” After this appetizer, the sentence shoots off in another direction, rhythmically and temporally, by the division of a dash. The dash is an insouciant, mobile mark of punctuation, symbol of casual, quickly shifting, evanescent thoughts. This dash suggests a choppy flow that comes to a full stop, a slicing-up of text into bite-size pieces in order to more readily consume it that then pulls up sharply with a full stop at the threat or memory of trouble. After the dash, the first sentence resolves itself into an independent clause, albeit a colloquial and child-like one, connected to the fragmented main clause by a simple coordinating conjunction. The second sentence is then constructed on the same pattern of conjunction followed by independent clause, carrying over the word “trouble” as a remainder from the sentence before, and repeating the structure once again in the final clause of the sentence, and the essay. This repetitive, progressive system of clauses in the second sentence, along with the slowly increasing word length of the first, makes the two sentences together feel like a therapy, a slowly developing system of successive approximations of bite-sized clauses building up to the “proper meal” of the full sentence.

If this is a therapy, it remains to be asked who is being treated. If the subjects of the essay have been first Bartleby and then Chloe, the subject of this sentence shifts drifts towards generality. As a pronoun, “anyone” is both general and specific, in that the “one” suggests a particular and identifiable subject, while the “any” suggests an indefinite number of individuals who could fill that role. Here, the “anyone” implies that this is a process that affects or could affect all of us equally. The sentence above the ones in question tell us that people with eating disorders “appetize” trauma, parenthetically noting, as if it were unremarkable, that “all of us, to some extent” fit this category. We are all potential anorexics, but also, potentially, the opposite of anorexics in that we, like the analyst, are not hungry enough. The pronouns, then, shift into undecidability. Who is the “we” and who the “they”? It seems that the inclusive “we” would be psychoanalysts, or more widely, those whose appetites for reading and writing are unimpaired, who prefer to and don't get in trouble for it, while the exclusive “they” are the patients, the Chloes and Bartlebys, who flatly refuse more textual or alimentary stimulation. Yet the paragraph ahead says that analysts, and those who might identify more broadly with the therapeutic
“we” are not hungry enough, so that there arises a passionate, even saintly purity of the desire of these conscientious objectors. How would we become hungry enough, if not by going over to the side of those who prefer not to, and thereby finish the collapse of the distinction between pronouns of us and them?

A Voice and Nothing More

A Voice and Nothing More summary: Dolar seeks to locate the voice as the uncanny object which neither is sublimated as it conveys meaning, nor is ossified by veneration into a fetish object, but which functions as the blind spot in the distinction between outside and inside.

Passage for close-reading: “Bringing the voice from the background to the forefront entails a reversal, or a structural illusion: the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed. It seems still to maintain the link with nature, on the one hand—the nature of a paradise lost—and on the other hand to transcend language, the cultural and symbolic barriers, in the opposite direction, as it were: it promises an ascent to divinity, an elevation above the empirical, the mediated, the limited, worldly human concerns” (31).

These sentences occur in the first chapter of Dolar's book, in which he explores the linguistics of the voice, in a section which details the linguistics of the non-voice, including hiccups, coughing, laughing, and singing. Continuing my interest in the musical metaphors serving as a sort of uncanny remainder within Deleuze and Guattari's text, I find myself drawn to the specificity of singing as a voice which pulls both ways in the very moment of seemingly fixating most purely on voice as object, to the point that the singer loses the elusive uncanniness of the object voice in the development of the perfectly controlled singing voice as object. In the sentence immediately preceding the ones in question, Dolar asserts that the fixation on the musical qualities of the singing voice serves as the invert of the attention to the object voice that he is pursing, but that even this inversion is dualistic. The gesture pulls both ways: music both “evokes the object voice and obfuscates it” (31). This passage, then, is admittedly existing on a narrow level of Dolar's text: a position that only partially approaches the object of his own examination, occurring in a specific example of a class of at least four non-verbal, and, in some cases, non-vocal sounds. Nonetheless, I'm interested in the ways this passage enacts the ambivalent gesture of obfuscation and evocation at the same time as setting up this paradigm as one of fetishization that removes attention from the elusive voice as object a. If the rhetoric of this passage pulls both ways at once, it does so at least in part through a series of visual metaphors, and specifically an optics of magnification, that exists in tension with the auditory profundity of the voice, and serves to outline the gap at the heart of Dolar's own object under the guise of a tertiary example.

The first sentence begins by “bringing the voice from the background to the forefront,” an act that can equally well apply to Dolar's own project of bringing forth the elusive qualities of the object voice from behind logocentrism, and to the opera aficionado's aim of highlighting the musical qualities of a beautiful singing voice over the comprehensibility of the words they utter. Before the colon, this first sentence is cast in the passive voice, with no clearly delineated actor who is responsible for drawing the voice forward. The void created by the lack of an agential subject places the emphasis on the action of bringing the voice forward, so that the voice itself takes on the role of both the actor prompted to step forward, and the uncanny frontrunner of a force that originates elsewhere, and which takes its force from its spatial dislocation. Furthermore, this first sentence in both its halves is organized around visual space through which this voice traverses. Before the colon, the voice is brought “from the background to the forefront,” terms which are both artistic and theatrical in their spatial specificity. If the spatial progression suggests an actor crossing the stage towards the footlights, underneath the visual image is the whisper of that actor's spoken lines brought forward from the back of the house, spreading throughout the theater in their sonority. Yet this motion entails, specifically, a view of the process as a “reversal, or a structural illusion,” a repetition which seemingly solidifies the spatial complex surrounding the concept of the voice. The word “illusion,” unlike, say, “hallucination” or “misconception,” is a specifically visual mis-recognition, while the “structural” implies both that the structure of a voice traversing a theatrical space is illusory, and that the illusion itself takes on a visual structure.

After the colon, the voice, despite its apparent ephemerality, “appears” in seemingly visual glory as the “locus” of true expression, a term which is visual in the specifically spatial register of a geometrical point, from which the disembodied voice expresses with profundity “what cannot be said [but] can nevertheless be conveyed” (31). From the vantage point of the voice's “locus of true expression,” the unsayable is dispersed outward from the very specific to the very expansive, like the first notes of an opera spreading from the vocal cords of a single singer to expand acoustically across an entire concert hall.With “conveyed”, the sentence ends as it begun, with visual terms that connote a traversal of a specifically delineated space. Both these phrases, however, surround the spatial and visual core of the sentence: “illusion.” Situated in the middle of the sentence, this is an illusion that visually pulls both ways, as if one were looking through each end of a pair of binoculars in turn, so that the object of vision was first remarkably distant, and then unusually proximate.

