Lacan and the limits of language

LACAN AND THE L I MITS OF L ANGUAGE

CHARLES SHEPHERDSON

AND THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NrrcJJ Ytn·k

Coprrisht e ,ooS Fordham Vnil·ersiry Press All rights reserwd. Ko part of this publicotion may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trarurnmed in :my fonn or by any means-electronic, mech:anic:1l, photocop)·, recording, or an)· other-except (or brief quotnions in printed reviews, without the plior permission of the publisher. Libmry of Congress Caraloging-in-Public:uion D~rn

(IDa"' to come)] Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 l 0)"'tCS tbewselves should oblige us-and I do see this as an ethical issue, especially today, when so many territorialized camps have been set up in the academy, such that Foucauldians do not read Lacan, philosophers do not touch psychoanalysis (and I use "touch" with all its phobic resonance), with the forceful and important exception of feminist theory, and Lacanians, unfortunately, do not read anyone else, except to demonstrate that so-and-so "on ly repeats what Lacan already said more profoundly," or "fails to recognize the most crucial point, which only Lacan was able to see for us"-to move across these territorial boundaries, which are only the trivial boundaries of academic turf, and not appropriate to the conceptual work that calls for our attention. Derrida and Lacan, Foucault and Lacan, have much closer and more intimate relations than thei r reception has allowed, and academic pieties and allegiances, indeed, kinship wars (inheritances of the father), have largely prevented us from engaging these relationships in a serious way. This is not to say that there are no serious differences between these thinkers- on the contrary. But we will never grasp them with any clarity if we begin, and teach our students to begin, with denunciations, excommunications, and imaginary rivalry. Too often, especially in our academic culture, and in the training of our doctoral students, these allegiances have taken the place of thinking, and I hope these essays will encourage some more generous and hospitable encounters. Let me be somewhat more concrete. C hapter t emerged from some questions posed to me by a Mexican student of psychoanalysis, who was trying to understand the concept of the " re.1l" and who asked me to clarify its relation to the symbolic order. I therefore wrote this piece in a very schematic way, somewhat like an encyclopedia article, hoping at least to sketch out some of the major issues that the concept of the real might engage, and also to suggest some general points of intersection between the real in Lacan and other contempora ry issues or thinkers- the " trace" in Derrida, the "i ncest prohibition" in Levi-Strauss, the critique of Lacan's covert essentialism that one finds in some of Judith Butler's work.

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Chapter 2 was written at the invitation of Joan Copjec, for a splendid conference on Autigone at the University at Buffalo, and since this community included some people in comparative literature whom I greatly admire (Rodolphe Gasche, Ca rol Jacobs, Henry Sussman, and others), I tried to emphasize not only the argument of Lacan's Etbics of P>)'Cbormnlysis but also ( 1) the literary text itself, (2) Hegel's famous interpretation of Sophocles, and (3) some classical issues stemming from Aristotle's Poetic.r, particularly insofar as they bear on "catharsis," and the problem ofjouissrmce. Chapter 3 was written on the ve1y sad occasion of the death of Teresa Brennan, who died unexpectedly and much too young, and I was honored to be invited by Kelly O liver and Elizabeth Grosz to a conference in honor of her work and her life, at the University at Stony Brook. In these circumstances, I could not write about anything other than "Mourning and lvlelancholia," and the concept of affect, which had so occupied Teresa. Here again, as in Chapter 2 , I had begun to think that affect, far from being neglected by Lacan, bore very directly on his concept of jouissrmce. The problem is enormously complex, of course, because Lacan appears at some points to say that anxiety is the only affect and that, indeed, anxiety is not an "emotion," which would seem to have a clea rer symbolic orientation. The distinction between affect and emotion would tlms be one approach to the border between the symbolic and the rea l, but this is only a first approximation. Any reader of Heidegger wi ll immediately realize that questions of stirmmmg ("mood"), Befiudlicbkeit ("disposition" or " attunement"), and indeed anxiety itself would call for a far more extensive treatment. Nevertheless, the question of affect in Chapter 2, and of the aesthetic effect of tragedy on our emotions (especially " pity" and "fear"), is in some sense continued in Chapter 3, where I also turn briefly from Autigonc to Hamlet for guidance. Chapter 4 was written at the request of David Goecocheia of Brock University, who organized a conference on Kristeva's Titles of Love and invited me to comment specifica lly on Kristeva's chapter on Plotinus and Ovid. I was thus brought to Tbe Metnm01pboses, yet another litera1y text , which complicated greatly what I might otherwise have written, either about Lacan or about Kristeva herself. This chapter is perhaps tl1e best example of what I mean by stressing the gift of tl1ese "occasional" origins: having been invited to write on this topic, I could not leave in place what I thought I knew about narcissism, in Freud or Lacan or K.risteva; on the contra1y, having been asked to comment on Plotinus, and thus on the philosophical tradition, which is not at all psychoanalytic, and then (even

