Cluttering Promises, Beyond Resistance

Adam Phillips’ mixed-genre collection Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature works to delineate the science of psychoanalysis from its pragmatics, suggesting we not use psychoanalysis to discover the answers to all life’s questions, but instead as a language through which to articulate the stories of who we are.

A trauma is that which is beyond, or resistant to psychic transformation. (53)

So, which is it—“beyond, or resistant to”—and where’s the second comma after “or resistant to”? What can this sentence tell us about the possibilities and limitations of trauma and psychic transformation as Phillips imagines them?

If “trauma is that which is beyond . . . psychic transformation,” trauma’s otherworldliness or temporal advantage relieves it from resistance; trauma which is beyond needn’t engage psychic transformation at all, even when the sentence puts them in relationship like this, whereas “a trauma . . . which is . . . resistant to psychic transformation,” must resist. It’s not that it could if only it wanted or needed to, but that trauma imperatively and insistently resists, that its reason for being is to do just that. Choosing to believe that trauma is “resistant to” psychic transformation turns all the momentum of “beyond” back onto itself so that trauma is no longer this space out there at a distance from psychic transformation, but a force of attack right here, pushing through psychic transformation’s barricades. “Resistant to” circumscribes psychic transformation as finite space, but now its boundaries push toward a trauma that actively engages it. A trauma that is beyond is a much less hostile trauma than one that is resistant to.

Whether trauma is “beyond” or “resistant to” also determines the possibilities and limitations of “psychic transformation.” “Beyond” catapults “trauma” into other dimensions depending on the definition one applies. In one sense, “beyond” situates psychic transformation as finite space which is in relationship to another space, trauma. The limit or end of the space of psychic transformation does not extend to the trauma out there, a trauma ostensibly the least bit concerned with psychic transformation or with testing its boundaries, as a trauma “resistant to” must do. “Beyond” in this sense puts an indefinable space between psychic transformation and trauma. In another sense, “beyond” indicates a temporality in motion. It can mean “Of time: past, later than.” If trauma is “beyond” psychic transformation in time, then trauma takes place in the always-thereafter of psychic transformation. This sense of “beyond” puts a space in time between psychic transformation and trauma. A third sense of “beyond” implies a superlative attitude: trauma is greater than, exceeds, or is superior in degree to psychic transformation—yet again calling attention to their distance from one another. Finally, “beyond” could indicate an afterlife, as in a Great Beyond, “that which lies beyond one’s present life or experience,” trauma as the clarion call from a great distance.

However you look at it, “beyond” puts distance between trauma and psychic transformation while “resistant to” puts the two into hostile contact with one another. Choosing either phrase relegates “psychic transformation” to the predicate object (of a preposition) and to a rather passive entity on the one hand or a tireless combatant on the other. The sentence, on the surface of things, suggests nothing of the paradox that it sets up. One might skate right by and never notice that the sentence does not offer a simple choice between interchangeable or substitutable terms; rather, the choice it offers positions the reader into the space between trauma and psychic transformation and asks her to determine what relationship the two will have.

The weird comma in the middle of the sentence, just after “beyond" (beyond beyond?), is intriguing. It is as though the comma and the option of “or resistant to”—the only things standing between “beyond” and “psychic transformation”—impedes the trauma “beyond” from gaining immediate access to “psychic transformation.” The phrase “resistant to” has sentence-level access to “psychic transformation”—trauma on the front lines, directly engaging psychic transformation. I’d love to read this comma as an Evel Knievel ramp that “beyond” might use to go beyond the sentence, elevating trauma to its promised “beyond” so that it needn’t interact with “psychic transformation” at the street level because it has been lifted above the fray.

Is trauma the great beyond that we should all be seeking, past the confinement of psychic transformation? Is it a volatile force against which we muster the weapons of psychic transformation?

***

“You never puzzle out a Phillips sentence; you reread because you were pleased the first time.” – From an Amazon.com book review

Dolar's Volumized Voice and Softened Power

Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More analyzes an impressive array of philosophical texts on the voice through a Freudian and Lacanian lens to position the voice as mediator of meaning between language and body and to pursue it as the psychoanalytic object.