The final sentence of this series continues the metaphorical binocular optics, as a scale of visual binaries that pulls both ways, into the specificity of the very small as well as the profundity of the very large. The sentence begins with a gesture towards the ocular trope with the simple verb phrase “it seems,” where the voice serves as the antecedent of the pronoun. This visual resemblance serves to reiterate, rather than simply produce, the “link with nature” which forms one half of the visual paradigm, reaching back into the minutia of a mythically distant and yet literarily specific, past, a “paradise lost.” “On the other hand,” in the second half of this sentence, the dichotomy reaches in the “opposite direction, as it were,” stretching infinitely upwards in order to “transcend language” (31), so that the two directional registers are situated neatly on the radial symmetry of the body. If the beginning of this second sentence posits music's ability to initiate a return to the specificity of a natural, paradisaical past, the second half of the sentence promises a “musical ascent to divinity,” an upwards trajectory from whose “elevation” one can gain the properly immense perspective on the dimensions of “limited, worldly concerns.” This double-optics system resembles the medieval scale of arranging life in visual, hierarchical ascensions from animal to angel, with man securely ensconced in the center of the concentric series. Yet here, there is a blind spot at the heart of these visual representations, a blind spot that is occupied exactly by the uncanny voice. The optical oppositions of the very large and the very small, each situated “on the other hand” of the other, have no body between them, but only the voice which echoes with profoundly illusory transcendental meaning. The structures of bringing the voice into the foreground is itself an illusion, both from within the perspective of the fetishization of the voice that this paragraph details, and within the larger aims of this chapter and this work. Through verbs like “being,” “appears,” and “seems,” the passage sets a reader into a viewer's position relative to the voice, hence himself both evoking and obfuscating the object voice within a realm of visual metaphors in the very act of commenting on the ways in which music does the same thing. Despite its ecclesiastical specificity, the passage functions to open the “gap that cannot be filled” through a series of visual metaphors which obfuscate the voice at its very moment of fetishized prominence.

Anti-Oedipus Week 2

Anti-Oedipus summary:

“Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men”: Deleuze and Guattari delineate the ways in which, by flattening the voice onto writing, desire is inscribed onto the full body within the territorial machines of primitive societies.

“Introduction to schizoanalysis”: Deleuze and Guattari outline a practical ethics of schizoanalysis, promulgating the use-value of a malevolently destructive desire that purifies as does a curettage.

Passage for close-reading: “Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn't effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary—withdrawal, freaks—provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the shuffle” (277).

This passage occurs early in what Deleuze and Guattari call their “Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” which, naturally, comes at the end of their tome on the subject. In the first few pages of the first section, one might classically assume that the positioning of this passage suggests it is of an at least preliminary importance for outlining what schizophrenia is and how it progresses.The chapter traces three points of view, that of regression, that of the cycle, and that of the disjunctive or at least potentially disjunctive community, before claiming that the familial investment is simply an “application of the unconscious investments of the social field” (277) through which application the child, who can be considered neither a precursor nor a basis for the adult, sets into motion “a delirious interplay of disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments” (277). The sentence in question appears at the end of a paragraph devoted to outlining two different poles of social investment around which the child, or the adult who supplants and surrounds but never succeeds him, can construct these delirious interplays. Last week, I started with this situation of the text in context as a way to elucidate the ways the rhetoric of the passage pulls out that semantic ground from underfoot, performing the schizoanalysis which it, on another level, recommends. This week, I chose to start here again because I am interested in the line of flight, and in order to talk productively about an escape, it seemed necessary to discuss the setting from which the text would stage its escape, an escape that is both internal to this text and this sentence, and eccentric to it, both forming and breaching a double barrier. Throughout the second half of this book, I've noticed the figure of the line of flight appearing as a briefly lucid tangent to the ostensible purpose of the discourse, so here I'd like to try to follow at least a short stretch of this movement, and the ways in which the line of flight, like the curettage Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere compare to schizoanalysis, structures by means of pulling out the insides of a rhetorical position.

The phrase “line of escape” first appears in this context as the qualification of the second type of social investment. If the first pole is that of the “paranoiac fascisizing” type that disinvests any potential figure of desire by flattening and homogenizing it into presumed universal desire through the sibilant reassurance of “yes, I am your kind,” then the second pole inverts this process to invest in the figure of the Other. By claiming flatly, “I am not your kind” the schizorevolutionary type speaks from an already-established eccentric position, and follows the centrifugal line of this tangent through the motions of desire, “breach[ing] the wall and caus[ing] flows to move” (277). This drift along a line of escape is immediately contained by the beginning of the sentence in question, where the proverbial “good people” tell us not to flee. Here, the “good people,” by their very universality and the banal simplicity of their descriptive adjective, take on a matronly air, suggesting cozy church matriarchs who dispense wisdom about the value of integrating oneself into the status quo. The “good people” provide us with a litany of such proverbial reminders: “we must not flee,” “to escape is not good,” “it isn't effective,” “one must work for reforms” (277). Taken together, these gentle reminders serve as a sort of pedagogical plea, with their repetitive parallel structure as verbal complements serving to lull the listener into a position of receptivity, as does, for example, the refrain of a children's song. The soothing quadruple repetition is coupled with basic syntax and vocabulary within each clause: the binaristic “good” against the implied “bad” of escape, the pedagogical “must not,” the generalizing appeal of the “one” who must “work for reforms,” with the promise that if one does so, one will be celebrated as a productive member of society. Even in the clause, “it isn't effective,” the longest word in this sentence is packed between two other clauses that clarify the meaning in context, in much the way that a teacher surrounds a complicated new vocabulary word with the contextual clues her students need to begin to develop an understanding of its meaning. In this way, the sentence places the “good people” in a maternal role at the same time as it structures the listener or reader into a child's position, pedagogically directing the reader away from their hopes of escape along the line of a lullaby.

Despite the comfortingly repeated simplistic adjective “good,” this paradigm serves to both infantilize and entrap the potentially schizophrenic revolutionary, so that the line of flight must take its trajectory directly away from these nostalgic associations of this family in order to be truly effective. Within the space of the next few words, the rhetoric does exactly that, with the subject growing up from a undifferentiated child in relation to a maternal figure to a “revolutionary” who emerges intact from this social fabric, who “knows that escape is revolutionary” (277), provided one unsettle the comforting layers of maternal, or more broadly, familial, subjugation as one does so, not only rejecting the “good people”'s doctrines but tearing apart the lines of the song from the inside out as one emerges. Even the interjection within the sentence instantiates the necessary aggression of this trajectory. Inserted between the sentence's main clause and its attendant supporting details, the interjection “withdrawal, freaks” unsettles what might otherwise be a simple counter-pedagogy. Unlike the four parallel terms of the “good people”'s lyrical advice, the two terms here, bursting from the text of the sentence between a pair of dashes, also have an uncertain and arrhythmic relationship to each other. Are they a pair of nouns in a series, separated by a comma, and hence slightly pushing aside the grammatical rules, lacking both a third term and a coordinating conjunction? Do they instead form an imbedded imperative sentence which reclassifies the revolutionary of the main clause as a “freak” which would be even more radically removed from the oppressively comforting paradigm of the good people? In either respect, the revolutionary interpellated by this interjection functions to disrupt the stable pieties of the familial system as represented by the matriarchal “good people” who settle their children into comfortingly soporific positions. In this way, he thereby purifies these relations by reducing them to rubble, in the hopes that “a piece of the system will get lost in the shuffle,” (277) leaving a hole that the most careful reconstruction of the paradigm would be unable to rectify.

Anti-Oedipus Week 1

Anti-Oedipus summary: Through disjunctions and proliferations of desiring-machines, Deleuze and Guattari reject the repressive schema of oedipalization, and the internalized fascist desire to be led, in favor of the unbearably joyful process of becoming-schizo.

Passage for close-reading: “We are also of a mind to believe that everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous news items.” (85).

This passage occurs in the chapter, “Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family” in a subsection entitled “The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation.” I start here, as if the passage in question can be triangulated through a process of successive approximations: this chapter, and this section, at the end of this paragraph with a clear transition between what went before and what comes after. I start here, as if by locating something I have made it meaningful, I have put it into a set and crystalline relationship to something else. I start here, because it is my usual, pedagogical approach: there must be something to grab hold of here, if I only start large enough and settle everything into its proper place. My usual approach is useless here.