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worse) on Ovid, I was pulled irrevocably back to my own origi ns in literary study, and I found that the text of Ovid, understood not as an "example" or " instance" of psychoanalysis but as a dense literary object, inserted into its own complex literary tradition, compelled me to read tbat text for what it contained. J\lly argument thus became a kind of encounter between literature (O vid), philosophy (Plotinus), and psychoanalysis (Kristeva and Freud), and the question of love is not unrelated to these crossings. In fact, Lacan says that "love is the sign of a change in discourse," and this may be part of the movement set forth in all the chapters that follow. C hapter 5 emerged from an invitation to write about "memory," for a special issue of Rc.rearcb iu Pbenrmteuology, a journal which I had greatly adm ired as a graduate student, and in wh ich I saw the most rigorous and exciting phenomenological community I knew. I thus took what I understood of Lacan's ideas about memory-a topic so crucial to Freud-and tried to show not simply what Lacan said about the subject, but how his ideas might intersect with some issues in the phenomenologica l tradition. C hapter 6, finally, was written at the request of C hristopher Lane, who was collecting a set of essays on the topic of psychoanalysis and race for Columbia U niversity Press. I understood, implicitly, (or thought I understood) that this was an invitation to write about psychoanalysis and mcism, and thus about the various forms of imagi nary and symbolic identification that structure our expc·rience of race, what we call " racial identity" or " racial practice." But the invitation itself spoke of •·ace and not mcism, and because I have long been interested in biology, and the history of biological thought (indeed Canguilhem was importan t to me, and Foucault's Tbe Bi11b of tbe Cliuic was a favorite book, no doubt because I had trained as a Romanticist, and was steeped in the early ni neteenth century, which saw the rise of biological sciences and the very concept of " life" in its modern form), I decided to try to address the relationship between psychoanalysis and "race" as a concept that claims to have some biological or genetic content. Cultural studies, of course, had long argued- persuasively, in my view-that science always operates within a discursive horizon, and is decisively shaped by concepts and categories that do not have a purely empirical basis, but belong to larger conceptual, discursive, and institutional regimes. And yet, when I think about the attacks on Darwin that are launched by religious fundamentalists in the United States, and I consider the importance of current genetic research, and medical advances, I find it impossible to say with tl1e haughty confidence of some cultural theorists

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that 11 race," or "the body," or usex," or indeed Hperception,n can be en-

tirely detached from all consideration of biological knowledge, even if that knowledge is, as I believe, a product of culture that will inevitably be shaped in many ways by forces that are not strictly "scientific" (in the sense that scientists would understand that term). In fact, it seemed to me that cultural critics themselves had become all too comfortable with their own appeal to "discursive constmction," as if tbnt regime of truth, tbat pious certainty, could serve as a magic wand, capable of banishing all the stupidities and blindnesses of otbcr thinkers, while leaving cultural tlleorists blind to tl1e mechanical operation of their own dogma, in which there could be no reference to "sex," no reference to " the body," no reference to "race" as a reality that might escape tl1e reach of language. O f course, as Judith Butler has relentlessly reminded us, any utlk abo11t race, or the body, will always involve some kind of discursive organization, which itself requires vigilant attention. But one should not forget that tl1is assertion, that "all knowledge is discursive," is itself prey to the same observation, and we should therefore ask what may be occluded or banished from thought by this insistent reminder, this universal truth of discursive constmction, which covers all knowledge and all thinking, no matter what the field of investigation may be. In response to this invitation to write on " race," then, I decided not to speak about racism, which I suspected many other contributors would address, and chose instead to think-almost in the manner of a thought experiment-what psychoanalysis might have to say about the idea of " race" as a biological fact. In other words, setting aside for a moment the ob,ious and compelling critiques that had been launched against the use of " race" as a biological category-critiques that I thought had been well-circulated and successful-and knowing that one could always rightly develop a critique of any scientific discourse, as Foucault himself did on several occasions, I decided to ask what psychoanalysis might have to say about "race," assuming that something like race is indeed a "rea lity" of a biological kind, namely, a form of human diversity that has affected our evolutionaty history, just as it did the history of otl1er animals. A critique of the anthropologica l me of race, or of the concepntal categories that were generated as an OTL<WC"J" to the reality of racial difference, would always be possible and necessary, but assun1ing for a moment that there is some truth to the the01y of evolution, and that human beings are not exempt from evolution, what would psychoanalysis have to say about this "rea lit)~' of the body? My answer was that human physiological

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diversity could not be understood in quite the same way that animal diversity is imagined, because humans organize themselves, group together, migrate and exchange, intermarry and reproduce, according to mechanisms and structures that are partly cultural. T his is quite obvious, but it seemed to me that evolutionary theory, insofar as I understood it, had not really addressed this fact. Thus, n·om the standpoint of cultural studies, theory seemed to have avoided the "reality" of race, while from the standpoint of biological knowledge, science had neglected to consider the impact of culture on the body. Psychoana lysis, strangely enough, seemed to me to be the obvious arena for a philosophical reflection on the history of the human body, in which the shortcomings of both biological and cultural theories would become more evident. A simi lar argument could be made about "sexual difference," and I had in fuct attempted such an argument in a previous book, Vital Sigm, whose title was explicitly intended to mark this conjunction of the "vital" order and the "signifier"- two realms that were too often separated from one another. "Race," however, as readers wi ll see, does not have the same status as "sexual difference," and the evolutionary perspective that I tried to maintain in this chapter, this thought experiment, remains fairly strong and radica lly distinguishes "race" from what Lacanians mean by "sexual difference." But tl1e larger point, n·mn the perspective of th is book as a whole, is that this chapter tries to dislodge some of the pieties of contemporary academic discourse and seeks to bring into contact areas of thought that are too often separated from one another-literature and philosophy, structuralism and history, Den·ida and Lacan, and so on. These "prohibited" relations, these "unthinkable" neighbors, are brought into proximity here, not to dissolve all differences but, on the contrary, to initiate a dearer understanding of the distinct contribution of each tradition, each "method" or "discourse" or form of knowledge. Each chapter can, in some sense, be read as an investigation of the "limits of language," in that I wanted to show how the dominant reading of Lacan, as a thinker of the symbol ic order, mistakenly reduces his work to a thought of notbiug but the symbolic order, which is obviously a very different thing. As a thinker of the symbolic order, Lacan brought to light many aspects of human existence that are irreducible to language. In C hapter ; , this appears as the limit to 1·emembc-riug, which is one of the first formations in Lacan of the concept of the real. In C hapter 1, it appears as the limit of the real itself, understood not as a preli nguistic reality but as

