Vadim Linetski
I. What is wrong with the Oedipus complex?–The Oedipus complex and “the foundational fantasy of the ego’s era” (Brennan)
These days it would certainly amount to a dare to propose that the Oedipus complex is the very core of patriarchal/logocentric discursivity. Every attempt to–consciously or unconsciously–(re)inforce Oedipus (Sprengnether 1985) is bound to be regarded as a reactionary enterprise. However, it is precisely such reinforcement that underpins the most advanced versions of poststructuralism. This paradox cries for a merciless treatment, for only thus can we hope to break the self-perpetuation of tradition, i.e. to attain the goal which the celebrated critics of logocentrism have justly posed but drastically failed to achieve.
To be sure, the task of surpassing Oedipus is not an easy one; it implies real and not a conventionally rhetorical shift of paradigms.1 On the other hand, there are no actual reasons for pessimism.2 To substantiate our claim we must closely attend to the genealogy of this pessimism, that is, to start with the question, “what is wrong with Oedipus?”–however trite it might appear to the poststructuralist eye.
Fortunately, the triteness happens only to be ostensible. Consider, for instance, one of the basic feminist charges against the Oedipal structure(s), that “the Oedipal chauvinism…for which Freud’s theory of the girl as ‘little man’ manqué was exemplary” (Benjamin 1995: 118). Chauvinism is, of course, an expression of the unconscious fear of castration, which, in its turn, gives rise to aggressivity, to the “drama of rivalry and aggression” that, according to Brennan, defines the “ego’s era”–the era of a self-contained patriarchal subject aspiring for (absolute) mastery and knowledge of the other (Brennan 1993: 53). As the postructuralist saying goes, historically, this abstract subject has found a talented impersonator in the father of psychoanalysis. Witness Freud’s strategy with his patients, governed as it was by the wish to evade and obscure “the legacy of the pre-Oedipal period,” “the flexible identificatory capacities of pre-Oedipal life” (Benjamin 1995: 119, 117). It is with the latter that feminism (and poststructuralism in general) has placed its stakes. Hence the vogue currently enjoyed by the “notion of recapturing over-inclusive structures of identification…by decentring our notion of development and replacing the discourse of identity with the notion of identifications” (118). At first sight it may actually appear that the decentering pluralization of identifications offers an economic solution to our problem. Since, as Derrida has taught us, there is no absolute ‘beyond’ to any logocentric structure, one has to work from the inside in the manner of “pharmakon.” As we shall shortly ascertain for ourselves, this view of deconstruction drastically limits its scope, making it a purely rhetorical affair, and unfortunately not in the de Manian sense.
Theoretically, the pluralized identifications should enable us to circumvent the rigid Oedipal identifications which form the coercive structure of patriarchy and in so doing to merge the parental figures into the “father of individual prehistory” who can be dubbed the mother as well (cf. Kristeva 1987: 33; 1989: 13-14).3 In Kristevan terms, this mergence allows the semiotic to emerge into the symbolic, the former acting as a “pharmakon” to the latter. The result is that “we plunge…into the representational flux–the rolling identifications and wrappings of self and other–of fantasy itself” (Elliott 1995: 48). Put otherwise, “the construction of interpenetrating consciousnesses” (cf. Dorval and Gomberg 1993) should guarantee that the concomitant construction of the “libidinal space” (Elliott 1995: 45) would be purged of the aggressive rivalry (Brennan 1993: 53). Thus, the way for the post-Oedipal non-patriarchal sexuality (not in the developmental, quantitative, but qualitative sense) freed from coercive relations of power seems to be cleared, so that nothing prevents us from assuming that the “foundational fantasy” of the ego’s era which excluded the woman (49) has been successfully displaced and replaced by a more progressive fantasmatization (cf. Castoriadis 1995). However–and be it only as a tribute to common sense–I think it would be unwise to purchase a new commodity while taking its difference from the old at face value. In other words, the underpinnings of the fantasy acted out by poststructuralism remain to be seen.
II. The foundational fantasy of poststructuralism–“Literature is psychoanalysis” (Spivak) but is psychoanalysis literature?–Parapsychoanalysis (telepathy) and paraesthetics (intertextuality)
In order to proceed with our inquiry in a most succinct way we will be well-advised to focus on the implications which the developments sketched above have for literary theory. Far from being fortuitous, this focus is implied in the subject we are discussing. Not only because, psychoanalytically, the notion of fantasy is bound up with the problem of human creativity (i.e., with such questions as repression, representation, sublimation, etc.), but first of all because poststructuralist decentering of fantasmatical constellations underpinning the Oedipus complex is aimed at a subversion of the status of psychoanalysis as science conceived as an embodiment of the logocentric urge for absolute knowledge and truth. This subversion initiated by Derrida’s critique of Lacan (1988, 1975) and N. Abraham and M. Torok’s works (1976, 1978) has by now become a rather conventional affair. Literary theory adds nothing essentially new to the notion of intertextuality being, at most, another illustration of how the author’s (Freud’s) ashes can be disseminated. 4 Nevertheless, it is precisely from this (para)psychoanalytic point of view that the (para)esthetic notion of intertextuality fundamental for poststructuralist theory in all its existing versions and applications can be most fruitfully questioned. The patient reader will soon see why.
The most recent attempts to undermine the psychoanalytic edifice foreground the notion of telepathy and in doing so promise to bridge the notorious gap between psychoanalysis and literary theory by trying to utilize precisely the alleged logocentric blind spots of both domains (N. Royle 1991,1995). After the studies of S. Markus (1985), N. Hertz (1985), to say nothing about Derrida, we are inclined to take for granted that psychoanalysis has mistakenly taken itself to be a science, whereas it is actually nothing but a fiction, a sort of literature (certainly, a first-class one). However, it remains to be proven that literature is psychoanalysis–and, more importantly, not “a perfect psychoanalysis” (Spivak 1994: 64), but also not entirely a failure. 5 Whence the appeal of telepathy, which “connects by disconnecting” (Ronell 1989: 132), retaining the supplement of copula precisely by crossing it. “There is no ‘and’ between telepathy and literature” (Royle 1991: 183). “It is difficult to imagine a theory of what they still call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy. They can be neither confused nor dissociated” (Derrida 1981: 11). However, if we are to believe poststructuralism, every attempt has been made in the history of psychoanalysis to sunder both theories. Not so much by Freud himself, who was “mad” enough “to speculate on telepathy” (Spivak 1984: 64), but by his followers, especially by Ernest Jones, who in Derrida’s narrative comes to play the role of a scapegoat. The irony of the matter is that, in Derrida’s own terms, this scapegoat is precisely the role of a subversive “pharmakon,” for the excluded other inevitably spoils the coherence of the system unable to accommodate its “prodigal son.” As we shall shortly see, such is the case with Ernest Jones, whose intuitions were obscured and ignored by the psychoanalytic edifice for just the same reasons which now guide Derrida in his search for the guilty party.
III. The prodigal son of psychoanalysis–The notion of “aphanisis”
Given the current troubles with constructing feminine identity and articulating a theory of “écriture féminine,” troubles which, according to Sprengnether, boil down to inability of leading feminist theorists to free themselves from the spell of Lacanian thought (1995: 147), it is indeed surprising that Jones’s contributions to psychoanalysis remain in abeyance. For it is nobody other than Ernest Jones who has provided us with a set of valid tools for solving the aforementioned problems. My contention is precisely that a genuinely new theoretical model can be elaborated on the basis of Jones’s legacy. I think this assumption will be sufficiently substantiated if we succeed in demonstrating that the model in question can account for textual reality more adequately than the models propounded in the wake of deconstruction, the “telepathic” model included.
As a theorist, Jones is best remembered for his notion of “aphanisis,” that is, of the disappearance of desire. That thus far no one has ventured to rethink this notion is another example of the “Lacanian spell” to which the postructuralist thought remains subject.6 The result is a drastic misunderstanding of Jones’s notion. Witness an entry in Laplanche-Pontalis’s dictionary, an entry, which, totally ignoring the most intriguing implications of this notion, can be said to give a faithful account of it only insofar Jones really “evokes the notion of aphanisis in the context of his inquiries into feminine sexuality” (1988: 40). Jones himself is at least partly responsible for the vicissitudes of this concept: certainly, there is no articulated theory of aphanisis of which to speak. Our present task is to remedy this deficiency–not only by drawing all the consequences from Jones’s remarks, but also by connecting these remarks with a number of Heideggerian and Bakhtinian intuitions which point in the same direction.
IV. Aphanisis and telepathy
Our first step will be to point out that aphanisis, central as it is to Jones’s thought, has a profound connection with his attitude towards telepathy, which, contrary to Derrida’s assumption, has nothing to do with logocentric biases. In fact, just the opposite is true. Witness Jones’s paper on “The Nature Of Auto-Suggestion” (1950). Certainly, Jones is unequivocal regarding the fundamental impossibility “to combine the two methods of treatment…those of psycho-analysis and suggestion” (291), equating suggestion with hypnosis, telepathy and analogous states (275-277). However, upon closer inspection, the train of thought leading to this conclusion proves to be a radical subversion of logocentrism, and thereby shows Derrida’s precarious complicity with the latter.
What should alert us that things are not just so simple as Derrida would like them to be are two facts in Jones’s paper which, far from being suppressed, come to the fore of the author’s attention. On the one hand, Jones is quite willing to acknowledge that “it is extraordinary difficult to draw any sharp line between hetero- and auto-suggestion…the former process may prove in most cases in practice a necessary stage in the evocation of the latter” (284-285, 289), stressing, on the other hand, that “we can no longer regard the subject as a helpless automaton in the hands of a strong-willed operator; it is nearer the truth to regard the operator as allowing himself to play a part, and by no means an indispensable one, in a drama constructed and acted in the depths of the subject’s mind” (277). Both points play a prominent part in Derrida’s celebration of telepathy,7 which can be regarded as an attempt to “resurrect” poststructuralist intertextuality by deploying the Formalist device of “defamiliarization” (“making strange,” “ostranenije“).8 The effects of auto/hetero-suggestion as a disseminating process for the dislocation of subjectivity are described by Jones with sufficient objectivity to find Derrida’s approval and to conclude that hypnosis and psychoanalysis are opposed as “the Eastern and the Western methods of dealing with life” (293); these are a patent example of ethno/logocentric prejudices that border on a real outrage since both methods are equated with the difference “between infantilism and adult life,” respectively (293). Unfortunately, such an evaluation provides all too easy sailing, for the invocation of infantilism has much more to it than a deconstructive eye is willing to admit.
It is obvious enough that a problem of knowledge is at stake. Far less obvious is which “method of dealing with life” that knowledge should be aligned with and what attitude should be regarded as its opposite. The first part of our question can be found without transcending Jones’s corpus, the second part requires an enlargement of our field of inquiry.
Given the poststructuralist view of psychoanalysis as a bulwark of logocentric scienticity and the subsequent efforts to undermine it by reading Freudian theory as an “auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic” (Derrida 1977: 146) “paraesthetic” narrative, one will be certainly inclined to assume that Jones’s refutation of hypnosis and telepathy stems from his concern that psychoanalysis retain the status of a science. This is why it is so surprising to find that the real concerns of our author lie elsewhere. Even the most superficial reader cannot fail to notice that the controversy between hypnosis and psychoanalysis is judged from a purely pragmatic point of view, i.e., not as a theoretical problem but a practical one. If the methods based on suggestion are undesirable, it is because they fail to alleviate the symptoms (292). This explains why, in the last resort, the question of hypnosis boils down to the question of lay analysis.9 Put otherwise, psychoanalysis is to be preferred not on scientific grounds, i.e., not because of the insights into the content of the unconscious which it achieves–Jones is quite unambiguous regarding the fact that both techniques uncover the same complexes and fantasies (287-288)–but solely because, contrary to hypnosis, it can free the patient from his/her symptoms (292). However, this is not to say that the question of knowledge is absent from Jones’s discussion and therefore can only be imported into it by the reader.
V. Paraesthetics and the infantile sexual theories
The irony of the matter is precisely that knowledge makes its appearance under the guise of infantilism which is attributed by Jones to techniques akin to suggestion. So long as knowledge, to slightly alter Derrida’s dictum, is that which returns to the father, Jones’s constant emphasis that, contrary to psychoanalysis, paratechniques (hypnosis, suggestion, telepathy, etc.) inevitably bring about the return of the father figure10 point to the heart of our problem.
This return is bound up with the reactivation of primary narcissism, which defines the hypnoid state (286). However, in order to tease out all the implications from this statement which at first sight appears hackneyed and uncommitted, we will be well-advised to take a step backwards, that is, to return to the stage in Freud’s development at which what has lately come to be known as ego-libido was still–and, as we shall see, more adequately–theorized as ego-instincts or instincts of self-preservation. For this return not only presents the sole possibility of solving a number of fundamental quandaries but also ultimately of precluding the desexualization of psychoanalysis,11 the desexualization, which, paradoxically enough, was an unavoidable corollary of the introduction of narcissism.
In other words, the poststructuralist (para)esthetic discourse is bound up with the reactivation of infantile sexual theories. It is precisely this “infantile” grounding which prevents deconstruction from reaching its goal. Since we would like to make this goal our own, our first task is to identify the particular infantile phantasy underpinning Derrida’s theorizing. However, this identification is impossible without a reconsideration of the psychoanalytic attitude towards the sexual theories of children in general.
Insofar as the infantile curiosity concerning sexual matters can be viewed as the very foundation of psychoanalysis, 12 it is surprising to discover that it finds no separate entry in Laplanche-Pontalis’s dictionary of psychoanalytic terms. That the authors have chosen to subsume our problem under the rubrics of “phantasy” and “sexuality” is a good example of the direction taken by post-Freudian psychoanalysis. And it is this direction which, throwing its retroactive shade on Freud himself, makes of a psychoanalysis an easy prey for poststructuralist attack.
VI. Sublimation and its discontents–Sublimation primal and secondary
What is at stake here is the very possibility of an exchange between psychoanalytic theory and humanities in general, literature in particular. For such an exchange, i.e., the existence of applied psychoanalysis, cannot bring any worthwhile results so long as psychoanalytic theory remains haunted by the ghosts of unsolved problems which bear directly on the foundational principles of psychoanalysis. More concretely, it is “the lack of a coherent theory of sublimation”–the lack which is not simply “one of the lacunae” but the lacuna “in psycho-analytic thought” par excellence (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988: 433)–that in the last resort is responsible for that precarious state in which psychoanalysis currently finds itself.
The reluctance to thematize the link between sublimation and infantile sexual theories is quite understandable, for such a thematization will immediately expose the resemblance between the psychoanalytic edifice and the Tower of Pisa, inevitably exposing the profound complicity between poststructuralism and its logocentric adversary. And this is due to the fact that the architects have disposed of the very cornerstone of their construction. Put crudely and bluntly, Freud’s legataries have got him completely wrong.
To clear the path, let us start from the very beginning–of Freud’s development as well as of a human being’s.
