Table of Contents
Flaxman - Past Imperfect, Future Unknown - JCRT 4.2
Past Imperfect, Future Unknown: The Discourse of Theory
Gregory Flaxman
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Pragmatically speaking, then, we know that there has been, over the last fifteen to twenty years, a strong interest in something called literary theory and that, in the United States, this interest has at times coincided with the importation and reception of foreign, mostly but not always continental, influences. We also know that this wave of interest now seems to be receding as some satiation or disappointment sets in after the initial enthusiasm. Such an ebb and flow is natural enough, but it remains interesting, in this case, because it makes the depth of the resistance to theory so manifest.
—Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory.[1]
Twilight of the (Theoretical) Idols
Whatever we think about theory, and today we are often encouraged to think the worst, perhaps we can all agree that its recourse has become a matter of profound tact. The “resistance to theory” that Paul de Man underscored in the mid-1980s has evolved over the last twenty years into something closer to disapproval, dismissal, and occasionally outright derision. The result is that one must ultimately understand the discretionary limits of theory as much as theory itself. In the most obvious sense, we might say that the savoir-faire of theory has degenerated into a game of proper names, for if the emergence of theory coalesced around the writings and teachings of distinct figures, the diplomacy of theory has come to lie in the capacity to grasp the right names to drop and the right times to do so. The proper name is now inextricable from the larger sense of its propriety. All things being equal, we know that Roland Barthes remains an ever-graceful option, Michel Foucault an acceptable turn, Jean-Fran’ois Lyotard a more delicate case, Jacques Lacan a prospective breech of etiquette, and de Man himself a point of almost certain instigation.
Remembrance of Theory Past: The French Invasion
The Position and Disposition of Theory
Propadeutic to Any Theory: The Four Discourses
S1
→
S2
↑
↓
$
//
a
S2
→
a
↑
↓
S1
//
$
a
→
$
↑
↓
S2
//
S1
$
→
S1
↑
↓
a
//
S2
Master
University
Analyst
Hysteric
a.
agent
→
other
agent
→
other
↓
product
agent
→
other
↑
↓
truth
//
product
> It is only the fourth position that introduces the psychoanalytic point of view. In fact, it is not the fourth, but the very first position, namely the position of truth. Indeed,
>
> Freud demonstrated that, while man is speaking he is driven by a truth, even if it remains unknown to himself. It is this position of truth which functions as the motor and as the starting-point of each discourse.[2]
impossibility
agent
→
other
↑
↓
truth
//
product
impotence
The Discourse of Hysteria and the Hystercization of Theory
Notes
Gregory Flaxman is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the editor of The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema and is currently at work on a book about romantic comedy and the modern imagination of freedom.
’ 2003 Gregory Flaxman. All rights reserved.
Updated 07/28/21.
http://jcrt.org/archives/04.2/flaxman/
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 5. ↩︎
Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine, trans. Marc du Ry (New York: Other Press, 1999), p. 101. ↩︎
Jean-Michel Rabat’, The Future of Theory (London: Blackwell, 2002), p. 4. ↩︎
Quoted in The Future of Theory, p. 2. Also see The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter (Boston and New York: Bedford and St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 1515. ↩︎
Rabat’, p. 2. ↩︎
Rabat’, p. 7. ↩︎
Rabat’, p. 17. ↩︎
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), p. xvi. ↩︎
de Man, p. 7. If the conditions for literary theory, as de Man describes them, have not substantially changed’as I believe a case could be made for this’then why do we live in the wake of theory? Surely part of the answer lies in the degree to which the procedures of this theory, as a mode of reading, were internalized, systematized, and reproduced: in short, in the degree to which literary theory became clich’. As de Man’s alter-ego in America, Jacques Derrida, recently admitted, deconstruction ultimately amounted, in the hands of its American practitioners, to “organized bodies of rules, of procedures and techniques, in a word, methods, know-how applicable in a current fashion. One could even formulate or formalize (and I applied myself in this way at first) a certain consistency in these laws which made possible reading processes at once critical and critical of the ideal of critique, processes of close reading, which could reassure those who in or outside the wake of new criticism or some other formalism felt it necessary to legitimate this ethics of close reading or internal reading. And among these examples of these procedural or formalizing formulae that I had proposed’ there was the reversal of hierarchy. After having reversed a binary opposition, whatever it may be’speech/writing, man/woman, spirit/matter, signifier/signified, signified/signifier, master/slave and so on’and having liberated the subjugated and submissive tem, one then proceeded to the generalization of this latter in new traits, producing a different concept, for example another concept of writing such as trace, diff’rence, gramme, text, and so on” (as quoted in The Future of Theory, p. 98). ↩︎
Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 240. ↩︎
Professing Literature, p. 228. ↩︎
For a more developed history of literary criticism in the American university, see Vincent B. Leitch’s American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). ↩︎
Rabat’, p. 8-9. ↩︎
Rabat’, p. 9. ↩︎
Plato, Timaeus, part III, 91 c. ↩︎
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Volume VII, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1999), p. 12. ↩︎
Freud, 78. ↩︎
Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing” in 'crits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977), p. 116. ↩︎
Jacques Lacan_, Seminar XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse_ (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 178. ↩︎
For an explanation of these functions, see Mark Bracher, “On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Four Discourses” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Ronald Corthell, and Fran’oise Massardie-Kenney (New York: NYU Press, 1994), p. 107 ff. ↩︎
L’envers de la psychanalyse, 11. ↩︎
Not that it is critical that we do not confuse these terms, which can rotate around the diagram, with the positions themselves, which remain fixed on the diagram. This temptation is particularly strong in the case of the subject, who would seem to automatically assume the place of agent when, in fact, the subject can be the agent (as in the discourse of hysteria) just as much as it can be the other (as in the discourse of the analyst), the product (as in the discourse of the university), or the truth (as in the discourse of the master). ↩︎
This is why Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis undertakes the “structural introduction, by artificial conditions, of the discourse of hysteria.” Indeed, if psychoanalysis induces the “hystericization of discourse,” as Lacan argues, then we might regard hysteria and its particular rhetoric of the unconscious as the primary (“universal”) means of describing the subject of psychoanalysis. See L’envers de la psychanalyse, p. 35-36. ↩︎
Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1993), p. 175. We must note here, however, that what mobilizes this form of hysterical questioning always refers to the enigma of sexuality, and this may explain why hysteria remains the privileged and accursed space of femininity (despite, as any analyst will attest, the existence of male hysterics). For instance, in the case of Freud’s patient Dora, the subject of Fragment of a Case of Hysteria, this question of “why?” belies her entire analysis, and Freud himself tracks it down in the girl’s illicit experiences with two women, her governess and her father’s mistress, Frau K. In each case, Dora seems to silently beg of them: what does it mean to be a woman? Or, as Lacan explains in returning to this case history: “As is true for all women, and for reasons that are at the very basis of the most elementary forms of social exchange (the very reasons that Dora gives as the ground for her revolt), the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as an object of desire for the man, and this is for Dora the mystery motivating her idolatry of Frau K.” See Jacques Lacan, “Intervention on Transference” in In Dora’s Case: Freud’Hysteria’Feminism, ed. Charles Berheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.99. Of course, Freud’s account of Dora’s hysteria bears witness to the analyst’s utter failure to understand that, behind Dora’s multiplying identifications, was precisely a desire for Frau K. rather than a for her father and his various substitutes. Whence the girl’s dismissive attitude toward doctors, including Freud himself: she had “grown accustomed to laugh at the efforts of doctors” because their knowledge could not account for the mystery of sexuality she desired, because her questions made fools of the arbiters and priests of knowledge. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, p. 22. ↩︎
See Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” Scilicet, 1970, nr. 2/3, p. 88. ↩︎
Verhaeghe, p. 111. ↩︎
L’envers de la psychanalyse, p. 239. ↩︎
Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 2. ↩︎
Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” p. 128-129. ↩︎