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an effect of the signifier itself. In Chapter 2 , the " limit of language" appears in the figure of Antigone, in a least two respects: fi rst, because she is presented by Lacan in terms of her appe.nmnce, her manifostntion, the socalled "beauty" of Antigone (I'eclat d'Antigone), a sort of "shining" that not on ly recalls Heidegger but introduces a profound meditation on the analytic of the beautiful in Kant's Tbh·d Ct·itique and gives rise to one of the fi rst incarnations of the concept of the "gaze," which reorgan izes the familiar account of the "imaginary" in Lacan; and second, because Antigone's ethical position, according to Lacan, can only be understood in connection with a refinement of our familiar understanding of the " law" in Lacan, since, as Lacan himsel f says, she confronts us with "something that is, in effect, of the order of law, but which does not get inscribed in any signifying chain." This is where Lacan breaks with the Hegelian interpretation. And here too, we are dealing with the limit of language, and its consequences for eth ics. In Chapter 3, this limit takes off from the remarks on jouissance offered in the discussion of Antigone and develops the question of affect more directly, together with a distinction between "affect" and "emotion," which Lacan's work might help us to pursue in a more precise and useful way. Chapter 4 approaches the limit of language in narcissism itself, insofar as the "time" of narcissism, and the very structure of the temporality of the subject, necessarily refers us to something that is not inscribed in history, an absolute past that organizes narrative but cannot be reduced to the narratives that seek to describe it. The tension between "genesis" and "stmcture" that runs throughout the book is at is highest point here, but despite the philosophical character of this question, it was expressed more precisely though Ovid than through Derrida, who taught me to be aware of tl1e issue. And fi nally, in Chapter 6, the limit of language is encountered, in a very different way, through tl1e problem of the body. From my earliest days as a student, I have been impressed and fascinated by the excruciating complexity of literary texts. And when I eventually began to read philosophy in a serious way-partly because poet1y was simply too difficult, impossible to spea k about, really- ! found myself struck by tl1e strange relation between philosophy and poetry. On the one hand, philosophers are notoriously clumsy and incompetent when they read poems, so much so that one should ad•ise philosophers to keep altogether silent on such matters. Recent accounts of Antigone, grounded in the interpretations of Hegel and Lacan, have been stunningly ignorant about the literary dimension of Sophocles' text, so much so tl1at can one

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hardly imagine one is dealing with a tragedy. As with early "deconstructive" readings of literary texts, one can only be shocked at how quickly the literary work disappears-a matter to which Den·ida himself was profoundly sensitive. Readings that make literary work into evidence of the "Foucauldian construction of early modern subjectivity," while often extremely illuminating as intellectual history, can only make a literary scholar cringe. Yet I would not have learned to read literary texts without philosophy. I would not have learned to pause and unfold the philosophical consequences of litera1y works without the guidance of Heidegger, Den·ida, and other philosophers. The same is true of Lacan: he is not a philosopher, and I have written many times about the erasure of psychoanalysis that takes place whenever Lacan's work is translated into the linguistic theory of Saussure or the philosophical account of intersubjectivity that one finds in Kojeve. Psychoa nalysis is not philosophy, and yet its significance, as Lacan always insisted, cannot be grasped from within psychoanalysis alone but requires philosophical elaboration, so that, eventually, the critique of philosophy that one finds in psychoanalysis can eventually emerge with greater force. These neighbors stand in need of one another, precisely in order that their differences can emerge. I have tried to initiate this process in the chapters that follow. I would like to thank The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on \Vomen at Brown University, which provided fellowship support during the time when C hapters 2 and 6 were drafted. I am grateful to E lizabeth \Veed for her support, for cultivating an exceptional intellectual space at the Pembroke Center, and for encouraging me to speak in my own voice. I would also like to thank the Institute for Adva nced Study for support during the time when Chapters 3 and 5 were completed. Joan Scott not only gave me exceptional guidance and support during my time in Princeton, but provided an unmatched example of the strength and spiritedness that are necessary for intellectual sun,iva l, and she has generously continued to support my work. I am also grateful to Bobby Paul of Emory University, who in the face of many demands has generously supported my work and helped me to give my interest in psychoanalysis a broader footing. I am deeply indebted to Charles Scott of Vanderbi lt University for his exceptional teach ing, for introducing me to Continental philosophy and making its questions real, and for taking me to the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Perugia, Italy, where my educational path was irrevocably altered. One could not hope for a better and more generous teacher.

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Earlier versions of some of this work appeared in the following places. I wish to thank the following publishers for granting permission to reprint. Humanities Press International and Resennh in Pbenomenolog;• for "Vital Signs: T he Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis," Resem·cb in Pbeuo11Jenology 23 (1993): 22- 72. Oxford Un iversity Press, for permission to reprint "The Intimate AJterity of the Real," Post:modem Culwre, vol. 6, no. 3 (J\IIay 1996). Joan Copjec and the State U niversity of New York at Buffalo, "Of Love and Beauty in Lacan's A11tigone," Umbr(a), no. 1 (Fa ll 1999): 63- 80. T he State U niversity of New York Press, for "Affect, Emotion, and the Work of Mourning," from Affict iu tbe Work ofTemrt Bmmnn, ed. Kelly O liver and Shannon Lundeen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 57- 77. T he Johns Hopkins University Press, for "Telling Thies of Love: Philosophy, Literature, Psychoanalysis," Diacritics (Spring 2ooo): 89- 105. Columbia University Press, for "Human Diversity and the Sexual Relation," Tbe P>)'Cbommly>'is of Race, ed. Ch ristopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 4 1-64.

