[jacques ranciere] the aesthetic unconscious(bookfi.org) (1)

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Contents

WhatFreud

Has

Do with esthetics

2 A Defective Subject

3 The Aesthetic Revolution 2

4 The Two Forms of Mute Speech 3

5 From One Unconscious to Another 43

Freud s Corrections 53

7 On VariOUSUses of Detail 6

A Conniet between Two Kinds of Medicine 9

Index



1

IWhat Freud Has to Do with Aesthetics

My title does not mean that intend to tal aboutthe application of the Freudian theor of the

unconscious to the domain of aesthetis 1 will

not be speaking about the psychoanalysis of art

nor about the numerous and significant borrow-

ings that historians and philosophers of art havemade from partiular theses advaned by Freud

or Lacan. I have no particular ompetene regard

ing psyhoanalyti theory More importantly

however, my interest lies in a different diretion.

I am not interested in the application of Freudian

concepts to the analysis and interpretation of liter

ar texts or plastic wors of art. will instead as

why the interpretation of these texts and wors

1 Thi text was originally preented in he form of o lecture,

delvered at the "School for Phoanale in Buel iJanu-

ay 2000 on the nviation of Didier Cromphout.



What Freud Ha to Do wth Aesthetics

occupies such an impotant, strategic position in

Freuds demonstration of the pertinence of

analtic concepts and forms of interpretation. I

hae in mind here not onl the books or articles

that Freud specicall deoted to writers or artists

to Leonardo da Vincis biograph, Michel-

angelos Moses, or jensen's Gdiva but also thereferences to litera texts and characters that

requentl support his demonstrations such as the

multiple references made in the Interetation of

Dreams to both the glories of the national literay

tradition such as Goethes Faust and contempo-rar works like Alphonse Daudets Sapho.

The reersal of approach proposed here does

not impl an intention to turn Freuds questions

around against him in order to ask for example

wh he is interested in Michelangelo's Moses or aspecific note from Leonardos Notebook in patic-

ular The members of the analtic profession hae

alread explained to us the circumstances of the

father of pschoanalsiss identiication with the

guardian of the Tables of the Law or the import of

his conusion between a kite and a vlture M

2



at Freud Has t D wth Asthtcs

goal is not to pschoanalze Freud and am not

concerned with the wa in which the literary and

artistic gures he chose t into the analtic

romance of the Founder What interests me is the

question of what these figures sere to proe and

what strctures allow them to produce this proo.

What these figures sere to proe at the mostgeneral leel is that there is meaning in what

seems not to hae an meaning something enig

matic in what seems selfeident a spark of

thought in wat appears to be an anodne detail

These gures are not the materials upon whichanaltic interpretation proes its abity to inter

pret cltural formations The are testimony to the

existence of a paicular relation between thought

and nonthought a partiular wa that thought is

present within sensible materialit meaningwithin the inSignificant and an inoluntary

element within conscious thought n short, Dr

Fred the interpreter of the anodne" facts aban-

doned b his positiist colleagues can use these

examples in his demonstration because the are

themseles tokens of a certain unconscious To

3



Wat Freuda< to Do with Aesthetics

put it another way: if it was possible for Freud to

f ormulate the psychoanalytical theoy of theunconscious, it was because an unconscious

mode of thought had already been identified

otside of the clinical domain as such and the

domain of works of at and literature can be

defined as the privileged ground where this"unconscios is at work My investigation wil

thus bear upon the way Freudian theory is

anchored in this already existing configuration of

unconscious thought in the idea of the reation

betw een thoght and nonthought that was

formed and deeloped primarily in the field of

what is called aesthetics We wil therefore inter-

pret Freud's aesthetic studies as marking the

inscription of analytic thought within the horizon

of aesthetic thought

This project naturally presupposes that we come

to terms with the notion of aesthetics itself. I do

not consider aesthetics to be the name of the

science or discipline that deals with ar In my viewit designates a mode of thought that develops

with respect to things of ar and that is conceed

4



at Freud H to Do wth Aest hets

to show them to be things of thought More nda-

entally aesthetics is a particuar historica regimeof thinking about art and an idea of thought