Rather, this act of triangulation backfires on me: the sub-chapter begins by returning to the figure of the body without organs as an egg, “criss-crossed with axes, banded with zones” (84), a reiterated observation whose refrain brings out the new overtones of a biochemistry of schizophrenia, a science that sounds more like calculus with its attention to “the distribution of field-gradient-threshold” (84). These languages in turn slides into those of travel, of the voyage of the undifferentiated body which exists from the beginning and looks forward, feels forward into the horrific depths of its own impending journey with a multiply dispersed gaze. This journey, as Beckett's characters also suggest, is both interior and exterior, although even that cozily coordinating conjunction sets the two terms apart as something separate and opposable, while Deleuze and Guattari maintain that these seeming opposites, stripped of extension, form and quality, emerge in their purity as coupled intensities, radiating with unbearable emotion in all directions, all times at once.

It is this dispersal of intensive, disjunctive flow in several dimensions and media that undermines my desire to triangulate my position in the text from the outset. Everything commingles to the point that there is no longer (if indeed there ever was) a distinct series of items on which to settle an interpretation. The very verb “commingles” blends connotations of social party-goers cheerfully interacting, with suggestions of a fermenting trash pile, where the discrete discarded things meld into the chemically-distinct “everything” of intensive flows. The rest of the sentence becomes itself a flow, consisting of the synthesis of three sets of conjunctions: the “becomings, passages, and migrations,” the ascent and descent, the pluralized flows of time, and, most notably, the partial list of items after the colon that partake of these flows. Becoming, passage, and migration are all directional terms with a suggested teleological aim: a migratory bird traces the same path season after season; the verb “becoming” encapsulates an end-term which the subject will eventually, concretely, become; and a passage suggests two endpoints with a traversable space between, be it a secret passage between rooms or a middle passage between continents. With each term pluralized and the three terms enclosed in a disjunctive series, however, this teleology is undermined by being multiplied past recognition, constructing instead a body without organs, crossed with zones of intensities, axes, thresholds. All this drift likewise both ascends and descends, where the coordinating conjunction leaves open the possibilities of the temporal order of these motions: first one, then the other? Some ascending while others descend? Everything going both directions at once?

The list after the colon is a litany of identifications, arranged in both ascending and descending order, with everything commingling in orders of scale. The list tellingly ends on “miscellaneous news items,” with the promise of journalism to tell the whole truth objectively. The newsboy's call, “read all about it!” implies not only that one can read all there is to know about a given story within the confines of a single sheet, but that through reading, “it” will become clear, it being both the specificity of the news article and the social milieu in which that article is placed. The news traditionally promises meaning through miscellany: if you read all the fragments, you too will know all you need by the end of your first cup of coffee. These news items, however, undermine such pretensions to certainty. Coming at the end of a flow of magnitudes, the news item is the smallest link, and the most prominently miscellaneous in a list constructed for miscellany. After the news items, the next sentence shifts into a list of potential becomings, each of which serves to open a potential of becoming something else. Everything shifts, from God to the daily news, and the importance lies in the ability of one to flow and shift into another, to impregnate another with meaning.

The temporal order of the sentence as a whole, despite its seeming progression from the clarity of a transition to a list of examples, undoes it own teleology from the beginning. “We are also of a mind to believe” puts me in a mind to believe that we are elaborating on the point established in the paragraph above, through the seductive appeal of the “also.” Yet, it is at this very moment that my desire for triangulation is undermined, the semantic ground shifting underfoot. The unassuming first-person-plural subject could refer to Deleuze and Guattari themselves, which, although a seemingly simplistic and even obvious denotation, already layers two subjects, two sets of intensive affective voyages, into the space of a single speaking position. Which one intones the words “we are also of a mind...?” If there is “no reason to oppose an interior voyage to an exterior one,” there is no reason to oppose interior authors to intertextual ones. The “we” of the subject includes, tangentially, the voices of Lenz, Nijinksy, Beckett, and Laing. Ultimately, their voices resonate together, indistinguishable, with only the plural pronoun standing in for the buzz which characterizes perfect unison.

The comforting “also” itself, in tune with the prepositional phrase “of a mind” and the infinitive verb construction “to believe” further layers these doubled-yet-singular, intensive-and-extensive voices. “To believe” is a verb laden with ecclesiastical overtones, as is the “law” that, elsewhere, they express hesitation to use to describe chemical processes for that very aroma of faith. Yet this spiritual, classically internal and intensive action is made grammatically dependent on the shifting ground of the phrase “of a mind,” suggesting that this belief is contingent on this mind, whose indefinite article promises any number of potential minds, in an infinite (albeit unexpressed) series of also/ands, each with their own attendant constellation of beliefs. This mind's belief, “that everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations,” takes up the rest of the paragraph, but despite that topical unity, the seeming topic sentence really exposes an infinite series of possible arguments, enacting the disjunctive sleights of hand at the heart of schizoanalysis.

Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film

Freud's Drive summary: De Lauretis elucidates a concept of the drives which puts seemingly diametrically-opposed thinkers such as Foucault and Freud into conversation around discussions of Cronenberg's film eXistenZ, and Barnes' novel Nightwood.

Desire in Narrative summary:

Passage for close reading: “As we fully experience the visual and aural pleasure, the solicitation of the scopic and auditory drives that are the lure of cinema and its grip on spectatorial fantasy, identification and desire—death is at work. Cinema is a mirror in which I see myself, an erotic scene laid out for my pleasure, luring me into its fantasy; to the extent that I become part of the fantasy, yes, in that sense, cinema can kill me” (38).

This passage appears at the end of de Lauretis' first chapter, in which she illustrates Freud's theory of drives by way of explications of the films The Hunger, Basic Instinct, and M. Butterfly, exploring how each film postulates a death drive that is inextricable from the sexual. This particular passage concludes the section on M. Butterfly, with a close reading of the final moment of the film, in which Rene, dressed in the Butterfly costume of his own cross-dressing and perfidious lover, commits suicide with a shard of the mirror in which he (or she?) can see his own reflection. After the sentences in question, the page is split by a trio of asterisks, followed by a brief transition paragraph, by means of a turn towards the ways she will incorporate Foucault's “ostensibly anti-psychoanalytic stance” concerning sexuality as a set of power relations, with Freud's stubborn, instinctual drive which the former seems to repudiate. The passage on M. Butterfly, then, constructs the space of a momentary hesitation, a reflection of a mise-en-abîme that thereby becomes one itself. These few sentences open a seemingly heterotopic space of danger and attraction within the text, spiraling deeper and deeper without reaching closure, so that the hall of mirrors must simply be shunted aside by the asterisks, left to reflect potentially endlessly within itself, and always threatening escape despite the reassuring strongholds of the externally-applied border.

