1
I
What Freud Has to Do with Aesthetics
My title does not mean that intend to tal about the application of the Freudian theor of the unconscious to the domain of aesthetis 1 will not be speaking about the psychoanalysis of art nor about the numerous and significant borrowings that historians and philosophers of art have made from partiular theses advaned by Freud or Lacan. I have no particular ompetene regard ing psyhoanalyti theory More importantly however, my interest lies in a different diretion. I am not interested in the application of Freudian concepts to the analysis and interpretation of liter ar texts or plastic wors of art. will instead as why the interpretation of these texts and wors 1
Thi text was originally preented in he form of o lecture, delvered at the "School for Phoanale in Buel i Januay 2000 on the nviation of Didier Cromphout.
What Freud Ha to Do wth Aesthetics
occupies such an impotant, strategic position in Freuds demonstration of the pertinence of analtic concepts and forms of interpretation. I hae in mind here not onl the books or articles that Freud specicall deoted to writers or artists to Leonardo da Vincis biograph, Michelangelos Moses, or jensen's Gdiva but also the references to litera texts and characters that requentl support his demonstrations such as the multiple references made in the Interetation of Dreams to both the glories of the national literay tradition such as Goethes Faust and contemporar works like Alphonse Daudets Sapho. The reersal of approach proposed here does not impl an intention to turn Freuds questions around against him in order to ask for example wh he is interested in Michelangelo's Moses or a specific note from Leonardos Notebook in paticular The members of the analtic profession hae alread explained to us the circumstances of the father of pschoanalsiss identiication with the guardian of the Tables of the Law or the import of his conusion between a kite and a vlture M 2
at Freud Has t D wth Asthtcs
goal is not to pschoanalze Freud and am not concerned with the wa in which the literary and artistic gures he chose t into the analtic romance of the Founder What interests me is the question of what these figures sere to proe and what strctures allow them to produce this proo. What these figures sere to proe at the most general leel is that there is meaning in what seems not to hae an meaning something enig matic in what seems selfeident a spark of thought in wat appears to be an anodne detail These gures are not the materials upon which analtic interpretation proes its abity to inter pret cltural formations The are testimony to the existence of a paicular relation between thought and nonthought a partiular wa that thought is present within sensible materialit meaning within the inSignificant and an inoluntary element within conscious thought n short, Dr Fred the interpreter of the anodne" facts abandoned b his positiist colleagues can use these examples in his demonstration because the are themseles tokens of a certain unconscious To 3
Wat Freud a< to Do with Aesthetics
put it another way: if it was possible for Freud to f ormulate ormulate the psychoanalytical theoy of the unconscious, it was because an unconscious mode of thought had already been identified otside of the clinical clinical domain as such and the domain of works of at and literature can be defined as the privileged ground where this "unconscios is at work My investigation wil thus bear upon the way Freudian theory is anchored anchored in this already existing existing configuration of unconscious unconscious thought in the idea of the reation betw een een thoght and nonthought that was formed and deeloped primarily in the field of what what is called aesthetics We wil therefore interpret Freud's aesthetic studies as marking the inscription of analytic thought thought within the horizon of aesthetic thought This project naturally presupposes that we come to terms with the notion of aesthetics itself. I do not consider aesthetics to be the name nam e of the science or discipline that deals with ar In my view it designates designates a mode of thought that develops with respect to things of ar ar and that is conceed c onceed 4
at Freud H to Do wth Aest hets
to show them to be things of thought More ndaentally aesthetics is a particuar particuar historica regime of thinking about art and an an idea of thought according to which which things of art are things things of thought It is well known that the use of the word aesthetics to designate thinking about ar is recent Its genealogy is generally referred to in Bagartens Aesthetica, published in 1750 and rtique ojJudgment ojJudgment.. But these landmarks Kants C rtique are equiocal For Baumgaren Baumgaren he term aesthetics in fact does not not designate the theor of ar but ar but ther the domain domain of sesibe knowedge the clear the clear but nonetheess "confused or indistinct knowledge that can be contrasted wi the clear and distinct know ledge ledge of ogic Kants position position in in this genealogy is equay problematic When he borows the ter "aesthetics f rom rom Baugaren as a nae for the the theor of forms of sensibiity Kant in fact rejects what ge it its meaning namely the idea of the sensible as a consed ineligible For Kant it is impossible to conceive of aesthetics as a theor of indistinct knowledge Indeed the Ctique of the Facul�y of udgment of udgment does not 5
What ud Ha ' to with wi th Aesthetics
recognize aesthetics as a theor; aesthetic only appears as an adjective and it designates a pe of judgment rather than a domain of objects. It i oy in the context of Romanticism and postKantian idealism through the ritings of Schelling the Schlegel Schlegel brother brothers, s, and Hegel th that at aaesth esthetic eticss comes to designate the thought of art even as the inappropriateness of the term is constantly remarked Only in this later context do we see an identi identific ficat ation ion beteen beteen the thought thought of art th the e thought thought effectuated by works of art and a certain certain idea of consed knoledge" occur under the name of aesthetics This new and paradoxical idea makes art the territor of a thought that is present outside itself and identical ith nonthought. It unites Baumgarten's denition of the sensible as consed" idea ith Kant's contrar definition of the sensible as heterogeneous to the idea Hence forth confused knowledge is no longer a lesser form of knoledge ut properly the thought of that
which does not thnk2 2
ics today one hears deplored the f act that aes thetics So f requently tod ination as a critique of the true des tina has been led as tra y f m its tru 6
What Freud la' to Do with Aesthetics
In other ords aesthetics" is not a new nae for the domain of art It is a specific conguration of this domain It is not the ne rbric under hich e can group hat formerly fell under the general concept of poetics. It marks a transformation of the regime of thinking about art. This ne regie provides the locus where a specific idea of thought is constituted My hypothesis in this book is that e Freudian thought of the unconscious is only possible on the basis of is regime of think ing about art and the idea of thought that is immanent to it Or if ou prefer Freudian thought despite the classicism of Freuds artistic rerences is only possible on the basis of the revolution that moves the doan of the a fm the reign of poetics to that of aesthetics. In order to develop and justi these proposi tions I ill attempt to show the link beteen a judgment of taste, as Kant had formulated it in a suar of Enlightenment tought But onl what exists can be ed asa. Since aesthetics never was the theory of taste the wish hat i might become it once again erel expresses the endess refrain of a "return to soe impossibe prerevolutionar paradise of liberal individualism 7
Wat Freud Has to Do with Aesthetics
certain number of privileged objects and odes of interpretation in Freudian theor and the changing status of these obects in the aesthetic configuration of thinking about art. Giving credit where credit is due, we will begin with the central poetic charactr in the elaboration of psycho analysis, Oedipus In The Interetaon of Dreams, Freud explains that there exists "legendar material whose universal dramatic power rests upon its conformity with e univer sal ta of infant pscholog. This material is the Oedipus legend and e eponymous drama by Sophocles.3 Freud thus hypothesizes that the Oedipal dramatic scheme is universal from a double point of view: as the development of universal - and universally repressed - infantile desires but also as exemplar form of revelation of a hidden secret The gradually intensied and 3
Sigmund reud, Te Interetation of Drems, n e Stndrd Edton of the Cmplete Pychologl Work ofgmund Freud tTans. and ed Jame trachey (London; Hogah 153]74), vol 4 p 261. Hereafr ted a Stndrd dton wth tite of ndidual work olume and page number
8
Wat Feud H<
to
Do with Aesthetics
skillf ull y dela yed re velation of O e d i p u s t he K n g is comparable, sa ys Freud to the work of ps ycho anal ysis. He thus cobines three tings within a single af f irmation of uni versalit y: a general tendenc of the human ps yce, a determinate f ictional material and an exemplar dramatic schema The question then becomes what allows Freud to af f rm this adequation and ake it the center of his demonstration? In other tes, what are we to make of the uni versal dramatic power of the Oedipal stor and the scheme of re velation emplo yed b y Sophocles The dif f icult experience of a playwright who attempted to exploit the success of this material will pro vide the example tat will allo us to approach this question
9
2
I
A
Defective Subject
In 1659 Corneille was commissioned to write a tragedy for the festival celebrating Carnival For the playwright who had been absent from the stage for seven years following the resonding failure of Peharte, it was the chance for a comeback He cold not afford another failure and only had two months to write his tragedy. The greatest chance at success he felt would be proVided by the definitive tragic subject. Since it had already een handled by illustrious models he would only have to translate" and adapt it for the French stage. He therefore chose to do an Oedius. But this golden subject quickly turned out to be a trap In order to have any chance at the success he was counting on, Coeille had to give up the idea of transposing Sophocles. The schema of revelation