The basic premise of psychoanalysis is that sexuality develops anaclitically: “the sexual instincts, which become autonomous only secondarily, depend at first on those vital functions which furnish them with an organic source, an orientation and an object” (29). Since “the instinct is said to be sublimated in so far as it is diverted towards a new…aim” (431), we can conclude that the emergence of sexuality is the first sublimation–the sublimation of self-preservative instincts. On the other hand, so long as Freud took considerable pains to keep sublimation distinct from repression as two different vicissitudes of the drives (cf. Freud 1915: 219), we can propose the notion of primal sublimation in contradistinction to the notion of primal repression allotted such a prominent role in Lacan’s semiosis. Thus we have laid down a foundation for an alternative model that will allow us to escape in one stroke all the logocentric pre- and post-Oedipal vagaries.
“The primal repressed is the signifier,” says Lacan in a passage which notably ends with a famous dictum: “Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself” (1977: 176). All attempts to rethink the notion of primal repression in order to purge it of logocentric overtones (cf.Kristeva 1987: 26-27, 33; Laplanche 1987: 126-128, 137) have wound up reconfirming Lacanianism: “Whatever the radicalizing possibilities of primal repression and identification, identity requires meaning, and therefore symbolic law…relation to the other, and therefore to cultural, historical and political chains of signification. The entry of the subject into socially constituted representations secures the repetition of the law. For these reasons, it makes little sense to understand the psychical processes organized through primal repression as signalling a ‘beyond’ to symbolic law” (Elliott 1995: 50). The irony of this excerpt is twofold. For one thing, it comes as the conclusion of a discussion in the course of which Kristeva et alia have been criticized precisely for failing to signal as “beyond” to symbolic law (45). On the other hand, the alternative propounded by Elliott–a view of primal repression as “the representational splitting of the subject” (50; his italics)–corresponds neatly to that with which every reader of Lacan is familiar. However, Elliott deserves our full appreciation for his unusual candidness. The straightforward equation of primal repression with identification (45, 51) and the concomitant foregrounding of empathy is precisely the discursive move which produces the (para)esthetic telepathic interpretive attitude of Derrida, who is certainly far from admitting, as Elliott does, that the result is the perpetuation of the law/tradition grounded in the notions–intersubjectivity, intertextuality, etc.–which are so dear to poststructuralist’s heart. Unfortunately, Elliott’s candidness does not extend far enough to lay bare the mechanism of the deconstructive perpetuation of tradition. Hence his resentment regarding the impossibility to reach a “beyond”–a resentment which characterizes the current theoretical scene. The propaedeutic value of our analysis is bound up with the comprehensive demonstration of how and why poststructuralism has cornered itself into the impasse which it now bemoans.
Despite its tone, the preceding paragraph is far from being a polemical aside, for it has established one fact essential for our inquiry. The recent celebrations of primary repression qua pre-Oedipal identification(s) show the impossibility to differentiate it from the secondary repression–from the Oedipal repression of the Name of the Father. At most, they differ quantitatively, the latter reconfirming the former. It remains to be seen what implications that this train of thought has for the project of “critical narratology,” parading as another attack on logocentric Oedipal metanarratives and taking its cue from Derridaean dictum: “writing is unthinkable without repression” (1978: 226).
The unification of the notion of repression allows us to assign it a more definite place in the history of the subject’s development.13 In fact, repression is nothing other than a secondary sublimation which differs in kind from the primary sublimation. What deserves our full attention is the fact that defining sublimation qua desexualisation and by the same token firmly grounding the concept of repression has become possible only after the introduction of narcissism: “With the introduction of narcissism and the advent of the final theory of the psychical apparatus Freud adopts a new approach. The transformation of a sexual activity into a sublimated one (assuming both are directed toward external, independent objects) is now said to require an intermediate period during which the libido is withdrawn on to the ego so that desexualisation may become possible” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988: 433). Taken at face value, this passage gives no reason for panic since it seems to be in perfect accord with the generally accepted view of the ego. Unfortunately, this first impression is misleading. Sublimation conceived within the framework of narcissism turns out to be nothing less than a subversion of psychoanalysis in toto–or, to be more precise, of psychoanalysis equated with the theory of libido.
The first paradox that immediately leaps to mind bears on the obvious impossibility of reconciling the desexualization of libido through its withdrawal onto the ego with the general definition of the latter agency “as a great reservoir of libido” (Freud 1923: 231). Certainly, this paradox has not escaped Freud’s attention. This explains why the notion of the super-ego becomes indispensable, appearing with the logical necessity of Derrida’s “supplement.”14 In effect, the super-ego, which, as a matter of fact, was introduced in the very same year as the cited definition of the ego,15 allows us to circumvent our quandary, but only confronts us with a more troublesome dilemma.
VII. The production of Oedipus
So long as the super-ego is conceived of as the differentiated part of the ego itself,16 it becomes possible to surmise that it is the former locks onto itself the libido withdrawn from the outer world (cf. 1916: 431-433). This means that sublimation within the framework of narcissism inevitably introduces the melancholic situation that it was designed to preclude by Freud as well as by Kristeva (Freud 1916; Kristeva 1989). The irony of the matter is that those who criticise Kristeva for her conviction that “to deny the power of the imaginary father is to risk depression, melancholia and, possibly, death” (Elliott 1995: 45) propound the model of melancholia as an anti-Oedipal alternative (cf. Abraham/Torok 1978; Sprengnether 1995) grounded in the notion of pre-Oedipal identifications which, as everyone tolerably versed in psychoanalytic theory knows, have exactly the same desexualizing outcome as the introduction of the super-ego described above.17 Whereas, according to the proponents of melancholically-telepathic hermeneutics, the melancholic model should enable the construction of non-Oedipal sexuality. The paradox is resolved since the process of desexualization foregrounds all the essentials of such a construction. In effect, the instinctual diffusion resulting from identification is nothing else than the return of the celebrated infantile polymorphism (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1972; Lyotard 1993; Benjamin 1995) which, however, happens to have nothing to do with sexuality. And it is hardly surprising, for the process we are discussing is aimed at undoing the primary sublimation that has transformed anarchical polymorphous instincts of self-preservation into sexuality. Put otherwise, the secondary sublimation is the non-Hegelian negation of the primary sublimation. And this is precisely what allows us not merely to equate secondary sublimation with the Lacanian notion of repression which triggers off semiosis, but to place the latter in its true light.
The reference to Hegel was meant as a caution against those cursory readers who at this point may be inclined to wonder whence all the sound and fury of our analysis, since it is certainly nothing new to say that repression is by definition a repression of sexuality. However, this argument is valid only if we take Lacanian statements at face value. Such naivete has been made impossible precisely in the wake poststructuralist appropriation of Lacan’s legacy, an appropriation that, more often than not, takes pains to stress its faithfulness to the “Absolute Master.”
As we have seen, pre-Oedipal identifications have exactly the same effect as the Oedipal ones. And yet to conclude that we have already hit on the very reason of the poststructuralist inability to do away with Oedipus would mean not only to treat poststructuralism rather leniently but also to miss the most interesting part of the whole story. For the gist of the matter is that identifications are in themselves neither pre-Oedipal, Oedipal nor post-Oedipal since the Oedipal structure does not pre-exist identificatory activity but emerges as its inevitable result. In other words, the discursive movement of telepathy and/or melancholy is a movement not of a reconfirmation/repetition but of the original production of Oedipus. And it is at this point that the infantile sexual theories come in, enabling us to spell out all the implications of the proposition we have just advanced.
Given Freud’s rank of an honorable structuralist, it is rather surprising that in the matters that interest us here he remains at the thematic level of analysis.18 This is even more true in case of his disciples.19 This sufficiently explains the general neglect and obtusion suffered by infantile sexual theories and corresponding fantasies. As was already mentioned, for Freud these fantasies were the main evidence for the existence of infantile sexuality. This explains why he was reluctant to thematize the obvious fact that the impetus of infantile curiosity is provided by circumstances which are more likely to activate the instincts of self-preservation. I refer, of course, to the birth of a brother or sister. From a conventional, i.e., libidinal point of view–incidentally the one adopted here by Freud–this event gives rise to envy and jealousy in the elder child(ren). But obviously there is no necessary connection between these feelings, however intense, and an urge to penetrate into the “secrets” of Mother Nature. Moreover, the stronger the envy and jealousy, the less likely the appearance of an “intellectual” attitude: as common sense would have it, jealousy makes us blind. Equally problematical is another conventionally libidinal interpretation which tries to reduce fantasies produced in the course of the child’s inquiry to a plainly defensive affair and to make the inquiry itself a deployment of a defence mechanism. However, this interpretation begs an explanation of how a fantasy can protect a child from the repetition of a painful event and/or alleviate his/her current troubles. Evidently, the omnipotence of thought also has its limits, and the child of course is not such a dope as to believe that his notion of “where the children come from” can have any influence on their actual arrival.20 The arrival of a sibling is certainly experienced as a threat, but not a libidinal one. If “the development of a child is materially influenced” by this event (Boehm 1931: 449), then this is precisely because the problem thus posed is an epistemic one: it is a question of hermeneia and not of filia. Put otherwise, the whole affair becomes traumatic because the child discerns in it not the possibility of the decrease of his/her share of parental love (here all depends on an actual familial setting) but the threat of losing contact with parents, of being excluded from communication with them. 21 Semiotically, the birth of a sibling represents an instance of diffusion, rather than confusion, of tongues between the child and adults (cf. Ferenczi 1980, 1933). This suggests that trauma,22 representing as it does a rupture of a dialogic intersubjective relationship, can be reinterpreted in a way which will furnish us with a genuinely alternative model which will effectively transcend the logocentric (Oedipal) binarism that is reinforced by postsructuralist ensnarement within the dialogue vs. monologue framework.23
There are two ways out of the traumatic impasse in which the child finds himself or herself. But first of all it should be stressed that the impasse that prompts the secondary sublimation qua desexualization/repression 24 is prior to any kind of Oedipality to which it may or may not give rise. 25 Put otherwise, Oedipus is a matter of free choice.
On the one hand, the child can try once again to deploy the mechanism of primal sublimation, i.e., to sublimate the upsurge of self-preservative epistemophilia into sexuality. If he succeeds, the diffusion of tongues referred to above becomes irrevocable and the child establishes a discourse of his own, beyond all patriarchal tradition. In other words, he spares himself the problematic of castration/Oedipus simply by taking another route. This is what we will term the normal development without repression.26 Significantly, the textual reality is a telling example of such a development.
On the other hand, the child can pursue his researches and become entrapped in the Oedipal strictures. He will (re)invent the Oedipal complex as the only means to ensure the possibility of communication. This obviously results in the perpetuation of tradition. It is far less obvious that this result crowns the efforts of those who make the undermining of tradition equated with power/knowledge/meaning/truth their battle-cry. We are left with a thorough misrepresentation and safeguarding of tradition; the targets of postsructuralist attack listed above (along with their derivatives) have nothing to do with the mechanism of tradition transmission. Significantly, these same motives are responsible for the direction taken by the post-Freudian psychoanalysis (Lacan’s version included), effectively robbing Freud’s teaching of its subversive potential.
Consider the problem of the construction of meaning. As Derrida would like us believe, deconstruction exposes the traditional claims for what they actually are, that is, an unsustainable effort to restrict the disseminating flow of significations. Meaning is undecidable. To think otherwise is to fall prey to the logocentric fallacy. Witness Freud and his Oedipal complex, a structure which “does not permit much flexibility” (Sprengnether 1995: 143). Hence the hope that the situation of “women differently within this general structure” (143) is ultimately of no avail: Oedipus has to be “interrogated at its core” (143). As we have already ascertained for ourselves, this task, however valid and laudable, in poststructuralist discourse boils down to a declamation of ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendum. If Carthage nevertheless still flourishes, this is because the (para)esthetic discourse of empathy/telepathy which foregrounds desexualizing identifications cannot help but promote the Oedipal structures and thereby unwittingly prove that these structures are far more flexible than generally assumed. This certainly does not make them less dangerous. To the contrary.
To return to our little explorer: having succumbed to the urge for knowledge, he has the choice between the negative and the positive versions of the Oedipal structure. Given the alleged impossibility of surpassing the Oedipal conflict, it is quite logical that the poststructuralist way of dealing with it boils down to privileging the negative version. Whereas the latter articulates patriarchal knowledge as grounded in rigid sexual difference which, in its turn, presupposes the recognition of the woman’s castration; “pederastic identification” implicitly “challenges the binarisms of sexual difference” by making the male subject “alert to further syntagmatic possibilities” (Silverman 1988: 172-173). These possibilities inscribed in the primal scene allow the conception of the latter as “perhaps most profoundly disruptive of conventional masculinity in the way it articulates knowledge” (157): “…it would seem that to the degree to which the primal scene phantasy acknowledges castration it cannot help but generalize it by making it a consequence not of anatomy, but of a subject position” (166). This seems to explain why the knowledge with which the primal scene confronts the male subject comes to be repressed within the patriarchal paradigm, anchored in the positive Oedipal structure that “fortifies the male subject within a paternal identification by renouncing his Oedipal desires” (157).
The irony of Silverman’s account is that it leaves no place for infantile sexual theories. In effect, from the libidinal point of view, there is knowledge inscribed in the primal scene. However distorted, ignored or repressed, however belatedly understood, this knowledge remains active in shaping the subject’s destiny. Hence there is nothing to give impetus to infantile theorizing. At most, the child’s brooding will be confined to the issues of activity/passivity and aggression/caress. It follows that the poststructuralist theorizing itself remains entrapped in logocentric binarisms and therefore drastically underestimates the intellectual capacities of children. This is not to suggest that infantile fantasies transcend the patriarchal discourse. What justifies our interest is the fact that the child can act as a subversive “pharmakon” precisely because of its innocent ignorance, both in respect to patriarchy and its alleged adversaries. It is sufficient to adopt the child’s point of view in order to gain a vantage point for a genuine deconstruction.
As psychoanalytically informed poststructuralist feminist critics would have it, sexuality is pregnant with knowledge, and not the other way round. Hence the role assigned to the notion of repression. Silverman’s reading of Henry James is just another attempt to prove that without repression neither patriarchal discourse nor its deconstruction are possible. What is repressed is the woman, especially empathic identifications with the mother figure. The trouble is not so much that deconstruction consequently mirrors the construction of patriarchy, coming under suspicion of being a simple reversal of signs, but primarily that femininity and the strategy of its recovery through removal of repression are at odds. To expose this paradox means to show that the notion of repression, 27 at least regarding applied psychoanalysis, is unsustainable and has no practical value. On the other hand, so long as femininity is equated with writing/style (Derrida 1979: 37), we are left with a challenging task of thinking writing without repression. The generally accepted view of Henry James as a patent example of writing as repression of unconscious desire 28 stamps him as a good frame of reference for our theoretical elaborations.
However, we are not as yet finished with these latter deliberations. So long as poststructuralism has already made the choice on behalf of our little explorer, let us see what the option in favor of the negative Oedipus looks like from the point of view of the child itself. Epistemologically (and it should be remembered that the child’s concerns lie in this sphere), this option is obviously an ideal one. For, as Freud puts it, “pater semper incertus est, while the mother is certissima” (1909: 229; his italics). All the child’s broodings “over the question played by the father in the genesis” of the sibling (Boehm 1931: 450) are doomed to be of no avail. Hence the hermeneutical value of the identification with the mother; in identifying with her the child guarantees the automatic arrival of knowledge without any effort on its own part: all it has to do is to wait and see what the father will undertake with the mother.29 Put otherwise, everything speaks in favor of the “pederastic identification” and, by the same token, nothing can explain why this identification should suffer repression.30 Hence to assume that repression nevertheless takes place–and it is on this assumption that the whole critique of logocentrism apparently hinges–means to make the identification with the father a much more puzzling issue.
