Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis

by Shoshana Felman, Martha Noel Evans (Translator)

Writing and Madness is Shoshana Felman’s most influential work of literary theory and criticism. Exploring the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through brilliant studies of Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, and James, as well as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, this book seeks the specificity of literature in its relation to what culture excludes under the label “madness.” Why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the madman, and how does this reclaiming reveal something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge?

Every literary text continues to communicate with madness—with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable, or senseless—by dramatizing a dynamically revitalized relation between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, the readable and the unreadable. This revelation of the irreducibility of the relation between the readable and the unreadable constitutes what the author calls la chose littéraire—the literary thing.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Literary Criticism, American

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.

Felman works in the fields of psychoanalytic literary criticism, performativity theory, feminism, Holocaust testimony, and other areas, though her writings frequently question, ironize, or test the limits of the very critical methods being employed. Often in her writing a reversal will occur so that the critical vocabulary gets subjected to and converted into the terms of the literary or cultural object being scrutinized rather than simply settling the meaning of the object; thus in Felman's style of criticism there is no fixed hierarchy of theory over and beyond the reach of the literary object. As such, her methods share an affinity with deconstruction, for which she is sometimes associated with the Yale School and colleagues such as Paul de Man.

Jacques Lacan is a significant influence on Felman and she was among the vanguard of theorists—and perhaps foremost among those addressing Anglophone audiences—to rigorously apply his concepts to the study of literature.

Since the 1990s Felman has written texts on testimony and trauma, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and other collective trauma.

Reviews

[Peter Mathews · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shoshana Felman's book Writing and Madness was first published in French as La Folie et la chose littéraire. The English translation leaves out some of the literary analyses of Nerval and Balzac that were in the original book, no doubt because they are too technical for English readers, but that is made up for by two additional interviews with Jacques-Alain Miller and Philippe Sollers and a new preface by the author.

Writing and Madness was a book that I wanted to like as a whole - its topic is certainly an interesting and timely one - but I found that I could only relate to it in bits and pieces. Felman starts out by articulating the difficulties of speaking madness, as outlined by Michel Foucault in History of Madness. She then plunges into the intricacies of the debate between Foucault and Derrida (Ch.2), paying careful attention to how both thinkers problematize questions of writing, philosophy, and literature in their attempts to write about madness. This section is easily one of the best in the book.

Unfortunately, Felman rather loses her way after this point. The chapters on Nerval's Aurelia (Ch.3), Flaubert's Memoirs of a Madman (Ch.4), and Balzac's "The Illustrious Gaudissart" (Ch.5) are dry and technical, and contain few genuinely new insights as far as I was concerned. Maybe others would find them more interesting.

I didn't get much insight, either, from the chapter on Jacques Lacan, which I found to be more verbose than genuinely difficult (Ch.6). Felman's point about the impossibility of Lacan's task, that he appears to be trying to create a universal grammar of the particularities of rhetoric, is an interesting one, but it would have made far more sense to connect this to Alfred Jarry's 'pataphysics, the absurdist "science of the particular." Doing so would have tied what Lacan was doing far more clearly to the issue of madness, which seemed to get lost in a lot of technical considerations.

The substance of Felman's book closes with an extensive meditation on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (Ch.7). More correctly, it is an analysis of the failure of Edmund Wilson's psychoanalytic interpretation of the text and others like it, with Felman showing how James constructs his text as a "trap" designed not only to capture the unwary, but more especially, the wary, sophisticated reader. At one hundred pages in length, Felman's analysis drags on for far too long, but the last few pages are a superb literary application of Lacan's idea that the "non-dupes err" - namely, that those who think they see the truth are as deluded as those who do not.

The closing chapter and the interview with Miller are too short to be of much interest, but Sollers does a fine job of teasing out the motivations and nuances of Felman's ideas.

On the whole I felt as though Writing and Madness was a major letdown. The opening sections begin with such richness and promise - especially the chapter on the Foucault/Derrida debate - but Felman's decision to proceed after that glorious beginning in the most oblique way possible, through a series of literary readings that nibble around the edges of her original topic, is a major disappointment. I also have to say that I'm not particularly enamored by her style. When she hits on a good idea her prose really soars, but too much of her writing I found to be technical and clever rather than genuinely insightful.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm surprised by how much I liked this (perhaps liked isn't the right word - appreciated?). Her analytical skills are probably some of the best (if not the best?) that I've read. Her analysis of not only The Turn of the Screw but the analyses of The Turn of the Screw (so her analysis of the analyses) was absolutely brilliant and really shifted how I thought of the novel. Her overall thesis also really rang true to me, and I think she backed it up excellently with an incredibly thorough analysis. (Have I mentioned how much I love how she analyzes?)
I will say that her prose is definitely dense and I understood the chapter on The Turn of the Screw much better than the other chapters. I'm unsure if this is because this was the only chapter (I think?) that was originally written in English or if it's because The Turn of the Screw was the only novel I read, out of the ones she analyzed. Or perhaps a combination of the two? So overall it wasn't necessarily a pleasant read, but her argument really added to my understanding of writing and madness and for that I'm glad I read it.