ebook img

Freud’s Memory: Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body PDF

189 Pages·2008·1.112 MB·Language, Discourse, Society
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Freud’s Memory: Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body

Language, Discourse, Society Series Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Selected published titles: Rob White FREUD’S MEMORY Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body Teresa de Lauretis FREUD’S DRIVE Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Mark Nash SCREEN THEORY CULTURE Richard Robinson NARRATIVES OF THE EUROPEAN BORDER A History of Nowhere Lyndsey Stonebridge THE WRITING OF ANXIETY Imaging Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture Ashley Tauchert ROMANCING JANE AUSTEN Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending Reena Dube SATYAJIT RAY’S THE CHESS PLAYERS AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity John Anthony Tercier THE CONTEMPORARY DEATHBED The Ultimate Rush Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson LITERATURE, POLITICS AND LAW IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE Geoff Gilbert BEFORE MODERNISM WAS Modern History and the Constituency of Writing Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley (editors) THE LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY READER Michael O’Pray FILM, FORM AND PHANTASY Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics James A. Snead, edited by Kara Keeling, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West RACIST TRACES AND OTHER WRITINGS European Pedigrees/African Contagions Patrizia Lombardo CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD Second edition Moustapha Safouan SPEECH OR DEATH? Language as Social Order: a Psychoanalytic Study Jean-Jacques Lecercle DELEUZE AND LANGUAGE Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBERTY The New York School of Poets Moustapha Safouan JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING (Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose) Stanley Shostak THE DEATH OF LIFE The Legacy of Molecular Biology Elizabeth Cowie REPRESENTING THE WOMAN Cinema and Psychoanalysis Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT The Emergence of Literary Education Language, Discourse, Society Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71482-9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Freud’s Memory Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body Rob White © Rob White 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-00264-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28089-6 ISBN 978-0-230-22756-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230227569 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: the Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 1 1 Figures of Freudian Theory 9 2 Others’ Memories 37 3 Mourning as Ethics and Argument 66 4 Across Limits 92 5 The Foreign Bodies of Psychoanalysis 120 Conclusion: Freud’s Secret 146 Notes 156 Bibliography 171 Index 181 v Acknowledgements I am grateful to Maud Ellmann, Andy Gallacher, Jeanne Gamble, Pelagia Goulimari, Gerard Greenaway, Franck Guyon, Stephen Heath, Vidhya Jayaprakash and her team in Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd., Jill Lake, Colin MacCabe, Forbes Morlock, Denise Riley, Christabel Scaife, Roy Sellars, Robert Smith, Caroline Jane Williams, Sarah Wood. In memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943–2007). vi Introduction: the Psychoanalytic Labyrinth Intervening in contemporary debates about psychoanalysis, this book emerges from the post-structuralist account of Freud, especially as it was undertaken by Jacques Derrida – but not without some scepticism towards that account, especially its celebration of apparent failures of meaning that are, rather paradoxically, presented as a sort of hedonistic melancholy. Having particular value as a practice of close reading (though one which tends to be amplified philosophically), the post- structuralist account has shown above all how internally complex Freud’s writings are. To quote Leo Bersani: ‘philosophers, psychoana- lysts, and literary critics have convincingly made it seem very naive to take what might be termed the official Freud literally.’1 Rather than being a quasi-scientific explanation of general psychological function- ing – or at least in addition to that – it becomes possible to redescribe Freud’s work as an especially intricate and labyrinthine series of writings whose patterns of rhetoric and argument put into question their own concepts and conclusions. As Tom Conley puts it, Freud’s writing ‘works through a gnostic rationale by the myriad ways that it rides along the paradoxes its expression puts forward as emblems, conundrums, or other shapes of wit.’2 The readings of Freud in this book constitute a wide- ranging attempt to explore some of these emblems and conundrums. My focus therefore is Freud’s language, which I approach using literary-critical methods. What is the relationship between my own critical language and Freud’s own? The post-structuralist approach to Freud has been assiduous in posing versions of this question, as with a