The paradox of the matter is that, in the poststructuralists’ own terms, it is impossible to explain the existence of the positive Oedipus, to wit, the very possibility of logocentric production of knowledge and ultimately, the existence of patriarchy itself. To be sure, all these things are hard realities, but poststructuralism is unable to account for, let alone deconstruct, them. And what is worse, this inability cannot help but unwittingly promote all that is ripe for subversion.
On the other hand, from the child’s standpoint it is quite clear why he privileges the identification with the father. His motives have to do neither with the problematic of activity/passivity (Silverman 1988: 171) nor with master/slave dialectic (Brennan 1993: 53-55).31 For at stake for the child, and by extension, for logocentric tradition, is not knowledge per se, as Derrida et alia take pains to convince us, but knowledge as a means of communication, by necessity a distorted knowledge. The epistemic certainty promised by the identificatory empathy with the mother has the same effect as total ignorance. And it is this Janus-like threat which, as we remember, prompted the quest of the child traumatically desexualized by the birth of sibling(s). To be sure, in cases of the child and of tradition alike, to identify with the father means to make a virtue of a necessity. But precisely by force of this fact, deconstruction, which exposes the devices of tradition’s transmission, in turn offers tradition an invaluable service.
As Russian Formalism has amply proved, the exposing device is an act of resurrection, of promoting to the second life that which by its own means is doomed to perish. It follows that Derrida is quite correct in assigning to his “supplement” the status of the “discourse of support” (1981: 324-330) remaining blind regarding its supportive effects. The supplement adds itself to the discourse which needs support in the movement of “+ N” (cf. 1987: 122-180). This movement certainly has nothing to do with polysemy/knowledge (1981: 252-253); it (re)confirms by doubling the communicational setup. This means that the necessity of the “supplement” (and of all the other Derridaean notions which are arranged according to the substitution/supplementary logic) is intrinsic to the logocentric discourse only inasmuch as it is historical, i.e., inasmuch as human being is subject to exhaustion, to economic aphanisis.32 Put otherwise, Derrida’s supplement is a neat counterpart of the Formalist strategy of “making strange.”33 Whence the status of pleonasm as one of the two master tropes of deconstruction. In order for there to be meaning one should guarantee a non-meaningless communicative substratum constituted by the overabundance of pure signifiers which tend to overflow all boundaries. Whence the celebration of gossip which communicates nothing, but by virtue of this fact can be regarded as a pure instance of communication as such (cf. Spacks 1985: 3-24, 258-265). Notably, along these lines gossip comes to be aligned with telepathy and other (para)esthetical forms (cf. Forrester 1990: 243-259). However, this grounding requires in its turn to be grounded itself. And it is the latter act concealed by tradition and its deconstruction that the recourse to infantile sexual curiosity allows us to divulge for the first time.
VIII. The fantasy of the reversal of generations and what is implied in it
The effect of identification with the father is the fantasy of the reversal of generations. Already referred to by Freud (1931: 421), it remained an aside in his teaching. The thread was picked up by Ernest Jones, who devoted to the subject a separate paper (1950). What this fantasy boils down to is the belief, “not at all rare among the children, to the effect that as they grow older and bigger their relative position to their parents will be gradually reversed, so that finally they will become the parents and their parents the children” (407). The correspondence between this fantasy and Derrida’s strategy of subversion of logocentric values, primarily of the notion of origin(ality), is striking enough to require no painstaking elaborations.34 On the other hand, it can be easily shown that the same fantasy underpins the discourse of poststructuralism as such. Whence the necessity to investigate these matters more closely.
The conventional interpretation is satisfied in seeing in our fantasy an instance of the drive for mastery.35 Paradoxically, to adopt this standpoint would mean to treat poststructuralism all too leniently and to miss the implications which highlight a real path beyond current theoretical predicaments.
Significantly, Jones himself hints at a possibility of a more fruitful approach. Since our poststructuralist tutors have drilled us to see in the drive for mastery the rectification of the position of the logocentric subject, it is rather invigorating to hear that the effect of this fantasy on “the child’s own personality” is that of distortion. It is precisely this effect that makes the reversal fantasy an essential mechanism “in regard to the transmission of tradition” (411). Certainly, this corroborates what was said above about poststruralism’s complicity with the tradition which it sets out to deconstruct. However, in order to pass from the deconstruction of an alleged deconstruction to the deconsruction of the tradition itself, that is, in order to launch deconstruction of the second degree and in doing so to propose a veritably alternative mode of thought, it is necessary to spell out all the consequences of Jones’s intuitions.
First, it should be noted that whereas Freud evokes the reversal fantasy in his discussion of female sexuality, Jones, for all his interest in the problem, chooses to speak in connection with our fantasy of a neuter “child.” However, what at first glance is bound to provoke a fashionable rebuke for genderless thinking proves upon closer inspection to be a genuine starting point for a construction of feminine as well as masculine identity beyond Oedipal strictures.
Apparently, the reversal fantasy reduces Lacanian accounts of the subject’s entry into the Symbolic order to its most schematic form.36 It is the reversal (Verkehrung) of the drive which produces the split alienated subject of the Symbolic–the subject “which is properly the other” (1977: 178 et passim). Nevertheless, there remains one issue that seems to radically divorce our fantasy from the Symbolic: the question of castration. The latter, as every student of Lacan knows, is the crucial difference–and not only between the Imaginary and the Symbolic which otherwise tend to be conflated. The point of regarding this problem with the eyes of our innocent little investigator is bound up with the fact that this perspective shows beyond any doubt that the notions of castration and repression (the two being closely interrelated) are unnecessary for setting the mechanism of signification/tradition transmission in motion. The function of castration/repression is precisely that of Derrida’s supplement, a means of discursive revitalization.37 Unfortunately, far from exempting Lacan from feminist critique of phallogocentrism, this fact exposes a precarious complicity of feminist theorizing with its enemy.
As we have seen, the identification with the father does not promote mastery, but even less does it lead to the denigration/exclusion/repression of the woman. The mother figure remains essential; it grounds the patriarchal discursivity–precisely because it is not repressed and therefore is not made to represent “castration as truth” (Derrida 1988, 184).38 The paradox of the identification with the father is that it suspends the problematic of castration as an access point to truth. Significantly, thus far no one has given proper attention to a crucial moment in Freud’s description of the castration complex which notably appears in a discussion of infantile sexual theories. The feeling provoked by the sight of feminine genitals is an uncanny, unbearable one. Hence the first reaction of the male child is not to deny or repress the perception but to assure himself that “the girl also possesses the penis, although a small one; but in due time it will grow. Only when the consequent observations prove the unsustainability of this surmise, the child assumes that the penis was cut off” (1910: 164-165). The identification with the father effectively spares the child the necessity of relinquishing his initial hypothesis. And this is precisely because the transition from the passive to the active position drastically diminishes the cognitive dimension, however phantasmatical and hallucinatory the latter may be. To become an actor, one has (at every moment to be ready) to act and not to wait to be acted upon. But there’s the rub! For the child still remains in darkness as to what the father does with the mother, still remaining excluded from communication with the adults. Whence the value of the initial hypothesis (the penis will grow in due time) which allows him to escape from this predicament that has proven to be unsurmountable by means of identification alone. The identification with the mother promises an absolute knowledge that can only result in silence, whereas the identification with the father prompts the communicative deployment of the knowledge which is lacking. The assumed possibility that the penis will grow effectively negotiates between these extremes, introducing a temporality which grounds hermeneutics as such. However, the advent of deconstruction coincides with the exhaustion of the potential of this temporality and by the same token of the resources of the Western hermeneutic tradition.
The infantile sexual theory we are discussing substitutes discursive certainty for the linguistic one. Only the former can ground communication as an intertextual exchange. The child gives woman and her penis time to grow, but it is equally true that the woman gives time to child’s curiosity to unfurl itself without the pressure of temporal handicaps.39 Therefore neither the child nor the woman strives to be “waited upon” (Brennan 1993: 91); both wait (for one another). And it is this mutual waiting which grounds the intersubjective dimension of “energetic” exchange (110, 116), the dimension in which the temporal pressure is sublated by the potentially meaningful ones,40 to wit, by the narratological suspense. Put otherwise, temporality underpinning the fantasy of the reversal of generations is exactly the same as that which Derrida elaborated in Donner le temps (1991).
IX. The guilt of gift, the gift of guilt
According to Derrida, the giving of time is the impossible possibility both of the récit and gift (1991: 46-60). The paradox, however, is that it is not only the tradition which cannot account for and accommodate the notion of the gift subversive of all restricted economies (21-29) but Derridian discourse as well, for the structure of gift as described by Derrida corresponds neatly to the hermeneutical structure of guilt developed by Heidegger.41 This means that the real “debts of deconstruction” are more profound than Samuel Weber would like to make us believe.
Weber’s paper can be classed as seminal in as much as it represents the most overt effort to “domesticate Derrida” (Godzich 1983), that is, to suppress Derrida’s striving to surpass the paradigm derived from his work.42 Starting with Derrida’s refusal to accept a telephone call, Weber draws the connection between this act and Derrida’s wonder at the ease with which Freud refuses his debts to the predecessors (cf. Derrida 1980: 25-26; 280-281) in order to reject Derrida’s intuition that it is possible to abolish intertextual/intersubjective indebtedness (Derrida 1980: 415). What is striking is that Weber classifies this intuition as “no longer deconstructive” (1987: 121). As we shall see, it is precisely this intuition which leads directly to the real deconstruction and not to what thus far passes under this name.
Since the telephone call was supposedly from Heidegger or from his ghost, Weber draws upon Heidegger in order to show the impossibility of repaying debts. For Dasein, says Heidegger, is always already, primordially guilty (Heidegger 1962: 325-335; Weber 1987: 129-131). Now whereas Heidegger takes pains to show that guilt and debt differ qualitatively just as, say, the irrational and an attempt to rationalize it (Heidegger 1962: 329), with equal consistentcy, Weber is bent upon equating both notions (120 et passim). And it is hardly surprising, since a strict adherence (a plain acknowledgement of indebtedness) to Heidegger would immediately rob Weber’s exegesis of its raison d’être.
In effect, that debt and guilt are not one and the same means that it is possible to requite debts so long as one assumes a primordial debt. Hence the crucial question is whether it is this operation which Derrida has in mind. Or, to generalize the problem, will the proposition still hold if we reverse its terms? An answer, on which the fate of deconstruction hinges, provides the last recourse to the fantasy of reversal of generations.
The only explanation of Derrida’s conduct which Weber can think of surmises that the rejection of the call was prompted by the lack of certainty as to the identity of the caller, of his/her “proper name” (130). Obviously this solution does violence to the thought of Heidegger and Derrida alike. Both men agree regarding the impossibility of unambiguously identifying a speaking subject–be it sender or receiver. Witness Heidegger’s dictum “Dasein’s call is from afar unto afar” (271). This means that the fantasy of the reversal of generations amply exemplifies Derrida’s and Heidegger’s semiotical models. On the other hand, Weber’s view signals the semiotic closure implied in the identification with the mother. In other words, Weber unwittingly exposes the ultimate fate of all versions of dialogism, for a most thorough (para)esthetic telepathic confusion of tongues cannot help but return to its “maternal” origin.
Witness Bakhtin, whose legacy is regarded as a theory of dialogism par excellence. Throughout his mature works, utterance is constantly defined by the change of the speaking subjects, i.e., by a discursive reversal (1979a: 254).43 In its turn, this change presupposes a “minimal degree of discursive closure which is necessary in order to make a response possible” (255). However, this closure has nothing to do with the “understandability of utterance” (255), i.e., with epistemology proper (knowledge, truth etc.). De Manian deconstruction provides a neat counterpart to Bakhtins’s theory. In de Man’s view, the epistemologic impasse, the celebrated undecidability of meaning, is a result of a clash between incompatible readings inscribed in a given text, although in itself each reading is complete (“finalized,” to use a Bakhtinian term) (cf. de Man 1975: 29). This means that the undecidability of meaning/identity of the speaking subject essential to the dialogic project has an unpleasant corollary in the decidability of the place, of the position from whence the utterance comes and whither it goes. Put otherwise, in order to remain forever uncertain about who is speaking, poststructuralism has to comply with certainty regarding the whereabouts of utterance.44 It is precisely this commerce that underpins the reversal fantasy, for in identifying with the father and giving time to the mother the child substitutes topological certainty for an epistemic (un)certainty. Whence the distortive effect of this fantasy on the child’s personality, which remains unaccountable and puzzling within the conventional interpretive framework.
X. The Law of (Oedipal) Return
By the same token, the reversal fantasy turns out to be not just a version of Oedipus complex but the very locus of its production. In effect, the structure of Oedipal Law is traditionally described in genuinely Derridaean/de Manian terms. The Law of Oedipus is the concurrent contradictory demand: “you must and must not be like the father” (cf. Laplanche 1980b: 284, 353, 401-402, 405, 409). Conventionally, the acceptance of this Law is equated with the dissolution of the Oedipal conflict. But, as we have seen, precisely this allegedly post-Oedipal impasse characterizes the child’s reversal of the order of the generations. Moreover, the acceptance of the (post)Oedipal Law turns out to be dependent on the maintenance of Oedipal structures, achieved by the suspension of the core castration problematic.
The contradictory nature of the Oedipal Law seems to make it a perfect example of a Bakhtinian double-voiced word. Paradoxically, at the very moment when the (para)esthetic confusion of tongues reaches its acme, it becomes impossible to maintain intertextual telepathy. To make matters worse, it is none other than Bakhtin who has pushed the paradox to the fore in a work which is generally regarded as a most inspired precipitation of poststructuralism.
I refer to Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, in which the direct speech equated with discursive mastery as repression of “resisting voices” (Hajdukowski-Ahmed 1993) is opposed to indirect speech as a decentring dislocation of identities. In Bakhtin’s terms this is the opposition between linear and picturesque style (1993a: 130-131). The picaresque is characterized by a thorough confusion of tongues between the author and hero and therefore by the suspension of the inside/outside border (131).45 It comes as a surprise to hear that in Russian literary language, where “as is well known, the syntactic patterns for reporting speech are very poorly developed,” where “one must acknowledge the unqualified primacy of direct discourse” (136) the precedence of the picturesque style has remained unchallenged throughout the modern period of Russian literature (from Classicism up to Symbolism). Given that the definition of utterance cited above is reconfirmed in this book (137, 143) as well as in the alleged “classic” of dialogism (cf. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 1979a: 300-301), one is bound to conclude that the literary text has either nothing to do with utterance/intertextuality or else that intertextuality is the very opposite of dialogism. However disastrous this paradox is for the postsructuralist project, it is not the weakness we are seeking. The great irony of our story is that dialogism is not Bakhtin’s main contribution to humanities just as the libidinal theory of repression/castration is not the quintessence of the Freudian legacy. The alignment of both thinkers is far from being fortuitous. Only in tracing the hidden interconnections can we show that Bakhtin and Freud have effectively spared themselves the subversive consequences of the mentioned impasse with which poststructuralism is doomed to end.