11
A Defctive
Subject
actical pr im y el et pl m co s a w ilt gu 's s ip ed and O and needed to be r ew or ked. lous in cu ira m r o f ed ss pa d ha at wh at th e w kn I be in those ong-ago times would seem horri rious our age, and that the eloquent and cu ince description of the way the unhappy pr the pts out his eyes - and e spec acle of ipping bood f rom those same dead eyes dr th f e ol wh e th es pi cu oc ich wh ce a f do wn his on act in the incomparable origina versi ho w es di la e th of y ac ic de e h nd e f of d woul r o of on rti po l tif au be t os m e th se compo y sil ea d l wo t us sg di e os wh d an ce en adi pany m co ac o wh se tho by n t o na em nd co l entai s no part ay pl e lo ce sin at th lly na f d an , em th t it was ec bj su e th in s le ro no e ha ies lad d an lacking in the principal ornaments that e ordinariy win s the approbation of th public. 4
j
Pierr Cornc, Cuvres complte, d. Gorgs outon (ar; Glmrd BbHothqu d 1 P 1987). vo 3, pp. 18-19 12
A Defectve
Subject
CorneilJe's problems, as you will have noted did not stem from the theme of incest They derived from the way the theme is turned into a narrative from the schema of revelation and the theatrical physicality of the denoumnt. Three points made the simple transposition that had rst been envisaged impossible: the horror of Oedi puss dead eyes the absence of love interest and nally te abse of oracles which allow the audi ence to gess the anser to the riddle too easily and make the blindness of the solver of riddles nbelievable. The Sophoclean schema of the revelation is defectve in that it shos too clearly what should only be said and makes knon too soon hat should remain mysterios So Corneille had to fix these deciencies In order to spare the sensibility of the ladies he moved off-stage the moment When Oedipus goges out his eyes But he put Tir esias offstage as ell He suppressed the verbal confrontation so central for Sophocles beteen the one ho knos bt does not want to speak and tells the tth anway and the 3
A Defective Subject
one who wants to know but refuses to hear the words that reveal the trth he Corneille of hide-and replaced this alltooapparent seek that the guilty detectie plays ith e trth with a modern plot that is a plot involving a conict of passions and interests that creates inde cision about the identiy of the guil pary The love stor lacking in Sophocles' play was neces sar in order to roduce this confict and suspense. Corneille gave Oedipus a sister Dirc whom he deprived of the throne that was hers by right, and gave Dirc a lover Theseus Since Dirc thinks she is resonsible for the journey that cost her father his life and Theseus has doubts about his own birth (or at least he pretends to in order to protect the woman he loves) three interpreta tions of the oracle becoe possible and three characters could turn out to be guilty The love story preseres suspense and unceraty about the dnouement through careful handling of the distribution of knowledge Sixty years later another plawrght encountered he same problem and resolved i in much e same
A Defective Sul ect
way At te ag e of t en V ol r e chose e subject of Oedips to star t his car eer as a dr aatist But he did so on e basis of an even mor e direct c ticism
of Sophocles an that of Co ele denounci g he impr obabilities of the lot of Oed us the K in g. It is unbelievable that Oedipus does not know the cir cstances in which his pr edecessor Laios died It is equally unbelievable hat he does not under stand what Tir esias
to hi and that he
insults the an who he had br oug ht bef or e hi as a vener able pphet and calls hi a liar The conclusion dr awn by V ol e is cal: "It is a def ect in the subject people say and not one intr oduced by the author . As if it wer e not the author ' job to cor r ect his subject when it is def ective!5 V oltair e er ef or e cor r ected his subject by f inding another candidate f or Laios's mur der Philoctetes, f or mer ly an exosed child desper ately in love wit Jocasta,
who had disappear ed f r om Thebes at the time of the ur der and r e pr ecisely at the tie a g uil par ty is needed. 5
V oltair e,
l e tt r e s ur
in ( u vr s
Volaire Foundation, 200 voL A
p.
337
(Ox f or d: The
A Defective Subject
A defectve subject s thus how the classcal age the age of representaton saw the workngs of Sophoclean psychoanalyss Ths deficency we must emphasze agan s not due to the ncest story The dffcultes Cornelle and Voltare encountered n adaptng Sophocles provde o grst for an argument aganst the unversalty of the Oedpus complex What they do put nto doubt o the other hand, s the unversalty of Oedpal "psychoaalyss that s Sophocles' scenaro for the revelaton of the secret For Cornelle and Voltare ths scenaro establshed a defectve relaton between what s see and what s sad between what s sad and what s under stood. Too much s shown to e spectator. Ths excess moreover s not merely a queston of the dsgustng spectacle of the gouged-out eyes; t conces the mark of thought upon the body more generally Above all the scenaro allows too much to be understood. Contrary to what Freud says there s no proper suspense and skllul progresson n the unvelg of trth to both the hero and the spectator What then compromses 16
A Defectve ubject
this dramatic ratioality? There can be no do ubt: it is the sub ject, the character of Oedipus him self. t is the fury that compels him to want to kn ow at an y cost against al l and against himself, an d at the sa m e time not to understand the barely veiled words that offer hi m the trth he demands . Here lies the heart of the problem Oedipus, driven mad by his need for knowledge does not m erely upset the "delicacy of the ladies when he go uges out his eyes What he upsets in the end, is the order of the representative system that gives dramatic creation its rle Essentially two things are meant by the orde r of representation In the first place it is a cerain order of relations beween what can be sa id and hat can be seen The essence of speech in this order is to show. But speech shows within the bounds of a double restraint. On the on e hand the nction of visible ma nifestation re strains the power of speech Speech makes maife st senti men ' and wills rather than speaking on its ow, as the speech of Tiresias - like that of Sophocles or Aeschylus - does in an ocular or enigmatic ,
17
A fective Subject
mode O the othe and this fuctio estains the powe of the visible itself Speech istitutes a certai visibility: it makes manifest what is hidden i souls ecouts ad descies what is fa fom one's eyes But i so doing it estains the visible that it makes manifest unde its command It fobids the visible fom showig on it own fom showig the unspeakable the hoo of te gouged-out eyes In the second place te ode of epesetation is a certain ode of elations beween knowledge and actio. Dama says Aistotle is an aange ment of actions At the ase of dama ae chaac tes who pusue particula ends while acting i conditions of partial igoace which will be esolved in the couse of the action What this excludes is what costitutes the vey goud of the Oedipal pefomance, namely the pathos of kowledge the maiacal elentless detemination to kow what it would be bette not to know the fuo that pevents undestading the efusal to ecognize the trth i the fom in which it pesents itself the catastophe of usustaiable kowing
A Defective Subject
a knowing that obliges one to withdaw f om the wold of visibility Sophocles' tagedy is made f om this p at ho s. A leady A istotle no longe undestands it ad epesses it behind the theory of damatic action that makes knowing a esult of the ingenious machiery of e vesal ad ecognitio It is this p at ho s that in the classical age makes Oedipus a impossible heo unless adical coections ae made. Impossible ot because he kills his f athe and sleeps with is mothe, but because of the way that he leas about it because of the idetiy of opposites that he inca nates in this leanig the tagic idetity of knowig ad not knowing, of action u dertake and p at ho s undergoe.
3
I
The Aesthetc Revolution
It is thus a whole regime of thinking about poetry that rejects the Oedipal scenario We can put this the other way around the Oedipal scenario can only acquire a privileged status after the abolition of the representative regime of thinking about the arts, a regime that implies a certain idea of thought: thought as action imposing itself upon a passive matter. This is precisely what I have called the aesthetic revolution the end of an ordered set of relations between what can be seen and what can be said knowledge and action activity and passivity For Oedipus to be the hero of the psychoanalic revolution, then there must rst be a new Oedipus one who has nothing to do ith those imagined by Corneille and Voltaire Beyond French-style tragedy beyond even the Aistotelian rationalization of tragic action this
e Aesthetic Revolution
to restore the tragic thought of Sophoces. Hlderin Hegel, and Nietzsche were among those who put f orh is new Oedipus and the new idea of traged y that corresponds
new Oedipus
to him.
Two traits characterize this new Oedipus and
make him the her of a "new idea of ought that claims to revive the idea of thought attested to by Greek tragedy Oedipus is proof of a cerain existentia savagery of thought a definition of knowing not as the subjective act of grasping an objective ideaiy but as the affection passion or even sickness of a living being. The signification of the Oedipa story according to 1e Bih of Tgedy is that knowedge in ief is a crime against nature.6 Oedipus and tragedy generay atest to the fact that in the matter of thought there is aays a question of sickness medicine, and their paradoxical uni. This philosophical restaging of the tragic equivalence between e Raymond Geus ( Frieric N ietzhe, Te Birh of Cam bridge U ni verity Pres, and Ronal Speir 1999), pp. 47-.