In the first of these three sentences, de Lauretis traces a shift from her explication of the final moments of the film, to our own self-identification with the death thus portrayed. The first half of this sentence is lush with parallel clauses, themselves packed with adjectives and prepositional phrases paired by coordinating conjunctions, creating a dense atmosphere ripe for sensory stimulation. The adverbial phrase “fully experience” early in the sentence suggests that there will, indeed, be a range and depth of experiential spaces into which a viewer can fully cast oneself, while the phrase “visual and aural pleasure” assures one of the potentially erotic enjoyment specific to the fullness of these experiences. Through parallel structure, de Lauretis asserts that the source of this fullness is the experience of the film's “solicitation of the scopic and auditory drives” (38), thereby expanding the possible number of drives by subdividing the familiar ones of sexuality and death. In particular, a scopic drive contains connotations not only of visual pleasure, as the counterpart to auditory enjoyment, but of a visuality keyed specifically to one's examination of the other, which serves the viewer as “something aimed at or desired; something which one wishes to effect or attain” (OED). In this way, the scopic, and likewise the auditory drives, as solicited by the film similarly construct the interior spaces of the film as both other and self, where to attain this aim is to incorporate within oneself both the physicality of the other and the directionality of their drive towards death, always already an echo of one's own. Enacting this idea, the first sentence abruptly breaks off at the end into an independent clause which is itself an importation from outside the scope of this book. The volume as a whole starts with Cocteau's phrase “la mort au travail” which, in its translational modifications, has drifted like a fugue to haunt the subtext of de Lauretis' own work. Despite the phrase's powerful effect, the circumstances of her first engagement with it are elided, in favor of a subsequent 1970 gloss by Straub concerning the cinema's ability to “captur[e] time in flight, catch[] death at work” (1). In the sentence in question, then, the phrase hauntingly reappears, both catching and instantiating the act of time looping back on itself . Furthermore, the use of the phrase is no longer quoted, footnoted, or cited as it is in the first chapter. Rather, the sentence erupts out of its larger context as a ghostly outlier, an introjected bit of someone else's thought, which, like the spine in the ego, emerges from the inside out to structure the very space it constructs.

The second sentence, then, enacts both a return to the specificity of the mise-en-abîme of M. Butterfly and also a generalization to the broader mise-en-abîme that attracts from within the heart of film and self. Cinema writ large becomes the subject of the sentence in a move away from the specificity of Rene Gallimard's personal swan song in Butterfly's gown. In contradistinction to this generalizing move, the second sentence shifts away from the first's technical language and inclusive, first-person-plural pronouns to an insistent repetition of intensely individualistic first-person-singular and reflexive pronouns. Likewise, this generality of cinema becomes a specific physical body deployed in space, both a “mirror in which I see myself” and “an erotic scene laid out for my pleasure.” While the latter figure suggests a sexualized body sprawled across a hypothetical bed, with the viewer granted the rights to enjoy it, the former makes the space in which we view this body a radically heterotopic one. If cinema is a mirror, then the viewer themselves becomes the star of the erotic scene which they simultaneously enjoy, in a spatial doubling that creates a vision doubly fantastical, in which the viewer engages as both object and subject. The viewer's figure in the mirror-world of the cinema is granted a fictive agency of enjoyment that the physical self positioned in front of the movie screen lacks, while also being granted the fictive subjectivity of the erotic scene itself, in all its projected deathliness. If the cinema is a mirror, it appears to be a warped one: although it allows one to reflexively view oneself, the “part of that fantasy” that the viewer plays becomes remains undecidable and duplicitous.

The Freudian Body

The Freudian Body summary: Through connections to Mallarmé, Beckett, and Abyssinian bas-relief, Bersani traces psychoanalytic lacunae, demonstrating how Freud's writing simultaneously argues for and undermines a definitional, disciplined reading.

“Three Essays” summary: Freud begins by discussing adult libido through the lens of deviations from the norm, such as object choice or diversion from sexual goal, concluding that perversion is an innate potential of human sexuality, before turning to childhood sexuality, which he asserts begins in infancy with the stimulation of the child's erogenous zones, goes through a latency period in middle childhood, and starts anew at puberty, when the sexual act becomes the constitutive method for diminishing the tension produced by sexual pleasure.

“A Child is Being Beaten” summary: Freud unpacks a common tripartite fantasy of his patients: firstly, the child fantasizes about possessing his or her father's exclusive love, so that the father beats another child hated by the fantasizer; secondly, the child unconsciously places him or herself in the position of the beaten child; and thirdly, the fantasizer consciously replaces the father with another authority figure, and the beaten child by (often anonymous and male) third parties, gaining sexual exciting from the vision of these children being beaten as derived from the original incestuous fantasy.

“Desire and Death” summary: After positing two scenarios for sexual excitation in Baudelaire's verse, one being that of the free-floating desires of shattered selves, and the other a desire for a passionate somnolence akin to sleep or to the diffused rays of a cold autumnal sun, Bersani asserts that the second scenario overcomes the first, so that the final climax of sexual pleasure would be the reduction of insatiable desire to the stillness of death.

“Is the Rectum a Grave” summary: Bersani explores how AIDS/HIV has been portrayed in mainstream media, with reflections on what it means to be mainstream and how the (white, heteronormative family) has come to signify in this discourse, before arguing for the value of powerlessness in sex, and of the ability of sexuality to demean the suspect efforts to redeem it through a pastoralist project.

Passage for close-reading: “The pessimism of Civilization and its Discontents should be an adequate warning: it is the discursive sign of a perhaps suicidal melancholy, the palely reactive aura of a cultural complicity with the power of an anticultural destructiveness, of a murderously childlike need to extinguish the other's fire.” (25)

Throughout this text, I was struck by places in which the voice appeared as paradoxically silent, powerless, or inscrutable, such as the “absolutely impenetrable Law which refuses to allow itself to be obeyed,” (97) which has held a sacred central place in human thought, “from Job to Kafka (97), or the way in which an “author's silent, insistent voice undoes that security of statement by which we can so easily be seduced, and possessed” (67). In this sense, the very act of transmission of the messages of culture were less undermining their content as they were constitutively preventing access to this content, so that the messages are exhibited as empty sets, or at least inaccessible locales, before the temporal possibility of undermining that meaning arose. Since I would like to focus on the empty spaces opened by the most seemingly and intentionally constitutive moves, I chose among these the passage that, by virtue of its position, served as a call for the relevance of an untying, designifying move behind a pair of otherwise disparate texts.

While earlier in the paragraph Bersani has described Freud's attitude towards his own speeches as ambivalent, the sentence in question begins with an assertion of the inherent pessimism in Civilization and Its Discontents. Pessimism, as the philosophical position of assuming the worst about a given situation, itself assumes the potential existence of specific worrisome outcomes, which, if they were to occur, would justify the pessimist in his or her belief in the unavoidable negativity of the situation. The generality of this use of the term, however, forecloses the option of particular negative outcomes, assuming instead an overarching, consistent state of pessimism, a generalized tone of an entire text which definitively fails to point towards a specific situation. The sentence previous to this one hints at specific “pessimistic comments” (24) by Freud concerning the cultural superego's severity, and hence the necessity of a new discourse. In this sentence, however, the placement of “pessimism” at the very beginning, with only the title of the work as its potential object, suggests that, if the work as a whole is primarily pessimistic, then the desire written within it for a new theoretical discourse is subsumed under that pessimism, enacting the very undoing gesture that Bersani is demonstrating within Freud's thought. Positioned at the beginning of the sentence, the word reflects backwards towards the sound of Freud's own “pessimistic comments” (24) which are themselves undermined, while simultaneously echoing forwards towards the “adequate warning” (25) as which this pessimism is, at the end of the clause, finally valued.

