The Freudian Body

by Leo Bersani

Analyzes Samuel Beckett's novels, Mallarme's poetry, Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo, Assyrian palace reliefs, and writings by Henry James in terms of Freudian theories.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Queer

126 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1986

About the author

Leo Bersani is an American literary theorist and Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He also taught at Wellesley College and Rutgers University.

Reviews

[Mina-Louise]

!!!

[asif-wtv-getthepictureduh]

i liked this one. had to skim some parts, but will return to it eventually.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am never meant to finish this...a page a day progress :)

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction
How has Freud profited–or suffered–from all the attention lavished on him?
The Freudian text has become both a privileged object of what is rather loosely known in literary studies as deconstructive criticism
Against the tendency to bury Freudianism as a reactionary ideology hostile to all but the most respectable versions of human pleasure and the most effectively disciplined forms of human community, the prestige of psychoanalysis has been enhanced by a remarkably dense–even remarkably troubled–textuality in its founder. ANALYTIC SURGERY RECENTLY PRACTICED ON ThE FREUDIAN TEXT
This surgery has ambiguous cultural status
Is his authority reinforced by his textual density?
Has an exceptional sensitivity to what have been called moments of textual embarrassment in Freud (moments when he appears to be resisting the pressures of an argument he does not make, will not make) made us more aware of politically radical currents in his thought?
Or have the very complexity and even obscurity of some recent “returns to Freud” served to make those views more intellectually respectable, and therefore left intact, for example, the phallocentrism of the sexual norn im Freud, the very category of “neurosis” as a result?
These questions won’t be answered here but they’re asked to celebrate a certain type of failure in Freud’s thought. I will be arguing that the psychoanalytic authenticity of Freud’s work depends on a process of theoretical collapse.
For the most part, we will be documenting the subversion of what Freud explicitly presents as his principal argument in several texts: the opposition between the individual and civilization in Civilization and Its Discontents, the teleological perspective on stages of infantile sexuality in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the defense of a biologically grounded dualism (of life and death drives) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the topological presentation of the psyche in The Ego and the Id. Each of those arguments has the effect of a certain normalizing of psychoanalytic thought itself and, as the principal component of that normalization, the erasure or at least the domestication of a psychoanalytic perspective on sexuality
The collapse of his argument is a function of its own development.
It is also, in each case, a reinstatement of the psychoanalytic definition of the sexual—that is, a reaffirmation of what I take to be the greatest originality of Freud's thought.
Attn to the normalizing intention within the Freudian text corresponds to an extratextual ambition crucial both to Freud’s own career and to the entire history of psychoanalysis: the ambition of elaborating a clinically viable theory.
NORmALiZING INTENTION collapses argument (sexual) and reinstates it.
Psychoanalysis DEF: Psychoanalysis is an unprecedented attempt to give a theoretical account of precisely those forces which obstruct, undermine, play havoc with theoretical accounts themselves. From this perspective, oppositions between theory and practice, and between the thinker and history, are false— or, at the very least, secondary—oppositions. Or, in psychoanalytic terms, they are symptomatic oppositions which both reveal and disguise an antagonism internal to thought itself. In other words, they betray strategic moves within consciousness by which a threatened rationality formulates the process of its own inevitable collapse as a perhaps historically tragic but ontologically reassuring conflict between imagination and reality, or between the subject and the object, or, in the broadest possible terms, between the individual and civilization.
SYMPTOMATIC OPPOSITION boil down to strategic moves within consciousness. Attempts to reassure conflict
Emph the ambiguity of the clinical imperative: the move from theory to practice is a flight from a specifically psychoanalytic type of thought
What kind of a discipline is psychoanalysis? Is it a discipline? To what extent does the Freudian text ruin the very notion of disciplines of knowledge at the very moment that it anxiously seeks to become one itself? Finally, is a psychoanalytic reflection on desire—a reflection at once paralyzed, madly excessive, and irreducibly paradoxical—compatible with the practice of discipline, with a reeducation of human desire?