In effect, the paradox of intertextuality we have highlighted is the paradox of psychoanalysis conceived of as an (unrestricted) libidinal economy, that is, as the process of (intertextual) signification (Lyotard 1993; Deleuze/Guattari 1972). However, as our interpretation of the reversal fantasy has amply proven, this view by necessity leads to a thorough desexualization for the simple reason that the disseminating meaningless libidinal flow of signifiers as an infinite supplementary movement, which according to Derrida underlies and grounds every signification making of it forever an unstable and undecidable affair, needs to be grounded in the Oedipal Law precisely because its contradictory structure has a paralyzing, restrictive effect. Put otherwise, two master tropes of deconstruction–the pleonasm/catachresis of supplement and the chiasm/oxymoron of hymen–are radically at odds. And it is precisely this self-deconstructive clash illustrated by our reference to Bakhtin which brings about the aphanisis of desire, an aphanisis that replaces the structure of repression/castration with that of sublimation.
XI. Sublimation qua aphanisis of hermeneutic desire
Certainly, Lacan was the first to acknowledge that desire which is “in fact, interpretation itself” (1977: 176) should not be subsumed under the rubric of sexuality (45). The immediate consequence is the contradiction which we are already acquainted with. This explains why, in the course of the same Seminar, Lacan is forced to give two incompatible definitions of desire. On the one hand, we are urged “to figure desire as a locus of junction between the field of demand, in which the syncopes of the unconscious are made present, and sexual reality” (156). On the other hand, he suggests that we “place ourselves at the two extremes of the analytic experience. The primal repressed is a signifier…. Repressed and symptom are…reducible to the function of signifiers…their structure is built up step by step…. At the other extreme, there is interpretation…. Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself. In between, there is sexuality. If sexuality, in the form of the partial drives, had not manifested itself as dominating the whole economy of this interval, our experience would be reduced to a mantic, to which the neutral term psychical energy would then have been appropriate, but in which it would miss what constitutes in it the presence, Dasein, of sexuality” (176). Whereas the first quotation represents the official image of Lacanianism which poststructuralism takes pains to maintain (desire as the contradictory structure of the Oedipal Law as an articulative effect of the deconstructive clash of two signifying entities/readings, i.e., chiasm/oxymoron only arbitrary superimposed upon the catachretic additive flaw of signifiers), the second quotation subversively reverses the first. And this subversion is even more thorough than our foregoing analysis would seem to suggest.
At first glance, the second excerpt only reinstates that with which we have already become sufficiently familiar. In order to function in the articulative mode, sexuality should be decomposed. Since signifiers are formed “step by step,” i.e., since the structure of signification is additive, it is necessary to surmise “that sexuality is realized only through the operation of the drives in so far as they are partial drives” (177). This means the desexualization of sexuality, or, in our terms, the secondary sublimation as the subsumption of sexuality under the model of the ego-instincts which are basically and inescapably partial.46 And yet this is not the whole story, for the articulative/ intermediary function assigned to desexualized sexuality in the second quotation remains totally unnecessary since sexuality is said to mediate between desire and that which has already the same additive structure, the edifice of signifiers. To reiterate the formula proposed above, we have another instance of the radical diffusion of tongues when their intertextual (para)esthetic confusion seems to reach its acme.
Yet Lacan is not as blind as he might appear to be. In fact, the separation of desire and sexuality bears witness that Lacan, all his derisory jokes notwithstanding, has taken Jones’s theory of aphanisis seriously enough to regard it as a major threat to the semiotic libidinization of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s theory of desire, central as it is to his teaching, is a clandestine response to Jones. In effect, the semiotical extension of psychoanalysis is impossible so long as we maintain, as Freud and Jones do, that desire is synonymous with sexuality for the obvious reason that the semiotization of sexuality (as a transformation into the (infinite) network of signifiers) is attainable only through its disseminating fragmentation which would involve the desire itself. Whereas the maintainece of the indestructibility of the latter is essential in so far as this indestructibility guarantees the undecidability of meaning. Put otherwise, the interplay of two master tropes of deconstruction–pleonasm/catachresis and chiasm/oxymoron–on which the deconstructive strategy as such hinges becomes impossible. This means the impossibility of a discursive revitalization by means of a supplementary (intertextual) interpretive act. We are left with the exhaustion/aphanisis of intertextuality/dialogism inscribed in the very structure of the latter.
XII. The poststructuralist return to Jung
Whereas there is no possibility to preclude this outcome along the lines of literary theory proper, a psychoanalytic extension seems to offer a loophole. However, the price to be paid is a bitter one, namely, understanding the Lacanian “return to Freud” as the “return to Jung.” What is striking is the readiness with which poststructuralism pays this price.
As we have heard, only the intermediary/articulative function of sexuality can preclude the emergence of “the neutral term of psychical energy” (Lacan 1977: 176). Lacan’s inability to maintain this function means that the ternary structure of signification (the Symbolic order) collapses into a dyadic structure peculiar to the Imaginary. One need not be a Marxist to acknowledge that dualism is a veiled monism. This explains why Freud’s attempts to maintain–in pique to Jung–the dualism of drives were from the outset doomed to fail. Witness the very title of the paper in which the instinctual dualism receives its final articulation. Instead of opposing the death drive to its “natural” “beyond”–libido–Freud suggests seeing in it the beyond of the pleasure principle. This boils down to an implicit acknowledgement that there is only one “neutral psychical energy” that functions dualistically–either in the regime of pleasure or of unpleasure.47 This is, of course, exactly the Jungian point of view which Derrida’s deconstruction of the death drive cannot help but make its own. In the same manner, feminist theorizing proceeds along Lacanian lines. Witness Brennan, who ends with the energetic intersubjective model grounded in the notion of the unified energy (48, 64).48 This model particularly clarifies the ultimate–Jungian–point of convergence between Derrida’s and Lacan’s theories, and thereby considerably facilitates our task.
Brennan is candid enough to admit that her energetic model begs two crucial questions. For one thing, it remains unclear “how it is accumulated” (48). Likewise, “the mechanism of transmission” (110) remains obscure. Regarding the second problem, Brennan suggests (albeit the term does not appear in her book) that transmission can happen only telepathically (cf. 72). On the other hand, the accumulation of energy presupposes a kind of “dam” (48),49 i.e., an inhibition. Hence we have precisely the structure which, as was shown, by necessity leads to the subversion of dialogism. However, far from multiplying evidence for evidence’s sake, our detour presents us with the last attempt to solve the poststructuralist quandary and thereby allows us to appreciate its full scope.
In effect, it appears that the demise of dialogism stems not only from the diffusion of two master tropes, but is already inscribed in the structure of one of them, namely, in the structure of supplement. And once again only the (psychoanalytic) translation, in a (para)Derridaean way, can allow us to see what is really wrong with the (semiotic) original.
The unrestricted disseminating flow of unified energy should be semiotized/articulated. For only fragmentation can allow the supplement to play its discursively revitalizing role. Put otherwise, the inhibition becomes a structural necessity.50 Psychoanalytically, the basic form of inhibition is of course the threat of castration. However, there seem to be two, apparently incompatible, ways to conceptualize inhibition/castration. Traditionally (i.e. logocentrically), castration leads to the resolution of Oedipal conflict, that is, to “normal” sexuality and conventional gender identity. However, as we have seen, this patriarchal option, unacceptable as it is to poststructuralism, is unsustainable, semiotically prompting a regress from the signifying triadic structure to a nondifferenciated monism via imaginary binarism. And yet it is precisely this reduction which gives poststructuralism its last chance. For viewed energetically, i.e., conceived along Jungian lines, castration/inhibition is profoundly linked to the mother figure.51 Therefore, castration acquires the new meaning of separation. Now the problem is that separation should not lead to the denigration/repression of the woman (otherwise the result would be the same as the conventional patriarchal castration). Despite the separation without which there would be no articulation, the link with the mother should be maintained. The contradictory nature of this demand makes poststructuralist energetics/telepathy a neat counterpart of the Oedipal Law. This means a transformation of the catachretical/supplementary structure of (empha/telepathic intertextual) revitalization into the oxymoronic/chiasmic structure that should be revitalized by means of the former. Hence the reversal, exemplified by our infantile fantasy, becomes unavoidable. However, only now can wefully appreciate its consequences.
For the poststructuralist castration, far from being a naive replica of the patriarchal one, exhausts the semiotical resources of the latter. And this is what allows us to see in the infantile reversal fantasy the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism.
In effect, castration/inhibition conceived of energetically places the woman in exactly the same position which she is assigned by the child who decides to wait for the penis to grow. This decision obviously has nothing to do with the repression of the “maternal origin” (Brennan 1993: 167), but precisely because of this dismissal of repression it becomes the very core of patriarchal discursivity. To surmise that the penis will grow means to guarantee the male supremacy more effectively, ingenuously and unequivocally than is possible by recourse to repression. To put it bluntly, the male child automatically becomes older than the woman and hence secures all the privileges which this position implies. What patriarchy boils down to is not the rigidity of sexual binarism but generational binarism: the woman/wife is always younger than the man/husband and should be treated accordingly.52
In Heideggerian terms, the woman becomes the very locus of the “potentiality for being” (1962: 333-335). The notion is basic to Heidegger insofar as it grounds the very possibility of understanding/interpretation as such. Potentiality obviously means the openness, over-inclusiveness, in Brennan’s words, the “accumulation of energy.” Thus, the woman becomes the accumulator or the reservoir of energy. These are not one and the same.
The positioning of woman as an energetic reservoir in “the economic space of the debt” (Derrida 1980: 415) means precisely that the debt becomes “immensely enlarged and at the same time neutralized” (415). In other words, the neutralization is possible due to the libidinal monism. However, the unrestricted accumulation of libidinal energy has a paradoxical effect. Jones’s theory of aphanisis tries to provide an answer to this paradox.
According to Jones, it is precisely the accumulation of libido that provokes its own disappearance53 with the result that the sense of guilt comes to the fore. Within the confines of the libidinal economy it is impossible to make either head or tail of this statement, for if there is no sexual desire of what can one feel guilty? However, if we remember that the libidinal economy operates with the desexualized libido, the two lines of our inquiry will merge in a most fruitful way.
The accumulation of libido is triggered by the privation of sexual satisfaction, and this privation is already an inhibition just as guilt is. This means that the pleonasmic structure of supplement is actually a restrictive structure, an oxymoron/chiasmus of the Oedipal Law. Therefore, the collapse of dialogism becomes inevitable and total because only the device of dialogically intertextual discursive revitalization reveals its structural identity by means of the already exhausted discourse.
According to Heidegger, guilt is interpretation itself as a limitation imposed upon the (signifying) potential of Dasein (1962: 331). Whence Derrida’s stress on debt rather than guilt, dictated by his concern for safeguarding the existence of tradition threatened by every interpretative act.54 The same concern guides the child in its sexual quest. In both cases the aim is to maintain communication/tradition and to ward off the revelation of meaning/truth. It is the contradictory nature of this demand which, paradoxically, prevents the child and Derrida alike from attaining their objective, for the narrative/sexual quest takes the self-subversive form of the reversal fantasy underpinned by the trope of oxymoron/chiasmus. Our analysis has proven that the undecidability of meaning stemming from the contradiction of the Oedipal Law is ostensible inasmuch as it calls for the supplement to ensure this suspension. But to add is to interpret. This explains why the supplementary structure can only double/mirror the structure that does not need the additive interpretive doubling but non-interpretive revitalization. The irony of communication is precisely that because it requires a delay/suspension of (the arrival of) meaning, that is, a mutual act of time-giving. But this act cannot help turning against itself: the more time one gives, the more the danger of exhaustion/aphanisis of temporality itself.55 Witness a mythological parallel of the reversal fantasy: the errancy of Ulysses.
XIII. The Ulysses complex and its Oedipal representation
The value of this parallel for our discussion is twofold, for it allows us to ultimately connect both strands of our discussion and thereby to end a critical part of it with a paradoxical conclusion opening directly onto a more positive task. Narratologically, the errancy we are speaking about clearly demonstrates the unsustainability of the notion of the “infinite text” (cf. M. Frank 1979) which is so dear to the poststructuralist’s heart.56 However, the textual infiniteness becomes unsustainable not due to the crude fact of the return,57 but because this return, and therefore the denouement of meaning, becomes a structural necessity only by virtue of the delaying technique deployed by Penelope and Telemachus. That this time-giving is fully conscious amounts to saying that, psychoanalytically, the postsructuralist model, dependent as it is on the notion of repression, fails to accommodate its own premises in exactly the same way as the logocentric discursivity.58 This means that the Oedipal complex cannot ground psychoanalysis, for at the moment of its final unfurlment in the reversal fantasy it reveals another structure that is its condition of possibility. And it is hardly surprising since the quest for meaning exemplified by Oedipus is secondary in respect to the quest for communication for which Ulysses provides a master plot.
To sum up the results of our inquiry aphoristically, the inability of poststructuralism to surpass Oedipus stems from the fact that techniques deployed to this end reinforce the very structure which makes Oedipus possible. Hence the suggestion to rename the Oedipus complex, since it is far more adequate to speak of a Ulysses complex.
The effect of renaming is twofold. For one thing, it enables us to radically place Freud outside of the logocentric paradigm and in doing so to divulge a profound convergence between Freudian and Bakhtinian intentions.59 The result will be an outline of genuinely psychoanalytic narratology.60 But this outline cannot help but contain the seeds for a theory of sublimation, an elaboration of which would require a thorough reformulation of psychoanalysis within a Kantian rather than Hegelian framework.61
Lacan’s failure to sustain a ternary structure and the concomitant collapse into dualism (ultimately a monism) is unavoidable within the confines of libidinal economy closely tied to notion of repression as a regulatory principle of the latter.62 As we have seen, the same monism underpins the poststructuralist (para)esthetic discourse of telepathy. Narratologically, the result is not only the exclusion of the third party (the hero),63 but the inevitable evaporation of the dualistic disguise itself, so that the communicative act comes to have only one protagonist.64 The paradox is that the Other is not missing, assimilated, “objectified,” “pacified” (Brennan 1993: 58-59) or repressed, but held in suspense–just as the penis supposed to grow, providing thereby a potentiality necessary to ground interpretation. This sufficiently proves the convergence of monologism/dialogism opposition–the ultimate fate of all logocentric binarisms. What saves Freud’s theory from sharing this fate is not the dualism of the drives but the ternary structure of psychic agencies, precluding the monistic collapse of instinctual dualism. And it is here that reference to Bakhtin can effect the necessary maximization of the psychoanalytic screen and thereby furnish us with the vantage point for a cross-fertilizing reassessment of both legacies. And this is significant because perhaps the most notorious failure of post-Freudian psychoanalysis is the failure to maintain the ternary structure of agencies.65 In this respect, Lacan’s substitution of the signifying triad for the triad of the agencies should carry the lion’s share of the blame.
The Bakhtinian insight that points beyond the logocentric binary of dialogue/monologue opposition is his (untheorized) distinction between the subject to whom the utterance is addressed and the subject whom it answers (1979: 174-177). According to Bakhtin, this distinction is fundamental to the structure of utterance. What is particularly pertinent to our discussion is that both positions fall together in case of the speech genres where the cognitive function prevails over all others (176).
