from a poem

"what it sounds like can't change what it is--"

So says Louise Glück.

Albert Thibaudet

Albert Thibaudet came to my attention first when I was writing about Charles Maurras. Thibaudet’s book from the 1920s on Maurras remains, I think, the best discussion of his ideas, ideology, and style (if you don’t mind keeping such things separate). I’ve been flipping through an English translation of Thibaudet’s history of French literature, subtitled “from 1795 to our era.” It was put together after his death by Léon Bopp and Jean Paulhan from, apparently, a nearly-complete manuscript. Originally published in 1938, the translation is from 1967. It is very much ‘light’ history, 130 years of literature in about 500 pages. Thibaudet is not, I gather, a profound thinker, but in my experience—bourn out by this book—he is a sensitive reader and critic; his opinions are always worth hearing. A few sections into the book, I became very sorry to be reading in English and not French—it has the feel of a quick translation, though this is perhaps because it is unfinished.

I like the positional and evaluative aims of the book. What is meant by positional? Thibaudet has arranged things by generations (1789, 1820, 1850, 1885, 1914). The meaning of each writer, each text, each school, comes in part from its position within the generation and between generations. Thus, the generation of 1789 is dominated by the revolution as event, which is itself ‘processed’ (my word, Thibaudet wouldn’t be so mechanical) by three dominant personalities, Napoleon, Chateaubriand, and Mme De Staël. The 1820 generation, for instance, takes Napoleon as a problem or model: Balzac is said to have regarded himself as the Napoleon of the novel, thus positioning himself vis-à-vis his predecessors, dominating the novel of his own period, and then becoming himself an aspiration for the next generation.

I hope that I find, rather than read into this, a model essentially similar to the one infinitely more rigorously applied by Randall Collins. Thibaudet, quite in opposition to Collins, is perfectly comfortable assigning these values retrospectively. I do not think this is a fundamental difference.

Thibaudet can be assign retrospective positional value because he his evaluative. Which third of Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme is still living? What, really, is praise- or blameworthy in Salammbô? Such are questions he is willing to answer. He is supple enough, though to distinguish between books important in their time but dead now, books popular in their time but dead now, lost classics, ‘revivals,’ this sort of thing. He constantly snipes at Brunetière (who excluded the letters of Mme de Sevigny from his manual of literature because they were not published until long after being composed, and therefore could not figure in the organic growth of genre).

Some books are simply, today, ‘unreadable.’ This is not a category of contemporary academic criticism. One may, possibly, say that a book is boring or useless, but this is not at all the same thing. I suppose ‘relevance’ is still a category, but this also is different. To say that something is readable or not is to make a judgment based on a certain kind of reader, who exists in a certain reasonably well-defined context and tradition. I get the sense, and I want to be more careful about generalizations than I sometimes am, that academic criticism functions in a basically ‘scientistic’ paradigm. That is, it tries to establish what is so, what isn’t so, what ‘operates’ and what does not. It still wants to find things. Thibaudet is, on the other hand, evaluative, which is to say normative, and explicitly so. Academic criticism, I think, accomplishes the same sort of normative evaluation, but at what could be called a meta-level. That is, rather than an individual academic taking it as their task to say what is and isn’t intrinsically worth reading, disciplines as a whole, the social-intellectual structures of academic life, make these decisions. There’s lots of fuzziness in that formulation, and I’m concerned that it’s re-inventing the wheel somehow. I don’t want to make what sounds to me now to be a banal foucauldian point about social production of truth.

At any rate, here is an example of Thibaudet’s style, slightly glossed, that I wish I had in French. He is speaking of the generation of 1914, by which he means those who were about 20 in that year.

“This venturesome young generation that spoke languages, that had turned to sports, that had left home for pleasure and for the conquest of the planet abruptly found itself blockaded by the war. When fish are taken from great depths, they come to the surface with organs that have burst because of decompression. It was in this state of inner revolution that this generation entered on its third decade. The first generation whose adolescence had been deprived of traditional humanism [by the school reforms of 1902] was further deprived, by its youth, of traditional humanity.”

happiness alone

Although I don’t feel great about it, I go to ‘the strand’ off Union Square almost every time I visit New York. The place appeals to me, even though, objectively speaking, I think the only really good thing about it is the floor of big-format art books. None the less, I can’t help but go in, and check out their selection of French-language books. When I did this last summer I came out with was La Pesanteur et la Grâce, a selection of Simone Weil’s writings. This weekend I was there again, and walked away first with the Library of America edition of James Baldwin’s essays, and also, more in line with Weil, a book of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s sermons. I’ve only had a chance to read the first one, which strummed what I’ve too-flippantly called my Catholic sensibilities, the ‘Sermon du mauvais riche.’