Te esthetic Revoluton
knowing and suering (the pathei mathos of Aeschyus or Sophoces) presupposes a gathering te trio of those who are sick with knowing: Oedipus and Hamlet, together in e Intereta tion of Dreams as they were in Hege's Lectures n Aesthetics, and Faust who is there as wel. The ivention of psychoanaysis occurs at the point where phiosophy and medicine put eac other nto question by making thought a matter of sickness and sickness a matter of thought But this soidariy between the things of thought and the things of sickness is itsef in soidari with the ne regime of thinking about the produtions of ar If Oedipus is an exempary er it is because his fictiona figure emblematzes te properies given to the productions of art by the aesthetic revoution. Oedipus is he who knows and does not know who is absolutey active and absoutely passive Such an identity of ontraries is precisely how the aesthetic revoution denes what is proper to ar. At first sight t eems ony to set an absoute capaciy for creation n opposition to the norms of the representative 23
Te Aesthetic Relution
regime. The work now stands under its own law of production and is its own proof But at the same time this unconditional creativity is identi ed with an absolute passivity Kant's conception of genius summarizes this dualit The genius is the active power of nature who sets his own creative power against any model or norm The genius, we might say becomes a norm for hiself But at the same time he is the one who does not know what he does and is incapale of accounting for his own activity This identit beteen knowing and not knowing beeen activity and passivity is the ve fact of art in the aesthetic regime; it radicalizes what Baumgarten called "confused clarity into an identit of contraries In this sense the aesthetic revolution had already begun in te eighteenth centu when Vico undertook to establish in his New Science, the gure of what he called the true Hoer in opposition to Aristotle and the entire representative tradition. It is worth recalling the context in order to clar i the filiation that interests us Vicos prima target is not the theo of art 24
Te A ethetic Revolution
but the old theologicopoetic business about the wisom of the Egyptians This question of whether hieroglyphic language was a code in which religiOUS wisdom forbidden to the uninitiated has been deposited an likewise whether ancient poetic fables were the allegorical epression of philosophical thought dates back at least to Pato In denouncing the immoralit of the Homeric fables Plato in effect refuted those who aw cosmological allegories in the divine adultere they narrated The question reappears in the rotoChristian era when pagan authors, seeking t reute the accusation of idolat, once again romote the idea of wisdom encypted in ogramatic writng and the fables of the poets It returns with force in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries borne by both the development eegetical methods and the philosophical quarre over the origins of language Withn this ntet Vico seeks to kill o birds with one tone. He hopes to liquidate the idea of a mysteus wisdom hidden in imagistic writing and oeti fables In opposition to this search for 25
e Aestetic Revolution
hidden menings he proposes new hermeneu to the conditions tics tht instead relates the of its production. But t the sme time he demol ishes the trditional imge of the poet s the inventor of fbles chrcters, nd imges. is discover of the "true Homer reftes the Aris totelian and representtive imge of the poet s inventor of fbles chrcters imges nd rhymes on four points First, he shows Homer is not n inventor of fbles. e did not recognize our distinction between histor nd fiction, nd in fct considered his so-clled fbles to be hitor which he trnsmitted as he hd received them Secondly he is not the inventor of chracters is soclled characters Achilles the brave Ulysses the clever Nestor the wise re neither individul ized chrcters nor llegories invented for poetic purposes They are abstctions in imges, which are the only way for a thought tht is eqully inca pble of bstction nd individuliztion to repre sent virtues courge intelligence, wisdom or jstice that it cnnot conceive nor even nme s such Thirdly, Homer is not the muchcelebrted
The Ae stetc Revolution
inventor of beutiful metphors nd briliant imges e simply lived in n ge when thought cod not be seprated from the imge nor he abstrct from the concrete. is imges re noth g bt the wy people of his time spoke. Finlly he is not the inventor of rhyth nd meters. e is simply proof of a stge of lngge in which speech and song were identicl Men sng before speking before pssing to rticlted lngge he poetic charms of sung speech re ctually oly the stammerngs of lnguge's infncy still oservbe in the lngge of def-mutes Thus e four trditionl privileges of the poet-inventor re trsformed into properties of his lnguge. is anguge is his only insofr s it does not eong to him; it is not an instrment at his isposl bt the token of n infntile stge of agage thoght, and humnity omer is poet accout of the identity between what he wants wht he does not wnt wht he knows nd a he does not know wht he does nd wht e oes not do The existence of poetr is tied to is ientity of contrries to this gp between
Te Aesthetic Revolution
speech and what t says. There s soldar between the poetic charcter of language and ts ciphered character But ths cpher does ot hide any secret scece It is n the end othing more than the nscrption of the process that prodces speech itself This hermeneutical fgure of the "true Homer s a prerequste to the gure of Oedps as an exemplary ad uversally vad tragc sbject Ths figure presupposes a regme of thnking abot art n whih art s deined by its beng the identit of a coscious procedure and an uncon scos production, of a willed acton and an vol untary process In short the dentt of logos and pathos wl heceforth be what attests to the exis tece of art. Bt there are two contrar ways to thk about ths identt: as the mmanence of logos in pathos, of thought in nothought, or nversely as the mmanece of pathos in logos of no-thought n thought We d the rst manne illustrated n the great founding texts of th aesthetc mode of thought such as Hege's Lectures on Aesthetics. Art, n Schellings terms
Te Ae st he t c R e vol ut ion
a spirt's odysse outsde of t sel In Hegels systematizaton ths sprt seeks to become man f est, whch means n the rst pla ce to make tself manf est to itself through the matter that is its opposite the compactness of bul or sculpted stoe n the denst of color or n the temporal nd sonorous materialt of lan guage It seeks tself n the doble sensble ex t erority of matter d the image It seeks itself and msses itsel . But ths game of hide-an dseek t creates tself as e nteror light of sensible ma teral the bea t l pearance of the god o f stone the arbores ent thrst of the Gothc v a ult and spre, or the rital brlliance anmating th e still-lif es insgnif n e Te nv erse model that can be opposed to s odsse is that of the beauti l and ratonal es etic appearance wh ose obscure depths are v en wth pathos. In Sc hopenhauer ths model is essed b the mov eme nt that turns its back on e pearances and the lov el causal order o f the W d of representat on n order to f ace the s e, subterranea n and nonsenscal world of e 10 -tsel : the m · 9-O eaningless wo ld of naked .
Te Aesthetic Revolution
will-tolif e, of the paradoxicall y named " will whose essence is to want nothing, rejecting the model of the choice of ends and the adaptation of means to those ends that f orms the usual meaning of the notion of will. In Nietzsche it is expressed b y the identif ication of the existence of art itself with the polari of A pollonian eautif ul appear ance and the Dion ysian drive that rings jo y and suf f ering in e qual measure and comes to light in the ver y f orms that would den y its e istence
4
I
The Two Forms of Mute Speech
Psychoanalysis thus nds it historical birthplace wthn this counter-movement whose philosophi cl heroes are Schopenhauer and the young Niet zshe and which reigns in the literature that frm Zla to Maupassant, Ibsen or Strinderg plunges to the pure meaninglessness of raw life or into the encounter with the powers of darkness We re not merely conceed with the inuence of he spirit of the age; more precisely we are tring t estalish the positions possile wihin a syste s dened by a certain idea of thought and a ertan idea of writing. For the silent revolution t we have called aesthetic opens the space in ih an idea of thought and a corresponding ea of writing can be elaorated This idea of ught rests upon a fundamental afrmation: ere is thought that does not think thought at 31
e Two Form of Mute peeh
work not onl in the foreign element of nonthought but in the ver form of nonthought. Converel, there i nonthought that inhabit thought and give it a power a it own. Thi nonthought i not imply a form of abence of thought it i an ecaciou preence of it oppoite From whichever ide we approach the equation, the identi of thought and nonthought i the ource of a ditinctive power Correponding to thi idea of thought i an idea o writing Writing refer not onl to a form of manifetation of peech but more ndamentall to an idea of peech itelf and it intrinic power It i well known that for Plato writing deignated not onl the materiali of the written ign on a material upport but a pecic tatu of peech He conidered writing to be a mute logos, peech that i incapable of aing what it ay differentl or of chooing not to peak It can neither account for what it proffer nor dicern thoe whom it i or i not appropriate to addre. Thi peech imultaneouly mute and chatt can be contrated with peech that i action dicoure guided by a
e Two Forms of Mute Speech
signcation to be tranmitted and a goal to be achieved. For Plato thi wa the peech of the master who know how to explain hi word and how to hod them in reerve how to keep them awa rom the profane and how to depoit them ike eed in the oul o thoe in whom the can bear frit The claical repreentative order identfied thi "living peech with the active peech of the great orator who move deepl and peruade edifie and lead oul and bodie is model likewie include the dicoure of the tragic hero who purue hi will and hi paion to the limit. In oppoition to thi living peech that provided the repreentative order with it norm riting i the mode of peech that correpond to the aethetic revolution: the contradictor mode of a peech that peak and keep ilent at the same time that both know and doe not know hat it i aing. But there are wo major gure of thi contradictor mode, correponding to the o oppoite form of the relation between ought and nonthought. The polariy of thee
e Two Form ofMue Speech
two gures sketches out the space of a single domain that of literar speech as symptomatic speech? Mute writing in the rst sense, is the speech borne by mute things themselves. It is the capa bility of signification that is inscribed upon their vey body summarized by the "everything speaks of Novalis the poetmineralogist. Evey thing is trace vestige, or fossil Every sensible form beginning from the stone or the shell tells a story In their striations and ridges they all bear the tces of their history and the mark of their destination. Literature takes up the task of deci phering and rewriting these signs of histo writ ten on things Balzac summarizes and celebrates this new idea of writing in the decisie pages at the beginning of Te Wild Ass's Skin that describe the antiquay's store as the emblem of a new ythology a phantasmagoria formed entirely from the ruins of consumption. The great poet of the new age is not Byron the repoer of the 7
See Jacque Rancre La Parol mut: Esai sur ls conradiion de la littraur (Pa: Hachette 1998).