FREUD RUINS ITSELF
I should, however, emphasize at the very start that neither my critical procedures with Freud nor my references to literature and the visual arts are meant to shift the Freudian text from one cultural area to another. Rather, they are intended to evoke a type of reflexiveness—a type of blocked thought, of speculative repetition—to which the notions of areas and of boundaries are profoundly alien.
Justifying mixed media/interdisciplinary: The artefacts of art are material metaphors for moves of consciousness which do not intrinsically “belong” to any particular cultural domain but rather transversely cross, as it were, the entire range of cultural expression.
I will be speaking of the estheticizing of the Freudian text.
THESIS: Freud’s text is “estheticized” to the extent that, like the other works of art we will be considering, it problematizes its own formalizing and structuralizing aspirations. Or, in other terms, it defeats the strategies which, as we shall see, it never tires of inventing in order to persuade itself–and us–that the activity of speculating on unconscious desire and on the mechanisms of sexuality need not disturb such aspirations
1. Theory and Violence
Beckett’s Molloy, hero is Moran. Searching for Molloy he asks theological questions. We are threatened by Beckett that the novel is making room for speculative thought.
The freudian model of the relation between thought and the body produce a consciousness of fundamental failure in the operations of itself–failure we should understand not as a consequence of empirically untested speculation in Freud’s work which a more rigorous scientific methodology will correct or reject, but rather as the constitutive sign of psychoanalytic thinking itself.
Our interest in Freud even suggests that we are drawn to theoretical texts to the extent that their theoretical positions fail to be formulated.
THESIS AGAIN: I wish to suggest that the moments of theoretical collapse in Freud are inseparable from what I will risk calling psychoanalytic truth. For the truth of a theory of desire cannot be dissociated from some recklessly self-defeating moves in the performance of the theory. Thus the question of Freud’s “scientific value” will be eluded as a matter of epistemological necessity.
This is not psychoanalytic criticism of literature. This is speaking of literature psychoanalytically
Writing becomes literature when, by particular kind of replicative insistence, it erodes its own statements and thereby blocks interpretation. THIS IS THE ESTHETICIzing movemENT. A subversion of forms
Freud provides us with both an interpretive discourse on these eroding forces, and an exemplification, within that very discourse, of the process of erosion.
To read his work is to witness the coming-into-literature of a discourse which could, thanks to a scientifically validated theory, presume to dominate literature. But it is precisely at, so to speak, that metamorphic moment that the Freudian text also becomes a psychoanalytic text—that is, at the moment it dismantles its own discourse and makes immensely problematic the identity of the thinker “in” or “behind” the discourse.
THe collapse of blockage of theory, the loss of the theorizing subject.
Freud's tirelessly repeated explanations—apparently designed to bring the psychoanalytic message to the largest possible audience—frequently function as a strategy for undoing any explanations whatsoever. In Freud, an intense and explicit straining toward intelligibility frequently subverts the communication which appears to be its aim, as if the very effort of concentrated lucidity produced the secretive and pleasurable phenomenon of a self-destroying intelligence.
Civ and its Discontents
The subject of this work is less the explicitly proposed antagonism between instinct and civilization than the moves by which that very argument is done
The central argument for Freud here: “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness”. the instinctual satisfaction of the individual is incompatible with social progress, even with social survival.
The difficulty Freud seems to have in finding his subject is rly the difficulty of maintaining such theoretical oppositions (individual and social progress) themselves.
Far from beginning with thesis on civilization, Freud starts with religious experience. He’d been called out for failing to recognize the true source of religious sentiments, the sense of eternity. Freud admits he cannot find the oceanic feeling in himself. He insists it’s source is nonetheless the limitless narcissism of infancy (undifferentiated ego). Calls it religious consolation and says it leads to human unhappiness
By ch 3 he’s calling his book an enquiry concerning happiness. He finally gets to the thesis in this chapter–”civilization is responsible for our misery”
