The Allure of Affect: Rigor, Style, and Unintelligibility in Kristeva and Irigaray Abigail Suzanne

206 Pages·2012·1.12 MB·English

by  Abigail Kluchin

The Allure of Affect: Rigor, Style, and Unintelligibility in Kristeva and Irigaray

Abigail Suzanne Kluchin

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2012
© 2012
Abigail Suzanne Kluchin
All rights reserved
Abstract
The Allure of Affect: Rigor, Style, and Unintelligibility in Kristeva and Irigaray
Abigail Suzanne Kluchin

In this dissertation, I develop a theory of interpretation that attends to the often
neglected affective dimensions of reading through a careful investigation of the writings
of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. For much of the history of Western thought, a
privileging of systematic and linear discourse as a crucial signifier of philosophical rigor
has gone hand in hand with a certain disdain for the body and the emotions. The texts that
I examine attempt to disrupt and discredit the equation of philosophy and systematicity.
They refuse both in content and in style the steady march of analytic logic in favor of
writing that is more intuitive, more experimental, and eminently more risky. I contend
that even psychoanalytic and deconstructive interpretive approaches, which privilege the
marginal, the de-centered, and the inaccessible, have not fully engaged with the question
of affect in philosophical writing. The overarching question this dissertation seeks to
examine is this: how can we find a way to take seriously the affective responses that
philosophical texts provoke, and to incorporate their content, strength, and effect into the
arsenal of strategies for reading and interpretation without relegating such reactions to the
damning category of the ‘merely subjective’?
I take as my primary focus texts that foreground and even force an affective
response, and I read such works as possessed of their own distinctive rigor. I maintain
that one of the ways that affect is made evident to the reader is through what I term a
“rigorous unintelligibility.” I argue that attention to the protocols of such rigorously
unintelligible texts produces a way to read that neither accentuates the individual reader
at the expense of the text, nor banishes the reader’s visceral affective reactions to the
realm of the subjective and inadmissible. Throughout, I refine the always slippery
category of affect. In particular, affect is not simply interior; rather, it emerges and
communicates itself through the ongoing interaction with the world. Affect is in rooms,
in texts, in averted glances, in speeches, in dreams, in crying jags and in lecture notes, in
philosophy and in poetry, in theories and in bodies. It has a deeply un-Cartesian lack of
respect for or knowledge of the membrane of the skin, the boundary between the self and
the world.
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................ii

Introduction: On Bad Reading.........................................................................................1

1. Beyond the Affective Fallacy: Expanding the Field of Analysis .............................17

Affect in New Criticism and Reader-Response Theory.............................................................21
Affect in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud and Bion ....................................................................32
Contemporary Affect Theory: Massumi, Sedgwick, Stewart....................................................44
Philosophy’s Peculiar Allergy....................................................................................................55

2. Fragile Readers: Affect and Analysis in Kristeva and Duras .................................59

Freud, Humility, and the Productions of the Hysterical Body ..................................................62
Affect and the Semiotic..............................................................................................................67
Fragile Readers...........................................................................................................................76
The Speaking Subject and the Malady of Death........................................................................84
Objections; Implications.............................................................................................................94

3. In Praise of Unintelligibility: Irigaray, Freud, and Styles of the Unconscious ...100

Philosopher or Hysteric?..........................................................................................................103
Style and Philosophy................................................................................................................113
Remaining with the Rebus: Irigaray on Freud’s “Two Syntaxes”...........................................125
Rigorous Unintelligibility.........................................................................................................140

4. Unintelligibility’s Effects and Affects.......................................................................144

Irony, Parabasis, Anacoluthon, and Other Sins of Rhetoric ....................................................145
Affect and Unintelligibility: “La Mystérique” ........................................................................161
First Reading............................................................................................................................170
Second Reading........................................................................................................................174
Conclusion................................................................................................................................185

Bibliography...................................................................................................................188

!