The most startling section was his discussion of the hordes of imagined poor, clawing, grasping, demanding rather than begging for alms, pounding at the conscience of the mauvais riche. This fictional mob inspires reason-dissolving fear, and effectively prevents the wealthy individual from taking any action to alleviate real misery. This seems to me a powerful psychological observation. Not so quotable, though, as what I’ve reproduced below. All these quotes are pulled directly from the gallica text. My favorite is the last one.

“Nous allons toujours tirant après nous cette longue chaîne traînante de notre espérance”

“la nature même nous enseigne que la vie est dans l' action. Mais les mondains, toujours dissipés, ne connaissent pas l' efficace de cette action paisible et intérieure qui occupe l' âme en elle-même ; ils ne croient pas s' exercer s' ils ne s' agitent, ni se mouvoir s' ils ne font du bruit : de sorte qu' ils mettent la vie dans cette action empressée et tumultueuse ; ils s' abîment dans un commerce éternel d' intrigues et de visites, qui ne leur laisse pas un moment à eux, et ce mouvement perpétuel, qui les engage en mille contraintes, ne laisse pas de les satisfaire, par l' image d' une liberté errante.”

“C' est le génie de la volupté : elle se plaît à opprimer le juste et le pauvre, le juste qui lui est contraire, le pauvre qui doit être sa proie ; c' est à dire : on la contredit, elle s' effarouche ; elle s' épuise elle-même, il faut bien qu' elle se remplisse par des pilleries ; et voilà cette volupté si commode, si aisée et si indulgente, devenue cruelle et insupportable.”

“la félicité toute seule, et je prie que l' on entende cette vérité, oui, la félicité toute seule est capable d' endurcir le coeur de l' homme.”

paths not taken

Next up was going to be Ernesto Laclau’s newish (2005) book On Populist Reason, and perhaps the debate between him and Zizek following it. But someone else in the Duke library system wants to read it, and it’s been recalled. So, rather than reading it quickly, hurriedly, I’ll do something which could conceivably go onto one of my prelim lists. What that will be...

Izenberg and Jameson

I have just read two more texts which, from very different disciplinary perspectives, explore the possibilities of psychoanalytic approaches to various ‘non-clinical’ problems. I read Frederic Jameson’s essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978), first, and then a methodological piece by the noted (at least where I come from) historian Gerald Izenberg, “Psychohistory and Intellectual History” (1975). I’ll talk about them in temporal order, though from the vantage point of 2007 they are nearly contemporary.

Izenberg is basically concerned to defend the use of psychoanalytic techniques in history, especially intellectual history, by setting some limits to their place and explanatory power. This involves making a distinction between rational and irrational acts, such as the signing of a treaty by a monarch and extending this to beliefs, for instance the development of Freud’s own theories. Izenberg no doubt correctly prefers rational/irrational to right/wrong, or true/false, though he treats all these as possible axes along which one might evaluate historical fact. Rational/irrational depends on what we would now call contextual factors. Ptolemaic astronomy is wrong, but it is rational. For the historian to decide if an action was rational, she needs to gather all the information that the actor had, and make an intelligent judgment. If a monarch (this is the easiest example), made a decisions against all advice, and apparently for no reason that could be explained by anyone, this may be said to be an irrational act. Then, and only then, may psychohistory enter the picture, and try thus to arrive at depth-psychological explanatory factor.

This essay is from the 1970s, and the examples before Izenberg, or, anyway, the ones he cites, are Leopold III, Luther, Hitler...we’re clearly in the realm of history-as-biography. He mentions Erich Fromm and even the Frankfurt school’s sociological psychoanalysis, but this is not his main interest. More on this from Jameson, who mentions Adorno, but of course not Erich Fromm. (See this essay about the eclipse of Fromm, which is for me in a box with other sociological treatments of intellectuals, for instance, Michele Lamont's "How to Become a Famous French Philosopher," about Derrida and Neil Gross, "Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher").

Izenberg argues that the irrational/rational distinction can be made with belief systems as well, even of sophisticated, self-reflective intellectuals. Interestingly, his main example here is the development of psychoanalysis itself. Was Freud’s theory developed suddenly, a leap of genius? Or did it make sense as an unfolding of previous ideas and clinical results? Izenberg argues strongly that it was the latter, that Freud’s theory was rationally developed, and therefore does not, itself, call for a psychoanalytic explanation.