The striking banality of the first chapters. He names it, calls the first chapters “self-evident” material. Is psychoanalysis just boring? NO: there’s play here between body of Freud’s text (the upper body) and his FOOTNOTES. Wildness springs into the Freudian text from these secondary thoughts, these afterthoughts, these bottom-of-the-page thoughts.
E.g. footnote on primal man conquesting fire–first civilizing act emerged from urge to pee on fire, a sexual act, enjoyment of sexual potency and homosexual competition. To keep the fire alight you’d need to renunce not homosexuality per se but something like it, he says. Symbolic homosexuality. Civilization depends on the renunciaiton of ambition. Civilization would be the result of the nonphallic relation to the phallic. Women are given domesticated space near fire for this reason. A happy lack (her anatomy makes conquering it impossible, she cannot yield to her desire)
So while the upper text is doing dull anthropology his footnotes is psychoanalytic material. Upper text represents the cultural malady, the unease
The body of the text itself exhibits the pleasure of yielding precisely his prophetic tone which he claims to have no ambition (on the last page of Civ)
A problematics of the exceptional individual, and of the exceptional individual's statements, is crucial to this book.
Freud’s case has a rejection that involves a treacherously subtle use of the content of psychoanalytic ideas in order to escape from a mode of discourse partially exemplified by the footnotes
The footnotes demystify the complacent view in the text.
The text, on the other hand, is the more advanced, more repressive discourse which both submerges and legitimates a desire for destructiveness in an apparently natural historical logic.
The desires of the upper text–it must satisfy and refuse to acknowledge them.
SUMMARY FOOTNOTES: Nothing is stranger—I am inclined to say nothing is more moving—in Civilization and Its Discontents than the erotically confessional footnotes—that is, those moments when the distinguished (if at times both extravagant and banal) anthropological imagination of the text descends into a footnote where it enjoys the fantasy of a mythic, prehistoric convulsing of our physical being in the passionate sniffing of a male on all fours. THE FOOTNOTES PLAY THE ROLE OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC UNCONSCIOUS
Footnotes’ material will only be allowed into the text proper if its sexual components are expunged. Upper text’s nonerotic attention.
E.g when he talks about aggressiveness.
E.g. the oceanic religious feeling.
He’s MYSTIFYING these by refusing to name their proper sexual source in the upper text.
Back to Civ’s argument
We must sacrifice part of our sexuality and sublimate it into brotherly love in order to control our murderous impulses toward each other.
This is reformulated into: human love is something like an oceanic aggressiveness which threatens to shatter civilization in the wake of its own shattering narcissistic pleasure. We don’t move from love to aggressiveness-love is redefined, represented, as aggressiveness.
Sexuality=aggressiveness=civilization. Tautology and circular.
To what extent might civilized discourse at least partially dissipate our savage sexuality by the mode in which it would mistakenly replicate it? Certain works of art—a poem, a film, some novels, and some ancient sculpture—will help us to begin to answer this question.
2. Sexuality and Esthetics
Does sexuality exist? And if it exists, what is the relation between sexuality and sex?
For Fucko, sexuality is the name given not ot some hidden or profound human reality but rather to a historical construct organized in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.
For Freud, who can’t be blamed for anything bc so much of it is just updated and not new (from discourse). He is effective in giving new impetus to it. That’s not nothing though!
Freud failed to define the relation between sexuality and the human subject. Nearly collapsed in unprecedented self-reflexive movement. Discursive paralysis at the heart of Freudian discourse.
Three Essays
Problems w compositional strategy: second only Interpretation this work has more modifications and additions than any of his works. Also why does he begin with sexual aberrations? They’re not aberrations, as he re-placed them in history of sexuality, a teleological perspective.
Third essay is interesting and tortuous attempt to define the nature of sexual pleasure and sexual excitement. He has economic theory of pleasure. Emph. on fore-pleasure, the kind of pleasure due to excitation of erotogenic zones. Contrasts with end-pleasure, discharge.
He characterizes sexuality by simultaneous production of pleasure and unpleasurable tension. He says we actually don’t seek to release the tension of the two but increase it. That don’t make a lot of sense!
We never, as Freud admits, get to the “essence” of sexuality, but sexuality would be somehow connected to a pleasurable unpleasure, or the impulse to increase an already unpleasurable pleasure, or to remove a stimulus by replicating it. HIS ANSWER ON SEX