In chapter 4, “The Ethics of the Voice,” Dolar delivers a series of observations concerning the volume and power of the voice of reason/intellect, the first of which is this statement, reminiscent of his earlier meditation on John the Baptist:

The voice of reason, silent as it may be, is the power of the powerless, the mysterious force which compels us to follow reason. (90)

A page later, Dolar qualifies and alters the previous configuration of voice and power, borrowing from Freud what Dolar says is “the very same metaphor” but what is actually a modification and/or clarification of the previous sentence:

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. (91)

Just after the long Freud quote from which the preceding sentence was extracted, Dolar rejoins with yet another, albeit less eloquent, synthesis of his own initial observation about the volume and power of the voice and the one he quoted from Freud:

So hopes for the future of mankind are again vested in the voice of reason, which, soft and quiet as it may be, will nevertheless gain the upper hand, and will ultimately get heard. (91)

The voice undergoes distinct shifts in volume and power as we move through the text. In terms of volume, the voice goes from being “the voice of reason silent” in Dolar’s words to “the voice of the intellect is a soft one” in the Freud quote, then on to Dolar’s “the voice of reason, which, soft and quiet as it may be.” The first adjective used to describe the voice in this sequence, “silent,” echoes a previous description of the voice as one that retains the capacity, even as it is “completely silent,” to “‘overcry’ all other voices” (90). The “silent” voice of our sentence, then, is “completely silent,” absolutely without sound, yet able to be heard over and above all other voices. But in the next reference to the voice, borrowed from Freud, Dolar not only alters the voice from that of reason to that of “the intellect,” but he also turns up the volume of the voice, from “silent” to “a soft one” (91). There is some ambiguity in the word “soft,” which we know can mean either not very loud, as in having some soft music playing in the background, or it can mean not hard, harsh, or severe, as in soft to the touch, unaggressive in its relationships to others. Though we’ve been primed with all this talk of the voice to believe “soft” means not very loud, in Freud’s use of the word “soft,” there’s no indication that he’s referring to volume at all; the actions in the next part of the sentence – the voice “does not rest” and “gain[s] a hearing” – imply that the softness of the voice describes its impetus for offensive action on its own behalf, maybe even its drive. Nothing in the sentence or excerpted quote gives the impression that volume is what’s “soft”; indeed, the excerpt’s economy is one of power, not of volume: words like “powerlessness” and “weakness” are used to describe “man’s intellect.” Dolar himself further complicates matters by asserting in the third iteration of this concept that the “voice of reason” is both “soft and quiet as it may be,” implying by his use of the two adjectives that they do not mean the same thing, that he requires both to describe the full impact of the power and volume of the voice. In this last sentence, Dolar further delineates the words’ meanings when he asserts that the voice “will nevertheless gain the upper hand,” suggesting that the voice’s softness will not prevent it from being overpowered, and the voice “will ultimately get heard,” suggesting that the voice’s volume will not prevent it from speaking. He repeats this gesture a few sentences later when detailing why the “soft powerless voice which one can barely hear emerges as the most improbable candidate for a dictatorship; its barely perceptible sound has all the markings of a future dictator” (91). We see through these final enunciations that not only has volume increased as we move through the text, but also power has softened, in its assertion of its power but not its force.

But my question remains unanswered: why does the voice get louder from one page to the next? A second question that should be added is why the belated emphasis on the softness of the power(lessness)? Is there something intrinsic to the volume of the voice which affects the recognition of the power in the powerlessness of the voice of reason? The repetition of the construction “as it may be” (first “silent as it may be” then “quiet as it may be”) demands we read the sentences as echoes of one another, so why is the second echo louder than the first? The voice of reason: talks softly and carries, well, a small stick too? I have no answer to these questions, just more questions about the imbrications of voice, volume, and soft power.

Oedipus or No-thing?

Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus reveals through its distinction between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis the way that society, the family, and the father fascistically indoctrinate humanity in order to control and repress human desire.