e Two Form ofMute eech
souls turmoil It is Cuier the geologist the natu ralist who reconstitutes animal populations from bones and forests from fossilized imprints8 With him a new idea of the artist is deined as one who traels through the labyrinths and crypts of the social world He gathers the vestiges and transcribes the hieroglyphs painted in the congura tion of obscure or random things He gies the insignicant details of the prose of the world their power of poetic signification. In the topography of a plaza the physiognomy of a facade, the paern or wear of a piece of clothing the chaos of a pile of merchandise or trash he recognizes the elements of a mhology He makes the true stoy of a SOciety, an age or a people visible in the figures of this mhology foreshadowing indi idual or collective destiny Everthing spea" i plies the abolition of the hierarchies of the representative order The great Freudian rle that tere are no inSignicant details that on the contrary it is e details that put us on the path of 8
Hono de Balzac T Wild Ass's Skin, trans Hebert J Hunt (Hmondsworth Penguin 1977, p. 41
The Two }rms of Mute Speech
truth - is in direct continuity with the aesthetic revolution. There are no noble and vlgar subjects nor important narrative episodes and accessor descriptive ones There is not a single episode description or sentence that does not bear within itself the signing power of the entire work There is nothing that does not bear the power of language Everything is on an equal footing equaly important equally significant Thus the narrator of At the Sign of the Cat and Racket sets us in front of the cade of a house whose asymmetrical openings chaotic recesses and outcroppings form a tissue of hierogyphs in which we can decipher the history of the house te history of the society to which it bears witness - and the destiny of the characters who live there Similarly Les Misrables plunges us into the sewer that, like a cynic philosopher says everything; it brings together on an equal basis everthing that civilization uses and throws away its masks and its distinctions as well as its everyday utensils The new poet the geological or arceological poet performs the same so of inquiry that Freud
The Two Forms of Mute �eech
conducts in Te Interetation of Dreams. He poses the principle that nothing is insignicant that the prosaic details that positivistic thought dsdans or attributes to a merely physiological rationality are in fact signs encrypting a histo. But he also poses the paradoxical condition of ths hermeneutics: in order for the banal to reveal s secret it must rst be myhologized The house and the sewer speak they bear the trace of truth - as will the dream or the parapraxis and the Mai Maian an comm commodi odity ty insofa insofarr as as they are are frst frst transformed into the elements of a mhology or phantasmagoria The writer is thus a geologist or archeologist exploring the labyrnths of the social world and later those of the self He gathers remnants exhumes fossils and transcribes signs that bear wtness to a world and write a histor Te mute writing of things deivers in its prose the truth of a civilization or an age that the onceglorious scene of "living speech had hidden from view The latter has now become a vain scene of oratoy the discouse of superficial agitations. But
Te wo Forms ofMute ofMute Seech
the interpreter of signs is also a doctor a smpto matologist who diagnoses e illnesses aicting the enterprising individual and the brilliant soci ety The naturalist and geologist Balzac is also a doctor able to detect at the heart of the intense activity of individuals and societies, a sickness identical to this intensit In Balzacs work the name for this sickness is wi: the malad of thought that seeks to transform itself into reality and so carries individuals and societies toward their destruction. Indeed, the histor of nine teenthcentur literature can be described as the histor of the transformations of the will In the naturalist and smbolist period it will become impersonal destin heredit, the accomplishment of a willto-live devoid of reason, an assault upon the illusions of consciousness b the world of obscure forces Literar smptomatolog will then acquire a new status in this literature of the pathologies of thought centering on hsteria nevosism," or the weight of the past These new dramaturgies of the buried secret trace the life histor of the individual in order to uncover the 38
Te wo Forms of o f ute Speech
profound secret of heredity and race and, in the a instance, the naked and meaningless fact of e. This literature is attached to the second form of denti of logos and pathos mentioned above the one following an inverse path from the cear to the obscure and from logos t o pathos, to the pure suffering of existence and the pure reproduction of the meaninglessness of life A second form of mute speech is likewise at work here In place of e hieroglph inscribed on the bod and subject to deciphering we encounter speech as soliloqu, speaking to no one and saing nothing but the impersonal and unconscious condtions of speech itself. In Freuds time it was Maeterlinck who most forcel theorized this second form of mute speech of unconscious discourse in his anasis of second-degree dialogue in Ibsen's dramas9 This dialogue expresses not the thoughts senti ments and intentions of the characters, but the 9
Marice Maeerlnck, "The ragical n Daily n The reasure of te Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro (Ne York: Dodd Mead and Co ) ) nd pp. 13-35.
39
e Two Form ofMute Speech
thought of the third person" who haunts the dialogue the confrontation with the Unknown with the anonymous and meaningless forces of life. The language of motionless tragedy" transcribes the unconscious movements of a being reaching luminous hands through the battlements of the artificial forress in which we are impris oned"0 the knocking of a hand that does not belong to us [and) strikes the secret gates of ou instinct" These doors says Maeterlinck in sum cannot be opened but we can listen to the knocking behind the door" We can transpose the dramatic poem, formerly dedicated to an ,
0
11
Jles Hret "Conversation avec Marice \aeterlinck and Maeterlinck, Confession de pote in Maetelinck Intduction a une pholog ds onge et atre (Brussels: abor 986) pp 156 and 8L Maeterlinck Small Talk The Theater in Symbolit Ar To ri: A Crtal Atholo, ed Henri Dorra (Berkeley Universiy o Califoia Press 1995 p 14. I am well aware that Maeter Iinck places himsel in the lineage of Emerson and the mystial tradition not in that of chopenaerian nihilis Bt what interests me here - and what moreover makes possible the confsion of the two traditions is the same stats they give to voiceless speec as the expression of an nconscios willing o eistene 40
e Two rm ofMu Speech
aangement of actions" into the language of hese blows, the speech of the invisible crowd that haunts our thoughts Perhaps what the stage needs is for this speech to be incarnated in a new body no longer the human body of the actor/ character but that of a being who would appear to live without being alive" a body of shadow or wax granted to this multiple and anonymous voice12 From this Maeterlinck draws the idea of an android theater that links Villiers de L!sle Adams novelistic reverie with the future of the theater from Edward Gordon Craig's berMari onee to Tadeusz Kantors Dead Class. The aesthetic unconscious consubsantial with e aesthetic regime of ar, manifests itself in the polariy of this double scene of mute speech: on the one hand a speech written on the body that must be restored to a linguistic signification by a labor of deciphering and rewriting; on the other he oiceless speech of a nameless power that lurks behind any consciousness and any Signication, to 2
Maetelnck mall Talk p 5. 41
T Two Forms (M Sp which voice and body ms be given The cos, however may be ha his anonymos voice and ghostly body lead e hman sbjec down he pah of he grea rennciaion oard he nohingness of will whose Schopenhaerian shadow eighs so heavily on he lierare of he nconscios
42
5
I
From One Unconscious to Another
he goal of his oline of he lierar and philo ophical gre of he aesheic nconscios i may bear repeaing is no o provide he model for a ne genealogy of he Fredian nconscios We have no inenion of forgeing he medical and scienific conex in which psychoanalysis wa elaboraed nor of dissolving he Fredian concep of he nconscios, he economy of he drives and he sdy of he formaions of he unconscios in a cenr-old idea of nknon knowing and hogh ha does no hink Nor is here any poin in ring o rn he game arond and show how he Fredian nconscios is nconsciosly dependen on he lierare and a1 whose hidden secres i claims o nveil. ha maers is raher o poin o he relaions of complici and conic esablished beeen he 43
Frm One Unconscious to Another
aesthetic unconscious and the Freudian uncon scios. We can dene the stakes of the encounter between these two versions of the unconscious on the basis of Freud's own indications when he recounts the invention of psychoanalysis in e Interetation of Dreams. His narrative posits a contrast between psychoanalysis and the notion of science associated with positivistic medicine, which treats the peculiarities of the sleeping mind as negligible data or attributes them to deter minable physical causes In his battle against this sort of positivism, Freud calls on psycoanalysis to forge an alliance with the old mythological heritage and poplar belief concerning the signi cation of dreams. But there is another alliance woven into The Interetaton qDreams, which will become more explicit in the book on Gradva: an alliance with Goethe and Schiller Sophocles and Shakespeare as well as oter writ ers less prestigious but nearer to him suc as Popper-Lynkeus and Alphonse Daudet Freud is dobtless playing the athority of the great names of clture off against those of the masters of 4
Frm One Unconscou., to Another
cience Bt, mor e f undamentally these gr eat names nction as guides in the jouey acr oss e Acher on under aken by the new science. If ide ar e necessary it is pr ecisey because te pace beteen positive science and popular elief or legend is not empty The aesthetic nconscious took possession of this domain by edef ining te tings of ar as specic modes of nion beeen the thought that thinks and the thought that does not think It is occupied by te ite atur e of travel into the depths, of the her meneutics of mute signs and the transcription f voiceless speech. This liter atr e has already c eated a link betw een the poetic practice of dipaying and inter pr eting signs and a par ticular idea of civilization, i ' br illiant appear ances and bcur e depths it sicknesses and the medicines apprpr iate to them This idea is not limited to the naturaist novel's interest in sterics and the ynd omes of degeneration. T he elaboration of a new medicine and science of the p s y ch e is possible because a w ole domain of thoght and w riting separates science and sper stition But the 45
From One Unc onscous to Another
fact that this semiological and symptomatological scene has its own consistency makes any simply utilitarian alliance between Freud and writers or artis " impossible. The literature to which Freud refers has its own idea of the unconscious, the p at h o s of thought, and the maladies and medicines of civiliza tion Pragmatic utilizaton is no more possible than unconscious continuity Te domain of thought that does not think is not a realm where Freud appears as a solitary explorer in search of companions and allies. It is an already occupied territo where one unconscious enters into competition and conic t with another In order to grasp this twofold relation we must pose the question again in its most general form: what business does Freud have in the history of ar? The question is itself double What pushes Freud to make himself into a histoan or analyst of art? What is at stake in the llscale analyses that he devotes to Leonardo to Michelangelo's Moses or jensens Gdiva or in his shorter remarks on Hoffmanns Sandman or Ibsens Rosmerholm? Why these examples? What is he 46
From One Unconscious to Another
looking for in them and how does he treat them? This rst series of questions, as we have seen plies another how should we think of Freuds place in the history of ar? Not only the place of Freud as an "analyst of art but of Freud the scientist the doctor of the psyche, interpreter of its formations and their disturbances? The histor of ar in this sense is something quite different from he succession of woks and movements It is the history of regimes of thinking about art that is of paricular ways connecting practices to modes of making those practices visible and thinkabe. In the end this means a histoy of ideas of thought itself13 The double question can then be reformulated as follows what is Freud looking for and what does he nd in the analysis of the works or hought of aists What lin does the idea of unconscious thought that animates these analses have with the one that defines a historical regime, he aesthetic regime of ar? 13
Sec on this poin Jaques Ranr, Te Poltcs ofAsthtics: T D trbuton o th Snsbl, tra. Gbl Rokhll (London: Contnum 2001).