LACAN AND THE L I MITS OF L ANGUAGE

CHAPTER I

The Intimate Alterity of the Real

Many readers of Lacan have asked the question: "Is everything really a 'discursive construction,' a product of the symbolic order, and if not, how can we speak of an 'outside' without returni ng to a naive realism?" This question is especially important for the concept of the "real," and more broadly speaking, it is one of the most important issues in contemporary intellectual lite. It might even be said that one's response to this single issue is enough to define one's theoretical orientation today. A map of postmodernism could in fact be drawn on the basis of the answers that are given to this question. It would have three major areas: in the first, we find an emphasis on the "symbolic order" and certain theories of "social construction"; in t he second, we find a reaction against upostmode rnismH and a return to "positive" and "empiricaln investigation, together with a return to biological, genetic, and endocrinologica l accounts of consciousness, behavior, and sexua liry; in the third, we find an effort to think tb1·ougb the " linguistic turn"-not to react against the formative power of representation, but rather to think its limit. This is where I believe the most interesting contemporary work is being done, and this is a problem held in common by Foucau lt, Lacan, and Derrida, though they do not elaborate the issue in the same way. There are many ways to approach the question, as it concerns Lacan, and I will therefore try to touch very briefly on a whole range of directions in which the question might take us. I wi ll loosely organize the discussion under three headings: "Inside/O utside," "The Limits of Formalization," and "Two Versions of the Real 0 udi th Butler and S lavoj Z izek)."

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Inside/Outside First, concerning the idea that the real is "outside" the symbolic. JacquesAiain Miller developed the term exti111ite from Lacan, suggesting that the real is not exactly "outside," but is a kind of "excluded interior," or an "intimate exterior."' In Scmi11ar VII, for example, in the chapter "On the J\lloral Law," Lacan says of the " thing" : "dns Ding is at the cen ter only in the sense that it is excluded" (SVII, 7 1). And aga in, in the chapter "The Object and the Thing," he speaks of what is "excluded in the interior" (SVII, I OI), noting that this exclusion presents us with a "gap" in the symbolic order-something that escapes the law- "a gap once again at the level of das Dit~g," which indicates that we can " no longer rely on the Father's guarantee" (SVII, 100). However much one may stress the notorious "law of tl1e father" in Lacan, it is clear that the symbolic order is not the whole story, and that the relation between the symbolic and the real (or between language and das Dit~g) involves a certain fa ilure of the law. \101Y rtfter Lrtcan, she argues-against the prevai ling view at that timethat Lacan's theory of subject formation is not an isolated, structuralist, and therefore ahistorica l theory (and structuralism was never ahistorical in this way), but is also a theory of histmy, and that, for Lacan, the contemporary experience of the ego is part of a broader theoretical and institutional development dating rough ly from the seventeenth centu1y , t he scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment- what Jacques-Alain Miller, in the epigraph to Brennan's book, calls "the 'modern ego,' that is to say, the paranoic subject of scientific civilization . .. at the service of free enterprise." Her argument thus sets the analysis of Lacan in a broader theoretical and institutional horizon: she views the enti re development of psychoanalysis as an emerging critique of the larger historical movement in which proper or normal subjectivity comes to be defined in terms of its capacity for individual, autonomous, sel f-conscious agency; and she argues that this model in turn must be understood against the background of scientific and economic rationality after the Renaissance. Bren nan thereby opens important lines of communication between Lacan and other thinkers, where an oppositional reception had quite mistakenly separated Lacanian psychoanalysis from other historical, economic, and philosophical

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modes of thought (purportedly " historical" thinkers). In this way, Brennan forged several large and sweeping alliances between Lacan and other thinkers-particularly Marx, Heidegger, and feminist theorists-who in different ways had launched a similar critique of the "subject" of modernity, understood as an autonomous, productive subject of representation constructed on a masculine model of scientific rationality. That this model was a fantasy and did not pro,~de an accurate account of our social and psychic life-that it was part of what she called " the ego's era," which concea led the primordially intersubjective dimension of our affective experience and obliged the outcast, the disenti·anchised, and the unrecognized to bear the burden of hostility, aggression, or self-doubt that "proper" subjects could not tolerate within themselves- all this is part of the argumen t of History lifter Lllcrm, which claims that the modern ego could not have arisen without the institutional support of capital, class struggle, and private property. vVithout entering into the details of her argument, let us simply say here that she understands very well the profoundly intersubjective and even socioeconomic foundation of human affectivity, the contemporary forms of which she li nks, in Hi. a foundation which is conceived in non-subjective. te rm s .'~

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Brennan refers to Spinoza here and to a certain sort of naturalism, which she calls "matter" and "flesh." The terms are not entirely worked out in this book, as she herself points out, but the thrust of the argument is to explore an alternative to what she sees (perhaps unfuirly) as deficient in Den·ida, Foucault, and other proponents of the " linguistic turn." Remarkably, and no doubt because of her immersion in Freud, she does not join the ranks of those who confuse Lacan with a purely "linguistic" theory (whatever that might be). Rather, she sees Lacan and Freud as offering a way to thin k the limit of representation: Derrida's position, like Fo ut-ault's, stops short after uncovering the. basis of the subject's illusions about itself. It doe-s not go o n to postulate. an alternative