The first error of psychoanalysis is in acting as if things began with the child. (275)

“Things began with the child” is a subordinate clause placed into a subjunctive relation with the main clause—“The first error of psychoanalysis is in acting”—by the subordinating conjunction “as if.” As defined by the OED, “as if” “introduc[es] a supposition, or way of conceiving some entity or situation, that is not to be taken literally, but yields some insight or convenience in metaphysics.” So what “as if” introduces—“things began with the child”—is a supposition that isn’t meant to be taken literally. Yet, the simple past construction of this subordinate clause indicates that things did begin with the child. A construction more attuned to the unlikeliness of “as if” is the past perfect, “things [had begun] with the child.” The addition of “had” works with “as if” to definitively position the content of the clause within the realm of the unrealistic or impossible; instead, the simple past tense alongside the subjunctive “as if” creates a paradox of reality and non-reality at the level of rhetoric—the same move psychoanalysts-fathers make when they Oedipalize by insisting that something isn’t there when and where it actually is (desire), and by insisting something’s there when and where it actually isn’t or doesn’t have to be (Oedipus).

But here I have brought psychoanalysts into a sentence which does not include them on its surface. The prepositional phrase “of psychoanalysis” in the main clause attributes the “error . . . in acting” to psychoanalysis, the practice, not to psychoanalysts, the agents of this practice. Interesting move, considering it’s embedded in a passage concerning who to assign guilt to and how and when it is placed there. The next prepositional phrase “in acting” is an interesting choice because the preposition “in” casts “acting” as the object of the preposition and therefore locates the “error” within the act of acting, implying a subject who is doing the acting. As I read this sentence, I intuitively add the agents into the sentence, like so: The first error of psychoanalysis is in [psychoanalysts’] acting. The acting is theirs, a possession or object of the psychoanalyst, but the acting surfaces in this sentence while the actors and their ability to possess their actions are repressed by the rules placed upon syntax and grammar (by… another repression). Sound familiar?

“In acting” is an adverbial prepositional phrase; it both modifies the main (helping) verb “is” and acts as a prepositional phrase. It tells in what manner the “error . . . is” and it locates that error “in acting.” “The first” demands both that psychoanalysis has more errors (and the tone is that there are many more errors) and that this one is primary or foundational in that it comes before the others and deserves honorable mention. The first and foremost error of psychoanalysis, then, is in performance. Like children, psychoanalysis seems to have been dropped in medias res into the ongoing Oedipalization process, out of control of its own actions, repressing agency to act upon its own desires, involved in the doing of Oedipus instead of the being of desire. In this sentence, psychoanalysis plays the role of the child, submitting its desire to the will of the psychoanalysts-fathers, while the psychoanalysts, veiled, play the role of the paranoiac father who is Oedipalizing the child. The sentence, despite the larger paragraph’s and chapter’s insistence that the guilt begins with and is sustained by psychoanalysts-fathers, leaves us with only psychoanalysis “in acting” and the paradox of beginnings and endings extant in those “things began with the child.”

And what of these things? This word can refer to anything. It’s so general and vague that all I can say about it is that it’s a noun substitute, but for what noun, I don’t know. Could it be that the sentence implies that thing-ness, that all things, that the very capability for matter or circumstance to be construed as a “thing” begins not “with the child” but elsewhere? If so, the preceding sentences help us reposition thing-ness within the father where it is introjected into the child via a conversion from thing-ness to Oedipalized guilt. If this reading is valid, and the word “things” can be read as the very capacity to call things “things,” then can we also say that the sentence demands the transgenerational introjection of guilt in order for children to declare any kind of agency at all? Is it Oedipus or nothing?

Forcing the Syntax of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia contends that Oedipus-based psychoanalytics remain within a closed familial/capitalistic system and argues instead for a non-hierarchical, inclusive desystemizing process called schizoanalysis.

At the beginning, psychoanalysts could not be unaware of the forcing employed to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the unconscious. (56)

In a book largely concerned with dislocations and non-origins, the first word “At” locates an originary moment precisely at a specific time or space, a moment or a location. There was an instance or a set place “at the beginning” of psychoanalysis, I presume (but the sentence doesn’t tell me), when or where the practitioners of the fledgling field “could not be unaware”—a contrived construction deliberately overdetermined for our unraveling. The modal “could” points to an ability—to “be unaware”—that is located only “at the beginning,” then the negating word “not” removes the possibility of locating this ability in the past; “not” de-locates the ability that has not yet been given to us by the sentence, the “be unaware” which follows “could not.” Before unawareness even creeps in, the sentence presents the possibility of this (in)ability, negating the possibility and thereby dislocating it; once the forecasted and foreclosed ability “be unaware” is given, it’s given in the negative. The whole thing could have been simplified had the sentence been written, “psychoanalysts were aware of the forcing,” so why the syntactic gymnastics?