according to which things of art are things of

thought It is well known that the use of the word

aesthetics to designate thinking about ar is

recent Its genealogy is generally referred to in

Bagartens Aesthetica, published in 1750 and

Kants C rtique ojJudgment. But these landmarks

are equiocal For Baumgaren he term aesthet-

ics in fact does not designate the theor of ar but

ther the domain of sesibe knowedge the clear

but nonetheess "confused or indistinct knowl-

edge that can be contrasted wi the clear and

distinct know ledge of ogic Kants position in this

genealogy is equay problematic When he

borows the ter "aesthetics f rom Baugaren as

a nae for the theor of forms of sensibiity Kant

in fact rejects what ge it its meaning namely the

idea of the sensible as a consed ineligible

For Kant it is impossible to conceive of aestheticsas a theor of indistinct knowledge Indeed the

Ctique of the Facul�y of udgment does not

5



What ud Ha ' to with Aesthetics

recognize aesthetics as a theor; aesthetic only

appears as an adjective and it designates a pe ofjudgment rather than a domain of objects. It i oy

in the context of Romanticism and postKantian

idealism through the ritings of Schelling the

Schlegel brothers, and Hegel that aesthetics

comes to designate the thought of art even as the

inappropriateness of the term is constantly

remarked Only in this later context do we see an

identification beteen the thought of art the

thought effectuated by works of art and a certain

idea of consed knoledge" occur under the

name of aesthetics This new and paradoxical idea

makes art the territor of a thought that is present

outside itself and identical ith nonthought. It

unites Baumgarten's denition of the sensible asconsed" idea ith Kant's contrar definition of

the sensible as heterogeneous to the idea Hence

forth confused knowledge is no longer a lesser

form of knoledge ut properly the thought of that

which does not thnk2

2 So f requently today one hears deplored the f act that aes thetics

has been led as tra y f m its true des tination as a critique of the

6



What Freud la ' to Do with Aesthetics

In other ords aesthetics" is not a new nae

for the domain of art It is a specific congura-tion of this domain It is not the ne rbric under

hich e can group hat formerly fell under the

general concept of poetics. It marks a transforma-

tion of the regime of thinking about art. This ne

regie provides the locus where a specific idea ofthought is constituted My hypothesis in this book

is that e Freudian thought of the unconscious is

only possible on the basis of is regime of think

ing about art and the idea of thought that is imma-

nent to it Or if ou prefer Freudian thought

despite the classicism of Freuds artistic rerences

is only possible on the basis of the revolution that

moves the doan of the a fm the reign of poet-

ics to that of aesthetics.In order to develop and justi these proposi

tions I ill attempt to show the link beteen a

judgment of taste, as Kant had formulated it in a suar of

Enlightenment tought But onl what exists can be ed asa.

Since aesthetics never was the theory of taste the wish hat imight become it once again erel expresses the endess refrain

of a "return to soe impossibe prerevolutionar paradise of

liberal individualism

7



Wat Freud Has to Do with Aesthetics

certain number of privileged objects and odes

of interpretation in Freudian theor and the

changing status of these obects in the aesthetic

configuration of thinking about art. Giving credit

where credit is due, we will begin with the central

poetic charactr in the elaboration of psycho

analysis, Oedipus In The Interetaon of

Dreams, Freud explains that there exists

"legendar material whose universal dramatic

power rests upon its conformity with e univer

sal ta of infant pscholog. This material is the

Oedipus legend and e eponymous drama by

Sophocles.3 Freud thus hypothesizes that the

Oedipal dramatic scheme is universal from a

double point of view: as the development of

universal - and universally repressed - infantiledesires but also as exemplar form of revelation

of a hidden secret The gradually intensied and

3 Sigmund reud, Te Interetation of Drems, n e Stndrd

Edton of the Cmplete Pychologl Work of gmund Freud

tTans. and ed Jame trachey (London; Hogah 153]74), vol

4 p 261. Hereafr ted a Stndrd dton wth tite of nd-

idual work olume and page number

8



Wat Feud H< to Do with Aesthetics

skillf ull y dela yed re velation of O e d i p u s t he K n g is comparable, sa ys Freud to the work of ps ycho -anal ysis. He thus cobines three tings within a single af f irmation of uni versalit y: a general tendenc of the human ps yce, a determinate f ictional material and an exemplar

dramatic schema The question then becomes what allows Freud to af f rm this adequation and ake it the center of his demonstration? In other tes what ,are we to make of the uni versal dramatic power of the Oedipa

l stor and the scheme of re velation emplo yed b y Sophocles The dif f icult experience of a playwright who attempted to exploit the success of this material will pro vide the example tat will allo us to approach this question