Again we must ask: are the difficulties of the Freudian text here symptomatic of the dysfunctional relation of our language to our body?
Sex is the continuously disappearing and reappearing object
He will never stop insisting on the existence of a nonerotic destructiveness (deaht instinct and then aggressiveness)
In Essays he places cruelty at the heart of infantile sexuality.
He says: ‘We know far too little of the biological processes constituting the essence of sexuality to be able to construct from our fragmentary information a theory adequate to the understanding alike of normal and of pathological conditions.” In fact, a kind of conclusion is reached; it is even rather insistently made, and if it can easily pass unnoticed it is because it risks dissipating the specificity of the work’s subject. “It is easy to establish,” Freud writes in a section on the sources of infantile sexualit “...that all comparatively intense affective processes, including even terrifying ones [spill over into] sexuality HIS DEF OF SEX. Anything will do the job. Anything w degree of intensity.
I wish to propose that, most significantly, masochism serves life.
THERE IS INSISTENT YET ALMOST INVisIBLE ARGUMENT IN THREE EsSAYS. Nearly dissolves the specificity by which Freud could expect his subject to be recognized.
If human sexuality, as distinct from those experiences of bodily contacts which we share with animals, is a kind of functional aberration of the species, then the abortive, incomplete, and undeveloped beginnings of our sexual life constitute and exhaust its esssence. HIS DEFINITION, HIDDEN YET THERE.
Sexuality manifests itself in a variety of sexual acts and in a variety of presumably nonsexual acts, but its constitutive excitement is the same in the loving copulation between two adults, the thrashing of a boundlessly submissive slave by his pitiless master, and the masturbation of the fetishist carried away by an ardently fondled silver slipper.
THE POINT: Sexuality is the atemporal substratum of sex, although the teleological argument of the Three Essays represents an attempt to rewrite sexuality as history and as story by reinstating structures of organ- and object-specificity. Freud’s work is a textual recapitulation of the psychoanalytic body’s existence. The phases of infantile sexuality and the climactic Oedipus complex give a narrative intelligibility to a text otherwise tormented, so to speak, by knots of tautological and self-cancelling formulations. In the same way, the ego will domesticate, structure, and narrativize those waves of excitement which simultaneously endanger and yet also protect the first years of human life. That process is described and exemplified in the textual body—in corpore freudiano—of psychoanalytic discourse.
His argument idk
The Oedpial triangle immobilizes representatiosn. If sexuality is constituted as masochism, the immobilization of fantasmatic structures can only have a violent dénouement. That is, the oppressive, excessive, destabilizing, exciting representation must be evacuated; the masochistic origin of sexuality means that the extreme logic of sexual pleasure is its explosive end. Masochism is both relieved and fulfilled by death, and to stop the play of representations perhaps condemns fantasy to the climactic and suicidal pleasure of mere self-annulment. The violence of the Oedipal structure is not merely that of an imagined rivalry between child and parent; by inhibiting fantasmatic mobility the Oedipal father promotes a self-destructing sexuality, a derivative masochism which threatens both the individual and civilization.
3. Pleasures of Repetition
Beyond the Pleasure Principle will be read here with attention to this tension between philosophical narrative and a kind of estheticizing repetition.
This is his most revealing and most disguised exploration of the nature of pleasure and the relation of pleasure to sexuality.
We are obliquely alerted to the work's secret project from the very start: the first chapter suggests that we can only go “beyond the pleasure principle” blindly, since psychoanalysis really doesn’t know what pleasure is.
“the meaning of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which act so imperatively upon us’’—'we are, alas, offered nothing to our purpose. This is the most obscure and inaccessible region of the mind.”
So he offers a least rigid definition: an economic

[Alex Poston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I understood that moments of theoretical collapse in Freud point to the unintentional and consciously resisted conclusion that death IS sexuality. Bersani contends that between the lines Freud shows that sexuality belongs to the non-linguistic biology of human life, and specifically our desire to lapse into “oceanic apophaticism” or self-shattering. This accounts for coincidence of love with hate, aggression with desire, and identifies the subconscious structure of love with the structure of the ego itself (oceanic feeling of religion, death drive ect). So cool!

[jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

even better the second time around. <3