This pessimism, we are told, should serve as an adequate warning, the “discursive sign of a perhaps suicidal melancholy” (25). Here, then, the language of the voice and of writing are conflated in service of the negative affect of melancholy. An adequate warning, it would seem, would be one we could hear, in the sense of a shouted telegraphic message which takes its power from the listener's ability to infer the speaker's urgency through the volume and intensity of his tone. The vocality of “warning” is, however, immediately overlaid with textual implications: the content of this warning recedes from us into a “discursive sign” (25), suggesting a conflation of word and image into something like a street sign, thereby occluding the place of the voice through the same gesture that originally gives that voice its force.

Yet the content of this warning, the warned-against outcome which the double layer of voice and text point to, is itself a dissociation, a “suicidal melancholy” that functions to bring the body into the focus of this shifting signification while constitutionally inaugurating that body's breakdown. The pessimism, then, gives voice to a bodily affect, melancholy, which is intense enough to, perhaps, sever the body from the very agency that allows one to give voice. Furthermore, if the temporal hesitations of a potentially suicidal melancholy are the content of the warning, so too is the “palely reactive aura” which parallels the former phrase, with the suggestion of deathly stillness undercut by the agential motion which both “reactive” and “suicidal” suggest.

In the phrase “palely reactive,” the adverb in conjunction with the word “reactive” grants a sense of fluctuating motion, so that the pallor is, through the parallel with “suicidal melancholy,” both the sickly steady-state of death, and a shifting sort of inverse sun. The italicized word “aura” suggests the corona that appears around the sun on a hazy day, as well as the Latin “aurora” for dawn, a double image of filtered light that reaches the observer at the day or the season. The image, then, is one of the eerie after-effects of light, with a gap in signification where the primary source of light should be. Instead, the word “fire” ends the sentence, the only tangible light-source in the passage, and one which is extinguished in order to produce the “reactive aura of a cultural complicity” (25). In between, this last clause is punctuated by words such as reactive, destructiveness, anticultural, murderously, and extinguish, which combine to suggest a breakdown of meaning that is chemical as much as it is semantic, with their combined connotations of an aggressiveness that is specifically nuclear. The simple, sexualized image of the tongues of flame with which the passage ends is undermined by the pale aura of a civilization that glows, a radioactive culture which functions through the fissionable energies of destructiveness, murder, and, as a paradoxical preliminary, suicide. The passage moves, then, through a series of elements that constitutively undo themselves, from the vocal to the bodily to the chemical, suggesting the voice's organic disconnection from the body: separated from its speaker as it extends through time and space, finally concluding in the radically, and radically atemporal, dissociation of an atomic fission.

Life and Death in Psychoanalysis

Life and Death in Psychoanalysis summary: Laplanche reads the large contradictions which form transversals across Freud's work, assuming dialectical force for even the most seemingly adventitious, and recasting aspects of the theories frequently dismissed as either/or into a unified and radically embodied structure.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle summary: Freud posits the death drive, or the impulse of each individual to “die in its own way,” as the titular “beyond” of the pleasure principle, using a speculative methodology that privileges systematically following a line of inquiry to its logical inclusion, and favors the possibility of transforming one's views on the basis of conclusions thus derived.

Passage for close reading: “Now sexuality, in its entirety, in the human infant, lies in a movement which deflects the instinct, metaphorizes its aim, displaces and internalizes its object, and concentrates its source on what is ultimately a minimal zone, the erotogenic zone.” (23)

This passage occurs in the first of six speculative and successive stages of Laplanche's self-described fragmentary analysis of the contradictions inherent in Freud's theories, situated in a discussion of the complication of meanings inherent in the term “perversion.” While a perversion is popularly understood spatially as a “deviation from an instinct” (23), thereby supposing a more specific and salutary aim which the perversion resists, Laplanche suggests that Freud's “dialectic is more fundamental” (23). The physical gesture of the perversion moving aside from the acceptable instinct actually works to catch up the whole of the sexual system, so that the “exception...ends up taking the rule along with it” (23). Radically, Laplanche suggest through this physical metaphor that the exception which seemingly presupposes and proves the rule of pre-existing sexual instincts, instead functions to undermine the entirety of the biological norm, effectively making everything perversion.

The sentence in question is a turn in the argument, in which Laplanche returns to the figure of the child as the limit case through which the role of the perverted can be explored in the lack of a sexual instinct which perversion itself instantiates. The sentence begins with a triple layer of introductory clauses. Initially, the word “now” functions as a transition, temporally designating the sentence as a shift in the argument which moves the discussion towards the reconceptualization of the relation between perversion and instinct. Simultaneously, the “now” functions to temporalize infantile sexuality, placing it in a position of primacy both in the time frame of an individual's life and in the place this seeming exception plays in regard to the rule it subsumes. The appositive, “in its entirety” has a conciliatory character akin to that of the transitional sense of “now,” suggesting a casual reader who must be gently and pedagogically disabused of his misconceptions. This posited reader might, without this interjection, be at risk of considering sexuality as fragmented, or more radically, wholly unlocalizable. This phrase, however, comes immediately before Laplanche lays out the actual location of childhood sexuality, so in conjunction with the presentation of the “now,” the appositive functions to cut off the reader's potential misconceptions before they have a chance to become fixed, effectively suspending them in the infant's radical present.

Despite these introductory clauses' insistence on the totalizable, and hence localizable, body of infantile sexuality, and the promise of tangible location in the verb “lies,” the actual place of this sexuality is constantly shifting: a “movement” rather than a space. Furthermore, the movement of sexuality is itself split four ways: deflecting instinct, metaphorizing that instinct's aim, displacing and internalizing its object, and concentrating its source. In this way, the sentence enacts the very gesture the introductory material seems to warn its readers against: a notion of the sexuality of infants as fragmented and impossible to locate. By forcing the two polarities into conjunction, the sentence functions to undermine both to the same extent, thereby uniting the seeming contradiction into a both/and scenario: human infant sexuality is both entire (and entirely localizable) and also fundamentally fragmentary.

If the sentence as a whole enacts the tension between oppositions which is the hallmark of Laplanche's project, on a still-smaller scale the verb phrases themselves have a similar aim. The first, which asserts that the movement of infantile sexuality is to deflect, contains the suggestion of angled motion away from a linear process of the instinct. This stands in distinction to the teleological impetus of the “aim” which is metaphorized in the second clause, making the instinct paradoxically both primarily direct and tangential. Within the third clause, similarly, the infant's sexuality is characterized as constitutively both displacing and internalizing its object. The spatiality of this conjunction likewise seems impossible, as displacement suggests a removal to an alien location, while internalization suggests an intensity of intimacy seemingly more directly relevant to sexuality. The tension in the seemingly-impossible simultaneity of extrinsic and intrinsic motion is undergirded by the suggestion that one of the constitutive movements of infantile sexuality is that of feeding, in which activity the child does, quite literally, displace the milk from the breast or bottle and physically internalize it within his own body in a motion which requires the regulatory functions of the sphincter and hence actualizes this area into an erotogenic zone. Within the sentence, the phrase “erotogenic zone” itself comes at end of a series of narrowing clauses, from the main verb “lies” to its prepositional complement, then to the restrictive clause with its four subordinate clauses within it, the fourth of which includes a prepositional phrase where “minimal zone” is the object of the preposition, finally concluding with the clarificatory appositive “erotogenic zone.” In this schematic, then, the sentence as a whole actualizes the process of childhood sexuality as the perversion which subsumes the rule, narrowing from its undifferentiated entirety to the specificity of the erotogenic zone in a figure that mirrors the motion of the sphincter.