47
From One Unconscious to Ano her
We can pose these questions on the basis of to theoretical signos. The first is posed by Freud himself, the second deived from the works and characters privileged by his analysis. As we have seen, Freud rms that re is an objective alliance eeen the psychanalyst and the t, and paic ularly beeen the sychoanalyst and the poet "Creative writers are valuable allies he asserts at the beginning of lusions and Dreams in jensen s Gdva14 Their kowledge of the pche, the singu lar formations and hidden operations of the huma mind is ahead of that of the scientiss ey kno things that the scientists do not for they are aare of the imortance and rationality roper to this phantasmatic component that positive science either sees as cmercal nothingness or atributes to simple physical or hysiologil uses Poes and novelists are ths the allies of the psychoanalyst the scientist who sees all the manifestations of the mind as equally imorant and knos there is a profound rationali to its "fancies abeations and 14
Sigmund Freud, Deluion and ream n jenen' "GradivC. Standard Eitn, vol 9 p. 8
48
From One Unconscious o Anoher
n-sense This imoran oint is too often derestimated: Freud's approach to a is not in e least motivated by a desire to demysti the limities of oetry and art and reduce them to e sexal economy of the drives His goal is not exhi the dirty (or stupid) little secret behind e grand myth of creation. Rather Freud cals on art and poetr to bear positive witness on behalf f the profound rationality of fantasy (antaisie) ad lend suppor to a science that claims in a cein way to put fantasy poe ad mythology ack within the fold of scientific rationalty This is hy the declaration of alliance is immediately accmanied by a reproach the poets and novel are in fact only halfallies They have not given enough credence to the rationali of dreams and fancy not taken a clear enough stand on behalf of he meaninglness of the fantasies they have porayed The second signpost is provided by the figures chosen as examples by reud A certain number f them are drawn from contemporary literature fm the aturalist drama of destiny as found in 49
From One Unconscious to Another
Ibsen or from a fantastic tradition exemplied by Jensen or PopperLynkeus and reaching back to JeanPaul Tieck and Hoffmann But these contempora works stand in the shadow of a few great models First are the two great incarnations of the Renaissance: Michelangelo the somber demiurge of colossal creations and Leonardo d Vinci the artist/scientist/inventor the man of great dreams and great projects whose handl of realized works appear as the various figures of a single enigma. Then there are the two romantic heroes of tragedy Oedipus bears witness to a savage antiquity that stands in sharp contrast with the polite and polished antiqUiy represented in French tragedy and to a pathos of thought that overurns the representative logic of the arrangement of actions and its harmonious distribution of what can be seen and what can be said. Hamlet is the mode hero of a thought that does not act or rather a thought that acts by its ver inertia In shor in opposition to the classical order there is the hero of savage antiquity as celebrated by H6lderlin or Nietzsche and the heroes of the 50
Frm One Unconscious to Another
avage Renaissance that of Shakeseare but also that studied by Burckhardt or Taine. As we have een the classical order is not sply the etiquette of a Frenchsle courtly art It is properly speaking the representative regime of art, the regime hose rst theoretical legitimation is found in stotle's elaboration of the noton of mimesis, its emblem in classical French tragedy and ts systematization in the great treatises of the French eigteenth centuy from Batteux to La Harpe by way of Volaires Co mmentires sur Co rneile. At the hear of this regime was a conception of the poem as an ordered arrangement of actons moving toward resolution by way of a confrontaon beteen characters who pursue con1ictng goals and manifest their wills and sentiments in heir speech following a system of rules of suitablity This system submitted knowledge to the authority of history and visiblty to the autho of speech in a relation of mutual restraint beeen what can be seen and what can be said. It is this order that is split apart by the romantic Oedipus the hero of a thought that does not know what it
From One Unconscious to Another
knows wants what it does not want, acts by suffering and speaks through muteness If Oedi pus and the whole lineage of great Oedipal along with him - is at the center of the Freudian elaboration, it is because he is the emblem of this regime of art that identiies the things of art as things of thought insofar as they are tokens of a thought that is immanent in its other and inhabited by that other that is everwhere written in the language of sensible signs and withdrawn into its own obscure heart.
52
6
I
Freud's Corrections
Freud makes an appeal to artists he remains n the other hand objectivey dependent upon te presuppositions of a determinate regime of art. We now need to understand the specificity of e conection between these to facts which cstitutes the specicity of Freud's interention wth respect to the aesthetic unconscious His rmar goa as we have already noted is not to establish a sexual etiology for artistic phenoena but raer to within the notion of unconscious thought that provides the productins of the aesthetic regime of art with their norm. Freud seeks that is to reestablish proper rder in te way art and the thought of art situate the relations between knowing ad notknowing sense and nonsense logos and pathos, the rea and the fantastic. His interention is rst of all A
53
Freud's Corection
designed to discredit an interpretation of these relations that plays pon the ambiguit of the real and the fantastic or sese and non-sense and leads the thoght of art and the interpretation of the manifestations of "fantasy toward a pure and definitive affirmation of pathos, of the brte meaninglessness of life He wants to contribute to the victor of a hermeneutic and explanator vocation of art over the ihilist entropy inherent in the aesthetic configuration of art In order to nderstad this we need to compare preliminary remarks made by Freud in o different texts At the beginning of e Moses of Michelangelo Fred explains that he is not interested in artworks from a formal perspective but in their "sbject-matter, in the intention that is expressed and the content that is revealed IS At the beginning of the Gradiva he reproaches poets for their ambiguiy with respect to the signifca tion of the minds fantasies We cannot der stand Freuds declared choice of the content I'
Freud, The Moses oficelangeo, Standard Edton vol.
211-12. 54
13, pr.
feud Correction.
