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.