There are some very clear flaws here. It is perhaps safe to say that among my contemporaries irrationality is an article of faith. All systems of thought contain contradiction, rupture, whatever you like to call it. Indeed, curiously enough, Izenberg seems to feel that irrationality remains irrational in filling a social function, where I suspect that many people would proceed under the assumption that a successfully filled social function is inherently rational, even part of a definition of rationality. Similarly, Izenberg is enough of a social-scientist that, rather than seeing history as stuffed, bursting at the seams with meaning, he seeks only ‘sufficient’ cause. There is surely a tendency today to over-reading the historical record, rather than under-reading. (Ours is a hermeneutic of suspicion?)

The area in which Izenberg is most assertive about the explanatory power of psychoanalysis for intellectual history is not so much in blind-spots, repressed possibilities, and the like, as it is in originary choices. This is discussed on the final pages of the essay, taking Max Weber, but first William James as test cases. The point here is that psychoanalysis does have something to say about why some people are interested in some things and not in other things. He says, “It will always be legitimate to ask why some area was a problem or research interest for someone, and at a basic level there will almost always be an answer in terms of identity needs or basic psychic conflict” (155). This I find quite curious. Just a page earlier, Izenberg quotes Sartre from Search for a Method. Sartre’s own psychoanalytic analyses pick up the question ‘why this, and not this other?’ in a totally different fashion. For Sartre, there is always a radically contingent original choice that lies at the center of a biography—for Baudelaire or Genet, for everyone. This choice is not that which is explained by psychoanalytic investigation, but the irrationality (in the sense of senselessness) which necessarily lies at the center of all human experience. Clearly we’re talking about two different things here, but I still find Izenberg’s attitude that from the ‘seething cauldron’ of the unconscious, something may come of social-science explanatory power, frankly amazing. I’m also surprised by the similarity of his ambition to the claims Randall Collins makes for his sociology of philosophies. Collins takes almost the opposite approach—seeking explanation for intellectual choices in external, network causes, rather than individualist, even infra-individual ones.

Now, Jameson’s essay is quite different. It meanders; it does not follow an argument so much as talk around a subject. Jameson discusses Lacan, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. I will start with one fundamental difference between Jameson and Izenberg, which I suppose is what makes the latter an historian and the former not: Jameson isn’t interested in causality. Writ large, he is a Marxist, and in this sense, his causality is taken care of. Writ small, he is a literary critic, and in this sense it is taken care of also. Also interesting, at least in the texts here, Jameson is more concerned than Izenberg with tying the individual/text into the larger social world. Jameson starts with some of the same examples of psychobiography (Erikson’s treatment of Luther, mainly) as does Izenberg. He is, of course, more committed to Sartre. The psychoanalytic approach to biography (Jameson isn’t concerned, here at least, with historical understand as such) replaces the biographer’s ‘intuition’ and ‘sympathy’ with context and situation—which is of course the technical existentialist term. Useful for all the difficulties it pastes over.

After a series of apparent digressions, which, I think, have the function of getting all the pieces of the Lacanian puzzle in place, Jameson makes his central suggestion for the literary use of the Lacanian system. It is best understood as a continuation of Freud’s own practice in reading literary texts, for instance his analysis of The Sandman. The narrative, somehow, illustrates a certain ‘pre-set’ psychic drama, trauma to neurosis, crisis, and resolution (no doubt this is an unacceptable formulation of said movement). Lacan offers a more sophisticated and diversified set of such given psychic narrative structures, each with different meanings. These are represented by the four permutations of the Lacanian formula Jameson reprints for us.

Finally, though, and this was published in 1978, what Jameson really wants is to use Lacan’s framework in order to articulate a cultural and political criticism, rather than a literary one. Of the various subject positions Lacan articulates, Jameson thinks that of the analyst is most useful. I quote the bulk of the last paragraph in the essay:

The ‘discourse of the analyst,’ finally, is the subject position that our current political languages seem least qualified to articulate. Like the ‘discourse of the hysteric,’ this position also involves an absolute commitment to desire as such at the same time that it opens a certain listening distance from it and suspends the latter’s existential urgencies—the illusion of conscious experience—in a fashion dialectical rather than ironic. The ‘discourse of the analyst,’ then, which seeks to distinguish the nature of the object of desire itself from the passions and immediacies of the experience of desire’s subject, suggests a demanding and self-effacing political equivalent in which the structure of Utopian desire itself is attended to through the chaotic rhythms of collective discourse and fantasy of all kinds (including those that pass through our own heads). This is not, unlike the discourse of the master, a position of authority...rather, it is a position of articulated receptivity, of deep listening (L’écoute), of some attention beyond the self or the ego, but one that may need to use those bracketed personal functions as instruments for hearing the Other’s desire.