9



2 I A Defective Subject

In 1659 Corneille was commissioned to write atragedy for the festival celebrating Carnival For

the playwright who had been absent from the

stage for seven years following the resonding

failure ofPeharte, it was the chance for a come-

back He cold not afford another failure and only

had two months to write his tragedy. The greatest

chance at success he felt would be proVided by

the definitive tragic subject. Since it had already

een handled by illustrious models he would onlyhave to translate" and adapt it for the French

stage. He therefore chose to do an Oedius. But

this golden subject quickly turned out to be a trap

In order to have any chance at the success he was

counting on, Coeille had to give up the idea oftransposing Sophocles. The schema of revelation

11



ADefctive Subject

and Oedips's guilt w as completely impr actical

and needed to be r ew or ked.

I kne w that what had passed f or miraculous in

those ong-ago times would seem horribe in

our age, and that the eloquent and curious

description of the way the unhappy prince

pts out his eyes - and e spec acle of the

bood f rom those same dead eyes dripping

do wn his f ace which occupies the whole f th

act in the incomparable origina version

would of f end he deicacy of the ladies who

compose the most beautif l portion of or

adience and whose disgust wold easily

entail condemnat on by those who accompany

them, and f nally that since loe plays no part

and ladies hae no roles in the subject it was

lacking in the principal ornaments that

ordinariy win s the approbation of the

public.4

j Pierr Cornc, Cuvres complte, d. Gorgs outon (ar;

Glmrd BbHothqu d 1 P 1987). vo 3, pp. 18-19

12



ADefectve Subject

CorneilJe's problems, as you will have noted

did not stem from the theme of incest Theyderived from the way the theme is turned into a

narrative from the schema of revelation and the

theatrical physicality of the denoumnt. Three

points made the simple transposition that had rst

been envisaged impossible: the horror of Oedipuss dead eyes the absence of love interest and

nally te abse of oracles which allow the audi

ence to gess the anser to the riddle too easily

and make the blindness of the solver of riddles

nbelievable.

The Sophoclean schema of the revelation is

defectve in that it shos too clearly what should

only be said and makes knon too soon hat

should remain mysterios So Corneille had to fixthese deciencies In order to spare the sensibility

of the ladies he moved off-stage the moment

When Oedipus goges out his eyes But he put

Tir esias offstage as ell He suppressed the

verbal confrontation so central for Sophocles

beteen the one ho knos bt does not want

to speak and tells the tth anway and the

3



A Defective Subject

one who wants to know but refuses to hear the

words that reveal the trth he Corneille

replaced this alltooapparent of hide-and

seek that the guilty detectie plays ith e trth

with a modern plot that is a plot involving a

conict of passions and interests that creates indecision about the identiy of the guil pary The

love stor lacking in Sophocles' play was neces

sar in order to roduce this confict and

suspense. Corneille gave Oedipus a sister Dirc

whom he deprived of the throne that was hers by

right, and gave Dirc a lover Theseus Since Dirc

thinks she is resonsible for the journey that cost

her father his life and Theseus has doubts about

his own birth (or at least he pretends to in order

to protect the woman he loves) three interpreta

tions of the oracle becoe possible and three

characters could turn out to be guilty The love

story preseres suspense and unceraty about

the dnouement through careful handling of thedistribution of knowledge

Sixty years later another plawrght encountered

he same problem and resolved i in much e same

14



A Defective Sul ect

way At te ag e of t en V ol r e chose e subject of Oedips to star t his car eer as a dr aatist But he did so on e basis of an even mor e direct c ticism

of Sophocles an that of Co ele denounci g he impr obabilities of the lot of Oed us the K in g.

