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.