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

189 Pages·2008·1.112 MB·Language, Discourse, Society

by  Rob White (auth.)

Language, Discourse, Society
Series Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
Selected published titles:
Rob White
FREUD’S MEMORY
Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body
Teresa de Lauretis
FREUD’S DRIVE
Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film
Mark Nash
SCREEN THEORY CULTURE
Richard Robinson
NARRATIVES OF THE EUROPEAN BORDER
A History of Nowhere
Lyndsey Stonebridge
THE WRITING OF ANXIETY
Imaging Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture
Ashley Tauchert
ROMANCING JANE AUSTEN
Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending
Reena Dube
SATYAJIT RAY’S THE CHESS PLAYERS AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity
John Anthony Tercier
THE CONTEMPORARY DEATHBED
The Ultimate Rush
Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson
LITERATURE, POLITICS AND LAW IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND
Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley
THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE
Geoff Gilbert
BEFORE MODERNISM WAS
Modern History and the Constituency of Writing
Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley (editors)
THE LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY READER
Michael O’Pray
FILM, FORM AND PHANTASY
Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics
James A. Snead, edited by Kara Keeling, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West
RACIST TRACES AND OTHER WRITINGS
European Pedigrees/African Contagions
Patrizia Lombardo
CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES
Colin MacCabe
JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD
Second edition
Moustapha Safouan
SPEECH OR DEATH?
Language as Social Order: a Psychoanalytic Study
Jean-Jacques Lecercle
DELEUZE AND LANGUAGE
Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild
STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS
Geoffrey Ward
STATUTES OF LIBERTY
The New York School of Poets
Moustapha Safouan
JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING
(Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose)
Stanley Shostak
THE DEATH OF LIFE
The Legacy of Molecular Biology
Elizabeth Cowie
REPRESENTING THE WOMAN
Cinema and Psychoanalysis
Raymond Tallis
NOT SAUSSURE
A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory
Laura Mulvey
VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES
Ian Hunter
CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT
The Emergence of Literary Education
Language, Discourse, Society
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Freud’s Memory
Psychoanalysis, Mourning
and the Foreign Body
Rob White
© Rob White 2008
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: the Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 1
1 Figures of Freudian Theory 9
2 Others’ Memories 37
3 Mourning as Ethics and Argument 66
4 Across Limits 92
5 The Foreign Bodies of Psychoanalysis 120
Conclusion: Freud’s Secret 146
Notes 156
Bibliography 171
Index 181
v
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Maud Ellmann, Andy Gallacher, Jeanne Gamble,
Pelagia Goulimari, Gerard Greenaway, Franck Guyon, Stephen Heath,
Vidhya Jayaprakash and her team in Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd.,
Jill Lake, Colin MacCabe, Forbes Morlock, Denise Riley, Christabel
Scaife, Roy Sellars, Robert Smith, Caroline Jane Williams, Sarah Wood.
In memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943–2007).
vi
Introduction:
the Psychoanalytic Labyrinth
Intervening in contemporary debates about psychoanalysis, this book
emerges from the post-structuralist account of Freud, especially as it
was undertaken by Jacques Derrida – but not without some scepticism
towards that account, especially its celebration of apparent failures of
meaning that are, rather paradoxically, presented as a sort of hedonistic
melancholy. Having particular value as a practice of close reading
(though one which tends to be amplified philosophically), the post-
structuralist account has shown above all how internally complex
Freud’s writings are. To quote Leo Bersani: ‘philosophers, psychoana-
lysts, and literary critics have convincingly made it seem very naive to
take what might be termed the official Freud literally.’1 Rather than
being a quasi-scientific explanation of general psychological function-
ing – or at least in addition to that – it becomes possible to redescribe
Freud’s work as an especially intricate and labyrinthine series of writings
whose patterns of rhetoric and argument put into question their own
concepts and conclusions. As Tom Conley puts it, Freud’s writing ‘works
through a gnostic rationale by the myriad ways that it rides along the
paradoxes its expression puts forward as emblems, conundrums, or other
shapes of wit.’2 The readings of Freud in this book constitute a wide-
ranging attempt to explore some of these emblems and conundrums.
My focus therefore is Freud’s language, which I approach using
literary-critical methods. What is the relationship between my own
critical language and Freud’s own? The post-structuralist approach to