The phrase “could not be unaware” argues that psychoanalysts “at the beginning” must have been aware of how forced the Oedipal complex was because it was impossible for them to not be aware; said another way, it was outside of the realm of possibility that they could be so senseless as to not feel themselves “forcing . . . Oedipus . . . into the unconscious.” Placing the burden of proof on unawareness renders a much different argument than one which places the burden of proof on awareness. Just as the remainder of the paragraph offers no proof that proto-psychoanalysts turned a blind eye to their own obvious awareness of forcing Oedipus, neither does it offer proof that they remained blissfully ignorant of their forcing. Either way (or… or another way), Deleuze and Guattari are gesturing toward a prototypical psychoanalysis machine operated by formative psychoanalysts, which they blame/credit with knowing all along what they were doing because they couldn’t not know.

So far, psychoanalysts have been asserted into the sentence but only to have foreclosed on the possibility of awareness; next, the analysts themselves will disappear, so that by the end of the sentence, only their actions will remain, and even then, only at the level of the unconscious. The prepositional phrase “of the forcing employed” demands an object to answer the question, “by whom?” Its passive construction covers over the psychoanalyst’s presence as the one forcing the introduction of Oedipus, forcing the injection of Oedipus into the unconscious. Why would the authors make such a bold move “at the beginning” of forcing psychoanalysts into the subject of the sentence as generators of the entire Oedipal paradigm, only to strip them first of their own (un)awareness then of their position as actors and agents? The psychoanalysts who employ these dual forces are eclipsed by the enumeration of those very forces: “to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the unconscious.” These two prepositional phrases, set off by the sentence’s sole repetition of “to,” delineate the twin purposes of psychoanalysis using an economics metaphor; once introduced into the economy of the therapeutic situation, the Oedipal currency injects itself (because there’s no psychoanalyst in this part of the sentence to do so) into the libidinal economy and is taken up as Law. This sentence, in moving from the agents-psychoanalysts to the producing-production of the libidinal economy, illustrates the movement from the psychoanalytic—hierarchized, fathered, and located blame, guilt, and association—to the schizoanalytic—flows and ruptures, orphans, nomads. It simultaneously represents the movement from the individual to the socius by its movement away from psychoanalysts to a more general (capitalist?) Oedipal economy. This way of thinking might help address one final question: Why do Deleuze and Guattari italicize “could not be unaware”? Later in the paragraph, they claim to have borrowed the phrase from Marx who said the same thing about early capitalists. Dis-locating Oedipality from the unconscious and moving it first through psychoanalysts and then into society recasts the Oedipal-machine as like any other machine, capable of being dis-located from its incorporation in the unconscious and properly introjected.

de Lauretis' Fetishistic Ambivalence

Teresa de Lauretis’ Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film argues for an inclusive both/and position over the exclusionary either/or through her analysis and synthesis of seemingly-contradictory drive theories from four theoreticians (Freud, Foucault, Fanon, and LaPlanche ) commonly pitted against rather than shown to agree with one another, which she illustrates via close readings of Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ and Barnes’ novel Nightwood.

Ambivalence, I think, is a predicament of what may perhaps still be called the human condition, and I do not know whether it can, or should, be resolved. (59)