It is unbelievable that Oedipus does not know the cir cstances in which his pr edecessor Laios died It is equally unbelievable hat he does not under stand what Tir esias to hi and that he

insults the an who he had br oug ht bef or e hi

as a vener able pphet and calls hi a liar The conclusion dr awn by V ol e is cal: "It is a def ect in the subject people say and not one intr oduced by the author . As if it wer e not the author ' job to cor r ect his s

ubject when it is def ective!5 V oltair e er ef or e cor r ected his subject by f inding another candidate f or Laios's mur der Philoctetes, f or mer ly an exosed child desper ately in love wit Jocasta, who had disappear ed f r om Thebes at the time of

the ur der and r e pr ecisely at the tie a g uil par ty is needed.

5 V oltair e, l e t t r e s ur in ( u vr s omhlet (Ox f or d: The

Volaire Foundation, 200 voL A p. 337

15



A Defective Subject

A defectve subject s thus how the classcal

age the age of representaton saw the workngsof Sophoclean psychoanalyss Ths deficency

we must emphasze agan s not due to the ncest

story The dffcultes Cornelle and Voltare

encountered n adaptng Sophocles provde o

grst for an argument aganst the unversalty of

the Oedpus complex What they do put nto

doubt o the other hand, s the unversalty of

Oedpal "psychoaalyss that s Sophocles'

scenaro for the revelaton of the secret ForCornelle and Voltare ths scenaro establshed a

defectve relaton between what s see and what

s sad between what s sad and what s under

stood. Too much s shown to e spectator. Ths

excess moreover s not merely a queston of thedsgustng spectacle of the gouged-out eyes; t

conces the mark of thought upon the body

more generally Above all the scenaro allows too

much to be understood. Contrary to what Freud

says there s no proper suspense and skllul

progresson n the unvelg of trth to both the

hero and the spectator What then compromses

16



A Defectve ubject

this dramatic ratioality? There can be no doubt: it

is the sub ject, the character of Oedipus himself. t is the fury that compels him to want to know at any cost against all and against himself, and at the same time not to understand the barely veiled words that offer him the trth he deman

ds. Here lies the heart of the problem Oedipus, driven mad by his need for knowledge does not merely upset the "delicacy of the ladies when he gouges out his eyes What he upsets in the end, is the

order of the representative system that gives dramatic creation its rle

Essentially two things are meant by the order of representation In the first place it is a cerain order of relations beween what can be said and hat can be seen The essence of speech in this order is to show. But speech shows within the bounds of a double restraint. On the one hand

,

the nction of visible manifestation restrains the power of speech Sp

eech makes maifest sentimen ' and wills rather than speaking on its ow, as the speech of Tiresias - like that of Sophocles or Aeschylus - does in an ocular or enigmatic

17



A fective Subject

mode O the othe and this fuctio estains

the powe of the visible itself Speech istitutes acertai visibility: it makes manifest what is hidden

i souls ecouts ad descies what is fa fom

one's eyes But i so doing it estains the visible

that it makes manifest unde its command It

fobids the visible fom showig on it own fom

showig the unspeakable the hoo of te

gouged-out eyes

In the second place te ode of epesetation

is a certain ode of elations beween knowledgeand actio. Dama says Aistotle is an aange

ment of actions At the ase of dama ae chaac

tes who pusue particula ends while acting i

conditions of partial igoace which will be

esolved in the couse of the action What this

excludes is what costitutes the vey goud of

the Oedipal pefomance, namely the pathos of

kowledge the maiacal elentless detemination

to kow what it would be bette not to know thefuo that pevents undestading the efusal to

ecognize the trth i the fom in which it pesents

itself the catastophe of usustaiable kowing

18



A Defective Subject

a knowing that obliges one to withdaw f om the

wold of visibility Sophocles' tagedy is made f om this p at ho s. A leady A istotle no longe undestands it ad epesses it behind the theory of damatic action that makes knowing a esult of the ingenious m

achiery of e vesal ad ecogni-tio It is this p at ho s that in the classical age makes Oedipus a impossible heo unless adical coections ae made. Impossible ot because he kills his f athe and sleeps with is mothe, but

because of the way that he leas about it because of the idetiy of opposites that he incanates in this leanig the tagic idetity of know-ig ad not knowing, of action u dertake and p at ho s und

ergoe.

