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.

"Mirror Stage," "Function and Field," and "Signification of the Phallus"

“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” summary: Objecting to the gloomy formalism of contemporary psychoanalysis, Lacan demonstrates the necessity of orienting Freud's concepts within language structures, by expanding the notion of the subject beyond his “subjective” experiences toward the intersubjectivity of his own unconscious as the other's discourse.

“The Signification of the Phallus” summary: Lacan expounds upon his notion of the phallus, neither as a fantasy nor as an organ, but rather as a signifier which serves to uncover the relations between mind, soul, and man's desire as structurally unsatisfiable.

“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” summary: Lacan characterizes the moment of the child recognizing himself in the mirror as a linguistically-structured series of asymptotic approximations toward his becoming, subjectively, I.

Passage for close-reading:

“Naïve mouth—whose eulogy I shall spend my final days preparing—open up again to hear me. No need to close your eyes. The subject goes far beyond what is experienced 'subjectively' by the individual; he goes exactly as far as the truth he is able to attain—which will perhaps come out of the mouth you have already closed again” (219).

This passage occurs in “The Function of Field and Speech” immediately after a section in which Lacan has been explicating Freud's treatment of the Other, specifically within the confines of the Wolf-Man case. At the end of the explication, Lacan concludes by asserting that the case makes clear how love is realized: through the state of grace instantiated in the intersubjective agreement. At this moment, the dialogue Lacan is constructing between himself, Freud, and the readers or attendees of his seminars is interrupted by the cry of an imagined “impatient auditor” whom Lacan, seemingly uncharacteristically, pauses to address.

The categorization “impatient auditor” make a synecdoche of the questioner, his own subjective experiences concentrated to the location of his ears, and their apparently imperfect listening skills. Frustrated and demanding clarification, the auditor is literally all ears, both in the aspect of his being Lacan illuminates for us, and in the content of his question, “What, then, is this subject that you keep drumming into our ears?”

The bodily synecdoche carries over int the text of Lacan's response, although the location of the focus shifts as Lacan addresses the erstwhile auditor as an interlocutor, as a “naïve mouth.” As the auditor's identification shifts to his mouth, the function of that organ shifts to incorporate that of the ears, as Lacan ceremoniously enjoins the auditor's mouth to “open up again to hear me.” With this direct address to the naïve mouths of the audience, Lacan embeds the impatient auditor into his own explanation, smoothing out the knots and opening a space in the network so that the voice of the impatient auditor emerges from within, effectively enacting the internalization of the desire of the other within his own discourse. Likewise, the gentle imperative sentences “open up again to hear me” and “No need to close your eyes” suggest a childlike auditor who requires developmentally and pedagogically appropriate lessons.

The passage is punctuated with instances of a resigned paternalistic tone. Naïve mouth as a form of direct address takes on the connotation of a diminutive for a child, particularly in light of the innocent associations of naivete, and the fact that the mouth represents the center for the earliest of the infantile libidinal stages, the oral. In this way, Lacan's address to the impatient auditor, in order to soothe his impatience, functions by operating on the auditor's body, training him in the proper poses to adopt in order to gain the clarity he seeks. If Lacan's interjection operates on a pedagogical level towards the auditor, this pedagogy is also spiritual. The image of the subject with open mouth—the better to listen with—and closed eyes is not only that of a child, but of a communicant, waiting with open mouth for Father Lacan to drop the wafer on his tongue that will provide him with the knowledge he seeks. With his mild injunction, “No need to close your eyes,” however, Lacan upsets this receptive mode of learning, refusing, characteristically, to give his teaching in the form of a little pill. Rather, he retrains and decenters his interlocutor's bodily responses, shifting the seat of these synecdoches in order to re-situate the place of the subject within his own body. He who has ears, let him see. He who has lips, let him hear.

Within this pedagogical moment of engaging with the subject's body, Lacan speaks to his original query by asserting that the subject exceeds the bounds of his own subjectivity in direct proportion to the amount of “truth he is able to attain” from a discourse outside himself. At this moment, Lacan again breaks off his own discourse to attend to the interlocutor's body for the second time, with an ironic adverbial phrase whose tone suggests a parent gently reprimanding a child for losing concentration. The auditor's mouth has already closed again, suggesting that in falling out of the bodily relationship in which Lacan is training him he is, temporarily, closed to the potential of receiving or transmitting, close-mouthed and hence unable to either listen or speak according to Lacan's slippery bodily identification.

Yet within this discursive shift which draws attention to the interlocutor's lack of bodily discipline, Lacan casts the auditor as the Other, who, in the intersubjective agreement, can futurally serve as the unconscious of the subject, the discourse of the other. The ironic “perhaps” fails to completely erase the future surety of the “will come out,” leaving open the perennial possibility of the mouth's reopening, of the bodily training progressing. IN this way, while the interlocutor's mouth has slipped closed in the immediate past of this clause, the possibility for its reopening can be forever anticipated, allowing the doubting auditor to successively approximate the truth of subjectivity—so long as he keeps his mouth open.