Freud has been assiduous in posing versions of this question, as with a
recent formulation by Samuel Weber:
[C]an psychoanalytic thinking itself escape the effects of what it
endeavors to think? Can the distortions of unconscious processes be
1
2 Freud’s Memory
simply recognized, theoretically, as an object, or must they not leave
their imprint on the process of theoretical objectification itself?
Must not psychoanalytical thinking itself partake of – repeat – the
dislocations it seeks to describe?3
Despite Freud’s claims to classify psychological processes and compo-
nents, the manner of his doing so always seems to yield complexity
rather than unitary explanation. Weber suggests that such self-
complication is inescapable: psychoanalytic theorizing cannot help but
be tangled up in the processes it ventures to define. There is therefore
repetition; objects do not remain static – instead they cease to be know-
able as stable entities; dislocations occur; ‘theoretical objectification’
begins to seem like an impossibility because theory cannot achieve
proper disentanglement. And so it begins to be possible to imagine an
endlessly self-implying process whereby theory confounds itself and so
fails ever to exit the maze of its peregrinations.
Close to Freud
In one of his later interpretations of Freud, to be found in the book
Archive Fever, Derrida poses his own set of questions:
Must one apply to what will have been predefined as the Freudian or
psychoanalytic archive in general schemas of reading, of interpreta-
tion, of classification which have been received and reflected out of
this corpus whose unity is thus presupposed? Or rather, has one on
the contrary the right to treat the said psychoanalytico-Freudian
archive according to a logic or a hermeneutic independent of Freudian
psychoanalysis, indeed anterior even to the very name of Freud,
while presupposing in another manner the closure and the identity
of this corpus?4
These remarks are in certain respects typical of the deconstructionist
approach. One may note the use of complicated tenses (‘will have been
predefined’) which sometimes take on a quasi-prophetic air, Derrida a
reader of auguries; the insistent self-qualifications (‘a logic or a herme-
neutic’) that seem to be designed to pre-empt through the listing of
alternatives any possible suggestion of terminological imprecision; the
invocation of portentous ethical considerations (‘the right to treat’)
framing the work of interpretation. This is, in its way, powerful
writing and the business of its rhetoric is to refute conventional
The Psychoanalytic Labyrinth 3
interpretative claims of dispassionate scrutiny whose viewpoint is extra-
neous to what is being studied. Post-structuralism has often forcefully
and successfully critiqued such claims: the interpreter, it is argued, is
always already implicated in the material being interpreted. One cannot
stand quizzically back, be separate and then look squarely at, for exam-
ple, a writer’s work as if it were some classifiable, delimited object.
Deconstruction often therefore arrives at some version or other of an
idea of interpretative inescapability and then affirms the idea as the
necessarily inconclusive end-point of its critique, as if nothing were so
good as to be caught in a hall of mirrors.
Derrida has taken this argument beyond argument into quasi-literary
experiments that enact a drama – it is something more emotionally
serious than a game – of inextricability based on what I would call
conceits of intimacy. In one text this goes as far as prosopopeia, Derrida
speaking not on behalf of Freud but (in the terms of the rhetorical
conceit) as if he were Freud:5
You have always taken me, like Fliess, for a ‘mind reader’. Contempt.
You are waiting holding your breath. You are waiting on the
telephone, I imagine you and speak to you on the telephone, or the
teleprinter seeing that I’ve prepared a lecture which I will never
give … . Well, you are wrong, for once, you will discover nothing
from me as regards the ‘enigma of telepathy’. In particular, I will
preserve this at all costs, you will not be able to know ‘whether or not
I believe in the existence of a telepathy.’ This opening could still
allow one to think that I know, myself, whether or not I believe, and
that, for one reason or another, I am anxious to keep it secret, in
particular to produce such and such a transferential effect (not
necessarily on you or on you, but on this public within myself which
does not let go of me). … I pretend … to admit that I do not myself
know. I know nothing about it. I apologize: if I have given the impres-
sion of having secretly ‘taken sides’ with the reality of telepathy in
the occult sense.6
There is a certain winning jokiness in this essay, which is to some extent
a skit on the idea of telepathy (see also Chapter 5) and a writing-exercise
that plays out rather than simply asserting the proposition that inter-
pretation is necessarily implicated in its object. In Derrida’s later work,
the playfulness is increasingly replaced by tones of grave seriousness:
the idea of interimplication is reinforced to the extent of becoming the
basis of an ethical theory of indissoluble interpersonal bonds (see