]9



3 I The Aesthetc Revolution

It is thus a whole regime of thinking about poetry

that rejects the Oedipal scenario We can put this

the other way around the Oedipal scenario can

only acquire a privileged status after the abolition

of the representative regime of thinking about thearts, a regime that implies a certain idea of

thought: thought as action imposing itself upon a

passive matter. This is precisely what I have called

the aesthetic revolution the end of an ordered set

of relations between what can be seen and what

can be said knowledge and action activity and

passivity For Oedipus to be the hero of the

psychoanalic revolution, then there must rst

be a new Oedipus one who has nothing to doith those imagined by Corneille and Voltaire

Beyond French-style tragedy beyond even the

Aistotelian rationalization of tragic action this

21



e Aesthetic Revolution

new Oedipus to restore the tragic thought

of Sophoces. Hlderin Hegel, and Nietzsche

were among those who put f orh is new Oedi-

pus and the new idea of traged y that corresponds

to him.

Two traits characterize this new Oedipus andmake him the her of a "new idea of ought that

claims to revive the idea of thought attested to by

Greek tragedy Oedipus is proof of a cerain exis-

tentia savagery of thought a definition of know-

ing not as the subjective act of grasping anobjective ideaiy but as the affection passion or

even sickness of a living being. The signification

of the Oedipa story according to 1e Bih of

Tgedy is that knowedge in ief is a crime

against nature.6 Oedipus and tragedy generay

atest to the fact that in the matter of thought

there is aays a question of sickness medicine,

and their paradoxical uni. This philosophical

restaging of the tragic equivalence between

( Frieric Nietzhe, Te Birh of e Raymond Geus

and Ronal Speir Cam bridge U ni verity Pres,

1999), pp. 47-.

22



Te esthetic Revoluton

knowing and suering (the pathei mathos of

Aeschyus or Sophoces) presupposes a gatheringte trio of those who are sick with knowing:

Oedipus and Hamlet, together in e Intereta-

tion of Dreams as they were in Hege's Lectures

n Aesthetics, and Faust who is there as wel. The

ivention of psychoanaysis occurs at the point

where phiosophy and medicine put eac other

nto question by making thought a matter of sick-

ness and sickness a matter of thought

But this soidariy between the things ofthought and the things of sickness is itsef in soi-

dari with the ne regime of thinking about the

produtions of ar If Oedipus is an exempary

er it is because his fictiona figure emblema-

tzes te properies given to the productions of art

by the aesthetic revoution. Oedipus is he who

knows and does not know who is absolutey

active and absoutely passive Such an identity of

ontraries is precisely how the aesthetic revou-tion denes what is proper to ar. At first sight t

eems ony to set an absoute capaciy for creation

n opposition to the norms of the representative

23



Te Aesthetic Relution

regime. The work now stands under its own law

of production and is its own proof But at thesame time this unconditional creativity is identi

ed with an absolute passivity Kant's conception

of genius summarizes this dualit The genius is

the active power of nature who sets his own

creative power against any model or norm The

genius, we might say becomes a norm for

hiself But at the same time he is the one who

does not know what he does and is incapale of

accounting for his own activityThis identit beteen knowing and not know-

ing beeen activity and passivity is the ve fact

of art in the aesthetic regime; it radicalizes what

Baumgarten called "confused clarity into an iden-

tit of contraries In this sense the aesthetic revo-lution had already begun in te eighteenth centu

when Vico undertook to establish in his New

Science, the gure of what he called the true

Hoer in opposition to Aristotle and the entire

representative tradition. It is worth recalling the

context in order to clar i the filiation that interests

us Vicos prima target is not the theo of art

24



Te A ethetic Revolution

but the old theologicopoetic business about the

wisom of the Egyptians This question of whether hieroglyphic language was a code in

which religiOUS wisdom forbidden to the uniniti-

ated has been deposited an likewise whether

ancient poetic fables were the allegorical epres-

sion of philosophical thought dates back at leastto Pato In denouncing the immoralit of the