source of meaning. I will challenge this by postubting a three-stage rather than a two-stage process. That is to say, in the (Derridean) two-stage. process, the. foundational present subje.c t of meaning is composed of a play of diffe-rence in which there is no meaning o r inhe re nt conation (a te m 1 she takes from Spinoza). .. . In the three-step proce.ss, whi·ies d'a111or11'? O r are we only telling tales when we tell tales of love? Is the narrative therefore a fiction, a myth, a web of words designed, not simply to describe or document, but rather to contain and make more tolerable a narcissistic wound that accompanies the subject through all the va rious historical formations that mark its symbolic life?' Can we put narcissism on the calendar, as we would at le.1st seem to be able to do with phi losophy and literature, or is narcissism rather-along with psychoanalysis itself-the kind of wate1y event or possibility that haunts the time of the narrative at every stage of its development? In this view, the trauma of narcissism cannot be rega rded as a historical event, an event in the histo1y of thought or literature, with a beginning, a middle, and perhaps an end. Though capable of various transformations, of being cast in various versions or metamorphoses-with Ovid and Plotinus for example-narcissism itself would not have a historical birth or dea th. Instead, the event and the disaster of narcissism would repeat compulsively, like an original trauma that eve1y narrative and every philosophy would bear within themselves, in a more or less '~sible way. The symbolic and cognitive presentation of this trauma-the philosophical and linguistic forms that appear to master and represent it (including K.risteva's historical rendering)-are certainly open to remarkable variation, but narcissism itself is not reducible to the images and words that offer to contain it. In this view, narcissism is not so much a ((new insanity" as the insanity o f a

trauma that can only repeat itself. Plotinus would therefore not be (the father) at the origin (of a new insanity), but would only rework and transform the insanity of a more ancient Platonism that he can not overcome or surpass-as if, true to the name of"neo-Piatonism," he were telling a tale that was passed to him from his ancestors, from those who taught him to speak, to take up their story, a story that he repeats, but also figures as his own, through a language that makes it new. In Ovid, likewise, the novitnsque that is repeated in Kt·isteva's title "Narcissus: A New Insanity" can no longer mean " new" in a historical sense, but rather is something that repeats itself anew with every generation. This would indeed be the "other" sto1y told behind the narrative that we apparently find in Tnles of Lo-ve: for as Kristeva in fact notes, the entire drama of shadow, sight, and reflection

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in P lotinus is constructed with "Platonic instruments" (TL, 108). The "new" insanity is thus, at bottom, the transformatio n, and even the repetitio n, of a difficulty that was not invented ex nihi lo by Plotinus o r Ovid, but was rather inherited from an earlier time. Thus, contraty to fi rst appearances, na rcissism itself is not a histo rical p hen omeno n-the inventio n o f a particula r moment, o r the contingent product o f a particula r philosophical o r literary outlook-but rather an event tl1at compulsively repeats itself as it passes from generation to generation. For Ovid, too, it is transparently clear that the sto ry o f Narcissus is already very old, its precise unfolding being closely tied to a series of similar stories. Kristeva herself explicitly points this out. "Much emphasis," she writes, " has been placed o n the morbid, narcotic, chthonian meaning o f this legend," the "subterranean torpo r" that " links the fable to the vegetative intoxication of Dionysus" (TL, 105). In fact, just as "Narcissus dies after he has seen himself," so also "Pentheus dies for having seen the mysteries of Dionysus" (ibid.). In a parenthesis, Kristeva n otes that the painter Poussin wi ll later recall this connectio n "in his Bit·tb of Bnccbus, which pairs the two myths and the two he roes" (ibid.). Ovid's Na rcissus is the refore not the first to see what he should not and to be punished for a kind of idolatry, a fascinated vision tl1at sees what is not really there-an image that is neither ano ther no r h imself, but an illusion or mystery that blinds him, cutting him off from the o ther and finally bringing about his death. These details about Dionysus a nd Poussin a re not simply ancillary informatio n, the sort of casual historical references that are supposed to characterize (the genre o f) scho larly kn owledge, a layering o f incidental facts and info rmatio n which have no real bearing o n the philosophical argument o f the text. On the contrary, they register the difficulty of the historical localization that Kristeva at first seems to have in mind. The story was the refore not invented by Ovid, and its historical o rigin cannot be so quickly secured. As Bla nchot points o ut in Tbe 1Vtiting of tbe Di>'llster and as Kristeva herself acknowledges, but without pursuing its consequences, there is already by the time o f Ovid a well-established tradition of fables around Narcissus, in relation to wh ich Ovid is in fact a notorious innovato r and a quite self-conscious revisionist. As always in the Metmuotpboscs, the story being told is already an ancient one, and O vid (like the G reek tragedians) is a latecomer, a commentato r and a receiver, whose task is to hear and understan d a new what has already been said in a mythological past. "Mythologists do no t fail to indicate," Blanchot writes, "that Ovid-an intelligent, civilized poet, upo n whose version of the myth

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less easy to grasp than one might think, and it is not clear that this time will be datable in the way that one might date the signing of a treaty, a scientific discovery, or some other "historical" event. Nor is this difficulty restricted to the tale that Ovid tells about Narcissus. On the contrary, it extends to narcissism itself, for the "event'' of narcissism-if one can speak of an "event" of narcissism, when it is really a question of something that never occurs, and at the same time never passes away, something that is impossible, a self-apprehension of the ego that is not a self-apprehension, a "splitting" that brings death at the very moment it brings the subject into being-already introduces a break with historical time and its sequence of localizable occurrences. T hus, while we have suggested that, for Kristeva, a provisional line might be drawn between philosophy and literature, on the one hand (insofar as their histories can be written), and psych oanalysis, on the other hand (in its watery omnipresence), the historical datability of philosophy and literature is no longer so clearly secured. At the same time, however, this is not to say that narcissism simply has no histOJy, for, as Kristeva observes, the "instruments" inherited from Plato are "dramatized, humanized, and eroticized by Narcissus," in a transformation that can be marked, only to be transformed or translated again, to "become with Plotinus logicnl elements of the elaboration, beyond narcissistic madness, of that \Vestern consciousness of self" (TL, 108, my emphasis). Nevertheless, if narcissism repeats itself compulsively, like a destiny or fate that every narrative and every philosophy would bear within it in a more or less visible way, this means that we cannot confuse the symbolic and imaginary presentation of this trauma with the enigmatic. structure that essentially comprises it. And if narcissism points us toward this constitutive "event," the thinking that aims at narcissism itself would have to consist, not so much in the documentary narrative that Kt·isteva appears to present, but in a task of thinking, whose effort would be to remember- to repeat, remember, and work through- a trauma that has always already claimed it in advance. It would therefore be a mistake to believe that we are concerned simply with the invention of a new world, casting off (or doubting) everything that has gone before and starting from a new ground of certainty; indeed, given these temporal difficulties and the fact that the true stmcture of the trauma would not consist in a localized ch ronological "event" that one might (secondarily) remember or forget, one can only conclude that the trauma itself is iu the memo1y, in the structure of remembering and repeating, and nowhere else. As Plotinus says, explaini ng the origin of his own "new" invention, "the reunification of