To fully appreciate the subversive impact of this distinction it is necessary to correlate it with the narratological model elaborated in Bakhtin’s early essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1979a),66 for otherwise Bakhtinian triadic structure can easily suffer confusion with the dualistic monism of poststructuralist intertextual narratology. Indeed it is all too tempting to collate the receiver and the addressee of Bakhtin’s utterance with the reader/writer-successor and writer-predecessor, respectively. The result, then, will be the reappearance of the “family romance” and the reversal of generations, its foundational consequence.67 However, Bakhtin’s thrust goes beyond the familial horizon,68 for only thus can one hope to conceive of relationships outside of the monologue/dialogue dyad.
XIV. The debt of madness
Far from being rigid, the “elemental structures of kinship” allow considerable “room for manoeuvre,” i.e. for all kinds of “double-voicedness” such as hybridization, meticulization, etc.69 Therefore Derridian “genealogical scene” (1977: 129) is a constructive act of elaboration of the blind spot of Levi-Strauss’ theory–not in order to subvert the latter but to improve it. As we have seen, the result is the exposition of a (communicative) structure (of Ulysses complex) that grounds the Oedipal structure of meaning. Put otherwise, there is no reason to oppose deconstruction to hermeneutics,70 for the former is a last attempt to furnish the latter with a secure foundation. However, the poststructuralist strategy of thinking out the un-thought axiomatics of logocentrism cannot help but turn against itself. Far from subverting logocentric rationality by exposing the layer of “madness” which, allegedly, underlies it (cf. Foucault 1967), deconstruction brings about the rationalization of “madness” that logocentrism places at the very fore of its discourse, and does this precisely by reinforcing the genealogical framework upon the parentlessness of the traditional discourse.
Witness the problematics of guilt/debt. In Heideggerian hermeneutics, guilt functions as an irrational foundation of understanding (1962: 325-335). Heidegger is quite conscious that to maintain irrationality is essential if we wish to secure the communicative transmission of tradition (193-194, 209). However, it is precisely the lack of familial underpinnings71 that prevents Heidegger’s attainment of his goal. By virtue of the simple fact that outside of the family every debt is basically a rational affair: it can be repaid by definition. Only a familial debt can be said to subsist in the irrational way of a Lacanian symptom/signifier. Whence Derrida’s obsession with genealogy. But the irony of the matter is that this familial irrationality depends vitally on another rationality, to wit, on the purely rational, mercantile character of relationship between the members of the family.72 But by the same token, the irrational (communicative) impossibility to repay the debt suffers a (meaningful) restriction.73 This amounts to saying that the whole affair boils down to the warding off of the true irrationality of familial structure–of love as the possibility to transcend the problematics of guilt/debt by a perfectly gratuitous arbitrary act of forgiving. Now it is precisely love that, according to Bakhtin, defines the relationship between author and hero in aesthetic activity.
The value of the emerging model is that it allows us to radically transcend the biologism inherent in the poststructuralist familial (para)esthetics, which reduces literary production to the question of the relation of father/author to his son/work and thereby leaves no room for the conception of the literary text as the very locus of construction of feminine identity.74 To be sure, our assumption begs an immediate justification, for Bakhtin’s statements taken at face value are rather misleading and bound to provoke contempt on the part of even the softest of feminists.75 In effect, the hero according to Bakhtin, is basically feminine (1979b: 80-81, 86). But this femininity seems to be notoriously patriarchal since it is constantly equated with passivity (110). However, the gender trouble is not Bakhtin’s. It is sufficient to abandon the dialogical perspective which reduces the aesthetic event to the encounter between the text and the reader in order to solve the optical predicament thematized by de Man.
What makes the early work of Bakhtin so puzzling to the poststructuralist eye is the bracketing of the very item that we are accustomed to focusing on. The text (and by the same token the reader) remains in the background, whereas Bakhtin’s interest lies with the author and hero. The latter is said to depend vitally on the former, for only an aesthetic intervention can alleviate the tension to which the hero remains prey as a “potentiality-for-being” (94, 100).76 The salutary effect of this aesthetic act stems from the author’s excess of vision over the hero (89-94). What is surprising is that the hero also possesses an analogous excess over the author (173).
Instead of avoiding this paradox77 and/or discarding it as a logocentric birthmark (naturalization) which was not yet washed off at this early stage of Bakhtin’s career, I am going to argue that we are dealing with one of the most profound and fruitful intuitions which, however, can be discerned and utilized only within a psychoanalytic setting. For the paradox is bound to evaporate the moment we recognize in it an aesthetic counterpart of Jones’s aphanisis which, in its turn, can be rectified only from a narratological perspective. Jones certainly said and did all he could to preclude the possibility of making of his notion a starting point for the construction of feminine identity beyond patriarchy. Not in the least because within the confines of libidinal economy he was free to speak only about the fear of aphanisis, instead of investigating what aphanisis actually meant as such.
XV. Aphanisis qua sublimation and the construction of the feminine identity
The fear of aphanisis is Jones’s answer to the question: “what precisely in women corresponds with the fear of castration in men?” (1950c, 438). The paradox is that, in Jones’s own terms, the answer is invalid, since it is a “fallacy…to…equate castration with the abolition of male sexuality…we know that many men wish to be castrated for, among others, erotic reasons” (439-440) whereas aphanisis is exactly “the extinction of sexuality” (450). Fortunately, Jones himself is not as blind as his interpreters (Lacan, Laplanche and Pontalis included) would like him to be. Quite conscious of the contradiction, he proposes two solutions: one more or less explicit (to conceive of male sexuality beyond the problematics of castration78), the other clandestine but all the more challenging, namely, the suggestion to see in aphanisis not the cause of repression of sexuality but precisely the condition of its emergence through the sublimation of the polymorphous instincts of self-preservation, primarily the Wießtrieb. Within the confines of libidinal economy aphanisis leads to the impasse of the oxymoronic/chiasmic restriction of revitalizing additive supplementarity, but the view advanced here allows us to transcend the Ulysses complex and its Oedipal representation and to do so, paradoxically, by deploying exactly the Derridian strategy of operating from within the discourse to be deconstructed, if only more coherently than Derrida has ever attempted to do.
XVI. What James knew
At this point the reference to textual reality becomes indispensable. The reasons for selecting Henry James, specifically his novel What Maisie Knew are obvious enough. Only with the advent of poststructuralism has James’s interest in feminine psychology, his predilection for feminine protagonists, been thematized along the lines of (para)esthetic discursivity, which foregrounds the notions of tele/emphatical unconscious identification between author and hero and attempts to explain the textual production as an effort to repress this identificatory desire. The irony of the matter is that poststructuralism could not have chosen a more unfortunate example to substantiate its claims.
In case of Henry James, the paradox of (para)esthetics is at its sharpest. First, it remains completely unclear what the notion of repression of “pederastic identifications,” which allegedly structures James’s textuality, has to do with the latter, since James himself was the first to consciously acknowledge it (see his prefaces). Secondly, to concetrate on repression means to make the question of knowledge a central issue. This is not to say that interpretation by necessity becomes a traditional search for a particular meaning, but that it becomes synonymous with the epistemic attitude.79 As a corollary, the denigration of aesthetics is equated with an attempt “to posit an idealized world that is nonconflictual,” with “a withdrawal into a private, idiosyncratic universe” (Przybylowicz 1986: 18, 23).80 The resulting distortion of James’s textual strategy in particular and of the subversive potential of literature in general is especially drastic in the case of this novel, which we will discuss briefly.
Given the poststructuralist biases, it is not surprising that in her study of James’s heroines, V.C. Fowler does not devote a single word to Maisie. The example of Maisie considerably problematizes the very premise of Fowler’s analysis, according to which James’s “American girls” are defined by “the fear of knowledge” (35). The only way to accommodate our girl within a (para)esthetic framework would be to say that her fearless knowledge is exactly that which the author takes pains to repress in order not to become a (castrated) woman (cf. Evans 1989, L. Frank 1989). Witness Freud’s attitude towards Dora, with which James’s relation to Maisie has been equated (Hertz 1985). Ironically, it is precisely the narratological extension of psychoanalysis that makes this explanation untenable. Psychoanalytically speaking, to become a woman means not only to become castrated/dead, but also to achieve clairvoyance in the process, i.e., to bring about the revelation of truth (Ferenczi 1980b, 243-244). So long as clairvoyance is inscribed in the notion of telepathy, we once again end up wondering how the latter can undermine logocentrism. Inasmuch as “James’s realistic fiction” of which What Maisie Knew is exemplary is said “to reveal a noncontradictory and homogeneous world of truth” (Przybylowicz 1986: 25), we must conclude that James has many reasons to consciously identify with his heroine. In other words, to interpret our novel (para)esthetically we have to part with the notion of repression which grounds this mode of interpretation; that is, we must no longer view repression as a force that structures textual reality.
Paradoxically, by acquiescing to this option poststructuralism gains more than it loses, at least at first sight. Upon cursory reading, the novel seems to reenact the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism–the fantasy of the reversal of generations–and what is more to do this on both levels of discourse–of author and heroine alike, allowing us to conceive of tele-empathy as a genuinely discursive phenomenon.
In effect, in the course of the narrative, which coincides with the process of growing up, Maisie’s status undergoes a characteristic reversal that it is not too far-fetched to be described as a generational one. The divorce of Maisie’s parents, with which the story starts, positions the child as an entity the parents desire “not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other” (1966: 13). Hence from the outset she functions as a means of mediation. However, the older she grows the more consciously she deploys this role “of bringing people together” (54-55, 66-67, 233) for which she developes a kind of talent if which she is quite proud (264-265). However, this reversal, far from being an instance of “art for art’s sake,” is fostered by Maisie’s need to feel secure in an unstable situation, which is governed by the instincts of self-preservation.81 Notably, this movement from activity to passivity is caused by the aphanisis of the parents’ desire to harm one another.
The reversal which apparently structures the rècit is paralleled by the discursive reversal, by the interplay of the two tropes for which James has an obvious predilection. These tropes are the master tropes of poststructuralism. Hence, as is easily foreseen, the outcome of the interplay between oxymoron and pleonasm82 is the same interaction with which our analysis has sufficiently acquainted the reader. The impossibility of discursively revitalizing what vitally needs revitalization would be especially disastrous in James’s case, amounting to the author’s failure to attain the aim that he has posed himself, namely, to endow the heroine with the power to transform “appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough” into “the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art” (7-8). The whole Jamesian project boils down to this particular aim. Put otherwise, it would not be enough for Maisie “simply to wonder…about them” (8), for within the (para)esthetic libidinal framework of aphanisis, especially when doubled, is at odds with this task. To worsen matters beyond any possibility of repair, discursive tele-empathy between author and hero, especially for novel that by its very title foregrounds the question of knowledge, would make the author an easy prey to logocentrism, positioning him either as the subject who knows, or, what amounts to the same, as a victim of repression. As the study of Przybylowicz amply proves, this is precisely how poststructuralism (mis)reads James. Fortunately, on an unbiased reading, James turns out to be not such an easy mark.
Put paradoxically, for all their suspicion regarding the author’s overtly stated intentions, poststructuralist critics interpret James’s preface and not the text itself. If read alone, James’s preface allows us to speak about repression and thereby stage an interpretive act as an intertextual affair between the author (who in this perspective should have committed suicide in order to attain clairvoyance) and the reader.
Such a view leads to a dialogically-conventional (mis)reading of Bakhtin, especially of his notion of emphatically grounded exotopy as a privilege of the author. The unnoticed irony is that on these terms it neither makes sense to speak of dialogism as a textual characteristic83 nor, and this is the point we are drawing, of the dialogicity of interpretive encounter with the text, of course, if we continue to use the term “dialogism” as a synonym for subversion.
The result of the one-sided excess of vision is that the author-hero relation comes to be conceived in terms of amplification and supplementation of what the hero(ine) does not see/know. As Tony Tanner has put it, “In a sense the book hinges on what Maisie does not know” (1965: 288). However, it is precisely this “in a sense” that makes all the difference in the world.
Although James is the first to foreground supplementarity of the auctorial discourse84, he is also the first to notice that this exotopy is at odds with his task, but which is more profound than the preface’s phrasing may suggest. James’s task is not the dialogical revitalization–technically impossible and morally deplorable85–but the de-victimization of his heroine, the transformation of her (and thereby his own) discourse into the discourse of innocence free of intertextual guilt/debt. The task is a Nietzschean one, for despite all the poststructuralist efforts to make of Nietzsche an avatar of primordial (intertextual) indebtedness, Nietzsche himself was quite unambiguous regarding the priorities among (re-evaluated) values: “In this way the gods served in those days to justify man…in those days they took upon themselves, not the punishment but, what is nobler, the guilt” (1989: 94). Since the justification/de-victimization of man/hero can be achieved only through the other, it follows that the model Nietzsche had in mind represents a ‘beyond’ of logocentric monologue/dialogue dyad which reinforces indebtedness. This means that Nietzschean views correspond neatly to the Bakhtinian model of aesthetic activity aimed at ensuring the discursive innocence.
Characteristically, the very title of James’s novel undermines all attempts to situate Jamesian textuality within the dialogically-intertextual (para)esthetic framework. The rough fact is that within this framework the title makes no sense at all.
The supplementary nature of the one-sided excess of vision indebts the author to the reader by in turn indebting the reader to the hero(ine). So long as Maisie is conceived as the subject supposed not to know, it follows that the author’s task is to provide the reader with the answer to the question posed by the title. Certainly, the author becomes a possessor of knowledge but, since he is indebted/obliged to pass it to the reader, his possession is only a provisional one and has nothing to do with Absolute Mastery.86 However, James is reluctant to acknowledge this debt.87
Ironically, from the poststructuralist standpoint, the answer to the question of what Maisie knew is doomed to remain in abeyance, albeit without this answer no interpretation can be regarded as complete.88 Certainly, this incompleteness itself may be interpreted in favor of a poststructuralist stance as evidence that the central concern of James is to perpetuate the transmission of tradition. For, in effect, James is quite unambiguous about the communicative point, to wit, about how Maisie knew. That her knowledge is acquired by (para)esthetic means of empathy and telepathy, if not by hypnotic clairvoyance, lies at the surface.89 This should already suggest that matters may eventually be a bit more complex.90 And in effect, on second glance, we are bound to concede that the title of James’s novel relates to the text in a way which is apparently more “conventional” than the one envisaged by Derrida (1991: 123). Nevertheless, it is precisely this conventionality that proves to be an actual subversion of tradition promoted by Derrida’s communicative supplementarity of which the title is a privileged example.
Appearances notwithstanding, the real question on which the narrative hinges is not the “how” but the “what” of Maisie’s knowledge. Not for nothing is the text punctuated by confirmations coming from the author as well as from the other personages that Maisie actually does know, albeit the content of her knowledge remains unrevealed. This means that James grants Maisie an excess of vision over himself equal to that which his status of the author provides him with. Put otherwise, if the “how” presupposes the (para)esthetic one-sided excess of authorial vision, the “what” grants the same excess to the hero(ine), thereby introducing the dimension of mutual discursive dependency between the author and the hero which effectively abolishes the intertextual indebtedness to the reader promoted by the one-sided exotopy. But to make our model of the aesthetic event fully coincide with Jamesian textuality and unfurl its subversive potential, a final step remains, which will reveal its implications for the construction of feminine sexuality closely tied with the process of sublimation.
