Migratory Word Watching

Summaries:

In an attempt to disrupt the master/slave dialectic through which the traditional psychoanalysis/literature relationship operates, Shoshana Felman “Open[s] the Question” of this volume, which she claims attempts to “reinvent” that relationship and rethink a traditional binary that supports a position of mastery.

Lacan’s “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet” illustrates the use of the complete chart of desire and the splitting of the subject through key moments (“hours”) from Shakespeare’s play and lays out the “true opposition” between perversion and neurosis.

Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” claims that reading turns on the distinctions between what is readable versus what is unreadable and knowing and not knowing, using Freud’s theories of the unconscious and dream work to examine the how of meaning instead of just the what.

Spivak, in “The Letter as Cutting Edge”, reads Lacan into two chapters of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria to show that by reading for chasms, slippages, refractions—reading psychoanalytically—one can interpret Coleridge’s letter remitting chapter 13 as a cut in the text, and thus as phallus, and thus as Law splitting Coleridge’s desire.

Peter Brooks summarizes his “Freud’s Masterplot” more cogently than I can in this phrase: “We emerge from reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle with a dynamic model which effectively structures ends (death, quiescence, non-narratability) against beginnings (Eros, stimulation into tension, the desire of narrative) in a manner than necessitates the middle as detour, as struggle toward the end under the compulsion of imposed delay, as arabesque in the dilatory space of the text” (295).

John Brenkmen’s “The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, and The Symposium” deconstructs binary oppositions in Plato’s text in order “to argue that the psychoanalytic theory of desire emerges from the subversion that literary writing performs on the discourse of philosophy” (456).

Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida” reads three readings of Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter”—Lacan’s, Derrida’s of Lacan’s, and her own of Derrida’s and Lacan’s—to show how each writer succumbs to the very missteps they criticize the others for.

Close Reading:

“Repetition is a return in the text, a doubling back. We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed” (288, Brooks’ emphasis).

This return. Buried there in the middle of this sentence about repression, return, and doubling back is this ambiguous pronoun, pointing back to an indeterminable this. This could be the “repetition” that began the sentence; it could be the return mentioned earlier in the paragraph, the one that Todorov’s “‘same but different’” depends on (288); it could be any repetition, not only the one that begins this sentence but all of them, anywhere in any text. I only begin with the word this because it’s one of two words in this sentence pairing that’s not meticulously renamed, perfectly subordinated or paralleled as to prevent the slippage of signification from occurring. All but this. This requires me as a reader to return, to double back into the text in order to track down the possibilities for this buried this; this is an active, shifting fissure in the midst of a serene and orderly topography of time and space. Its position in the middle of this sentence—particularly within an essay concerned with “the dynamic interrelationship of ends and beginnings, and the kind of processes that constitute the middle” (285)—presents the possibility of shifty unsteadiness in meaning and language and may allow this sentence to serve as a microcosm for the larger essay; I wish it were positioned closer to the middle of the essay, but, alas, it is near the beginning.

The other possibility of slippage occurs with the other pronoun in this sentence, the imperial “We” that begins the second sentence, but I’m less concerned about it in context because Brooks uses this “we” throughout to refer to himself and his pocket friends, I suppose. But for another reason, there’s more to say about this “we cannot say”. In several of the texts over the past few weeks, writers have been drawing attention to the way that negation is used to serve a number of functions. The one at use here is to posit that “we cannot say” but then to go ahead and say it anyway, and, in this passage, to further that once more by adding examples of that which “we cannot say.” I cannot say whether “we cannot say” or we do not know, but either way, Brooks is clearing a spot for himself to say something he cannot say. In so doing, he’s saying what he can’t say, an impossible task from the beginning.

There’s one more mobile word in the sentence that slips but not in the same way as the pronouns: whether. Whether is part one of a set of correlative conjunctions; when paired with “or”, this duo is used to link equivalent sentence elements—in our case, it links “this return is a return to” or “a return of”. It’s slippery because, after the colon and the conjunctive adverb “for instance”, the “whether” is implied before the equivalent sentence parts are paralleled on either side of the “or”. To use a mathematical analogy, the “whether” is distributed, a doubling forward, if you will, after the colon. That “whether” moves across a colon matters not because the colon is yet another gesture of renaming or illustration through equivalent terms; it’ll be the same whether in both places. The mobility of “whether” is unlike the mobility of the pronouns in that “whether” is attached to elements within this sentence and serves the same function in both positions while the pronouns, particularly this, point to elements which exist outside the sentence. Here, the whether never changes, but this can.

While these elements are busy in the middle of the sentence pairing, the beginning and the end seem to be a bit more static or stable, grounding. The first short sentence is a series of definitions through renamings. “Repetition”, the subject of the sentence, is linked by “is” to first the predicate nominative “a return”, and secondly by a comma to the appositive, “a doubling back.” Between the two is a prepositional phrase modifying the word return, “of the repressed”. The prepositional phrase doubles back on “a return”, the word “back” returns to modify “doubling”, “a doubling back” and “a return” double back on “repetition”, and if we accept that this from the preceding analysis points to Todorov’s return, the whole sentence doubles back on the content above it. It’s a sentence which does what it says, which practices what it preaches. That “of the repressed” is literally “below” the sentence were you to chart it in a sentence diagram—and that “the repressed” is further subordinated in that it is the object of a preposition—is intriguing, as well as is the fact that Brooks manipulated the syntax just so the same prepositional phrase would fall at the very end of the sentence, because no matter how you look at it, as it’s said outright or merely hinted toward in this sentence, the return of the repressed is itself secondary to the sentence’s primary drive from beginning to end, subordinated, pushed into secondary status. Yet it is “the return of the repressed” that keeps returning; note that its companion in the first sentence, “a doubling back”, does not, in fact, double back; it’s not repeated. It’s the least mobile element of the entire sentence, refusing even to repeat itself as its root word doubling might suggest it could.

Finally, there’s the matter of the two star prepositions, to and of. The preposition “to” as it functions in the construction “return to origins” dictates a subject before the word “return”: People or things return to origins. The word “of” in the phrase “return of the repressed” begs for another prepositional phrase afterward: return of the repressed to the present? From the past? In the text? By whom? Though both prepositional phrase options are being offered as equivalent—not considering the privileging of the first qua its position as first syntactically—they indicate two very different movements. The first would suggest the subject returns to the repressed memory’s origin; the second suggests that the origin of the repressed memory returns to the subject. Brooks maintains that “we cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of”, which means Brooks is unwilling to place the impetus for being cured either upon the conscious or unconscious subject. Without knowing who or what is to do the moving, these returns become as meaningless to us as this and as the memories to which we haven’t returned or which haven’t returned to us. Or, to put it back into Brooks’ words: “Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation which binds different moments together as a middle which might turn forward or backward” (288).

The end result is that there is no end to signification. In a passage which is supposed to offer a simple definition/renaming and two equivalent sentence elements, the choices the reader must make in order to secure some semblance of meaning exceed the rhetoric and structure of the sentence. Dropping the doubling, the one word in the sentence that ought to be repeated exactly twice, could be read as a slip which announces the multiplication of possible meanings within this sentence as well as the hidden mobility which exists beneath what appears to be solid parallel structures, nominatives, and pronouns.