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I I

J

the soul within the ever-present unity of intellect": "Human souls rush down here because they have gazed at their images as in the mirror of Dionysus" (TL, 107)-a passage Kristeva marks as "another mythical reference ... in Plotinus." T he "new" insanity of Plotinus is thus not to be confined to a historica l moment, but is itself the memo1y, the echo, of a Dionysian myth, and Kristeva herself repeatedly stresses these "reflections" of archaic and mythical doctrine within Plotinian thought. Thus, commenting on the text of Plotinus, she writes: "Let us recall that, according to one version of the myth, Dionysus as a child allows himself to be seduced by Hera by means of a mirror, before undergoing the ordeal of the T itans, who cut him up into pieces that are then put together again by Athena and Zeus" (TL, 107).

Of Narcissi.•m itself Is there, then, a history of narcissism, with an origin in Plotinus or Ovid, and an end or culmination in modernity? Or is it rather a matter of tell ing tales, when we speak of the formation of the subject? And if tbe literary and pbilo.ropbical exposition ofnarciHinu in fact reveals a structure that cannot be historically confined to a particular moment, what would this mean for nm·cissism il>'e/f, as it is understood, not in literature or philosophy, but in the domain (and genre) of psychoa nalysis-if one can pretend to suppose, after what we have just seen, that this psychoanalytic domain is "no longer" the domain of philosophy or indeed of literature, but a distinct and strictly separable genre? In order to do justice to this question, we would have to ask not on ly about Kristeva's text, and the peculiar tension that marks it-narrating the history of subjectivity while taking back a certain number of formulations, as we have tried to show, with observations that acknowledge an archaic repetition. \Ve would also have to ask about narcissism itself, about the story or histo1y of narcissism as it appe.1rs in certain versions of psychoanalysis, where we are told about the moment of the " mirror stage," which replaces a moment of bodily incoherence with a new unity, only to be again transformed (or metamorphosed) by the order of language. Does Freud himself (like Lacan, who only repeats what Freud has shown us) not speak of a "primary narcissism" and of its later transformation, tl1rough the Oedipal conflict, into something li ke "secondary narcissism"? Does he not also spe.1k of a period bejo1·e narcissism, before the Lacanian " mirror

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stage," in which the subject's body is not yet coherent-a stage before the constitution of the body? The essay "On Narcissism" is perfectly clear on this point: "vVe are bound to suppose,'' Freud writes, " that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. The auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the ve1y first; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism- a new psychical action- in order to bring about narcissism" (SE, 14:77). Narcissism is thus not present at the beginning. A new psychical action is necessary to bring about narcissism. That "new psychical action'' is, of course, the " mirror stage," the "moment" (but in what kind of time?) when the child passes from bodi ly fragmentation to imaginary completeness, the inaugural moment in which the body is "given" by being transformed from a disorganized assemblage of bodily w nes, each of which is capable of a certain pleasure, which Freud calls autoerotic, to another organization, in which the pleasure of the ego will become possible. Thus, as Lacan says, "we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that psychoanalysis gives to that term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image" (E, 2). As we know, this initial "form" (with its captivating beauty, as the cognate formosa suggests) of the imaginary ego will later be subjected to yet another transformation with the advent of language, which will allow the subject to identify with signifiers- a possibility harbored by the name, which will cany the subject beyond the realm of the image, toward something resembling the "other"-an alterity that, whi le it at first falls prey to tlte image (appearing only as an alter ego), can finally emerge as an "other" for the "subject." Lacan acknowledges tlus later transformation when he writes that the mirror stage reveals to us tlte I "in its primordial form, before it is objectified in the dia lectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject" (E, 2). In psychoanalysis, too, tltere would thus be a history of narcissism- if not the history it acquires in Kristeva's text, then the series of stages that narcissism itself undergoes, according to psychoanalysis. And yet, here too the matter is not so clear. Does Lacan not famously acknowledge that the moment of the mirror stage amounts to "the assumption of . . . an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development" (E, 4)? In this view, the fundamental feature of narcissism would lie in its constitlltivc character, in the fact that narcissism entails an initial formation of the ego-a first, traumatic rupture witlt natural existence--whose later redeployments and

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translations will never overcome that constitutive foundation. In "On Narcissism," Freud likewise observes that the o rigin of the ego has a formative and stmctural character that no revision and no retroactive reworking wi ll be able to forget (no t on ly because of its constitutive character, but also because, as we h ave suggested, the inaugura l "event" of narcissism canno t, properly s peaking, be remembered). Narcissism wi ll therefore never pass away, like a n event that acquires a date o r a moment that eventually belongs to the past . Speaking o f the projective identificatio n that su pposedly marks a stage in the "maturation" o f the su bject- what Lacan speaks of as the displacement of the first, bodily ego into a transitive identification with the a lter ego- Freud writes that the subject now projects into the future another possible identity, an "ideal ego" toward which the present ego can aim. This will be a new formation in which the initial selfabsorption o f the c hild is supposed ly transcended, cast o ff and le ft behind, as a moment that now belongs to the past. And yet, no soone r has Freud deposited this notion into h is text than he finds it necessary to explain that the p rocess is not so linear: This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the. actual ego. T he subject's narcissism makes its appe.arance. displaced onto this ne.w ideal ego, which, like. the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of everything that is of value. [Diesem ldudirb gilt mm die Se/bstliebr, welcbr in der Kimlheit daswirklicbe lch geno~)·. Der Narzissmu.s erscbeint miftlieses 11rtte ideale feb i.JeJ)·hoben,

welcbe.r sirb wie dfls injimtile im Besit:, fllin· wert'vollm Vo/lko1Jtflft1fbritm beftudet).