i
This dissertation would not exist without the support of a broad network of
teachers, colleagues, friends, and family. Above all, I am indebted to my advisor, Wayne
Proudfoot, for his wisdom, encouragement, and patience. He embodies a scholarly
erudition and an abiding commitment to his students that have deeply informed my own
conceptions of pedagogy and research. Mark C. Taylor is an eternal gadfly in the best
possible sense, persistently challenging me to take risks with my writing and thinking. He
is a true mentor, who gave me the permission and confidence to be as “literary” as I
chose. Gil Anidjar taught me about the impossible necessities of reading, one sentence at
a time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s infectious intellectual enthusiasm and dazzling way with
words and ideas have inspired me since I first met her; one could not wish for a better
horizon for becoming. Patricia Dailey provided me with copious provocative suggestions
for the future of this project.
In addition, I am grateful to my teachers at Swarthmore College. Tamsin Lorraine
has been and remains an model of feminist philosophical scholarship; she was the first
person to make me think seriously about the meaning of rigor, and to consider that I
should aspire to rather more of it. Mark Wallace introduced me to many of the thinkers
and texts I discuss here, in such a compelling fashion that I have been unable to stop
writing about them since. And I owe Steven Hopkins more than I can say, for showing
me year after year how scholars can fall—and stay—in love with their work.
I had the opportunity to present earlier versions of Chapters Two and Three at the
American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings in 2010 and 2011, and received
extremely helpful feedback in the form of conversations with panelists and audiences. I
am thankful for the growing community that is forming in the AAR around the study of
ii
affect. During significant portions of the writing process, I was supported by a teaching
appointment at Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum. My dynamic, brilliant,
hilarious students at Columbia and at the Cooper Union have been a constant source of
creative energy and new ideas. I was able to write and revise significant portions of this
dissertation in January 2012 in Housatonic, Massachusetts, thanks to Dana Hammer.
Dana provided me with a quiet, beautiful place to stay and to work, a stunning view from
my desk, and unforgettable companionship.
I have been very lucky in my colleagues past and present. In the Columbia
religion department, Todd Berzon, Joel Bordeaux, Liane Carlson, Daniel Del Nido, Kali
Handelman, James Hare, Sajida Jalalzai, Frank Shepard, Hamsa Stainton, and Drew
Thomases are the best people with whom anyone could ever hope to share a windowless
group office. Julia Clark-Spohn in the religion department office has been indispensable.
I am also grateful for my colleagues elsewhere at Columbia, the Cooper Union, and the
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, particularly Michael Brent, Ajay Chaudhary,
Laurel Koepf Taylor, and Christine Smallwood; those from Swarthmore ’03 “Team
Religion,” Dave Kaczorowski, Alyssa Timin, and Free Williams; and my Antioch
Buddhist Studies in India cohort, especially Dan McNamara and Lora Ksieniewicz. Other
supportive and wonderful friends who deserve mention for innumerable reasons include
Maeve Adams, Mei Chin, Caitlin Cox, Adrienne Fowler, Dana Hammer, Gil Jones,
Graziella Matty, Loring Pfeiffer, and Robin Varghese.
Several friends and colleagues deserve particular mention. Todd Berzon patiently
assisted me with the nuances of New Testament Greek and made consistently exceptional
pastries. Frank Shepard has been my fellow traveler in philosophy of religion since 2005;
iii
I cannot imagine this process in the absence of his philosophical acumen and dry wit.
Liane Carlson is my conference buddy, yoga date, daily sounding board, and a priceless
resource regarding all things German idealism. She is a formidably precise and original
thinker and I cannot wait to see her take the academic world by storm. Mara Gustafson
and I had countless late-night talks about Freud, Bion, the unconscious, psychoanalysis,
therapy, and family dynamics. She checked my use of psychological and psychodynamic
terminology from the perspective of a working therapist as well as that of a brilliant,
insightful friend. Christine Smallwood and I have been reading, writing, working, and
thinking together since 1999 at Swarthmore, Columbia, and now at the Brooklyn
Institute; I devoutly hope our collaboration and friendship may continue indefinitely.
Kara Levy is a dear friend and confidante, as well as an exceptional writer, editor, and
teacher, who knows more about philosophy than she would like to admit. And I am
constantly grateful for those colleagues, friends, and faculty—and also, always, my
sister—who have taught me so much about becoming a feminist teacher and scholar.
These “divine women,” to borrow Irigaray’s phrase, are Elizabeth Castelli, Erika Dyson,
Rosemary Hicks, Becky Kluchin, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein.
I am infinitely grateful to my family for their constant love and support: my
parents, Judy Allen and Bob Kluchin, my sister Becky Kluchin, my brother-in-law Bryan
Warhold, and my nephew Samuel Warhold. My mother talked me through difficult
periods of writing at all hours of the day. My father painstakingly edited the distribution
copy of the dissertation. My parents have been unfailingly encouraging and supportive of
my sojourns into philosophy, literature, and religious studies, no matter how far afield
from pragmatic issues I have ventured. When I was in high school, my sister Becky came
iv
home on college vacations with handfuls of books for me: women’s studies anthologies,
feminist theory, collections of literature by women. I entered graduate school just as she
finished her doctorate in history, and I have been able to watch her ahead of me every
step of the way. With very different methods and in different fields, we have both taken
up the question of when and how women speak and can be heard. I count myself as
exceptionally lucky to have her not only as my sister but as a model, a resource, and a
friend. I am so thankful to have been raised in a household in which education, reading,
and intellectual conversation were continually modeled and highly esteemed. My family
can argue about most things, but it is united in a devotion to reading and a belief in its
transformative effects. This shared value provided some of the fundamental impetus for
my desire to explore ways in which philosophical writing, too, can affect us. This
dissertation is dedicated to them.
Finally, Ajay Chaudhary is my best reader and interlocutor. This project would
not have reached fruition without his ongoing love and support, his brilliant synthetic
mind, his relentless creative energy, and his exceptional ability to know what I am trying
to say long before I do.

v
for my family

vi