Melancholy of Race

Melancholy of Race summary: Through readings of Flower Drum Song, The Woman Warrior, M. Butterfly, Invisible Man, Dictée and Twilight: Lost Angeles, 1992, Cheng constructs a theory of racial melancholy, which expands upon Freud by exploring the melancholic relationship of loss and exclusion to possession, assimilation, fantasy and hypochondria.

Passage for close reading: “The internalization of cultural origins as subjective or ontological origins indicates a path to theorize the act of hearing a story, how a story enters us, structures us” (89).

This passage occurs toward the center of the chapter “A Fable of Exquisite Corpses,” in a section where Cheng has been addressing the complex of plaints and losses surrounding the mother and daughter dyad of Woman Warrior. The daughter, as an adult, seeks a “ghost-free” country (88) as a direct complaint against the mother's ghost stories that have haunted her childhood, while Cheng assets that this very complaint unites the two women over a common grief, a loss that the mother chiefly mourns, while the daughter melancholically, and hypochondriacally, repeats that grief, resurrecting the ghosts through her very plea to be rid of them. Cheng argues that the daughter's complaint is actually filed “not on behalf of the mother, but as mother in a kind of endocryptic repetition” (88), a repetition that functions, in part, on the level of the text's complicated and complicit temporality, where the daughter’s childhood and adult recollections and often indistinguishable from each other and from recollections of and from the mother. For Cheng, the “contextual conflation” (88) makes possible cultural transmission of any sort, in that this confusion of voices and temporalities allows the mother to introject into her own loss into the daughter as a kind of alien subjectivity, as the ghost in the machine. I would like to look more closely at the dynamics of these porous bodies, and how a relationship is constructed across the gap of endocryptic functioning.

The sentence immediately preceding this one refers to the mother's attempt to assimilate the daughter into a culture that is not immediately personally meaningful to the latter, so that the focus remains closely tied to the text of the novel in question. This sentence, then, marks a sudden shift to generalized and institutionalized language. The first word of the sentence, in the phrase “internalization of cultural origins,” turns an adjective into a verb into a noun, effectively enacting in miniature the contextual and temporal conflations that Cheng works through in the preceding passages. The generalizing language, and pluralized form, of “cultural origins,” however, moves this conflation away from the singularity of the text, into a condition of possibility for any and potentially all cultural exchange.

“Origins” as the object of the prepositional phrase and hence the object becoming internalized, are here both ontological and subjective. The origin of subjectivity in particular is reminiscent of Lacan's mirror stage, where subjectivity is originated at the moment of self-awareness and self-vision, with the caveat that the self viewed in the mirror is always an embodiment of anticipation, a figure instantiating an asymptotic relationship that looks forward to a state of perfect control that is always already lost to one. This origin is itself temporally complicated, looking both forward to the perfect moment of control and backwards to the Edenic boundedness that is already fantasmic before it is actualized. Yet the “origins” in this sentence are further complicated, both by the temporal and grammatical layers entombing the word “internal” and by the temporal complication of the mother-figure inserting within the daughter, as though it were already extant, a cultural program that is always already asymptotic and contingent, while the abruptly impersonal tone of this sentence universalizes that impossibility of a pure origin t anyone.

The internalization of one kind of origins as another constructs a shifting complex of three impossible-to-locate centralities: the origin of culture, the origin of one's ontological or subjective self, and the situation of those origins internally. If this internalization is cryptic, so too is the path out: the trio of origins align to form a “path to theorize the act of hearing a story, how a story enters us, structures us” (89). “Hearing” a story, as opposed to reading or even writing one, creates the image of the listener as a child figure who needs the guidance of an adult reader to guide their affective responses through a story's structure, an act which becomes doubly receptive through both the ears and the imagination. Through this verb, the reader of Cheng's text, who has been able to insert their own cultural introjection into this impersonal sentence, takes on the place of the daughter from Woman Warrior, listening to a story that constructs both temporality and culture within them.

If we must be structured as children in order to accept this internalizing story, the story itself also, seemingly, structures the listener/reader as adult. The last two phrases of this sentence shift abruptly from the impersonal, universalizing tone of the early sections to an intensely personal—and plural—intimacy. The verb phrase “enters us” makes the story an active, penetrative agent, inserting itself in a sort of sexual paradigm into our bodies. If the earlier part of the sentence allowed a reader to insert themselves into its rhetoric thanks to its generality, the “us” here forces the reader to personalize and literalize that relationship, suddenly making this story, both Woman Warrior and Cheng's own text, force themselves intimately upon our bodies in an act of constructing a cultural identity of which we may not be a part. In this way, the final verb phrases shift the reader, the recipient of cultural assimilation, into a position both as sexual object and maternal figure. If the story “enters” our, and the narrator's “vulnerably porous” (89) bodies, that very porousness incorporates spaces that the story can “structure” much in the way that a fetus changes the structures, chemistry, responses and function of the maternal body. Here, then, the story inserted within the body becomes an exquisite corpse, in the sense of incorporated cultural memories that cannot be assimilated, but also a sexualized and generative actualization of the relationship between generations, structured through the penetrative power of story.

The Shell and the Kernel

The Shell and the Kernel summary: Torok and Abraham's constellation of articles, written over twenty years, develops a form of Freudian psychoanalysis that rethinks the death drive, penis envy, and repression, focusing instead on the symptomatic value of fantasy, the development of desire through introjection, and the production and exhumation of psychic crypts which contain incorporated remains of unmourned love objects.

“Mourning and Melancholia” summary: Freud distinguishes between the titular conditions, both occurring with the loss of a beloved object, with the latter presenting the same depression, lack of interest in surroundings, and lack of affection towards others as the former, with the addition in the case of melancholia of self-hatred and recrimination, resulting from the melancholic subject's libido detaching from the object and regressing into his own ego into narcissism.

Passage for close-reading: “I, for my part, prefer to see in Freud's discovery the beginnings of a radical renewal of culture, laying bare the myths of the Oedipus complex, castration and the law—a renewal to be wrought at the point of origin of all these objectivations, at the meeting place between the Envelope and the Kernel, the place where, between two poles of non-meaning, the superior rationality of the symbol is born, where the innumerable forms of civilization disintegrate, originate, and bloom” (97)

This passage occur at the end of the penultimate paragraph of Abraham's essay from which the collection takes its name. In this section, Abraham is revamping readings of the Oedipus complex and the incest prohibition. Rather than succumbing to the seemingly hopeless repetition of the Oedipal compulsion that many have found oppressive, Abraham takes comfort in the notion that, with the Oedipal tale and its multiple implications in mind, each subject can introject his or her true desire towards sexual maturation. The selected sentence supports closer attention both because of its physical and structural place within this discourse, as well as because of the temporal and spatial registers of the renewal of the body and culture it lays out.

The last word of the sentence immediately preceding refers to the baneful influences of a hypocritical and moralistic society, which serves to block the road to “psychic equanimity” (97) offered by the process of introjection which the essay has served to champion. This society, despite the constitutions of its individual members, has hypocrisy inherent in its networks, and therefore serves to constrict the developmental desire for each individually desiring subject. Coming immediately after a view of this painfully universalist society, the sentence in question serves as a shift away from such a narrowed view of Freud's contributions, serving instead to recast his theories in light of the ability to move aside the net formed by society, to allow introjection to proceed unimpeded.