de Lauretis explains and illustrates in this sentence how the oscillating motion of ambivalence clears a space between its valences for queer subject formation. To choose to not choose one option over another and to therefore accept both becomes fetishized through the very action of pushing ambivalence to excess—desiring ambivalence more than one desires univalence (or even multivalence), dis-solving the tensions of decision into indecision. Ambivalence is fetishistic precisely because it chooses to not choose—the ambivalent subject does not opt for one contradictory emotion/attitude or another but accepts both/and. Ambivalence is inclusionary, so what do we make of de Lauretis’ definitional phrase “Ambivalence . . . is,” her gesture that nails down a word which, by its very OED definition, chooses “the coexistence . . . of contradictory emotions or attitudes (as love and hatred)”? Her declarative definition of the word “ambivalence” contradicts what we’ve come to understand about ambivalence: that it thrives on contradictions rather than on resolutions. But separating the subject and verb in this sentence both syntactically and connotatively is the conditional comment clause “I think.” Inserting a hedging statement, one that’s meant to throw the absoluteness of Ambivalence is into question, points to de Lauretis’ own ambivalence, her choosing to not choose between a mastery which would seek resolution and a speculation which would prefer the productive tension of the irresolute. “Ambivalence” implies a confidence in the oscillation between either/or, whereas “ambiguity”—the word frequently offered as ambivalence’s synonym—describes the feeling of uncertainty concerning the available options. de Lauretis is not ambiguous, she doesn’t lack agency to make this choice; rather, she’s an ambivalent subject who finds agency in her desire for having it both ways. The passive verb construction which ends the sentence obviously saps agency from whoever might choose to resolve such ambivalence, suggesting that agency is to be found not in either/or but in both/and. This sentence, taken as fetishistic in its full embrace of ambivalence, positions agency and authority within ambivalence, within the fetish, rather than outside of it. Fetishizing the queer ambivalence which chooses to not choose liberates the subject from the false dichotomies of the either/or and offers a position of power precisely between the both/and.

“Ambivalence, I think,” the sentence states, “is a predicament.” The OED offers these three synonyms as a definition for “predicament”—“circumstance, condition, or situation”—suggesting with its use of “or” that we must choose one (already, there’s ambivalence, so, naturally, we’ll choose to not choose and to therefore choose them all). If we take it in the sense of a “circumstance” or a “situation,” “predicament” suggests a moment of time, a temporal lapse into a short span of ambivalence, “esp. one which requires resolution,” just as the end of the definition of “predicament” dictates. These two words convey not a long-term state of existence as or in ambivalence, but a single occurrence that seeks resolution and completion. Calling ambivalence a “condition,” on the other hand, implies longevity, a sense of diachrony, a state of being which will not soon or easily end, which will not fit the “esp.” caveat of the definition. de Lauretis offers the word “condition” into the sentence proper just a few words later, hinting that “ambivalence” should be taken in the conditional denotation of “predicament,” but she codes it as an uncertain word choice when she says it “may perhaps still be called the human condition.” (Here, I clearly attempt to disambiguate when I may perhaps ambivalently accept ambivalence as a predicament situated both synchronically as a circumstantial situation and diachronically as a lasting condition.) de Lauretis’ diplomatic gesture throughout her book is to occupy this space of oscillation and translation, and from this position she uses ambivalence as a tool (or weapon?) toward conflict resolution. In so queering the choice, ambivalence legitimizes itself as a third option by choosing itself as such. The conflict has ended because the choice was made to end the conflict.

Ending the sentence with the word “resolved” implies that the ambivalence with which this sentence began was once “solved”—that we are stuck within a repeat cycle of solution/re-solution/re-solution, that there has, in fact, been no resolution. Perhaps there’s been no resolution because there’s no problem. Hear me out: the word “solved” points to an originary moment of ambivalence which needs solving, but the sentence never actually approaches the specific contradiction or problem—the word “resolved” stays two steps away from the tension of ambivalence rather than mingling with the solvents, which are not found in this sentence. de Lauretis’ reluctance to “resolve” ambivalence makes sense, as the goal to resolve skips several steps in the process which would precede any attempt at conflict resolution (namely, identifying the problems, testing for solvents). Trying to “resolve” the contradictions inherent in ambivalence gets us nowhere; dissolving the need to solve ambivalence is a more fruitful endeavor. de Lauretis’ hedging statements that all but stall the sentence with their insistent back-peddling and her oscillation between what should and shouldn’t happen to ambivalence move us farther and farther away from the initial ambivalence, so by the time we reach the final hedge, “or should,” couched in the passive conditional, “whether it can . . . be resolved,” we think we may perhaps know that ambivalence can, can’t, should, or shouldn’t be resolved, and I, for one, am okay with that. Choosing to accept the negative and the positive, the no and the yes, death and pleasure, situates the subject in a position of power between the both/and; the practice of fetishistic ambivalence may perhaps be that position of power.

