Table Of ContentAberrations of Mourning
Other Books by Laurence A. Rickels
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
Acting Out in Groups
The Case of California
The Devil Notebooks
I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick
Nazi Psychoanalysis
I. Only Psychoanalysis Won the War
II. Crypto-Fetishism
III. Psy Fi
Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema
The Vampire Lectures
Aberrations
of
mourning
Laurence A. Rickels
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS
LONDON
The writing of this book was sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation.
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance
provided for the publication of the paperback edition of this book from the
University of California, Santa Barbara Freshman Seminars program and the
Foundation for International Art Criticism, Los Angeles.
Originally published as Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).
Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rickels, Laurence A.
Aberrations of mourning / Laurence A. Rickels. — [New ed.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7595-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. German literature—History and criticism. 2. Authorship—Psychological aspects.
3. Psychoanalysis and literature—Germany. 4. Death in literature. 5. Authors,
German—Psychology. I. Title.
PT129.R472011
830.9353-dc22 2011013910
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
PREFACE Invitation to a Reprinting vii
Aberrations of Mourning
1
INTRODUCTION
1. AVUNCULAR STRUCTURES 22
Sigmund Freu d/Frie drich Nietzsche
2. THE FATE OF A DAUGHTER 60
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
3. THE FATHER'S IMPRISONMENT 99
Wilhelm Heinse
4. NECROFILIATION 120
Antonin Artaud
5. REGULATIONS FOR THE LIVING DEAD 172
Gottfried Keller
6. BURN NAME BURN 218
Adalbert Stifter
7. WARM BROTHERS 243
Franz Kafka
8. ARISTOCRITICISM 294
Karl Kraus
9. THE UNBORN 333
NOTES 372
INDEX 403
PREFACE
INVITATION TO A REPRINTING
"Reprinting" was one of the analogues Freud used to illustrate
transference; the other image was haunting. My book is back! My
thanks to Douglas Armato for arranging its ghost appearance with
the University of Minnesota Press. Aberrations of Mourning thus
has another outside chance to circulate in its own writing and to
reunite with its immediate context, the trilogy Unmourning. In ad-
dition to this book, Unmourning counts The Case of California
(reprinted by Minnesota in 2001) and Nazi Psychoanalysis (which
first appeared with Minnesota in three volumes in 2002).
In 1988 (twenty-two years ago as I issue this invitation), Ab-
errations of Mourning was way ahead of its time. Though I doubt
its time has come, there is now a milieu of comps in the publications
market that makes it a little harder to ignore a work of mourning.
Literary and cultural studies of mourning, melancholia, trauma,
haunting, and occult and technical media were not always topics of
interest admitted by the university. While in the meantime it's all
the range of what anyone in the academy could ever want to know,
that's not because there has been a continuous history of scholars
taking dictation and writing on crypts. A colleague (who many
years later would write a ghost book that was welcomed as the
height of the new —in sociology) asked me back then, as though in
shock, how long it had taken me to write Aberrations. I guess most
first books are cursory exercises, like dissertations probably should
vii
Aberrations of Mourning
be. But I answered and then knew that I had spent all my young life
writing this book.
Aberrations of Mourning had a vulnerable start. But that it
appeared at all, very much before its time, I owe to Robert Mandel,
who was director of Indiana University Press when I published
what would become one chapter or case study in Aberrations of
Mourning as a contribution to a centenary collection of essays on
Kafka. Mandel is the reason Avital Ronell's Dictations: On Haunt-
ed Writing appeared from Indiana, out of context but at every other
press at the time completely out of the question. Mandel moved to
Wayne State University Press, and my manuscript followed him.
One of my senior colleagues then, sensing perhaps that I felt
Wayne State wasn't all it should be, assured me that this press was
known for keeping its list in circulation for the long haul. Jump
cut: in no time Aberrations was abandoned as out of print. I can't
imagine that this book was the biggest drag in the press's stable.
I can imagine that intimate intrigue on the part of one of the aca-
demic series editors killed the book's young shelf life.
Aberrations of Mourning was the opening of all my resources
for reformulation already inside its own looped discourse but then
also beyond. (A review in SubStance characterized the book, very
much to this point, as "overstimulating.") At a time when in the
humanities you were expected to take sides with Benjamin and
dismiss Adorno I took the latter of this law as my style consul-
tant. I loved the way he used apodictic statement to make what I
later learned to identify as a paradoxical intervention in the most
transferentially loaded passages of our tradition of thought. He
also created cliches (in the sense of printing and reprinting) out of
syntactic asides on which I modeled my own recurring hieroglyphs
to corral a following or understanding.
I was already writing The Case of California as I was just be-
ginning to close the covers on Aberrations. Nazi Psychoanalysis,
already well on its way, was all I could talk about in interviews
held on the occasion of the publication of The Case of California.
Between 1982 and 1995 I was writing "one" work that broke apart
or was released in parts along the way. The separateness of the
works, which I would never deny or abandon, is marked mainly by
shifts in the specific manner in which I gave form to thought. But
that is a major part of my task as writer.
viii
Preface
For The Case of California I promoted as forced marriage
the juxtaposition between teen idioms and the Germanic jargons of
critical thought, but in Nazi Psychoanalysis I opened up shop at the
borderline to psychosis. But there is already extensive commentary
available (by me and by others) on the stylistic features of those
works. Now it's time for me to stand by my first book.
How did a young man of good upbringing, to whom the
chance had been given to live—really to live—on the Coast of
unlimited opportunities for happiness, come to write such a mon-
strous book?
California wasn't all bad. The shock of it brought me back to
Freud. I had turned to Freud already in adolescence, when, trying
to think about mourning, I discovered that, quite simply, Freud
alone addressed mourning directly or, to borrow Derrida's excel-
lent formulation, without alibi. But in the course of my higher edu-
cation I became convinced that a more abstract or overriding frame
that would encompass Freud's thought among other discourses
was what earning the doctoral degree ordered. OMG: I was on my
way to becoming Foucauldian! But the isolation of UC Santa Bar-
bara (especially in the early 1980s) delivered me of that contact
high school of the academy's conformity to the one discursivity.
With the former world thus lost, I sought recovery inside
Freud's "underworld of psychoanalysis," the corpus that had not
even begun to be read yet. I am grateful to the gods that I was not
situated in the academy in such a way that I had to become what
I'm not in order to publish and perish. Friedrich Kittler confided to
me early on that he had switched from psychoanalysis to Foucault
in order to wage a career in the German university system. Please
don't misunderstand my anecdotal indiscretion: Kittler managed
just the same to offer, to my mind, the most original reading of
Lacan in evidence to this day.
I was fortunate not to be left alone in my isolationism as Cali-
fornia antibody during the time of this book's conception. Avital
Ronell, with whom I had done time as fellow graduate student at
Princeton, came to California to teach just a few years after my
arrival. In our shared sense of the shell shock of life is a beach,
we were close colleagues, preparing our classes and presentations
together, when not in person then on the telephone. Once upon a
field trip together to the amusement park Knott's Berry Farm ("not
ix