The sentence begins with a casually personal tone, which although seemingly hesitant, actually serves to instantiate the process of removing the self from the circle of “moralism and insincerity” (97) implied by this society, making it clear that the reader can choose to take, leave, or recast all or part of the following propositions. The appositive prepositional phrase, “for my part” encloses the writer's subject position, containing it between commas and hence separating it from “society.” The clause's seeming self-abnegation serves instead as a gently defiant gesture of sideways motion, taking the route of humble personal disclaimer in order to skip around the barrier constructed by insincerity.

Standing by itself before the interruption of the appositive, first-person-singular pronoun which starts the sentence is seemingly tenuous: grammatically unnecessary, since the sentence could begin equally effectively with the prepositional phrase, physically slim and easily overlooked, and positioned at the start of a sentence where its unique, subjectival, property of capitalization is lost. Yet, from this seemingly minimized position, the “I” serves as the subject of the sentence, powerful and self-reflexive enough to be able to do without a directly-stated antecedent. The pronoun, despite seeming forgettable, actually serves to structure all of what comes after it, so that the phrase “for my part” and the unscientific verb “prefer” lose their reservations and become, instead, subversive without being dogmatic or aggressive. Far from asserting, insincerely, the speaker's own insignificance, the sentence's opening performs the sidestepping motion necessary to undermine society's reservations.

A similar effect can be seen in the phrase “in Freud's discovery.” While the prominent mention of the name seems to serve to offer admiring homage to the master, yet the verb “see,” attached as a complement to the seemingly weak and highly subjective verb “prefer,” serves to make the content of Freud's discovery contingent upon the vision of the subject who occupies such a slender, introductory position at the beginning of the sentence. Freud's discovery, then, is remarkable for its pellucidity, a lens through which the subject can see into the depths, where the seed “of a radical renewal” (97) begins to bloom.

This word “radical” contains strident political overtones, borrowed from a context where to be radical frequently involves tearing down old and restrictive structures in order for the desired renewal to occur. This renewal, however, is radical through the function of sight: the renewal takes place in the way structures and functions are visualized and constructed within the mind of the subject radically seeing his way out of society's oppressions. In this way, the radical renewal is one that, rather than tearing down, functions by developing new positions from which to see, using as material the old stories and myths that appear, like the Emperor in his tale, denuded of the unnecessary.

This process of construction takes place at the “point of origin of all these objectivations,” so that the renewal itself must be “wrought” out of the commonality that can be lifted from these disparate myths, themselves turned to the material of construction for the purpose. This construction metaphor takes place at both a time and place that is undefinable, however. The point of renewal is the point where the Envelope and the Kernel meet, a point out of which is born “the superior rationality of the symbol.” Yet this point is not a point, but rather a flexible and fluidic plane which both separates and interpenetrates two concentric yet imbricated entities, so that the symbol is not born through a single point, or a single orifice, but simultaneously through all points in a plane that is itself indefinite.

Furthermore, this birth is not situated in linear time, but rather in a partially inverted, complicated temporality that echoes the Mobius-strip like shape of the point joining Kernel and Envelope. By laying bare and renewing the overdetermined myths, the temporality of the new vision doesn't need to build on the deaths (and death drives) of the entities on which it is founded, but rather enlivens the myths by modifying the implications of their foundations. In this way, the myths serve to repeat everything that comes after them, so that the after events refresh the potential of the originary myths, rather than the myths serving as deadening ballast underlying the only-superficial newness of the succeeding experiences.

Literature and Psychoanalysis

“To Open the Question” summary: Feldman highlights the similarities of the contributors in this volume as interpreters who see literature as the unconscious of psychoanalysis, both in the sense of blind spot and condition of possibility.

“Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet” summary: Lacan reads the patterns of desire and object relations in Hamlet, particularly in his relation to Ophelia, positing that Hamlet is suspended, throughout, in the time and desires of the Other.

“Turning the Screw of Interpretation” summary: Feldman problematizes the notion of a Freudian reading through attending to the ghostly reading-effects of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, as uncannily trapping readers into performing its tale only by repeating its mechanisms.

“The Letter as Cutting Edge” summary: Spivak recounts the studies of an imaginary common American psychoanalst critic reading Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, who recognizes in it inacessibility and postponement, while Spivak herself insists on then necessity of attending to conditions of intelligibility in texts, while recognizing that all texts engage in the double bind of frontier concepts.

“Freud's Masterplot: Questions of Narrative” summary: Brooks, through Freud and Formalism, reads narrative time as repetitively recursive, so that the beginning takes meaning from the end which precedes it, in the way that life acquires meaning by tending toward the death that is specific to it individually.

“The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, The Symposium” summary: Brenkman situates Plato's Symposium as the triangulation point between literature and psychoanalysis, for the ways that reading this ancient text illuminates the knot formed between desire, idealism, and philosophy in relation to psychoanalysis.

“The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida” summary: Johnson reads the contradictions and uncanny doublings which inhere in the complex of Poe's “Purloined Letter,” Lacan's response, and Derrida's counter-response, implicating herself in the same economy she uncovers.

Passage for close-reading:

“If the face-off between two opponents or polar opposites always simultaneously backfires and misfires, it can only be because 2 is an extremely odd number. On the one hand, as a specular illusion of symmetry or metaphor, it can either be narcissistically reassuring (the image of the other as a reinforcement of my identity) or absolutely devastating (the other whose existence can totally cancel me out)” (469).

This passage occurs in Barbara Johnson's response to Derrida's response to Lacan's response to Poe's “The Purloined Letter,” a house-that-Jacques-built rhetorical structure that Johnson addresses as part of the necessary specular illusion of these texts. In particular, I'm interested in how this passage shifts the discourse from this kind of concentricity to one of specular duality that doesn't only double, but triple or quadruple. Writing and response, in this moment, begins to become geometrical and, perhaps paradoxically, increasingly hallucinatory and specular.

Johnson generalizes oppositions of these near-miss varieties, specifically this game of evens and odds between Lacan and Derrida, as a “face-off.” Yet even within this simple denotative value, meanings begin to narrowly miss each other. Face-off can contain connotations both of a rather informal opposition, in the sense of facing off over a game or a gambling table, but also the weightier, teleological thrust of a battle: a (perhaps Oedipal) face off with one’s self or one’s fate. Furthermore, the term face-off, in its implication of two faces diametrically opposed suggests an inversion of the Janus image, in that the two faces are turned rather than outwards in their dual gaze. The face off then, is off center, in that the illusion of similitude between the faces is reflected over a line of symmetry occupying the gap between the two, a space which emphasizes the difference in perspective between the faces as much as it does their reflective symmetry.

This symmetry, furthermore, takes place over a space of misdirection and miscommunication. There is no space for the face-off to progress, but only and always to simultaneously backfire and misfire, two directional forms of obliquity which are themselves in tangential opposition. Backfiring implies a reversal which cancels out the intended forward motion to create a failure of motion, while misfiring implies a firing with no particular direction, a firing that shunts off into an oblique angle rather than a straight one. An oblique trajectory and one that moves directly away from its source cannot, in a Euclidean geometry, co-exist on the same vector. In this, both terms serve as geometric metaphors in an irrational trigonometry that works at cross-purposes to itself rather than integrating.

In the second half of each of these terms, they contain commonality in the suffix “fires.” The presence of two negative prefixes suggest the implicit presence of a positive term, a face-off that fires. This focus on the firing that fails to create progress between these faces, but always creates an impossible splitting of movement, hence forms an electrical metaphor which co-exists with the geometrical one. The space between the faces, then, in addition to being bisected by the line of reflection between the two faces, is also arced by the sparks created by this similitude, a spark which characterizes the space between the faces as that of metaphor.