Homeric fables Plato in effect refuted those who

aw cosmological allegories in the divine adulter-

e they narrated The question reappears in the

rotoChristian era when pagan authors, seeking

t reute the accusation of idolat, once again

romote the idea of wisdom encypted in

ogramatic writng and the fables of the poets

It returns with force in the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries borne by both the development

eegetical methods and the philosophical quar-

re over the origins of language Withn this

ntet Vico seeks to kill o birds with one

tone. He hopes to liquidate the idea of a myste-

us wisdom hidden in imagistic writing and

oeti fables In opposition to this search for

25



e Aestetic Revolution

hidden menings he proposes new hermeneu

tics tht instead relates the to the conditions

of its production. But t the sme time he demol

ishes the trditional imge of the poet s the

inventor of fbles chrcters, nd imges. is

discover of the "true Homer reftes the Aristotelian and representtive imge of the poet s

inventor of fbles chrcters imges nd rhymes

on four points First, he shows Homer is not n

inventor of fbles. e did not recognize our

distinction between histor nd fiction, nd in fctconsidered his so-clled fbles to be hitor

which he trnsmitted as he hd received them

Secondly he is not the inventor of chracters is

soclled characters Achilles the brave Ulyssesthe clever Nestor the wise re neither individul

ized chrcters nor llegories invented for poetic

purposes They are abstctions in imges, which

are the only way for a thought tht is eqully inca

pble of bstction nd individuliztion to represent virtues courge intelligence, wisdom or

jstice that it cnnot conceive nor even nme s

such Thirdly, Homer is not the muchcelebrted

26



The Aestetc Revolution

inventor of beutiful metphors nd briliant

imges e simply lived in n ge when thought

cod not be seprated from the imge nor he

abstrct from the concrete. is imges re noth

g bt the wy people of his time spoke. Finlly

he is not the inventor of rhyth nd meters. eis simply proof of a stge of lngge in which

speech and song were identicl Men sng before

speking before pssing to rticlted lngge

he poetic charms of sung speech re ctually

oly the stammerngs of lnguge's infncy still

oservbe in the lngge of def-mutes Thus

e four trditionl privileges of the poet-inventor

re trsformed into properties of his lnguge.

is anguge is his only insofr s it does noteong to him; it is not an instrment at his

isposl bt the token of n infntile stge of

agage thoght, and humnity omer is poet

accout of the identity between what he wants

wht he does not wnt wht he knows nd

a he does not know wht he does nd wht

e oes not do The existence of poetr is tied to

is ientity of contrries to this gp between

27



Te Aesthetic Revolution

speech and what t says. There s soldar

between the poetic charcter of language and tsciphered character But ths cpher does ot hide

any secret scece It is n the end othing more

than the nscrption of the process that prodces

speech itself This hermeneutical fgure of the "true Homer

s a prerequste to the gure of Oedps as an

exemplary ad uversally vad tragc sbject

Ths figure presupposes a regme of thnking

abot art n whih art s deined by its beng theidentit of a coscious procedure and an uncon

scos production, of a willed acton and an vol

untary process In short the dentt of logos and

pathos wl heceforth be what attests to the exis

tece of art. Bt there are two contrar ways to

thk about ths identt: as the mmanence of

logos in pathos, of thought in nothought, or

nversely as the mmanece of pathos in logos of

no-thought n thought We d the rst manneillustrated n the great founding texts of th

aesthetc mode of thought such as Hege's

Lectures on Aesthetics. Art, n Schellings terms

28



Te Ae st he t c R e vol ut ion

a spirt's odysse outsde of tsel In Hegels systematizaton ths sprt seeks to become manf est, whch means n the rst place to make tself manf est to itself through the matter that is its opposite the compactness of bul or sculpted stoe n

the denst of color or n the temporal nd sonorous materialt of language It seeks tself n the doble sensble ex terority of matter d the image It seeks itself and msses itsel . But ths game of hide-andseek t creates tself as e nteror light of sensible materal the beat l pearance of the god of stone the arbores ent thrst of the Gothc v ault and spre, or the rital brlliance anmating the still-lif es insgnif n

e Te nv erse model that can be opposed to s odsse is that of the beauti l and ratonal es etic appearance whose obscure depths are v en wth pathos. In Schopenhauer ths model is essed b the mov ement that turns its

back on e pearances and the lov el causal order of the W d of representaton n order to f ace the s e, subterranean and nonsenscal world of e · .