ne of works unless we see it in relation to the cond position The qest for the content as we w enerally leads toward the discover of a ressed memor and in the nal instance ard the original moment of infantile castration xiety This assignation of a nal cause is geer ly mediated through an organizing fantasy (ntsme) a compromise formation that allows e rtists libido (most ofte represented by the ro) to escape repression and sublimate itself i e work at the cost of inscribig its enigma there This overhelming precoception has the singur consequece of transforming fiction into bi raphy. Freud ierprets the fantastic dreams d ightmares of Jense's Norber Hanold Hoff anns Nathaniel and Ibsen's Rebecca West as if ey ere pathological data peraining to real eole and jdges the writer according to the lcidiy of the analysis he gives of them The lmit example is fond in a note to the discussion of Te Sandman in e Uncanny where Fred adduces the proof that the optician Coppola and te lawyer Coppelis are one and the same 55
Freud's Coection
person, namely te castrating fater He tus reestablises te etiolo of Nataniel's case In is role as a fantasy doctor, Hoffmann blurred tis etiology but not to te point of iding it from is knowledgeable colleague, for "Hoffmanns iginative treatent [PhantasieJ of is material as not made suc wild consion of its elements tat we cannot reconstruct teir original arrangeent16 Tere tus exists an original arrangeent of te case of NatanieL Beind wat te writer presents as te product of is unfeered imagination we must recognize te logic of te fantasy (antasme) and te primal aniety tat it disguises: little Nataniel's castration anxiety an expression of te familial drama experienced by Hoffmann imself as a cild Te sae pcedue rns trug te wole book on Gdiva. Beind te arbitrary decision and te fantastic story of tis young man wo as fallen in loe wit a gure of stone and dream to te point of being unable to see te real woman 1(
Freud "T 'Uncany S Eii vol 17, p. 56
232
not
Freud s Coetions
aning more tan a pantasmatic apparition tis antique gure Freud attempts to reestabh te true etiology of te case of Norbert aold te repression and displacement of te dlescents sexual attraction for young Zoe Tis oection obliges Freud to found is reasoning the less tan irmly establised fact of te al existence of a fictional creation But more portantly it requires a mode of dream interpreton tat seems sligtly naie wit respect to euds own scientific prnciples. e idden ssage is in fact proided by a simple translation the dream gure into its real equvalent you re inteested in Gradiva because in eality it is Ze yu are intested in. Tis synopsis sows
hat someting ore tan just te reduction of te ctional to a clinical syndrome is going on ere ud een calls into doubt wat migt ake te ydrme interesting for a doctor namel te diagnosis of fetisistic erotomania He furter eglects wat migt interest te scolar concerned wit relating clinical practice to te history of m namely te long istory of ms 57
Freud's Coectio
exemplied by Pygmalion, about men who fall in love with images and dream of actually possess ing them. Only one thing seems to interest Fred reestablishing linear causalit in the plot even if this requires him to refer to the unverifiable facts of Norbert Hanold's childhood Even more than the correct explanation of Hanold's case his conce is to refute the status that ensens book gives to literatures "inventions. His retation bears on two undamental and coplementar points: first the authors airmation that th fantasies (anames) he describes are the sol invention of his fanciful imagination (antaisie); second, the moral that the author gives to his stor, namely the simple triumph of "real life in lesh and blood and good old plain German which through the voice of its homonym Zo mocks the folly of the scholar Norbert and sets its simple and joyous perpetuit in contrast with his idealistic reveries The authors insistenc upon the freedom of his imagination is obviously of a piece with his denunciation of his heros reveries This congence can be summarized b
Freud s Coections
a single Freudian term, desublimation If there is esublimation going on here it is the novelist and ot the psychoanalyst who carries it out And it ocides with his lack of seriousness with respect to the phantasmatic fact Behind the "reduction of the ictional datum to a non-existent pathological and sexual "reality is us a polemic seeking to refute the confusion of e ctional and the real that grounds the practice a the discourse of the novelist By insisting that e fantasy is the product of his fanY and retig s characters reverie in the name of the reali nple the novelist grants himself the capacit o circulate freel on both sides of the bondar een reality and fiction Freuds first conce is o assert a univocal stor against such equivocit e important point that justifes all the shortcuts of the interpretation is the identification of the ove plot ith a schea of causal rationalit It is ot the inal cause the unverifiable repression ong back to Norberts childhood that interests reud so much as causal concatenation as such t atters little whether the stor is real or fictive. 59
Freud Coectons
The essential is that it be univocal tt in contrast to Romanticism's rendering the imaginary and the real indiscernible and reversible it set forth an Aistotelian arrangement of action and knowledge directed toward the event of recognition.
60
I
On Varous Uses of Detai
re the relation between Jreudian interpretation the aesthetic revoltion begins to get compli te Psychoanalysis is possible on the basis of regime of art that delegitimizes the represen$tie ages wellordered plots and in trn grants itimac to the pathos of knowledge. Bt reu kes a distinct choice within the configuration of e aesthetic unconscious He privileges and aorizes the first form of mte speech, that of the ptom that is the trace of a history in opposiion to the other form that of the anonymous oice of nconscious and meaningless life This opposition leads him to try to recapture the oantic figures of the equivalence of logos and athos within the old representative logic The ost striking emple is to be found in the text on Michelangelos Moses. Ie object of this analysis is 61
On Varo Uses ofDetail
in fact quite unique Freud does not talk here as he did in the text on Leonardo about a ntasy found in a note He talks about a sculptural work that he says, he has returned to see se veral times His analysis is based an exemplar adequation between visual attention to the works detail and the psychoanalytic privilege given to insigni cant" details As is well known this relation passes by way of an endlessly commented reference to Morel/Lermolieff the doctor who became an expert in artworks and the inventor of a forensic method of identiing works on the basis of slight and inimitable details that reveal the artist's indi vidual touch A method of reading wor ks is thus identied with a paradigm for research into causes But this detailoriented method can itself b e prac ticed in two ways which correspond to the o major forms of the aesthetic unconscious There is on the one hand the model of the trace that is made to speak in which the sedimented inscrip tion of a histor can be read. n a famous text Carlo Ginzbur g has shown how the reference to Morellis metod inscribes Freudian interpretation
On Varous es qDeil
in the great judicial paradig that seeks t reconstitute a process on the basis of its traces.17 But ere is also the oer model, which no longer sees the insignificant" detail as a trace that allows a process to be reconstituted but as the direct mark of an inarticulatable trth whose imprint on the surface of the work unoes the logic of a well ar ranged stor and a rational composition of elements It is this second model for analyzing etails that certain art historans will later champion in opposition to the privilege that Panofsky ave to the analysis of painting on the basis of the stor represented or the text illustrated. This polemic caied on in the past by Louis Marin and today by Georges DidiHuberman stands under the authorit of Freud the Freud inspired by Morelli as the founder of a mode of reading that locates the truth of painting in the details of indi vidual works: an inSignificant broken column in 17
Calo Gnzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidentl Pradig m in Gues, Myth and th Htorcal ethod tns. John nd Anne Tedesc hi (Batimoe The Johns Hopkins Universty Pess 1989) pp. 9612 5
On Varous Ues ofDetal
Giorgiones Tempest, or splotches of color imitat ing marble on the base of Fra Agelicos Madonna of the Shadows.18 Such details functon as partobjects, fragments that are impossible to integrate and that undo the order of representation, legitimizing an unconscious trth not to be found in an individual histor but rather in the opposition between wo orders: the gural beneath the gurative or the vual beneath the represented visible But wat is today hailed as psychoanalysiss contribution to the reading of painting and its unconscious is something that Freud himself wanted nothig to do with. Nor did he have any trck with all the Medusas heads representatives of castration, that so many contemporar commen tators have managed to discover in every head of Holofernes or John the Baptist, in some particula r detail of Ginevra de Benci's hair or an individual vortex drawn in Leonardo s notebooks IH
Louis Marin, On Representation, trans. Cathene Porter (Stan ford: Stanord Universt ress 2001; eoges Dd-Huberman Coronting Image: Quetioning the Ends ofa eain lito/ oA. trans John Goodman Unvesit ark ennsylvana Stae Universit ess 2005) 64
On Varous ses ofDetail
t is clear that this psychoanalysis of da Vinci as cticd notabl y by Louis Marin, is not the same Freu ds t might be argued that what interests Feud in the detail privileged in this wa y is ther truth of the painted or sculpted gure,
at of the histor of a singular subject symptom fantasy and that what he is looking f r is the fatas y that pvides the matrix of an artist's ativiy, not the unconscious igural order of art.
he example of Moses, however runs against this ml explanation W hile the statue is indeed hat interests him the principle of this interest is uprsing. The long anal ysis of the detail of the sition of the hands and the beard does not eval an y childhood secret or encr ypted uncon-
cious thought It poses instead the most classic of questions: exactly what moment of the biblical tory does Michelangelo's statue represent? Is it
deed that of Moses f ur? Is he in the act of dropping the ablets of the Law? Here Freud is as far as possib le from the anal yses of Louis Marin W e could even sa y that in the debate between
W orringer who tried to ident diff erent visual 65
On Varous Uses ofDetail
orders that coud be correated with dominant psychoogica traits and Panosky, who made the identiication o forms secondar to that of the subects and episodes represented, Freud de acto takes Panosky's side More undamentay his attention to detai reers to the ogic o the representative order in which the pastic orm was the imitation o a narrated action and the particuar subject o the painting was identica with the representation o the "pregnant moment in which the movement and meaning o the action is condensed Freud deduces this moment rom the position of the right hand and the Tabets. It is not the moment when Moses is about to strike out in indignation against the idoaters The moment for Freud is that o anger mastered when the han ets go of the beard and irmy grasps the Tabets once again This moment is not of course to be found in the text of the Bibe Freud adds it in the name of a rationaist interpretation in which the man who is master o himse wins out over the seant of the eaous God The attention to detail in the end sees to identi Moses position as 66
On Varous Uses ofDetail
estimony to the triumph o the wiL Michean eo's Mo ses is interpreted by Freud as something ike Winckemanns Lao co o n, the expression o e victor o cassica serenit over emotion. In e case o Moses, it is speciicaly reigious pathos a is conquered by reason Moses is the hero o emoion conquered and brought to order It is not rticuary important whether, as a certain tradiion has it what the Roman marbe reay repreents or the patriarch of psychoanaysis is his own aitude with respect to his rebeious discies Much more than a circumstantia seortrait this Moses reproduces a cassica scene of e representatie age: whether it be on the tragic ge in opera seria or histor painting, the umph o wi and consciousness incarnated by a oman hero who reasserts his mastery o himse d the universe: Brtus or Augustus, Scipio or itus. As the incarnation of victorious conscious ess Freuds Moses stands in opposition not so uch to idoaters or dissidents as to those who ve produced nothing and remained victims o expicated antasy We are of course thinking of 67
O Varous Uses of Detail
ichelangelo's legendar alter ego, Leonardo da Vinci the man of notebooks and sketches the inventor of a thousand unrealized proects the painter who never manages to individualize gures and always paints the same smile in sort the man bound to his fantasy and stuck in a homosexual relation to the Father.