(SE, '4'94)

Thus, contrary to first appearances, "primal" o r "primary na rcissism" is not a stage that is eventually given up. Indeed, as Freud adds in his laconic way, depositing the most obscure theoretical difficulties into a prose that is altogether misleading in its urbanity: "As always where the libido is concerned, man has he re again shown himself incapable of g iving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed " (ibid .). vVe canno t stop here, however, for the matter is still more complicated: it is insufficient to say that the primordial narcissism of the child ("the self-love which was e njoyed in c hildhood by the actual ego") remains present in its future transformatio n, in the form of the idea l ego, which now attracts the self-love of the su bject, for the peculiar fact is that the o rigin itself, the very moment of the emergence o f na rcissism (the "satisfaction he had o nce enjoyed "), does not appea r to lie at the begi nning, but would seem to emerge for the first time

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qu/y tht·ougb tbi,· "Inte-r" fonu. This is indeed the sense of Freud's meticulous phrasing, in which " narcissism mnkes it>· appemmzce di>plnced" (my emphasis). It is thus as if narcissism had to take place twice-through a certain repetition-in order to appear at all. Narcissism itself-not merely a later form or stage of narcissism, but the very thing itself: Dc1· Nm'Zissmuswould "fi rst'' show up and make its entrance (encbeint) only on the basis of this "new" form ("auf dieses neue ideale Ich vershoben"). \Vhat Freud is saying here is that it is only on the basis of the " idea l ego" that the psychic economy is able (or we might say "condemned"), nostalgically, to produce for itself a backward glance, a new temporal arrangement, that will allow this ego to speak to itself of a "former time," to represent for itself a mythical past that the childish ego once (as in "once upon a time") enjoyed. This is what it means, and this is the peculiar structure under consideration, when Freud writes that narcissism is ji1~t bqm (or "makes its appearance") the moment the ideal ego "now" receives {the autoaffection of) a self-love which is co11stmed as the recapturing of a " lost enjoyment," a mythical satisfaction that is now attributed to an archaic time called "childhood" "Diesem Idealich gi lt nun die Selbstliebe, welche in der Kindheit das wirkliche Ich genoss." In fact, as the passage continues, the two moments of the ego we have just articulated in their peculiar tempora lity are further elaborated, and we find yet another moment, so that Freud's account would complete the same three moments already isolated by Lacan-the ego in its primordial form, the ego in its relation to the alter ego (identification with the other), and what Lacan calls the "restoration" (another word whose temporal dimension would lead us into difficulties) of the "subject" in the dimension of the "universal." Precisely these moments appear in the Freudian text, in the very passage we have just cited, where Freud speaks (as we have seen) of the "ego"-what he calls tlte "actual ego," dns itself were tbe conrequence and by-prod/let of 1liii'Cis.rism, less a rational tool of communication between already existing "subjects" than a fantastic and desperate invention spewed forth by the human animal in an attempt to fashion an exit, or at least to heal the wound, of the narcissism that brought him into being. Again, this ch ronologica l mapping of stages is clearly irreducible to any historical sequence, for Freud notes that even with the ego ideal, the child is not willing to forgo the narcissistic pe.rfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of childhood and by the awake.ning of his own critical judgment> so that he c11n longern!f.flin that perfection,

he seeks to recove1· it in the new form of an ego ideal. What be prlljerts before him as his ideal is tbe mh.\'fitute fOr the lost 11li7YhYi.wu ofhis cbildhood, in which he was his own ideal. (SE, '4'94• my emphasis)

Infanti le narcissism is therefore not actually transcended by means of social identification: on the contrary, it is pl"ojected into the future, so that it can be "found again," recaptured and preserved. Freud thereby suggests that the very formation of "conscience," the awakening of "critical judgment" that comes with the incorporation of the admonitions of others (an internalization of the law) and leads us to give up our infantile demands, is at the same time a repetition of the narcissism it promised to transcend. At every stage, it seems, the transformation of narcissism is less a sequence of discrete historical stages than a process of repetition and reiteration, all of which is set in motion by the "originally" narcissistic constitution of the subject.