109-O-tsel : the meaningless wo ld of naked

29



Te Aesthetic Revolution

will-tolif e, of the paradoxicall y named " will

whose essence is to want nothing, rejecting the

model of the choice of ends and the adaptation of

means to those ends that f orms the usual meaning

of the notion of will. In Nietzsche it is expressed

b y the identif ication of the existence of art itself

with the polari of A pollonian eautif ul appear

ance and the Dion ysian drive that rings jo y and

suf f ering in e qual measure and comes to light in

the ver y f orms that would den y its e istence

30



4 I The Two Forms of Mute Speech

Psychoanalysis thus nds it historical birthplace

wthn this counter-movement whose philosophi

cl heroes are Schopenhauer and the young Niet

zshe and which reigns in the literature that frm

Zla to Maupassant, Ibsen or Strinderg plungesto the pure meaninglessness of raw life or into

the encounter with the powers of darkness We

re not merely conceed with the inuence of

he spirit of the age; more precisely we are tring

t estalish the positions possile wihin a syste

s dened by a certain idea of thought and a

ertan idea of writing. For the silent revolution

t we have called aesthetic opens the space in

ih an idea of thought and a correspondingea of writing can be elaorated This idea of

ught rests upon a fundamental afrmation:

ere is thought that does not think thought at

31



e Two Form of Mute peeh

work not onl in the foreign element of non-

thought but in the ver form of nonthought.

Converel, there i nonthought that inhabit

thought and give it a power a it own. Thi non-

thought i not imply a form of abence of

thought it i an ecaciou preence of it oppo-ite From whichever ide we approach the equa-

tion, the identi of thought and nonthought i

the ource of a ditinctive power

Correponding to thi idea of thought i an idea

o writing Writing refer not onl to a form of

manifetation of peech but more ndamentall

to an idea of peech itelf and it intrinic power

It i well known that for Plato writing deignated

not onl the materiali of the written ign on amaterial upport but a pecic tatu of peech

He conidered writing to be a mute logos, peech

that i incapable of aing what it ay differentl

or of chooing not to peak It can neither account

for what it proffer nor dicern thoe whom it i or

i not appropriate to addre. Thi peech imul-

taneouly mute and chatt can be contrated

with peech that i action dicoure guided by a

32



e Two Forms of Mute Speech

signcation to be tranmitted and a goal to be

achieved. For Plato thi wa the peech of themaster who know how to explain hi word and

how to hod them in reerve how to keep them

awa rom the profane and how to depoit them

ike eed in the oul o thoe in whom the canbear frit The claical repreentative order iden-

tfied thi "living peech with the active peech of

the great orator who move deepl and

peruade edifie and lead oul and bodie

is model likewie include the dicoure of the

tragic hero who purue hi will and hi paion

to the limit.

In oppoition to thi living peech that

provided the repreentative order with it normriting i the mode of peech that correpond to

the aethetic revolution: the contradictor mode

of a peech that peak and keep ilent at the

same time that both know and doe not know

hat it i aing. But there are wo major gure

of thi contradictor mode, correponding to the

o oppoite form of the relation between

ought and nonthought. The polariy of thee

33



e Two Form ofMue Speech

two gures sketches out the space of a single

domain that of literar speech as symptomaticspeech?

Mute writing in the rst sense, is the speech

borne by mute things themselves. It is the capa

bility of signification that is inscribed upon their

vey body summarized by the "everything

speaks of Novalis the poetmineralogist. Evey

thing is trace vestige, or fossil Every sensible

form beginning from the stone or the shell tells a

story In their striations and ridges they all bearthe tces of their history and the mark of their

destination. Literature takes up the task of deci

phering and rewriting these signs of histo writ

ten on things Balzac summarizes and celebrates

this new idea of writing in the decisie pages at

the beginning of Te Wild Ass's Skin that describe

the antiquay's store as the emblem of a new

ythology a phantasmagoria formed entirely

from the ruins of consumption. The great poet ofthe new age is not Byron the repoer of the

7 See Jacque Rancre La Parol mut: Esai sur ls conradi-

ion de la littraur (Pa: Hachette 1998).