From where I stand, at any rate, this is certainly a recipe, in all its profundity (that is, real and imagined) for the surprisingly narrow array of individuals who have arrived at the position of academic cultural critics. Then there is the last sentence, which I know is supposed to be a rhetorical flourish, and I think may be only that:

The active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position, which acknowledges collective desire at the same moment that it tracks its spoors and traces, may well have lessons for cultural intellectuals as well as politicians and psychoanalysts.

toril moi against lacan

Toril Moi’s 2004 article in Signs, “From Femininity to Finitude” is a good counter-point to the Zizek. Her take on Lacan is quite different from Zizek’s, so I often found myself disagreeing with her.

For instance, she claims that Lacan has a ‘post-saussurian’ theory of language, in other words, she sees him as basically a poststructuralist. Of course in Sublime Object one of Zizek’s main goals was to do away with this idea. Moi, who counts herself among the ‘new wittgenstinians,’ and is much taken with Stanley Cavell, is fairly unmerciful towards what she sees as an outmoded, naive, and deeply flawed representationalist account of language. One can only agree that a (one understands here, saussurian) representationalist account of language is insufficient, but, even from reading the most famous Lacan texts (Mirror Stage, Agency of the Letter, Meaning of the Phallus...) it seems to me that there is room to argue that Lacan has no such view of language. At any rate, I don’t like it when people snidely cite Wittgenstein to prove other people are naive about language. It’s not wrong, it just rubs me the wrong way.

This, however, was tangential to the main thrust of her argument. The essential point is that psychoanalysts, especially Lacanian ones, use ‘castration’ as a concept signifying, in the end, Lack, and that this is unnecessary and destructive. That Lacanian feminists are deluding themselves when they eagerly point out as progressive the Lacanian principle that the Phallus is a signifier, and thus can be possessed by anyone, so that anyone may be symbolically castrated. To my mind, the crucial passage is:

“In Freudian and Lacanian theory, castration is used in three different senses, namely, (1) to signify lack as a general human condition, (2) to signify sexual difference or femininity, and (3) to signify the discovery of our own "one-sexedness," that is to say, the discovery that we can only ever be one sex, in the sense that we can only ever have one body. (Desire remains as polymorphous and infinite as it ever was, but it is now confronted with the traumatic discovery of sexual finitude. I shall return to this.) Meaning 1 encourages us to believe that as soon as something can be called "lack" it can also be theorized as castration. It is difficult to understand why this is considered a sign of theoretical sophistication. Meaning 2 is the clearly sexist theory of femininity this article has been concerned with. Meaning 3, however, is just fine, but probably not very successfully conveyed by the word castration.

The indiscriminate use of castration encourages us to roam freely between the three meanings, collapsing them into each other as we please. The resulting confusion of categories is responsible for a distinctly (hetero)sexist "oversexualizing" or "overgendering" of human existence.”

I can only agree with her, and could hardly defend Zizek—a quick perusal of Sublime Object verifies, as if it were required, that he does indeed use ‘castration’ in the ways to which Moi objects.

Now, the other part of Moi’s project in this article is to convince us that Freud is in fact better for feminists than Lacan. First she establishes that the two have, in the end, the same view of human sexuality—that it is ultimately contingent, made, but is certainly influenced by the body into which one is born. Moi regards this is basically the same as that argued for in The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. Fine. Of course, both Freud and Lacan are sexist in various unsurprising ways. However, she says, because of Lacan’s ideas about language, he makes the phallus as signifier into a transcendental signifier—that around which meaning is organized, a metaphysical principle. In this way, Lacan makes out of Freud’s personal but empirically vulnerable sexism a metaphysical principle. If the phallus is the principle around which the symbolic world is organized, how can woman ever be anything but the other? Such is, I think, Moi’s point. In the terms she has set out, I have to agree.

However, I have few bones to pick none the less. First of all—and this, I understand, has everything to do with reading Zizek rather than Lacan—what can we do with the concept of point de capiton, the quilting-point? Zizek discusses this concept in terms of ideology—Freedom, for instance, is an empty signifier which none the less structures a whole ideological field. If I’ve understood Zizek right, it is in Lacanian terms a quilting-point for a whole symbolic order. Other theorists would call it a transcendental signifier. But part of the point of Zizek’s analysis of ideology is that there are many different potential ideological quilting-points. Is it possible that we can regard the symbolic sexual order as an ideology parallel, somehow, to these others, or anyway, homologous to them? This is a profoundly un-Freudian thing to do, I think.