A Threat Which Nature Allows: Bersani's Masochistic Rhetoric

Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” connects pleasure to suffering through the child’s fantasy of being beaten.

Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality explains sexual perversions, childhood sexuality, and the transformation from the latter to the former through the process of sexual maturation.

Leo Bersani’s “Desire and Death” reads Baudelaire's poetry to show, mostly with Freud and removed from LaPlanche, that death and pleasure are inextricable.

Bersani’s “Is the Rectume a Grave?” recuperates for its defensive and life-preserving value the gay, masochistic lifestyle choices that manifested themselves personally and politically during the 1980s AIDS crisis.

Bersani’s The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art reads several of Freud’s texts alongside works of fiction and art in order to show through Freud’s emissions and omissions that masochism lies at the heart of (or is synonymous with) human sexuality.

“Human sexuality is constituted as a kind of psychic shattering, as a threat to the stability and integrity of the self—a threat which perhaps only the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to survive” (Bersani 60).

I’m drawn to this sentence because of its structure, its passivity, its repetitions. I’m becoming a fan of the long dash. In a chapter called “Pleasures of Repetition,” it’s the sentence’s own threat of masochism which most intrigues me. First, the grammatical subject and verb of the sentence—“Human sexuality is constituted”—omits by its passive structure the sentence’s subject from the very sexuality being constituted. We’re led to ask, “constituted by whom?” or “constituted for whom?”—both questions the sentence answers after the long dash. But the sentence is not interested in showing by or for whom human sexuality is constituted in this first part; instead, where the preposition would be, we get the redirection of the word “as.” As it is being used here (in my sentence and Bersani’s), “as” is a comparative adverb (or an adverb of manner) which establishes a simile; this is also the case with the second time we see “as” in the sentence. The first part of the sentence can now be read as such:

Human sexuality is constituted as a kind of psychic shattering [is constituted], as a threat to the stability and integrity of the self [is constituted]. . .

“As” can be read, “in the same way as.” Bersani uses “as” to compare the three constitutions: “Human sexuality,” “a kind of psychic shattering,” and “a threat to the stability of the self.” The use of “as” to create similes of these objects, I argue, turns the sentence twice around those similes; the vertigo of the turns—the “inconclusive movement of perceptual verification on our part between the repeated terms” (73)—might allow us to too easily dismiss or ignore the insistent passivity and the unnarratated repetitions that the sentence twice effaces, perhaps as a “threat to the stability and integrity of the” simile and, thus, of the sentence’s rhetoric. Psychically shattered similes?

Note Bersani’s careful use of rhythm and parallel structures in this first part of the sentence to put pressure on the words “kind” and “threat.” He positions them both just after the turns of “as” and the indefinite article “a”; he positions them before prepositions. So as far as constitutions go, he’s comparing human sexuality’s to kind’s and threat’s. The noun “kind,” as in “a kind of,” means “a sort of” or “a (person or thing of a kind)” or an individual that is, or may be, included in the class in question, though not possessing its full characteristics.” “Kind” in “a kind of” does not have a constitution; it is a word that constitutes the need for another constitution. “Threat” means “a declaration of hostile determination or of loss, pain, punishment, or damage inflicted in retribution for or conditionally upon some course.” Both “kind” and “threat” point away from themselves, “a kind of” to a category or sort, and “threat” to pending violence. “Human sexuality,” the next part of the sentence shows, points to masochism. That the sentence sets up the simile, human sexuality : kind : threat, suggests we read the sentence through its displacements and re-signfications, that we should expect these turns and effacements. The sentence demands we look toward objects, predicates, and omissions (emissions?), not toward subjects, for meaning. Bersani’s rhetoric—with its constitutions buried within, its repetitions and ultimate inability to narrate its own passivity, even its big, long dash in the middle—has taken a masochistic turn.

The most apparent repetition in the sentence, the word “threat,” is, in my imagination, Bersani throwing the reader a bone, reminding her to look more closely, to play his game a little longer for a greater reward. That he chose “threat” to repeat and not any of the others is an obvious stamp of masochistic behavior: the repetition of threat. Indeed, Bersani writes just a few sentences later, “The compulsion to repeat presumably unpleasurable, repressed experience could therefore be understood as a permanent tendency on the part of the ego to resexualize its structure” (61). The “compulsion to repeat” the word “threat” and the repressed passive construction “is constituted” signify the inability to narrate the sentence’s actual pleasures: the violent constitutions.