recent formulation by Samuel Weber: [C]an psychoanalytic thinking itself escape the effects of what it endeavors to think? Can the distortions of unconscious processes be 1 2 Freud’s Memory simply recognized, theoretically, as an object, or must they not leave their imprint on the process of theoretical objectification itself? Must not psychoanalytical thinking itself partake of – repeat – the dislocations it seeks to describe?3 Despite Freud’s claims to classify psychological processes and compo- nents, the manner of his doing so always seems to yield complexity rather than unitary explanation. Weber suggests that such self- complication is inescapable: psychoanalytic theorizing cannot help but be tangled up in the processes it ventures to define. There is therefore repetition; objects do not remain static – instead they cease to be know- able as stable entities; dislocations occur; ‘theoretical objectification’ begins to seem like an impossibility because theory cannot achieve proper disentanglement. And so it begins to be possible to imagine an endlessly self-implying process whereby theory confounds itself and so fails ever to exit the maze of its peregrinations. Close to Freud In one of his later interpretations of Freud, to be found in the book Archive Fever, Derrida poses his own set of questions: Must one apply to what will have been predefined as the Freudian or psychoanalytic archive in general schemas of reading, of interpreta- tion, of classification which have been received and reflected out of this corpus whose unity is thus presupposed? Or rather, has one on the contrary the right to treat the said psychoanalytico-Freudian archive according to a logic or a hermeneutic independent of Freudian psychoanalysis, indeed anterior even to the very name of Freud, while presupposing in another manner the closure and the identity of this corpus?4 These remarks are in certain respects typical of the deconstructionist approach. One may note the use of complicated tenses (‘will have been predefined’) which sometimes take on a quasi-prophetic air, Derrida a reader of auguries; the insistent self-qualifications (‘a logic or a herme- neutic’) that seem to be designed to pre-empt through the listing of alternatives any possible suggestion of terminological imprecision; the invocation of portentous ethical considerations (‘the right to treat’) framing the work of interpretation. This is, in its way, powerful writing and the business of its rhetoric is to refute conventional The Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 3 interpretative claims of dispassionate scrutiny whose viewpoint is extra- neous to what is being studied. Post-structuralism has often forcefully and successfully critiqued such claims: the interpreter, it is argued, is always already implicated in the material being interpreted. One cannot stand quizzically back, be separate and then look squarely at, for exam- ple, a writer’s work as if it were some classifiable, delimited object. Deconstruction often therefore arrives at some version or other of an idea of interpretative inescapability and then affirms the idea as the necessarily inconclusive end-point of its critique, as if nothing were so good as to be caught in a hall of mirrors. Derrida has taken this argument beyond argument into quasi-literary experiments that enact a drama – it is something more emotionally serious than a game – of inextricability based on what I would call conceits of intimacy. In one text this goes as far as prosopopeia, Derrida speaking not on behalf of Freud but (in the terms of the rhetorical conceit) as if he were Freud:5 You have always taken me, like Fliess, for a ‘mind reader’. Contempt. You are waiting holding your breath. You are waiting on the telephone, I imagine you and speak to you on the telephone, or the teleprinter seeing that I’ve prepared a lecture which I will never give … . Well, you are wrong, for once, you will discover nothing from me as regards the ‘enigma of telepathy’. In particular, I will preserve this at all costs, you will not be able to know ‘whether or not I believe in the existence of a telepathy.’ This opening could still allow one to think that I know, myself, whether or not I believe, and that, for one reason or another, I am anxious to keep it secret, in particular to produce such and such a transferential effect (not necessarily on you or on you, but on this public within myself which does not let go of me). … I pretend … to admit that I do not myself know. I know nothing about it. I apologize: if I have given the impres- sion of having secretly ‘taken sides’ with the reality of telepathy in the occult sense.6 There is a certain winning jokiness in this essay, which is to some extent a skit on the idea of telepathy (see also Chapter 5) and a writing-exercise that plays out rather than simply asserting the proposition that inter- pretation is necessarily implicated in its object. In Derrida’s later work, the playfulness is increasingly replaced by tones of grave seriousness: the idea of interimplication is reinforced to the extent of becoming the basis of an ethical theory of indissoluble interpersonal bonds (see

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.