Less speculatively, I also object to Moi’s formulation of ‘finitude,’ which she takes from Cavell. Moi proposes, sensibly, that we replace the blanket notion of castration with one of the discovery of finitude. This has the effect of de-sexualizing the psychoanalytic discourse around various sorts of experiences which are no doubt traumatic (such as the realization of one’s mortality), but seem to have little enough to do with sex. She says,

““Only those who have a sense of their own and other people's finitude can hope to create something like a human community,” Cavell writes. Lacan would perhaps have said that "only those who have taken up a position in relation to the phallus can enter into the symbolic order." My point is that the same fundamental idea is at stake in these two formulations, but that Lacan's formulation is sexist (and philosophically unclear) in a way that Cavell's is not.”

It seems to me that the same thing is indeed not at stake in these two formulations. Only if one believes, as I guess Moi does, that ‘symbolic order’ means the same thing for Lacan as Law, and that Law, in turn, means the same thing as human community. It is this last leap which seems unacceptable to me. Although I hate to use the word as a weapon, Moi seems to be putting forward, through Cavell (and I don’t know Cavell’s ideas here, I may be off) a deeply liberal view of social relations. That is, if one cannot live in community with others, it is because one is somehow psychologically immature, unprepared, bent—in need of psychoanalytical help discovering one’s own boundaries. I must say that Laclau and Mouffe’s agonistic model of social reality makes a great deal more sense to me than this kind of ‘if we disagree to the point of violence, you’re clearly still an adolescent.’ Such an approach seems more 19^th than 21^st century.

theory

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).

First of all, the experience of reading this book. While conscious that I might be generalizing my own reading style, I would still say that this is not a book for which it is necessary to understand every sentence. I plowed through it. I think the book is designed for this sort of reading, because the major themes are repeated, speak to one another at nearly every point. Further, nearly every point is made first in highly specialized terminology, lacanian, hegelian, whatever, and then those nice whacky examples, Hitchcock, Jewish, Stalinist or otherwise obscene jokes...I, at least, followed doggedly and began to have moments of clarity. Here and there I came to see how the descriptions made sense. Lacanian formulations which were at first nonsensical began to take on not just specific, but, I think, useful meaning.

I am hesitant to summarize conclusions of the book in a conventional way. However, Zizek is explicit in the introduction about what he wants to do. First, he intends to introduce the reader to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Zizek’s Lacan, rather than post-structuralist is “perhaps the most radical contemporary version of the Enlightenment” (9). Although there seems to me no natural opposition between the two terms, Zizek also claims Lacan as a rationalist rather than an obscurantist. Second, he wants to “reactualize Hegelian dialectics by giving it a new reading on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis.” Finally, Zizek wants “to contribute to a theory of ideology via a new reading of some well-known classical motifs...and of some crucial Lacanian concepts.” Naturally, these three objectives are related.

Being familiar neither with common versions of Lacan as post-structuralist or Hegel as monist-idealist, I am not necessarily well equipped to evaluate Zizek. I am hardly better off when it comes to the theory of ideology, which I take to be more or less the same thing that Laclau and Mouffe do—Hegemony and Socialist Strategy pops up frequently in the text, and Laclau wrote the preface—a sort of althuserian post-marxism. I’ve looked at Hegemony, though only really in passing. Certainly, Zizek’s application (if so vulgar a word is acceptable) of Lacanian procedures to political/social analysis is more fluid, enjoyable, and condensed than Laclau and Mouffe’s. He seems less concerned than they are with ‘political’ questions, focusing rather on theoretical, philosophical issues.

What I appreciate about Zizek, and which I didn’t find in Hegemony, is the strong effort to have it both ways. Indeed, he presents Lacan as someone who is in full control of the conceptual apparatus of ‘structuralism’ and ‘post-structuralism,’ and who wants, none the less, to describe lived human experience. Or, rather, who insists on the reality of this experience, “Lacan always insists on psychoanalysis as a truth-experience: his thesis that truth is structured like a fiction has nothing at all to do with a post-structuralist reduction of the truth-dimension to a textual ‘truth-effect.’” (154). The contortions of Lacanian psychoanalysis are, among other things, attempts to explain the profound interpenetration of so called subject and so called language. These contortions are not so dissimilar, I think, to Sartre’s in the Critique of Dialectical Reason—hammering together the existential individual and marxist historical materialism. It is curious, I suppose, that Lacan seems more useful, more relevant today. Still, at several points in Zizek’s book, I felt strongly that the Lacan he was explaining had a great deal in common with the Sartre I’m aware of. Perhaps this feeling is the result of drinking at the Jamesonian trough about Sartre, and hearing him drop dark hints about the Sartrean interstices of Lacan. I’ll have to read Jameson’s Lacan essay.