Our description of mutual dependency between the author and hero can still be reappropriated (para)esthetically so long as its temporal dimension remains unspecified. One may argue that mutual dependency boils down to a mutual act of tele-empathical time-giving as the precondition of interpretation as such. The result would be a communicative re-naming of James’s novel. In other words, we still have to prove that the title of the novel has much more to it than the postructuralist reader is willing to concede.
Fortunately, this proof provides the notion of aphanisis that within the (para)esthetic setting can be experienced only negatively as an always already present danger of communicative exhaustion which can be warded off only by recourse to the device that brings it about. This vicious circle is effectively broken by Jamesian narrative.
Witness the final scene of the novel, the scene of Maisie’s departure with Mrs. Wix. This departure, since it is a matter of free choice on Maisie’s part, is essential to the proper understanding of James’s relation to his heroine and the appreciation of the subversive force of his textuality. For, in choosing to depart, Maisie effectively disentangles herself from the network of indebting relationships which, paradoxically, she herself has helped to establish by means of her empathetical identifications. To depart means to renounce the (para)esthetic strategy and the knowledge accumulated by its means. This proves that there actually was something that Maisie knew. And this renouncement makes it impossible to define our novel as a Bildungsroman, that is, as a passage from innocent ignorance to knowledge–a structure underpinning logocentric discursivity as the mechanism of tradition transmission (rites de passage).91 For that we are left with is the return of innocence.92
The return of innocence should not be confused with the return to the monistic myth of pure origins. Paradoxically, (para)esthetics promotes this myth by conceiving of the aesthetic event as a relation between text and reader which becomes motivated by primordial indebtedness. On the other hand, Bakhtin’s theory corroborated by Jamesian textuality makes the bond between author and hero a purely arbitrary one and thereby for the first time provides an opening for the deployment of Saussurean linguistics without betraying its essence. But by the same token, we have a chance to solve the psychoanalytic quandary about super-ego and sublimation.
The trouble with the concept of the super-ego is derivative of the fundamental psychoanalytic trouble with temporality. The basic structure of temporality with which psychoanalysis operates is that of Nachträglichkeit, of belated understanding. It is precisely these hermeneutical concerns which hinder a genuine psychoanalytic narratology.
Paradoxically, the same Nachträglichkeit grounds both views on the emergence of the super-ego. According to Kleinians, the super-ego is already present at the pre-genital stage, whereas in the more conventional perspective it is the heir of the Oedipus complex. Appearances notwithstanding, both views are complimentary, representing an instance of the patently Lacanian signifying see-saw between too early and too late. For both theories converge at one fundamental point, i.e., both view the emergence of the super-ego as the result of introjection, that is, of the transformational movement from arbitrariness into motivatedness, the latter the precondition of interpretation. This explains why the relation between ego and super-ego is unanimously considered to one of indebtedness, guilt and fear of aphanisis. Put otherwise, the excess of vision is one-sided.
From the poststructuralist standpoint, the semiotic correlate of the super-ego is the reader and the ego correlates with the author and/or the text. The result is the perpetuation of tradition, the inability to disentangle logocentric strictures.
However, Bakhtinian theory and Jamesian textuality suggest that it is far more adequate to conceive of the aesthetic event as structured by the mutual dependence between author and hero. Psychoanalytically, this means that super-ego is equally and to the same extent dependent on the ego as the latter is on the former which boils down to saying that the relation between the two agencies is that between loved and beloved (cf. Schafer 1960). Semiotically, the relationship thus conceived is purely gratuitous and arbitrary, for the super-ego is the ego’s product, the result of the renouncement of the claims of the instincts of self-preservation,93 of the actively performed aphanisis qua sublimation leading to the emergence of sexuality. It is this sublimating process which structures James’s novel, making it the very locus of the construction of feminine identity beyond patriarchal Oedipality.
According to Freud, the weakness of the super-ego stemming from polymorphous identifications places women in a dependent position (1925: 29; 1933: 138). Therefore, we can conclude that the basic problem of feminism is the strengthening of the super-ego, which, as our exploration suggests, has by definition a feminine gender.
Significantly, only on these premises can we hope to allot the notion of sublimation the place in psychoanalysis that it deserves, and thereby offer a theory of culture that escapes the notorious fancifulness of psychoanalytic accounts. The trouble with sublimation is that, so long as one conceives of it as a desexualization, it remains impossible to account for the existence of subversive art. In the conventional perspective sublimation is a synonym for conformism and compliance with received cultural norms. Sublimation becomes the very opposite of any genuine creativity, which is subversive by definition.94 However, certain psychoanalytic accounts of creativity suggest that it has nothing to do with repression of sexuality (cf. Lowenfeld 1941: 119-121) and that the self-preservative instincts, epistemophilia being the most prominent among them, interfere with creativity.95 Witness Freud’s study on Leonardo.96 In other words, if we are to continue to align sublimation with creativity, we must redefine the former as the process of sublimation of ego-instincts.97
In its turn, this redefinition paves the way for a relationship between psychoanalysis and literature which will not lead to mutual reductivity. Textuality receives a firm psychoanalytic grounding in the ternary structure of psychic agencies. If the aesthetic event is an affair between author/super-ego and hero/ego, then its product–a text–is the Id itself.98 This explains why it can only be repressed, distorted, misread by the super-ego aligned by post-structuralism with the reader.
Witness the poststructuralist repression of Jamesian textuality by an interpretive confinement within the framework of the ego’s fantasy of reversal of generations which James’s discourse on Maisie effectively subverts.
Notes
1. Put otherwise, it is not enough just to add the prefix “anti-.” Unfortunately, in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari theorists are quite content with this option.
2. Cf. “…no absolute transcendence of the Oedipal is possible. It is no more possible to get rid of the omnipotent aspect of the Oedipal position than it is to get rid of the pre-Oedipal fantasy of omnipotence. (Or rather, it would only be possible in a world without loss, envy and difference–which would be a wholly omnipotent world.) Rather, the point is to subvert the concealed omnipotence by exposing it, as well as to recognize another realm of sexual freedom that reworks the Oedipal terms. To be sure, this realm depends upon the other face of omnipotence: the over-inclusive capacities to transcend reality by means of fantasy, which can be reintegrated in the sexual symbolic of the post-Oedipal phase” (Benjamin 1995: 119). It remains to be seen whether the equation of envy, loss and difference, on the one hand, and of fantasy, over-inclusiveness and sexuality, on the other, can be sustained. The testing of these equations is one of the aims of our present inquiry.
3. I do not think that this is a simplification or a misreading. Speaking pre-Oedipally, there is only one combined parental figure (a notion which falls under the rubric of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis). Hence an attack on Kristeva for reinscribing gender stereotypes within the pre-Oedipal phase (cf. Cornell 1991: 69-71) is rather puzzling from the psychoanalytic standpoint. However, since this attack focuses on Kristevan phrasing, it corroborates our assumption about the conventional rhetoricity of postsructuralist strategies.
4. Cf. J. Hillis Miller 1984; A. Ronell 1984, 1989; N. Rand 1988, 1989; E. Rashkin 1988, 1990; M. Sprengnether 1995, among other examples.
5. Both views converge in a most paradoxical way, representing two ways to the same notorious impasse of applied psychoanalysis which constantly misses its target (text) hitting either too low or too high. “A perfect psychoanalysis of literature” (the one performed in Derrida’s view by Lacan) reduces the text by treating it as a symptom which itself is a failure (too low). On the other hand, Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” undermines the very possibility of psychoanalytic explorations into the arts. Bloom deals only with “strong poets,” that is, with those who have successfully overcome the influence of predecessors. This obviously means that there are no traces (symptoms) of this influence in their texts (too high). It is precisely this paradox of Bloom’s intertextuality to which N. Abraham’s elaborations address themselves. Every text hides a “secret” (“truth”, “symptom”), but this secret cannot be located in any concrete text save that of the interpreter (a most lucid example of this strategy is Abraham’s “The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act,” 1988). The interpreter comes to occupy the middle position assigned by Derrida to “pharmakon.” This means it is impossible to maintain that logocentrism undermines itself prior to any deconstructive intervention. Further it means that an act of interpretation boils down to the production of the “aesthetic object,” the production that, as we have shown elsewhere (Linetski 1995), in Bakhtinian theory is an activity of the reader as a fictitious other.
6. I refer the reader to Lacan’s Eleventh Seminar where he invokes “aphanisis” only to make fun of it as a phantastical notion (cf. 1977: 207).
7. Cf. “It is always difficult to imagine that one might be able to think of something in separation, within one’s interior space, without being surprised by the other…This puerile belief of mine, in part mine, can only stem from a foundation–sure, let’s call it unconscious….” (Derrida 1983: 212). The last sentence exposes the link between the two excerpts from Jones’s paper and in doing so exposes Lacan as a mediator between Jones’s and Derrida’s views on the unconscious, for it was up to Lacan to define the unconscious as “the presence of the analyst” (1988: 159). That is why already at this point we can precipitatingly hint at two conclusions of our analysis. The telepathic unconscious propounded by Derrida is profoundly similar to the logocentric one of Lacan because both guarantee the possibility of understanding and make the presence of the analyst/interpreter indispensable (one cannot help but wonder what the unconscious telepathic discourse “repeated in large letters to avoid all misunderstanding” has to do with the basic assumption of deconstruction concerning the primordial impossibility to deliver any “truth” whatsoever at its hermeneutic destination). This makes the unconscious an “aesthetic object” that, according to Bakhtin, is a product of interpretative activity of the reader as a fictitious other. Whence the Jones-Bakhtin connection, for the former also defines the operator as a dispensable figure. And this prompts us to equate the unconscious conceived along the poststructuralist (telepathic) lines with fetish qua Freudian ” (para)esthetic object” par excellence–a theme to be pursued elsewhere.
8. As we shall see, the reference to Russian Formalism is a far cry from being simply a figure of speech. Derridian narratology, primarily thanks to the concept of “supplement,” has incurred a debt to Formalist theory–a debt which, given Derrida’s view of structuralism and its Russian precursor as adhering to the logocentric paradigm, no one is willing to notice, let alone to requite.
9. “One may lay down the dictum that if the patient is not treated by psycho-analysis he will treat himself by means of suggestion, or–put more fully–he will see to it that he will get treated by means of suggestion, whatever other views the physician may have on the subject” (291).
10. Cf. “Perhaps, incidentally, this is the reason why it is so difficult for the hypnotist to give effective suggestions that obviously conflict with the father-ideal, such as criminal and immoral suggestions” (287).
11. Cf. “A general philosophical category is imposed, leading to a curiously asexual (and affectless) psychoanalysis” (Macey 1995: 81). Although Macey is speaking about Lacan and his commitment to Hegelian categories, the formula also applies well to psychoanalysis in general. The only point where a correction seems to be necessary is the linking of asexual and affectless. As our investigation will prove, psychoanalysis comes to be threatened with ultimate and unambiguous desexualization precisely in the wake of the poststructuralist foregrounding of various models grounded in affectivity, the telepathic model being the most illuminating example.
12. Paradoxically, psychoanalysis not only boils down to this problem but, in the last resort, stands or falls with it. In effect, the theories of neuroses and psychoses alike hinge on the notion of sexual traumatic experiences of childhood. But the assumption of the sexual nature of these traumas presupposes that there is such a thing as infantile sexuality, the main evidence here being precisely the infantile sexual quest.
13. The point of view advocated here allows for the first time to really merge structure and history–a task which remains unaccomplished despite all efforts undertaken in this respect from Saussure to Derrida. And this is because sublimation is not an arbitrary moment (a dominant psychoanalytic view) but a necessary and unavoidable stage predating repression/Oedipality. The quandary regarding sublimation is precisely the inability to conceive of it temporally. This leads to the structural misconception of this notion.
14. That psychoanalysts and poststructuralists alike prefer to turn their eyes away from this logic is quite understandable, for to expose it means to undermine the famous notion of the mirror stage as a first step in acquiring an identity by an attempt to unify anarchical sexuality through the reference to the other. Ironically, to relinquish this notion means not only to part with the Lacanian version of dialogism but also with the very point d’appui of a postsructuralist attack on patriarchy which, as Brennan has made sufficiently clear, has to postulate the existence of a self-contained ego (cf. Brennan 1993: 12-25).
15. See “The Ego and the Id” (1923).
16. It seems that this is the only indisputable point in the psychoanalytic theory of the super-ego.
17. Cf. Quite a random example: “With every identification, Freud points out, there is a desexualization and at the same time an instinctual diffusion. The libidinal cathexis no longer binds the destructive tendencies which now find expression in the severity and punitiveness of the superego. This diffusion is particularly evident in melancholia” (Sandler 1960: 134; italics mine).
18. Witness his attempt to provide an intertextual symbolic framework for the Rat Man’s fantasy or for Dora’s imagery–an attempt that received a full elaboration in Shengold (1980) and Kanzer (1980). But the most notorious example of psychoanalytic thematicism is certainly “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1908).
19. It is not an accident that the obfuscation of infantile sexual theories is paralleled by the interest in primal fantasies, for the latter foreground the notion of repression problematized by the former.
20. In point of fact, if the child’s concerns were defensive ones, he would have had all reasons to accept the explanation furnished by the parents, and this precisely because a stork or its substitute can be hindered (at least phantasmatically) from coming. The parents’ aim is not so much to deceive, but to console the child who–unexplainably–does not want to be consoled.
21. “Perhaps we have not always noted sufficiently in our analyses that this is when children begin to divine that their father and mother can do something that they themselves cannot, namely, can produce children together” (Boehm 1931: 449). As we shall see, the apparent familiarity of this statement evaporates the moment we try to read it semiotically (i.e., to treat the parent’s “doing” as a performative). However, in our case the deployment of this patently poststructuralist mode of interpretation will immediately subvert the claims of its propagators.
22. It is worthwhile to adumbrate one of the “remnants” of our analysis which proves its fruitfulness by highlighting the scope of reassessments to which it can give rise. From the point of view advocated here it is possible to resuscitate one of the most abused items from psychoanalytic archives, namely, Rank’s theory of the “trauma of birth” which turns out to be indispensable for tackling a number of contradictions that Freud’s rejection of Rank’s intuition has left us with. But, in order to make Rank’s notion an effective weapon, one has to view the traumatic birth as the birth of a sibling.
23. Thus far only one author was candid enough to at least voice suspicions that perhaps dialogism may be a purely logocentric affair (cf. Calinescu 1991: 163). Needless to say, to pursue this train of thought requires more independence than the average theorist can muster.
24. Obviously this begs the question of how we are to conceive the development of a child who is spared the society of siblings. The question is crucial since, on our own terms, the secondary sublimation is a necessary stage. Although an answer requires a large amount of original clinical work, we can assume that the situation in both cases is basically the same. A single child is prompted in his quest by comparison with his more (un)fortunate playmates. One can even go as far as to surmise that his quest will be all the more compelling since in addition he has to grapple with the puzzle why “there are too few…persons involved” (Fenichel 1931: 421).