Lining up all three of these kinds of constitutions one beside the other begs the question: who is their master? The second part of the sentence obfuscates the answer to that question when it hides the sentence’s one acting agent, masochistic nature, within an inverted sentence structure. To find the libertine in the second part of the sentence—“a threat which perhaps only the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to survive”—I found it helpful to strip the sentence and examine it naked: a threat which nature allows. Human sexuality, the kind of psychic shattering so much like trauma it’s scary, and the repeated threat to the self: Bersani is saying that perhaps we survive them only because our masochistic nature has allowed us to survive them. We are, after all, at the mercy of our masochistic nature, the libertine, it seems, of both human sexuality and this sentence. We finally do appear as “us” at the end of the sentence, dependent for our existence in the syntax on the fact of our never being a subject, never acting, never satisfying our own rhetorical pleasures. We’ve turned up in the end “to survive.”

Dance with the Devil: Freud's Contestable Rhetoric

Jean LaPlanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis explores, through a lucid examination and clarification of terminology and binary pairs, the vital psychoanalytic concepts of sexuality and death in order to differentiate a sexual from the more general Freudian death drive.

In his highly speculative work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud tries to delineate the pleasure from the reality principle via a biological (and logical) correlation between the life and death drives in organisms and Eros and Thanatos in desiring subjects, a correlation which hinges on the desire to restore things to an earlier state.

“It is surely possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the reader prefers, as an advocates diaboli, who is not on that account himself sold to the devil” (71).

This rhetorical gesture lies at the end of the work, after Freud has already laid out what he calls in the next sentence “the third step in the theory of instincts” (71). Steve Grandchamp would hate this move because it withholds Freud’s real thoughts about the argument until the end, leading you (the reader) to buy into what Freud has said before he pulls the rug out from under you. Steve would say it’s deceptive, which the text itself seems to be haggling with by introducing this sentence with its assurance of safety, “It is surely possible”. The word “surely” in this situation is “used to express a strong belief in the statement, on the basis of experience or probability, but without absolute proof, or as implying a readiness to maintain it against imaginary or possible denial: = as may be confidently supposed; as must be the case; may not one be sure that” ("surely"). In a statement about playing rhetorical roles in which the writer may or may not believe in the argument he’s putting forth, Freud plays upon the reader’s belief in the hominem’s assurances, as though to say, “I’m certain that it’s possible to believe in the intuition of a person who pitches what could be falsehoods cloaked in scientific and logical conclusions”. This ad hominem fallacy is all the more vicious, then, because the man set up to take the fall bases his authority on his role as devil’s advocate. There’s no real person here to take any blame; both the advocator of this “it is surely possible” and the devil’s advocate in the last part of the sentence are constructs of the sentence itself and therefore unable to take anyone’s real blame if their claims fall through. Freud defends his person by presenting the ad hominem as already within the text, not bracketed to the man, Freud.

The word “possible” here draws attention to the fact that this sentence is posited as hypothetical, “it is surely possible” instead of “I have already done this” or “it’s common fact that this happens”. No such claim to empirical evidence (even with the nod to “simple scientific curiosity”). Instead, we get the possibilities. The what-could-happen. Freud isn’t saying that he’s accomplished his goal “to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads”, only that it’s got to be possible based on what he’s learned and observed. So much distancing from a statement which draws upon Freud’s proximity to this truth, his first-hand experience of its power.

