Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism (S U N Y Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture)

268 Pages·2008·0.76 MB·English

by  Greg Forter

D E S I R E O F T H E A N A L Y S T S
P s y c h o a n a l y s i s a n d C u l t u r a l C r i t i c i s m
GREG FORTER AND PAUL ALLEN MILLER, EDITORS
Desire of the Analysts
SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture
Henry Sussman, editor
Desire of the Analysts
Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism
Edited by
Greg Forter
and
Paul Allen Miller
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2008 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Desire of the analysts : psychoanalysis and cultural criticism / edited by Greg
Forter, Paul Allen Miller.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7914-7299-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7914-7300-9
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Psychoanalysis and culture I. Forter, Greg. II. Miller,
Paul Allen, 1959–
BF175.4.C84D47 2007
150.19'5—dc22
2007016659
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller
Part One
Psychoanalysis and the
Future of Cultural Criticism
1. Sartre, Politics, and Psychoanalysis: It Don’t Mean a Thing
if It Ain’t Got das Ding 35
Paul Allen Miller
2. Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Cultural Criticism at
the Millennium 57
Henry Sussman
Part Two
Psychoanalysis and Collectivity
3. Lacan’s F(cid:2)ou(cid:2)r Discourses: A Political Reading 81
Slavoj Zizek
4. Signs of Desire: Nationalism, War, and Rape in Titus
Andronicus, Savior, and Calling the Ghosts 99
Deneen Senasi
v
vi CONTENTS
Part Three
Psychoanalysis and the Author
5. Moving beyond the Politics of Blame: Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men 123
Kaja Silverman
6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Psychobiography, and the Fin-de-Siècle
Crisis in Masculinity 147
Greg Forter
Part Four
Psychoanalysis and Sexuality
7. Desiring Death: Masochism, Temporality, and the
Intermittence of Forms 179
Domietta Torlasco
8. Sadistic and Masochistic Contracts in Voltaire’s La pucelle
d’Orléansand Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne; or,
What Does the Hymen Want? 195
Sharon Diane Nell
9. Queer(ing) Pleasure: Having a Gay Old Time in the
Culture of Early-Modern France 225
Pierre Zoberman
Contributors 253
Index 255
Acknowledgments
This volume grew out of a conference that took place at the University of
South Carolina in February 2003: the fifth annual University of South
Carolina Comparative Literature Conference, organized by the editors and
entitled “The Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criti-
cism in the New Millennium.” We wish to thank all the conference partic-
ipants for making it an unusually stimulating event. The South Carolina
Humanities Council and the following units at the University of South
Carolina provided generous support: the College of Liberal Arts, South
Carolina Honors College, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and
Cultures, the English Department, the Women Studies Program, and the
Philosophy Department. We also wish to thank Noreen Doughty and
Paulette Jiménez for their adminstrative assistance, as well as the following
graduate students in Comparative Literature: Mandy Bayer, Kay Clowney,
Atussa Hatami, Georg Schwartzman.
Portions of Paul Allen Miller’s chapter (chapter 1) will appear in altered
form as “L’espace littéraire, la pensée du dehors, et l’objet sublime,” in La Lit-
térature a-t-elle un espace?, edited by Pierre Zoberman (Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de Vincennes, 2006). A shorter version of Greg Forter’s chapter on
Fitzgerald (chapter 6) appeared in American Literature 78.2 (June 2006):
293–323. We are grateful to that journal’s editors for permission to reprint.
vii

Introduction
GREGFORTERANDPAULALLENMILLER
Why do we—or at least some of us—continue to desire psychoanalysis?
How might that desire contribute to the project of interpreting, perhaps
even changing, the world in which we find ourselves at the dawn of a new
millennium? What, finally, is the relationship between the desire for psy-
choanalysis and the domain of expressive culture, a relationship that the
title of this collection assumes in its yoking of “psychoanalysis” with the
enterprise of “cultural criticism”?
These questions in part reflect longstanding concerns among cultural
critics, but they have a special urgency in the current intellectual climate,
for there has recently been much talk of the death or irrelevance of psy-
choanalysis. The proclamation has come from many quarters. Psychiatrists
have trumpeted new discoveries in biochemistry that they say render
quaint such concepts as repression, displacement, transference, uncon-
scious motivation, and even the mind itself (as opposed to the brain). They
contend that we must confine our discussions of mental activity to empiri-
cally verifiable facts, implying that the intangible quality of “the psyche”
renders it no more than a metaphysical leftover of religious belief in the
soul. Perhaps most damningly, these critics point to the development of
powerful psychotropic drugs, especially for the treatment of depression, as
proof of the obsolescence of Freud and his followers. For if depression is
simply the effect of a genetically influenced chemical imbalance, and if this
imbalance can be redressed through the diligent application of Zoloft, who
needs talk therapy of any kind, let alone of the kind that can take years and
perhaps cost thousands of dollars?1
A similar form of skepticism has come to prevail in the humanities and
social sciences. In the latter field, the criticisms leveled are closely related
to those in psychiatry. Freudian thought is disreputable, on this view, be-
cause the existence of unconscious processes cannot be empirically verified.
1