Sacrifice, Responsibilit)' We have tried to mark a tension in Kristeva's book, a peculiar vacillation between history and repetition, between the history that at least .<eel/IS to characterize ph ilosophy and literature in this text, and the watery omnipresence of psychoanalysis, that does not enter into history, but accompanies its entire unfolding. This tension is apparent in Kristeva's title, in the very word bi.rtoil·es, which shuttles between "story" and "h istory." But the

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difficulty has not been restricted to the tale Kt·isteva tells about Narcissus. On the contrary, it extends to narcissism itself, in the sense that the "event" of narcissism (if one can speak of an "event" when it is really a question of something that never occurs) gives rise to a "past'' that only emerges "later," as a lost origin-one that the subject, moreover, projects into the future, in order to "recover" and possess this time that never was. Like the moment of the glance that fixes Narcissus before the watety pool, so narcissism is also an event that is impossible, a self-apprehension of the ego that is not "self" -apprehension, but rather the figuring forth of an "identity" that is not the subject ("He did not know what he was seeing," O vid's narrator tells us portentously; line 4 30), an identity that brings petrification and death in the vety moment when it brings the ego into being- on ly to promise, by means of this lure, an escape, another way forward, the possibi lity of attaining one day an existence that will recapture an original plenitude, a past that never was, or never was until the promise cast it forth, in the form of this absolute past. The catastrophic character of the Ovidian story makes his version less sanguine, perhaps, than Kt·isteva's, or indeed than the tale told by psychoanalysis, which holds out the promise of an end to narcissism, or-if not an end-then a future for narcissism in which love is not altogether impossible. It is perhaps this promise that Den·ida is willing, for a moment, to read in the sacrifice of Isaac, a stoty that shows us an Abraham whose decision (if it can even be called a "decision," any more than the look of Narcissus can be said to be the act of a subject) to accept this absolute loss paradoxically gives rise to a future, a "sti ll-more-time," a possibility in which, despite (and because of) sacrifice and death, time ·remains: The instant in which the s-a.'Uality was nevertheless introduced by Breuer" (SXI, 157), who had begun to wonder about his preoccupation with this interesting patient: "Thereupon, the dear man, somewhat alarmed, good husband that he was, decided that things had gone quite far enough," and set off for a vacation in Italy with his wife-"in response to which, as you know, [Anna] 0. displayed the magnificent and dramatic manifestations of what, in scientific language, is called pse11do-cyesis or, more fami liarly, she blew up with what is called a nervous pregnancy" (SXI, 1 57). The question La can poses at this point concerns the transference. The symptom in th is case, tied to sexuality, is not one that brought the patient into analysis, but is produced in the relation to the analyst. But how, exactly, are we to understand this symptom, as it opens beyond biology onto tl1e relation to tl1e Other? One dung is clear: in the "Rome Discourse" (and elsewhere), Lacan had said that the symptom can be understood in terms of the symbolic order and resolved by means of symbolization, but now there is something beyond the symbolic, a factor that links the symptom to semality, which is not reducible to the happy days of chimney sweeping, when one remembered "right down to the dregs"; it is this factor, moreover, that disrupts the concept of tl1e transference. T he symptom is no longer understood as a signifier "written in the sand of the Aesh" (E, 69): "the nervous pregnancy is a symptom, and, according to the defi nition of the sign, something intended for someone. The signifier, being something quite different, represents a subject for another signifier" (SXI, 157). The symptom here is not something she brought with her into analysis: in different language, we might say that it is not her memory, not her reminiscence. Parallel to this transformation of the symptom (from signifier to sign), one finds a second shift, in keeping with the peculiar twist that has taken us from the symbolic. to the rea l. Following Freud, Lacan has stressed the voodoo of the "talking cure," the magical effects that detached the symptom from its place in organic. medicine, adding that since the symptom is symbolic, so also the operation of the talking cure is S)~nbolic. Lacan says, citing Tbe lnterpretatiou of 01'Ca11/s: " nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbol ic way, as one says, in effigy, in absentia" (SXI,

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so). But the symbolic order is "not the whole truth." And Freud says in "The Dynamics of Transference" that "when all is sa id and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigy (SE, I 2: Io8; La can cites this remark as well, SI, 38). Are we simply faced with a contradiction, or is it not rather that, as Russell G rigg says, "something beyond the signifier is at work in the transference," something Freud will elaborate as "transference-love,'' an ideutification that binds t he subject to some " thing," outside the network of signifiers?l1 Faced with this remarkable turn of events, Freud speaks to his colleague about the case. "Let us observe what Freud says to Breuer-Wbat! Tbc tnmsfcnuce is tbe spontaneity of tbe said Bcnba 's tmcom·ciotu. It's not yom~, 11ot your desire," Lacan writes, adding " I think Freud treats Breuer as a hysteric here" (SXI, I s8). Now, for Lacan, this is the begi nning of the end, the fi rst foothold of a movement that forgets the Freudian discovery, a movement that has its source in Freud himself. Freud exonerates Breuer, certain that this is really a manifestation of Bertha's desire, since after all it is ber symptom. \Ve must notice the distribution of responsibility here: Breuer's action, after all, was entirely philanthropic, and surely merits no guilt. "The curious thing is," Lacan observes, that Freud's response "does not make him feel less gui lty, but he certainly makes him feel less anxious" (a decisive opposition: less anxiety, but more gui lt). "This brings us to the question of what Freud's desire decided, in diverting the whole apprehension of the transference in a direction that has now reached its final term of absurdity" (SXI, I s8). Still later in Semi11ar XI, as it reaches its end, Lacan returns to this issue once more, claiming that Freud appea led to " a kind of rapid sleight of hand when he said-(lfter all, it is on~y tbe desire of tbe pmiem- this should reassure one's colleagues" (SXI, 2 54). But "why not consider Bertha's pregnancy rather, according to my formula 11/{lll'.r desire is tbe desin oftbe Otbet-,'' that is to say, recognizing that Bertha's S)~nptom was "the manifestation of Breuer's desire .. . that it was Breuer who had a desire for a child?" (SXI, I 58). It might be confirmed if we remembered that Breuer, on vacation with his wife, "lost no time in giving her a child"- a child who, at the very time Jones ("the imperturbable \\Ieishman") was writing this history, had just committed suicide, thereby demonstrating the profound and unnatural force of unconscious desire, and the indestructibi lity that preserves it from one generation to the next. We cannot stop here, with the platitude that would conclude " it is not her desire, but his. " Such a view would end up with a mere reversal, by

Tbe Place. ofilr/rmury in P