6
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There is another "gure of stone that can be set in opposition to this classical Moses: the bas-relief of Gdiva. Freud judges the similarity of gait between the stone igure and the living young woman together with the encounter of Zoe in Pompeii to be the only invented and arbi trar element in the presentation of Norbert Hanolds case19 I would happily sa the opposite This young Roman virgin whose gracel gait is composed of suspended ight and rm touch on the ground, this expression of lively action and tranquil repose is anything but an arbitrar inven tion of Wilhelm Jensens brain On the contrary, we can early recognize a fgure celebrated hundreds of times the age of Schiller and 19
Freud, Jense :
"Gradiva . Stadard Edtio voL 9, pp. 41-2 6
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yn H6lderlin and Hegel The whole age took this image of the kre from Grecian urns and their memories of the Panathenaia frieze and built upon it their dream of a new idea of the sensible community of a life at one with art and an art at one with life. More than an extravagant young scholar Norbert Hanold is one of the innumerable victims whether in a tragic or comic mode of a cerain theoretical fantasy: the quivering life of the statue, of the fold of the tunic or the free gait that incaated the ideal world of a living community. The fantast Jensen finds it amusing to confront in this way the dreamed life of antique stone and the community-to-come with the tviali of petit-borgeois life neighbors canaries in the windows and passersby in the street The lover of life-incarnated-in-stone is called back to the life of prosaic and mean-spirited neighbors and the banality of petit-borgeois honeymoons in Italy Freud constrcts his interpretation opposton to Zoes cure which simply liquidates the drea in this way and leaves no place for emotional kathais. He denounces the complici between 70
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e position of the fantast and a cerain prosaic nd of the dream This denunciation itself is not new We might recall the pages of Hegels Lectues n Aesthetics where he denounces the ritrar character of Jean-Paul or Tiecks fancy nd its ultimate solidarity with the philistinism of orgeois life In both cases what is denounced is certain se of romantic wit ( Wtz) by the fntast ut within this proximity an essential reversal has occurred. Hegel contrasts the subjec ve frivolity of Witz with the sbstantial reality of ind Freud reproaches the fantast for his failure to recognize the substantiality of the play of Witz egel's primary conce is to set aside an ep figre of free subjectiviy reduced to its repeti tive self-aration Freud confronted with the ne developments of the aesthetic unconscious seeks above all to put into question a cerain idea of objectivity that is summarized by the idea of the isdom of life. In the case of the laughing Zoe Bergang and the fantast Wilhelm Jensen this isdom looks fairly anodyne ut this is not the case in some other "cures other ways of ending 71
A Conict between Two Kinds ofMedicine
dreams" illustrated by the literary medicine of the late nineteenth century Here we might think of o exemplary fictions one invented by a doctor's son and the other taking a doctor as its hero. The rst is the conclusion of the Sentimental Education with its evocation of the failed visit to La Turques bordello which in the collapse of both their idealistic hopes and their positive ambi tions represents the best of Frdrics and Deslaurierss lives Even more signicant no doubt is the end of Zolas Doctor Pascal, which is also the conclusion of the whole Rougon Macquar cycle and its moral. This moral is unique to say the least: Doctor Pascal recounts the incestuos love affair between the old doctor who is also the family historiographer and his niece Clothilde. At the end of the book after Pascals death Clothilde breastfeeds the child who is the reslt of this incest in the former doctors office that has now become a nursery The child in his innocence of any culural taboo raises his little fist not to some glorious future but simply to the blind and brte force of life assuring 72
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its own perpetuty. This triumph of life affirmed by a banal and even regenerative incest repre sents the serious" and scandalous version of jensens lighthearted fatasy (antaisie). Zolas moral represents precisely the bad" incest that reud refuses bad not because t shocks moralty but because it is disconnected from any good plot based on causality - and clpability - and there fore from any logic of liberating knowledge I do not now whether Freud ever read Doctor Pascal. He certainly did read however, and with care the works of one of Zolas contemporaries Ibsen the author of exemplary histories of the souls troubles and of childhood secrets cures confessions and healings. Freud gives an analysis of his play Rosmeholm in the essay Some Char acterTypes Met with in Psychoanalytic Work This text studies a paradoxical group of patients who are opposed to the rationality of the psycho analytic cue some because they refuse to renounce a satisfaction and to submit the pleasure principle to the reality principle; others to the contrary becase they ee from their own 73
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success and refuse a satisfaction at the ver moment the can obtain it when it is no longer marked b the seal of impossibilit or transgression Such are the young lad who has long schemed her marriage and the professor who is about to obtain the chair for which he has long itrigued and who lee from the success of their enterprise Freuds interetation is that the possibilit of success provokes the invasion of an uncontrollable feeling of culpabilt. At this point he brings in examples drawn from two exemplar plas Macbth, of course but also Rosmerholm. Since Ibsen's pla is less well known than Shakespeares, it is worthwhile to summarize the plot The setting is an old manor house located on the outskirts of a small town in Norwa huddled at the end of a fjord In this manor connected to the world b a footbridge crossing a turbulent millrace lives the former pastor Rosmer the heir to a long famil of local notables A ear before the action of the pla his wi suffering from mentl illness, threw herself into the water In the same house lives the governess Rebecca who cam 74
A nict hetween Two Kinds ofMedicne
ere aer the death of her stepfather Dr West. This freethiker had educated Rebecca after her other's death and conveed her to his liberal deas Rosers cohabitation with the young woman has two consequences Frst the former astor is converted to liberal ideas which he publicl endorses, to the great scandal of his brotherinlaw headmaster Kroll the leader of the local par of order Secondly, his intellectual counit with Rebecca is transformed into feel gs of love and he proposes marriage to her. But Rebecca, aer a momentar reacton of jo decares marrage impossible Whereupon head aster Kroll arrives to reveal to his brotherilaw hat his wife was driven to suicide and to Rebecca hat her birth was illegitmate: she is in fact the atural child of her "stepfather Rebecca energetcall refuses to believe this She admits however at she was e one who had insinuated into the dead womans mind the ideas that drove her to suicide She then prepares to leave the manor at hich point Rosmer again asks her to become his wife She refuses once again saying she is no
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loger te abitious young woan wo ad oved ito te ouse and quietly gotten rid of te wife wo stood i er way. If kowing er as coverted to free tougt se o e cotrary as been ennobled by contact wit i Se ca no loger enjoy te success se as won It is ere tat Freud itervenes oce agai wit te goal of correctig te explanations give by te autor ad reestablisig te re eiology of te case. Accordig to Freud, te oral reason ivoked by Rebecca is erely a scree Te young woa erself idicates a ore solid reaso: se as a past Ad it is easy to uder stad wat tis past is by aalyzig er reactio to te revelatio about er birt f se refuses so eergetically to adit tat se is Wests daugter ad if te cosequence of tis revelation is to er criial aeuvers it is ake er because se was tis so-called stepfaters lover Te recogition of icest is wat sets off te feel ig of guilt; it and not er moral coversion stads i te way of Rebeccas success. I order to uderstad er beavior we ust reestablis te 76
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tt tat te play does not tell and could ot tell oter than by vague allsios2 But wen e opposes this "te idden reason to te oralizing one declared by te eroine Freud forgets wat gives Rebeccas beavior its nl eaning in bse's eyes. forgets te ed of te play were neiter moraliZing coversion nor te crsing weigt of guilt is operative Rebeccas transforation is located beyond good nd evil and is anifesed not by a conversion to orality but by te impossibility of acting, the ipossibilit of willing even For Rebecca who no longer wants to act and Roser wo o loger wants to know the stor ends i a particular kind of ystical unio They unite and arch joyously toward te footbridge were tey drown together i te coursing water Tis ultiate unio of knowledge and nonknowledge of activity and pssivity fully expresses te logic of te aestetic nconscous. Te true cure te true ealing is Scopenaerian renunciation of te will to live, 20
Freud, "Some CharacterTypes Met with in Psyho-analyi Work, 5'andard Edition, vol. 14, p. 329. 77
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selfabandon to the original sea of nonwilling the "supreme bliss into which Wagner's Isolde descended and that the young Nietzsche assimilated to the triumph of a new Dionysos Such bliss is what Freud refuses Against it he puts forard the good causal plot te rationalit of the feeling of guilt liberated by headmaster Krolls cure It is not the moralizing explanation but the innocence of plunging into the primordial sea that he opposes. Here again the ambiguit of Freuds relation to the aesthetic unconscious appears in stark relief: faced with this nihilism this radical identity of pathos and logos that in the age of bsen, Strindberg and Wagnerism became the ultimate truth and the moral of the aesthetic unconscious Freud retreats to what is in the end the position adopted by Corneille and Voltaire when confronted with Oedipus's r He seeks to reestablish against this ath, a good causal concatenation and a positive virtue tat would be the effect of knowledge The force of what is at stake here for Freud can be felt in a rief refer ence to another of Ibsens psychoanalytic 78
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dr amas, Te L ad y from the Se a, in which Dr W angels wif e is haunted by the ir r esistible call of the sea W hen her husband leaves her f re e to f ollow the passing sailor in whom she r ecognizes the incar nation of this call Ellida r enounces her desir e Just as Rebecca claimed that contact with Rosmer has tr ansf or med her Ellida claims to have been set f r ee by the choice her husband gave her . Since she can choose she will stay with him. T his time however the r elation beeen the author 's r easons and the inter pr eter 's appear in an inver se r elation Fr eud conr ms the char acter s inter pr etation and sees it as a successf ul cur e" car ri ed out by Dr W a ngeL I bsen s p r e par a tor notes however r educe this f re edom to an illusor y status; the plot summar he gives is r esolutely Schopenhauer ian : Life is apparenty a happy, easy and ively thing up there in he shadow of the mountains and in the monoony of tis secusion The the suggestion is thrown up that this kind of life is a ife of shadows. No iitiaive; no fght 79
A Conflict between Two Kin oMedicine for liberty. Only longings and desires This is how life is lived in the brief lght sumer. Ad aerards - into the darkness. Then longings are roused for the lfe of the great world outside But what wold be gained from that? With changed srrondings and wth one's ind developed, there is an increase n ones cravngs and longngs and desires. L . ] Everyhere litation From ths comes elancholy like a subdued song of ourning over the whole of hun existence and all the actvties of en One bright sumer day with a great darkness thereafter that is all .