25. However idiosyncratic or paradoxical it may appear, this thesis is the only solution to the contradiction which haunts psychoanalytic theory in matters of infantile sexual curiosity. As we have already pointed out, the whole problem is central to Freud’s teaching. But the irony of the matter is precisely that within the Oedipal framework which is postulated as preexistent, the infantile sexual theories can be conceived of only as an arbitrary phenomena unable to influence child’s development in any significant way. In effect, if the incestuous wishes are primordial, if they preexist the traumatic situation we are investigating, it is impossible to understand what influence the arrival of sibling and the fantasies which it fosters can have upon them.
26. In the wake of Foucault and Derrida, we happily take for granted that semiosis as such is grounded in repression. Against this background, the recent study by Kincaid (1992) is bound to appear more innovative than it actually is. Kincaid’s critique of Foucault and the questioning of the notion of repression deserves our full appreciation especially because it comes as an introduction to the study of the period (Victorian culture) which is conventionally regarded as a patent example of the workings of repression. Unfortunately, Kincaid’s introductory remarks lack consistency, being a far cry from a theory of writing without repression.
27. This has corollaries, the notion of the primal scene being the most formidable among them. Paradoxically, within the libidinal framework we have to make an unpleasant choice between the notion of the primal scene–as a real event or as a fantasy, it matters little–and the concept of infantile sexual curiosity. According to Freud, the primal scene is already a result of sexual curiosity while at the same time it is said to awaken sexuality (Freud 1925: 24 et passim). On the other hand, sexual curiosity is an ultimate proof for the existence of infantile sexuality.
28. Cf. Silverman (1988), Przybylowicz (1986), Rashkin (1990).
29. As a reminder to the reader with an all too stark reality complex: the whole story is played on the fantasmatic/hallucinatory plane, the plane on which the (para)esthetic tele/emphatic discourse of poststructuralism deliberately operates.
30. Especially if we grant pertinence to the poststructuralist assessment of logocentrism as a culture which places (absolute) knowledge above all other values.
31. Thus far poststructuralism has not managed to get beyond these two–complementary–solutions in its attempt to account for the “ego’s era” in the history of human knowledge.
32. Therefore Derrida’s critics, whose main target is the alleged a-historicity of deconstruction (cf. Lentricchia 1985: 105-106; Brennan 1993: 195) obviously miss the point. The paradox is that deconstruction’s inherent historicity is a purely self-deconstructive affair.
33. Cf.: “In art, material must be alive and precious. And this is where there appeared the epithet, which does not introduce anything new into the word, but simply renews its dead figurativeness” (Shklovsky 1973, 43; italics added).
34. The most lucid example is certainly Derrida’s La carte postale (1980). According to Derrida, the postcard depicting Plato behind Socrates corroborates his views on textuality/writing which by definition is incompatible with the notion of stable origins. Writing by virtue of the reversal it stages makes it impossible to grant hermeneutic supremacy to any particular structure: “…the oedipal trait is only a rection for the leading thread of the spool” (362), “only one figure among others” (Weber 1987: 106). This explains why the generational reversal has become a poststructuralist strategy par excellence: “Everything has to be read in reverse” (Derrida 1986: 74). Allegedly this is “a new attitude towards knowledge” directed “against the traditional model of research” and by the same token against the continuity of tradition grounded in the belief in “an irreversible heritage” (Ulmer 1985: 133, 136). However, an attempt to apply grammatology more or less coherently immediately exposes the real state of affairs. I refer to endeavours of Abraham, Torok and their imitators. The aim to be attained is the one mentioned above: to prove that the symptoms are more varied and complex, are not reducible to one common source (Oedipus/castration) but that they have multiple origins (cf. Rashkin 1988: 32-34). But the result is the substitution of one general structure for another: instead of Oedipus we have the genealogical reversal structure which comes to be regarded as an explanatory structure “par excellence” (Abraham/Torok 1978: 395). The irony is twofold. For one thing, the search for (textual) secrets which declares itself free from Oedipus/castration but nevertheless stresses its psychoanalytic character, by necessity boils down to equating psychoanalysis with the most general structure of scienticity which poststructuralism attempts to undermine by means akin to those of Abraham and Torok (this logic is especially lucid in Torok and Rand 1994). This means that precisely within the conventional psychoanalytic framework Oedipus/castration is only one figure among the others. However, this is not to say that we are dealing with another instance of the paradox of the Cretan liar sufficiently thematized by poststructuralism as the universal fate of discursivity. The gist of the matter is that the famous critique of Barbara Johnson (1977) is no critique at all, for Derrida is the first to admit that it is impossible to escape the Law(s) of the genre one sets out to deconstruct. But by the same token our analysis can lay claim to being the first sustained critique of the shortcomings of deconstruction, and this because only from our standpoint does it becom possible to show that deconstruction does not repeat the fallacies it has pointed out but tries to secure the mechanisms which tradition itself has failed to shield.
35. “The ‘reversal’ fantasy then gratifies this by placing the child in the imagination in a position of power over the parent” (Jones 1950: 411). The same interpretation is reiterated by Brennan, who evokes the fantasy in her discussion of the “ego’s era” but significantly breaks off the discussion at the point where further investigation threatens to undermine the accepted views on patriarchal discourse (1993: 96-97).
36. One goes even as far as to say that the notion of reversal is the Lacanian concept par excellence. It is the reversal which underpins the Imaginary as well as the Symbolic. Witness the famous scheme of the concave mirror (1977: 145; 1978: 132-134; 1988: 77-79) or the definition of transference illustrated by reference to “a famous song by Georgius Je suis fils-père (‘I am son-father‘)” (1977: 159), or, last but not least, the reversal underpinning the celebrated interpretation of the Freudian dictum “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (1988: 232).
37. Although I see no point in multiplying evidence, it may be worthwhile to make an exception for a corroboration which comes from the Lacanian camp. Paradoxically, an attempt to develop Lacanian theory has led Laplanche to reformulate the problematic of castration in terms of a conflict between fathers and grandfathers (1980a: 226-227) which is precisely the conflict foregrounded by the reversal fantasy (to posit oneself as a father of one’s own father means to adopt the role of the grandfather).
38. Hence Brennan’s account is in itself an example of discursive reversal: “In making the woman…the repository of his truth…the man is directing his urge to control and his belief in something beyond himself to the same object. He has no reference point for his ‘I’ that is distinct from his ego, in that he has no grounds for separating that to which he defers (the woman as truth) from that which he seeks to shape” (1993: 74). As we shall shortly see, some Bakhtinian intuitions applied to the textual reality offer an effective solution to this self-imposed poststructuralist quandary.
39. Cf. “…the slower time becomes, the greater the ego’s need to speed things up, its anxiety, its splitting, its need for control, its ‘cutting-up’ in its urge to know…and its general aggression towards the other” (Brennan 1993: 181). According to Brennan, these are the consequences of the acting out of the foundational fantasy of patriarchy. As our analysis shows, the failure to identify the foundational fantasy leads not only to the misconception of patriarchy but to the theoretical acting out which reconfirms what it intends to subvert.
40. Characteristically, Brennan speaks of the “energetic attention” as “the cornerstone of my theory of an intersubjective economy of energy” (110; italics added). However, this allegedly innovative theory is what patriarchal discursivity boils down to.
41. Hence the controversy Derrida vs. Heidegger, deconstruction vs. hermeneutics which continues to trouble theorists (cf. Allison 1982; Hoy 1982; Behler 1991; Krell 1990) proves to be a tempest in a teapot.
42. This is not to subscribe to the view expressed in an equally seminal paper by R. Gasché (1994) who thinks that Derrida and Derridians are simply and bluntly at odds. In my view, the appropriation of Derrida’s theory by literary critics is faithful enough. The real problem is not the one of misreading but of ignoring instances in Derrida’s work where the author is at odds with himself. These contradictions have nothing to do with de Manian dialectic of blindness and insight, being far closer to the Freudian conflict between conscious and unconscious strivings, save that in Derrida’s case the conflict seems to be a hysterical one, i.e., the conflict between two consiousnesses which, according to Freud, comes to the fore in hypnotic and similar paranormal states (cf. Freud 1885: 91). Needless to say, it is precisely these instances that can furnish the starting point of a real deconstruction.
43. All the apparent “parergonal” confusion of tongues (polylogue) notwithstanding, Derridian polylogue cannot escape from this basic Bakhtinian rule: the speaking subjects remain distinct and do not merge (cf. 1987: 340-343, 358, 377).
44. Witness Derrida’s style, his obsessive question “where?” followed by an immediate unequivocal reply: “there” (cf. among many examples 1987: 361, 366, 372). Which means that Derrida’s and Heidegger’s concerns are fundamentally the same. Cf.: “While the content of the call is seemingly indefinite, the direction it takes is a sure one” (Heidegger 1962: 318; his italics). Place and direction establish an elementary communicative network. In respect to the latter the content of the”call” (Heidegger)/”missive”, “letter” (Derrida) is secondary, but by the same token it is only seemingly indefinite. Notably, Abraham and Torok’s paraesthetic cryptonymie operates precisely within this Heideggerian setting: “It is understandable that, in contrast to other cases, this type of work requires a genuine partnership between patient and analyst: all the more so since the construction arrived at in this way bears no direct relation to the patient’s own topography but concerns someone else’s” (Abraham and Torok 1978: 290).
45. It is towards this model that most advanced versions of poststructuralism are oriented: “The standpoints of Kristeva and Laplanche are flawed in respect of…the outside as constitutive of desire itself. By contrast, I suggest that we must develop a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity and intersubjectivity which breaks with this inside/outside boundary” (Elliott 1995: 45). Derridian “parergonal logic” is another unavoidable point of reference especially since its fullest elaboration is to be found in the study of visual representations (Derrida 1987: 18-121).
46. Interestingly, our interpretation is corroborated by Lacan himself who cannot help but acknowledge that sexuality proper “shows a natural functioning of signs. At this level, they are not signifiers, for the nervous pregnancy is a symptom, and, according to the definition of the sign, something intended for someone. The signifier, being something quite different, represents a subject for another signifier” (157). This holds so long as “repressed and symptom are homogeneous, and reducible to the function of signifiers” (176) On the other hand, it is the Name-of-the-Father in Lacanian theory that should suffer repression; it follows that, on Lacan’s own premises, sexuality can be defined as precisely that which has nothing to do with repression. The repression therefore stems from the dynamic of the instincts of self-preservation, from the a-sexual search for knowledge. Characteristically, Lacan’s formulations just cited may be attributed to Torok and Abraham. But the paradox is that these authors cannot help ending with an implicit demise of the notion of repression, since the “secret” to be uncovered by means of cryptonymic reading is far more likely to be withhold consciously (cf. Abraham/Torok 1978: 236 et passim).
47. Notably, only within this framework does the notion of repression become indispensable. The irony is that Derrida advances this profoundly logocentric model as the ‘beyond’ of logocentrism (1980: 287-290).
48. The interest of Brennan’s explorations stem from the fact that they make particularly lucid the profound similarity between Derrida’s and Lacan’s models by exposing the ultimate–Jungian–point of their convergence.
49. It should be stressed that far from being a perversion of Lacan’s teaching, Brennan’s energetics (which is another name for telepathy) faithfully follows in the steps of the Absolute Master. Whence her reference to a recent study by Boothby (1992), whose aims are those of a modest exegete (48).
50. A number of Derridian concepts–hymen, blanc etc.–clearly have an inhibitory function.
51. It is not a question of who actually issues the threat (Lacan has amply proved that the fact–already pointed out by Freud–that the threat more often than not comes from women has no bearing on the emerging structure), but precisely the question of structure.
52. Hence the irony of Brennan’s appeal to “generational time” (1993: 189) which, within the energetical empha-telepathetic framework, is actually the time of the generational reversal.
53. It may well be that Jones himself would have rejected this formula. However, the latter is the only feasible conclusion to be drawn from his elaborations and at the same time the only possibility way to to bring coherence into his rambling theorizing. In effect, Jones has done everything to obfuscate the subversive potential of his theoretical insight by trying to force his notion back into the narrow confines of the libidinal economy. However, within the framework of the libidinal economy, the notion of aphanisis is unsustainable. It is the privation of sexual gratification which provokes in the child the fear of the “extinction of sexuality” (450, 442), although, logically speaking, privation should lead to the accumulation of an undisposed libido. Fortunately, Jones’s break with logic is not thorough enough. Witness his remark that in order to ward off “the dread of aphanisis,” “the wishes that are not destined to be gratified” are damped down(442) or redirected. This is of course a conventionally libidinal view of sublimation which however implies that first of all libido should be accumulated.
54. Cf. “…an undissolved transference, like an unpaid debt, can be transmitted beyond one generation. It can construct a tradition with this possibility in its entrails” (Derrida 1987: 353). The same concern, stated almost in the same words, underpins Abraham and Torok’s cryptoaesthetics (1978: 395-400).
55. Obviously, this is a strictly materialist point of view. Interestingly enough, despite all Derrida’s theorization of time-giving postponements (cf.1984) which affect his style itself (thus far nobody has paid due attention to the fact that Derrida’s texts are punctuated by hymens like “Let’s take our time”, “no, no, or at least not so quickly” (1987: 281, 288).) In rare moments of candidness he cannot help admitting that there may emerge a (hermeneutic) impasse when “no one will have any more time” (1986: 117). Significantly, this impasse is somehow (for Derrida drops the intriguing thread) related to the construction of feminine identity.
56. Derrida has made the fate of deconstruction directly dependent on the “unlimited textual propagation” (1980: 351-352).
57. It may be argued that every closure is an arbitrary affair which therefore has no essential impact on the textual infiniteness (Cf. Lyotard 1988: 2).
58. The full scope of this paradox becomes evident only when we evoke the defensive measure envisaged by Derrida, who certainly does not turn his eyes away from the shortcomings of his theory, to counteract the sort of critique just advanced. The failure to accomodate/account for the conditions of discursive possibility, says Derrida, is implied in the very definition of discursivity. Hence it would be a miracle if deconstruction has succeeded in exempting itself from this universal rule. And what is more deconstruction, according to Derrida, has never tried to do anything of the kind: one has to comply with the Law of the genre which one sets out to deconstruct. But the great irony is that in actual fact that deconstructive theory as well as practice runs counter to this basic rule of deconstruction, and this due to the central role assigned to the concept of the supplement. For the supplement is nothing else than a radical attempt precisely to account for all that which makes discourse (im)possible. To say nothing about the fact that due to the suspension of the inside/outside opposition the conditions of discursivity by necessity become invaginated. It follows that the supplement and repression as the exclusion of the unthought axiomatics are at odds. Put otherwise, Derrida’s own writing seems to escape from the predicament of all writing said to be inextricably bound with repression.
59. The Freud-Bakhtin connection remains rather a murky question. The awkward Freudianism (1993b) seems to ward off any attempts to seriously broach the subject. Add to this the happy ignorance of Bakhtinians (and Slavists in general) in psychoanalytic as well as all other matters pertinent to the theoretical advancements of the last half century. With this in mind it is no wonder that the rare discussions of our problem remain either superficial (Byrd 1987) or address the question from a particularly unfruitful angle (Pirog 1987). The most recent effort to situate Bakhtin within the psychoanalytic context (Handley 1993) reiterates dialogical commonplaces and thereby effectively forecloses the possibility to divulge the most promising intuitions of Bakhtin and Freud alike.