If this face-off both backfires and misfires, it does so because it requires only and exactly two participants, an extremely odd number. In the sentence, 2 is cardinal rather than written out, a figure which serves to draw attention to its numeracy and indivisibility: both in the literal sense, as the smallest prime number, and figuratively, as a figure from the wrong discourse, a mathematical stranger in a strange land. 2 is unassimilable into language in a way that two is not, and as such serves to draw attention to its mathematical properties more than its implied duality or the doubling effects that Feldman elsewhere details. 2 is the origin point for doubling, the figure for the dual, yet also the starting point of the prime number series and the smallest whole number with an irrational square root. Within the potential of doubling, then, two carries within it the promise of irrationality, and therefore of a kind of metaphoric madness, over which sparks can fly.

Within the metaphoric dualism, the number 2 can be seen as not only representative of the two halves of the metaphor, the two faces opposed to each other in their metaphorical face-off, but also the equal sign that ties them together, as an illusion of consanguinity. Metaphor then, is presaged on an illusion constructed over the space between the two mirrored terms. The 2, in the second sentence, is itself given two options: reassurance or devastation, although an illusion either way. As reassurance, a narcissistic illusion suggests self-construction, a purposeful simulacrum to keep anxiety at bay. Yet within the term “narcissistic” is also embedded the contingency of a mirror image, the specular image which can't really provide reassurance because its comfort is an illusion, its promises concealing a death from too close proximity with the self. In this way, the second sentence of the passage enacts the literary doubling of the number 2, both as a comforting specular illusion and a devastating one. The devastation, then, arises from realizing that the illusion is the truth, (that the other does exist and can cancel oneself out) and that we are embedded in and embodying a discourse of illusion and irrationality, so that there is no truth at base on which to rest.

Writing and Madness

Writing and Madness summary: Within a series of single-text studies, Feldman seeks the “uncanny moment” which, in its paradoxical attempts to conceptualize the inconceivable, points to the lack at the center of the rhetorical act, which itself forms the unreadable heart of literature.

Passage for close-reading:

“The text work is thus analogous to dream-work....Can it be said that the function of thematics is also to keep awake that we may sleep, to preserve the power of sleep that resides in language? For the theme blinds (us) by its very brightness; its task is to obscure the rhetoricity of the text, to make the rhetoric literally unreadable. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is whatever makes the theme malfunction, whatever makes the theme not work, undo itself” (97).

This passage is rich with different voices, some ventriloquized, some directly quoted, and some suggested with subtlety enough to make the reader question their presence, in the manner of a hallucination. The ellipses in my quoted selection above elides a passage in Feldman's chapter of embedded quotes drawn from a preceding discussion on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. This shifts into a response by Nietzsche affirming that it is “no small art...to sleep” (96), responding to Freud's assertion that the dream functions as the “ 'guardian of sleep'” (96), drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra. The succeeding footnote connects Heidegger to the discourse tangentially, citing a “beautiful passage” (97) from What is Called Thinking? concerning “both the madness and thought of Nietzsche” (97).Within this footnote, furthermore, the text's thematic points to the difficulty of finding Nietzsche's text, and, once finding it, to lose it again. Heidegger then quotes one of the “epistles of madness” which Nietzsche addressed to his friend and public lecturer Georg, in saying “After you had discovered me, it was no trick to find me: the difficulty now is to lose me....'”' Standing at the center of a Russian-doll formation of nested quotes, the epistle from Nietzsche points back to the great difficulty of this very layered structure: a difficulty not in locating the central extra-textual element, but in the impossible task of brushing aside the ghostly echoes of its implications.

If the ellipses thus point obliquely to outside writers situated both above and below the text they modify, the passage I've selected continues the spatial shifting of these layers of ghostly texts. Feldman's commentary on her constellation of quoted texts begins with a thematic of light and power, which suggests the dream, recounted by Freud and, subsequently, Lacan, in which the father of the recently dead child dreams his child awakens him with a reproachful, “ 'Don't you see I'm burning?'” in time to awaken fully and see the body of his child burning from a fallen candle, thanks to a sleeping attendant. Thematics function in the mirror image of the dream-work here, which keeps the father asleep to prolong both his rest and his child's life by an extra instant. The thematics work instead to keep one awake so as to sleep, inverting the order of the terms. The blinding power of the thematics, working to obscure the rhetoric, puts one in mind of the blinding blaze of the candles both within the father's dream, and without it in his child's sick-room.

Yet the word obscure has primary connotations of darkness, not light. The thematics then, blinds through brightness, and yet darkens the rhetoric into unreadability, as though the shifting rhetorical positions between light and darkness, as well as between speakers and the ghosts of speakers, throw shadows over the page. Theme, then, creates a double blindness so that there is no privileged position outside of the glare or the darkness, and hence no privileged place for reading, no condition or point of perspective that will align the relationships between texts and voices and clear out the shadows.

If the thematics blind us and therefore make the rhetoric unreadable, rhetoric makes the theme malfunction, shifting the register yet again into the mechanical, in the sense of a light shorting out. Furthermore, the phrase “undoes itself” is italicized, seemingly granting it favor over the term “malfunction.” With the word “undoes” the passage pulls into itself references to the knot metaphor, while concurrently suggesting the knot's slipperiness and ability to be pulled apart. In this way, the italicization ties together the otherwise distant registers of thematics and rhetoric, playing them at cross-purposes as they undo and obscure each other from different positions.

Throughout the passage, these italicized phrases function to highlighting its own rhetoricity. Italics apparently function to make writing more readable, by giving the reader a structure of emphasis and hence valuation. Here, however, the italics push the words into prominence, marking them as of a different register than other, un-italicized words, yet the italicized words are themselves often imported from other sources, where they are not italicized, hence setting up a play of differences based on repetition. Furthermore, the embedding of italics within quoted passages, and Feldman's quotations of her own italics, serve to form an orthographic tie between passages, pulling out a particular theme and then torquing it, through the emphasis of italics, to serve the rhetoric of the current analysis. In this way, Feldman serves to create the same power of rhetoric, the same ability to make theme malfunction, that she is citing,creating the kind of impossible, un-positionable and non-hierarchical reading that she analyzes.

The content of these italicized phrases further complicates the shifting ground on which this rhetoric is based. The first italicized phrase “keep awake” echoes Nietzsche's remarks quoted before, and, as remarked above, is paralleled with the verbal complement of the adverbial phrase “that we may sleep.” Within Nietzsche's quotation, it is apparent that the same generalized, proverbial subject is both sleeping and, to that end, keeping awake all day. Although, as quoted by Feldman, these phrases suggest a causal relationship, they vary notably in that the first lacks a pronoun. A variant like “keep us awake” make of thematics a relatively passive force which exists to engage our attention as readers, keeping us active and awake. The pronoun-less version instead serves to grant thematics an agency as the potential subject of the verb phrase “keep awake.” The use of the word “may” in the second phrase, as opposed to “can” grants us a permission rather than ability to sleep. Thematics, then, takes on the role of the watcher at the death-bed of the father's dream, with the exception that thematics is a more successful watchman, keeping awake so that we may sleep, granting (us) permission to sleep, opening a space to preserve this power of sleep that resides in language.