Speaking of the phrase “throw oneself into”, its position immediately following the certain assurance of the safety of this assertion sets up an interesting contrast between “surely” and “throw[ing] oneself into” To throw oneself into anything, one must fling oneself, and the gesture is not typically considered to be a calculated one, as one might think of throwing oneself into the awaiting mitt of a catcher behind home plate or throwing oneself into the pool at a party; this kind of phrase is more typically used when talking about sublimation and repression: “throw oneself into” work after a spouse leaves or dies, or “throw oneself into” one’s marriage to push back intrusive images of combat. Freud is borrowing here on a concept discussed earlier of the child’s game of fort/da, from the little boy’s “disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was quite often a business” (13). What does it mean in this passage that, instead of throwing these objects, one would “throw oneself”? What are the implications for this displacement of oneself-as-object from one set of object relations into an adjacent set of relations? The prepositional phrase “throw oneself into” ends with its object, “a line of thought”, the location into which one might throw oneself. Throwing oneself into a line seems odd; throwing oneself into a line of thought offers the mental image of being “caught up in” the ever-moving, dynamic line of thought the way a piece of something is caught up in a current under water, the bit of something pulled along (against its will, at times). This implies that, unlike the fort/da game, throwing oneself into a line of thought does not make for easy retrieval; one cannot so simply find oneself thrown into a line of thought as, say, find a toy thrown into the corner. Throwing oneself into, it would seem, relinquishes the pleasure of retrieving oneself, the pleasure discovered in the “da” of the childhood game.

This gloomier reading seems to bemomentarily recuperated when Freud uses the term “simple scientific curiosity”, a phrase which reeks of none of the self-sabotage that “throw oneself into” does, and in fact implies a childlikeness to the throwing of oneself, a simplicity, a curiosity in the spirit of the childlike game he starts the book off with. But the phrase “simple scientific curiosity” also reasserts the scientificity of this process, legitimizing in its simplicity and scientificity the logical nature of the argument Freud is here also delegitimizing through the rhetoric. These subtle and covert undercuts force the attentive reader to reckon with the seemingly overt confidence and certainty of this statement; the reader is left not knowing whether to trust Freud’s hominem or to herself assume the position of rhetorical naysayer. The reader is summoned directly to make such a choice when Freud petitions her preference in the conditional phrase “if the reader prefers”, but in a way, this phrase also pulls the reader into the same “level” of the text as the authoritarian who continuously undermines his own authority, so Freud isn’t necessarily asking the reader to perform as the reader would normally perform—according to a heartfelt “preference” or desire—but to assume that other position, the devil’s advocate, a position which would actually cause the reader to go against what she would “prefer”, to deliberately act against her own desire. Freud here is putting the reader into a place of perverted or subversive desire, a kind of “devil’s desire” which the reader can occupy but only at her own risk (of, possibly, eternal damnation, as I’ll next aver).

And what to make of this use of the Latin phrase advocates diaboli? As I was researching, it was the dictionaries and encyclopedias of Catholicism which best addressed this phrase, which they concur indicates “one of the most important officers of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, established in 1587, by Sixtus V, to deal juridically with processes of beatification and canonization. His official title is Promoter of the Faith (Promotor Fidei). His duty requires him to prepare in writing all possible arguments, even at times seemingly slight, against the raising of any one to the honours of the altar” (Burtsell 1). The advocates diaboli’s job was to write down any counterargument and rebuttal he could think of in order to defend the man who was under scrutiny for beatification and canonization. This high honor was taken seriously, and it was the advocates diaboli who insured a fair trial through his unwavering support and logical argumentation in the face of any untoward evidence against the candidates. That Freud offers to the reader’s preference this holier-than-thou option which directly invokes Catholicism and defense of the perhaps unworthy serves yet again to position the speaking persona of the sentence into a defendable rhetorical position by suggesting the reader take up a similarly defendable position within the sentence, one whose holy mandate lends ethical and moral credibility to what has hitherto been a logical, scientific argument. Without mentioning God, Freud has brought the power of the church into contact with the reader’s desire in an effort to assure the reader that, should he take up this position within the sentence, he will surely be one “who is not on that account himself sold to the devil”. Selling oneself to the devil is similar to throwing oneself into a line of thought; both gestures represent the internal economy of this sentence, a trade and barter system wherein the reader must sacrifice her own self and desire to accommodate the demands of the sentence’s rhetoric. With all of these rhetorical hoops to jump through in assuming the position of authority or of reader in this sentence, all possible positions become hypothetical and contestable, rhetorical positions unfit for real people but perfectly poised for hominems to take up without fear of ethical, moral, or logical reprimand.

Works Cited

Burtsell, Richard. "Advocatus Diaboli." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. Web. 14 Mar. 2011.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1969. Print.

"surely, adv.". OED Online. November 2010. Oxford UP. Web. 14 March 2011.