60. The volume Lacan and Narration (1985) remains representative for the current impasse of psychoanalytic narratology which is hardly avoidable so long as the narratologists continue to use the notions of repression, transference and the opposition of manifest/latent content. Up till now no one’s imagination has reached beyond this framework.
61. To this task we address ourselves in a paper “The Sublime Innocence” (forthcoming).
62. Despite all the assurances of Deleuze and Guattari to the contrary, repression as well as Oedipus structure their economy of desire. Witness the machines of desire which by definition are destined to perpetual malfunctioning (1972: 332-365). However, malfunctioning is precisely the principle of interpsychic economy as exemplified by a symptom (which is always a failure) unconceivable without the notion of repression.
63. Recently, this exclusion has attracted attention of a number of authors (cf. States 1993). Unfortunately, they fail to propose anything worthwhile, confining themselves to a critique (actually a dismissal) of deconstruction, whereas, as we shall see, the consideration of this problematic can help deconstruction to the butterfly’s second life as opposed to the miserable caterpillar of contemporary deconstruction.
64. This is precisely what happens in the most advanced–Derridian–version of poststructuralism. At the outset we have the familiar reversal: now it is the reader (receiver) who guarantees the text. However, this role presupposes “the death of the author”, or, in Derridian terms, the dissemination of the author’s name (cf. Derrida 1984). The paradox is twofold, for sometimes, notably in respect to Freud, Derrida is quite close to unambiguously stating that the reader in question is in fact the author himself (cf. 1977: 121, 136). This, in Derrida’s own terms, can only mean that there is no reader. On the other hand, if there should be a reader, his/her task boils down to collecting the scattered fragments of the author’s name. The result would be the revelation of the meaning in its most patent form: that of the proper name. This is of course quite a logocentric enterprise. However, it is precisely this enterprise which currently has come to be known as cryptonymie. Derrida’s admiration for Torok and Abraham’s stance can speak for itself.
65. One example is what Sandler with unusual candidness calls the “‘conceptual dissolution’ of the superego” (1960: 130).
66. Recently this work has attracted the attention of feminist theorists: “Bakhtin’s earliest work is potentially the most radical and relevant for feminists” (Pollock 1993: 238; italics mine). However, thus far nobody has attempted to profit from this potential. The reason is that the reappraisal is conceived along the familiar lines of telepathic/empathic dialogical (para)esthetics which is too narrow for Bakhtin’s thought: “…aesthetic activity is essential for understanding the social nature of individual consciousness. True aesthetic activity–and I think that for Bakhtin aesthetic activity is any shared, disinterested semiotic activity–consists of a double motion of empathy and ‘finding oneself outside’–which Bakhtin calls ‘vnenakhodimost’” (238; italics added). An attempt to transform Bakhtin’s aesthetics into poststructuralist (para)esthetics can lead only to a misunderstanding of the notion of exotopy (vnenakhodimost) central to Bakhtin’s thought. However, this misunderstanding has become a commonplace, if not a dogma, in Baktinian studies (cf. Morson and Emerson 1990).
67. A striking fact which, nevertheless, remains unnoticed is that the theories of literary history propounded in this century boil down to the reversal model. There is a reversal between the Formalist notion of “indirect descendence” (a generational reversal of sorts) and the latest model of Harold Bloom which represents a double reversal starting as it does with the reversal of Formalist views in order to endorse the reversal on the rhetorical level. This means that the celebrated “double bind” turns out to be nothing else than the double reversal in respect to the structuralist predecessors, with a purely Hegelian result.
68.”This other person–‘a stranger, a man you’ll never know’–fulfils his functions in dialogue outside the plot…. As a consequence of such a positioning of ‘the other’, communion assumes a special character and becomes independent of all real-life, concrete social forms (the forms of family, social or economic class, life’s stories)” (1979a: 264; italics mine). An astute reader need not be prompted to recognize in this kind of dialogism only a conventional phrasing, a more than transparent disguise of a beyond of monologue/dialogue dyad.
69. This equation of family and language is another Derridian appropriation from Hegel (Derrida 1986: 7-9), and, as our analysis suggests, not at all deconstructively.
70. A common demarche which, logically enough, cannot help but end with more than modest results. Cf. Behler 1991.
71. “Family” is the Heideggerian blind spot par excellence: the reference to it is completely missing from his oeuvre, which is all the more puzzling given his focus on “everydayness,” “care,” etc.
72. In order for the capitalist economy to function accounts cannot be settled. Crediting is a perfect economic counterpart of the semiotical act of time-giving, without which there would not be any capitalism to speak of. Whence the fundamental law of capitalism: “the poor become poorer, the rich–richer.” It is worthwhile to note that, according to Marx, the crisis of capitalist economy stems from an oxymoron (over-production leads to impoverishment)–and therefore corresponds neatly to the crisis of the libidinal economy of (intertextual) (para)esthetic signification for which Jones’s notion of aphanisis provides an ample description. It remains to add that for quite understandable reasons that neither Lyotard (1993) nor Derrida (1991; 1994) have anything to say about these obvious interconnections despite their interest in the semiotic extension of the problematic of crediting.
73. An astute reader has already recognized here the outcome of the interplay between two master tropes of deconstruction discussed above.
74. The notion of dissemination is in itself a sufficient proof for Derrida’s entrapment in traditional biologism, or, to be more precise, for the deconstructive reinforcement of this biologism. For, as we have amply ascertained for ourselves, it is the disseminating fragmentation of sexuality (as a result of the secondary sublimation) which foregrounds the questions (of knowledge, truth etc.) essential to logocentrism. This explains sufficiently why Derrida’s attempts to introduce the problematic of gender into his discourse (cf. especially 1985: 52-53) cannot help appearing as a concession to the prevailing trend.
75. This is a major obstacle for the feminist theorists interested in Bakhtin (cf. O’Connor 1993: 247-248). Fortunately to remove the obstacle it suffices to read Bakhtin more closely and independently, that is, to approach him not as an avatar of dialogism.
76. Although at the moment of writing the essay Bakhtin has not read Heidegger, the description of hero’s condition before the author’s intervention is a perfect echo of Heidegger’s description of Dasein in its throwness (1962: 219-225). Despite the fact that the Bakhtin-Heidegger connection is anything bu a neglected subject (in fact Heidegger is the thinker most frequently evoked in connection with Bakhtin), its real nature remains undivulged owing to the dialogical commitments of investigators as well as to their stance (shared by Bakhtinians with Slavists in general) to see in theorizing a bogey.
77. Thus far no one has bothered to pay attention to it, let alone to ponder over its implications.
78. Cf.: “The male dread of being castrated may or may not have a precise female counterpart, but what is more important is to realize that this dread is only a special case and that both sexes ultimately dread exactly the same thing, aphanisis. The mechanism whereby this is supposed to be brought about shows important differences in the two sexes” (440; italics added).
79. It is impossible to speak of repression without evaluating positively knowledge as such. Which means that grammatology grounded in the notion of repression is not a “science that functions as the deconstruction of science,” as its fans would like it to be (Ulmer 1985: 12).
80. This anti-aesthetic, to wit, (para)esthetic stance is one of the most striking characteristics of poststructuralism. Cf.Przybylowicz 1986: 2, 13-14; Norris 1988: xii, 86.
81. Hence her need to be reassured that she actually brings people together (67).
82. Cf. James 1966: 51, 65, 180, 200, 209.
83. This point is readily acknowledged exactly by those Bakhtinians who bother to take account of what goes on by way of theory around them (cf.Hirschkop 1989: 24-25). However, far from questioning the concept of dialogism as such, they assume that the dialogicity of the reader’s response is unproblematical.
84. “…our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies” (6).
85. For the discursive revitalization presupposes that the hero(ine) is put to use by the author in just the same manner as Maisie was at first used by her parents to indirectly communicate in quite a poststructuralist way.
86. So long as postsructuralism chooses to see in Jamesian textuality an instance of logocentrism, the poststructuralist claims exemplified by Derrida’s account of the letter’s itinerary in Poe’s tale have been always already deployed by tradition.
87. This rectifies the general view of intertextuality. The primordial debt is not the debt to the predecessor(s) but to the reader. The first being a meaningful, the second a communicative one. The theories of intertextuality obviously privilege the first (the reader-response criticism is exactly the criticism and therefore can allow itself the franchise of ignoring theoretical issues) but in doing so unwittingly undermine the very foundations of intertextuality. For this stance amounts to a mute acknowledgement that virtually any author rejects his debts to the reader, whereas only these latter make reading possible.
88. The less prejudiced the reader, the more likely he/she is to avow this deficiency.
89. Cf. 67, 92, 132, 144, 152-153, 172, 214.
90. It is by no chance that precisely in the case of James, poststructuralism is compelled to make an exception from its basic postulate not to trust the textual surface.
91. Alternatively, we can rethink the genre of Bildungsroman beyond logocentric metanarratives which, as we have seen, are dialogical in essence.
92. Certainly we are not the first to recognize in innocence the very core of Jamesian textuality. Unfortunately, far from elucidating matters, the book-length treatment of James’s thematization of innocence (G.H. Jones 1975) has rather obscured them. This is not so much due to the fact that the study in question is a pure instance of thematical criticism. Despite the structuralist and the postsructuralist denigration of the latter, I would rather subscribe to Jones’s view that the thematical description is in the last analysis also a structural one (285, 287). But the gist of the matter is that Jones strikingly fails to establish the continuity between theme and structure. This means that the real trouble is primarily that of misreading in its most trivial sense. And it is this misreading which is responsible for the ultimate convergence between the poststructuralist treatment of James and the one advocated by Jones who is bent upon preserving his theoretical innocence (the fashionable references are totally absent from his study). Instead of examining the Jamesian meaning, Jones is satisfied with the traditional view of innocence as essentially a process of loosing it (287). This view makes of innocence a mechanism of tradition transmission (144, 149). Jones’s study is a particularly telling example of all the paradoxes to which an attempt to accommodate innocence within the framework of Western logocentrism gives rise. The first to emerge is the narratological impasse. Put bluntly, Jones fails to show that innocence is “the premise from which evolves the conflict in a novel or tale” (285). And it cannot be otherwise so long as innocence is conceived of in a traditional way as “abundant time, timeless time” (286), or, in Derridian terms, as an act of time-giving. Whence the recourse to generational/genealogical model. The dialectic of innocence (innocence–a thesis, responsibility–an antithesis, renunciation–a synthesis) which is said to represent Jamesian master plot suffers a diffusion with the result that each term comes to be represented by a group of texts. That this implies a certain reversal of chronology is obvious, for the dialectic is a development of concept and not of an individual. In other words, instead of dialectic of innocence we have a Hegelian dialectic of desire which, as Lacan is the first to remind us, is essentially a negativity (1988: 147). What comes to be renounced is the desire. This renouncement promotes the tradition (277). This means that the mechanism at work is that of repression. Jones’s description of innocence is strikingly similar to the poststructuralist (Lacanian) description of desire: “Innocence itself…is absence or vacancy; it is limitation; it is negation” (285). And once again the distortion of textual reality is particularly obvious in case of the novel we are discussing. Witness Jones’s summary: “Maisie has lost her innocence because of all that she knows” (10). The recovery of innocence in which Jones is interested is to be sought in other texts. However, it is not be found, for the renunciation (and Jones is quite astute to recognize in it the gist of the problem) affects desire and not knowledge. Put otherwise, thematical criticism cannot help relinquishing thematicism in favor of theoretical model which tallies perfectly with the poststructuralist one. However, this reversal, in its turn, comes to be reversed. The paradoxical result is the resurrection of the buried author. The cue for Jones study provides “a letter in which Henry’s older brother William describes him in middle age as ‘dear old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Henry’. What, I wondered, does innocent mean if it applies equally to a writer…and to the characters he conceived as well?” (ix). But in the course of his study Jones has nothing to say about the innocence of the author’s discourse. Jones attempts to remedy this deficiency in a brief section (288-295) appended at the very end of the study in which James’s own innocence is treated in purely biographical terms. This uncanny return of the referent is paralleled by the same outcome in the poststructuralist discourse on the uncanny/sublime. To sum up: it is precisely the innocence that, despite the apparent foregrounding of the purity of origins, subverts the tradition said to privilege these origins. For it is tradition and its postsructuralist Indian summer and not Jamesian textuality which is “haunted by innocence” (ix). However, to account for this subversion as a discursive event played out between the author and the hero(ine) one has to adopt our perspective.
93. Paradoxically, only by acquiescing to this interpretation can one maintain the view of the super-ego as “a pure culture of the death-instict” (Freud 1923: 283), which, as we have seen, is unsustainable from the libidinal standpoint which by necessity implies the reversal between the ego and the super-ego as regards the function of accumulation of libido.
94. Witness the interpretation of What Maisie Knew advanced by Przybylowicz who treats Maisie’s development as an instance of conformism (27). The textual misreading stems from the psychoanalytic, from treatment of sublimation as synonymous with repression (19). The paradox of this kind of exegesis is that it cannot help but end with the reversal of the subjects of repression. Now it is not the author who represses his/her unconscious knowledge but the hero(ine). However, even the most cursory reader is bound to admit that the latter assumption is strikingly at odds with Jamesian textuality. Cf. for instance: “What helped Maisie was that she exactly knew what she wanted” (263).
95. Significantly, despite all his attacks on the “ascetic ideal” equated with sublimation and the “will to truth” (1989: 143-146, 160) as the very core of Western tradition, Nietzsche seems to be the first to discern the subversive potential of sublimation. Witness his opposition between ascetic castration and genuine Vergeistlichung–the real enemy of tradition (88). Derrida mentions tis opposition but only to quickly drop the theme which threatens his paraesthetic stance (1979: 91-93). The value of our theory of sublimation is that it allows us to account for narrative structures without privileging the avant-garde ones. Precisely this privileging and the concomitant inability to deal with traditional narratives is what all attempts to crudely equate sexuality and textuality are bound to wound with (cf. Lingis 1983: 101 et passim). That poststructuralist theory takes its cue from avant-garde textual practice is another point in favor of our standpoint. For, far from being a subversion of Oedipal patriarchy, the avant-garde thrust to always be ahead of its time corresponds neatly to the assumption implied in the reversal fantasy, i.e., the assumption that the male child is older, ahead, of the woman–the foundational premise of patriarchy. It follows that the traditional narrative is the real touchstone for the validity of theory.
96. Cf. Freud 1910: 193. It can be said that the very thrust of Freud’s study is to show how epistemophilia equated with the father figure impairs art. Interestingly, Laplanche picks up Freud’s discussion to ultimately dismiss the notion of sublimation from psychoanalytic vocabulary (1980b: 119, 191). A telling example of epistemophilia promoted under the nickname of postmodernist paraesthetics.
97. This redefinition emerges as the only feasible solution to the paradox that Freud’s musings on “the future of an illusion” have left us. On the one hand, Freud admits that “every individual is virtually an enemy of culture,” which remains puzzling so long as the attainment of the cultural ideal is said to provide a narcissistic satisfaction (1927: 345).
98. I propose this definition in contradistinction to the paraesthetic theory of “the unconscious of the text” (cf.Bellemin-Noèl 1979; Davis 1985; Schleifer 1985) which by necessity equates textuality proper with the ego.
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