.
]
Te seas power of attraction The longng for the sea People akn to the sea. Bound by the sea Dependent on the sea. Must return to t.
[
J The great secret is the dependence of te huan wll upon "the wllIess 21
Ths the cycle of seasons in the north s identifie with the vanishng of the illusions of representation 21
Hcnrik Ibsen, Draft or The ady from th Sa in Oxf Ibsen ed. James Waltr MFarlane (London: Oxord Unversy Prss 1966), ol 7, pp. 449-50
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ito the nothingness of the will that wills nothing. I this case Freud adopt Dr Wangels ad the Lady om the Seas moral in oppositio to the one proposed by the author We might cosider this to be a "historical issue bt this does ot mean that there is aythig circumstantial abot it. Fred was not simply fightig agaist a ideology present i the spirit of the age - a age moreover that was already receding into the past when he wrote these texts. The battle is between two versions of the uncon scios, o ideas of what lies beeath the polite polished surface of societies two ideas of ciiliza tions ills and the way to heal them. Since we are speaking of periods, let s ote precisely whe this one is located Te Moses ofMichelangelo was written in 1914; both he Uncanny and the short text o Ibsen in 1915. We are not far from the uing poi i Fred's work constituted by the introduction of the death drive i Bond the Pleasure Princle. reud himself explaied this u in his wor in tes of the dedction of the death drive om the study of the problematic 81
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traumatic neurosis. But its recognition is also bound to the bow that the war of 1914 deivered to the optimistic vision that had guided the rst era of psychoanalysis and the simple opposition between pleasure principe and reaity princple There are however reasons to suspect that this explanation does not exhaust the signicance of this oment The discovery of the death drve is also an episode in Freuds long and oen disguised confrontation with the great obsessive theme of the epoch in which psychoanalysis was fomed: the unconscious of the Schopenhauerian tinginitself and the great literar tions of return to this unconscous. The ultimate secret of the whole tradition of the novel of the illusions of the wi summarizing the literature of a century the lterature of the aesthetic age is that what life preseving instincts ultimately preseve for life is its movement toward its death and that the "guardians of ife are in fact myrmidons of death Freud never stopped ghting with this secret Indeed the interpretation of the "reaity principle ies at the heat of the correctons Freud 82
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kes to Jensens Hoffmas or Ibsens pots This confrontation with the logic of e aesthetc nconscios is what compes him to reestablish the correct etioogy of Hanold or Nathaniels case and the proper ending to Ro smerholm, but also e coect attitude of Moses, that of the cam ictor of reason over sacred passon. Eerything occurs as if these analyses were so many ways of resisting the nihilist entropy that Freud detects and rejects in the works of the aesthetic regime of art, bt that he will also legtimze in his theoiza tion of the death drive We are now in a position to understand the paradoxica reation between Freud's aesthetic anayses and those that will later claim his patronage. The intenton of the latter is to rete Freuds biographism and his ndifference to artistic form They look for the effect of the unconscious in the particularties of pictorial touch that silently bele the guratie anecdote or in the stammengs of the iterar text that mark the action of another language whin language. Understood in this way as the stamp of an unnamable truth or the 83
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shock poduced b the foce of the Othe, the unconscious exceeds in pinciple an adequate sensible pesentation At the beginning of Te Moses, Feud evokes the shock povoked b geat woks and the disaa that can seize hold of thought confonted with the enigma of this shock "Possibl indeed some wite on aesthetics has discoveed that this state of intellectual bewilde ment is a necessary condition when a geat wok of art is to achieve its geatest effects. t would onl be with the geatest eluctance that I could bing mself to believe in an such necessity22 The mainsping of Feud's analses, the eason fo the privilege he gives to the biogaphical plot whethe it be the biogaph of the fictional chaacte o of the artist can be found in the fact that he eses to ascibe the powe of painting sculptue o liteatue to this bewildement In ode to ete the thesis of this hpothetical aesthetician, Feud is ead to evise an stoy and if necessary even ewite the saced text. But the aesthetician who reu, Moes
2-. 84
Sndard Ediion, vol 3, pp
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was a hpothesis fo Feud is toda an actual gue in the eld of aesthetic thought a geneal rule he elies pecisel on Feud to poide the gounding fo the thesis that his paton wanted to efute, the thesis that links the woks powe to its bewildeing effect 1 hae in mind hee ost paticulal the analses in which ]ean-Fanois Lotad towad the end of his life elaboated an aesthetics of the sublime whose thee pillas ae Buke Kant and Feud23 Lotad contasts the weak-mindedness of aesthetics with the powe of the pictoial touch conceied as a powe of diesti tue. The subject disamed b the stamp of the a itheton the sensible that affects the naked soul is cononted with a powe of the Othe which in the nal instance is the face of God that no one can look upon putting the spectato in the posi tion of Moses befoe the buning bush Against Feudian sublimation Lotad poses this stamp of 23
See Jean-Franois Lyotard Te Inhuman: Refecos on Yme ans. Bennngton n Rchel Bowlb (Stnford; Stn ord Pres 992) n Postmodern Fables. ran George Van Den Abbele (Mnneapol o Mnnesot Pres 997
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the sublime producing the triumph of a pathos irreducible to any logos, a pathos that in the final analysis is identified with the power of God himself calling Moses The relation beween the wo versions of the unconscious then takes the shape of a singular crisscross Freudian psychoanalysis presupposes the aestheti revolution that rescinds the causal order of classical representation and identifies the power of art with the immediate identit of contraries, of logos and pathos. It presupposes a literature based on the wofold power of mute speech. But Freud makes a choice within this dualit Against the nihilist entrpy inherent in the power of voeless speech, Freud chooses the other form of mute speech the hieroglyph offered to the labor of interpretation and the hope of healing Following this logic, he tends to assimilate the work of fantasy" and the labor of its deciphering with the classical plt of recognition that the aesthetic revolution had reected He thus bngs back within the frame of the representative regime of art the gures and plot strctures that
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this old regime had rejected and that it took the aesthetic revolution to put at his disposaL Today a diferent Freudianism argues against this return It puts into question Freudian biographism and claims to be more respectful of the specifici of art It presents itself as a more radical Freudiansm in that it has been freed from the sequels of the representative tradition and harmonized with the new regime of art that made Oedipus available the new regime that equates activi and passivi by arming both the antirepresentative autonomy of art and its forcibly heteronomic nature, its value as testimony to the action of forces that go beyond the subject and tear it away from itself In order to do this of course it relies above all on Beyond the Pleasure ncile and other texts of the 1920s and 1930s that mark the distance Freud has taken from the corrector of Jensen bsen and Hoffmann, from the Freud who admired Moses for having freed himself from sacred fur This project requires a decision within the contradictor logic of the aesthetic unconscious, within the polari of mute speech opposite to the one 87
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made y Freud. The voiceless power of the Others speech must be valorized as something irreducible to any hermeneutics This requires in turn an assumption of the whole nihilist entropy, even at the cost of transforming the bliss of returning to the original abyss into a sacred relation to the Other and the Law. This Freudianism then executes a turning moement around Freud's theory bringing back in Freuds name and against him the nihilism that his aestheti analyses never stopped fighting against This turning movement affms itself as a rejection of the aesthetic tradition24 But it might in fact be the nal trick that the aesthetic unconscious plays on the Freudian unconscious 24
See Lyor, "Ama Mna n Pst Fbs pp. 235-9
8