34



e Two Form ofMute eech

souls turmoil It is Cuier the geologist the natu

ralist who reconstitutes animal populations frombones and forests from fossilized imprints8 With

him a new idea of the artist is deined as one who

traels through the labyrinths and crypts of the

social world He gathers the vestiges and tran-

scribes the hieroglyphs painted in the congura

tion of obscure or random things He gies the

insignicant details of the prose of the world their

power of poetic signification. In the topography

of a plaza the physiognomy of a facade, thepaern or wear of a piece of clothing the chaos

of a pile of merchandise or trash he recognizes

the elements of a mhology He makes the true

stoy of a SOciety, an age or a people visible in

the figures of this mhology foreshadowing indi

idual or collective destiny Everthing spea"

i plies the abolition of the hierarchies of the

representative order The great Freudian rle that

tere are no inSignicant details that on thecontrary it is e details that put us on the path of

8 Hono de Balzac T Wild Ass's Skin, trans Hebert J Hunt

(Hmondsworth Penguin 1977, p. 41

35



The Two }rms of Mute Speech

truth - is in direct continuity with the aesthetic

revolution. There are no noble and vlgar

subjects nor important narrative episodes and

accessor descriptive ones There is not a single

episode description or sentence that does not

bear within itself the signing power of theentire work There is nothing that does not bear

the power of language Everything is on an equal

footing equaly important equally significant

Thus the narrator of At the Sign of the Cat and

Racket sets us in front of the cade of a house

whose asymmetrical openings chaotic recesses

and outcroppings form a tissue of hierogyphs in

which we can decipher the history of the house -

te history of the society to which it bears witness- and the destiny of the characters who live there

Similarly Les Misrables plunges us into the sewer

that, like a cynic philosopher says everything; it

brings together on an equal basis everthing that

civilization uses and throws away its masks andits distinctions as well as its everyday utensils The

new poet the geological or arceological poet

performs the same so of inquiry that Freud

36



The Two Forms of Mute �eech

conducts in Te Interetation of Dreams. He

poses the principle that nothing is insignicant

that the prosaic details that positivistic thought

dsdans or attributes to a merely physiological

rationality are in fact signs encrypting a histo.

But he also poses the paradoxical condition ofths hermeneutics: in order for the banal to reveal

s secret it must rst be myhologized The house

and the sewer speak they bear the trace of truth

- as will the dream or the parapraxis and the

Maian commodity insofar as they are frst

transformed into the elements of a mhology or

phantasmagoria

The writer is thus a geologist or archeologist

exploring the labyrnths of the social world andlater those of the self He gathers remnants

exhumes fossils and transcribes signs that bear

wtness to a world and write a histor Te mute

writing of things deivers in its prose the truth of

a civilization or an age that the oncegloriousscene of "living speech had hidden from view

The latter has now become a vain scene of

oratoy the discouse of superficial agitations. But

37



Te wo Forms ofMute Seech

the interpreter of signs is also a doctor a smpto

matologist who diagnoses e illnesses aictingthe enterprising individual and the brilliant soci

ety The naturalist and geologist Balzac is also a

doctor able to detect at the heart of the intense

activity of individuals and societies, a sickness

identical to this intensit In Balzacs work the

name for this sickness is wi: the malad of

thought that seeks to transform itself into reality

and so carries individuals and societies toward

their destruction. Indeed, the histor of nineteenthcentur literature can be described as the

histor of the transformations of the will In the

naturalist and smbolist period it will become

impersonal destin heredit, the accomplishment

of a willto-live devoid of reason, an assault uponthe illusions of consciousness b the world of

obscure forces Literar smptomatolog will then

acquire a new status in this literature of the

pathologies of thought centering on hsteria

nevosism," or the weight of the past These new

dramaturgies of the buried secret trace the life

histor of the individual in order to uncover the

38



Te wo Forms of ute Speech

profound secret of heredity and race and, in the

a instance, the naked and meaningless fact ofe.

This literature is attached to the second form of

denti of logos andpathos mentioned above the

one following an inverse path from the cear to

the obscure and from logos topathos, to the pure

suffering of existence and the pure reproduction

of the meaninglessness of life A second form of

mute speech is likewise at work here In place of

e hieroglph inscribed on the bod and subjectto deciphering we encounter speech as soliloqu,

speaking to no one and saing nothing but the

impersonal and unconscious condtions of speech

itself. In Freuds time it was Maeterlinck who most

forcel theorized this second form of mutespeech of unconscious discourse in his anasis

of second-degree dialogue in Ibsen's dramas9

This dialogue expresses not the thoughts senti

ments and intentions of the characters, but the

9 Marice Maeerlnck, "The ragical n Daily n The reasure

of te Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro (Ne York: Dodd Mead and

Co ) nd pp. 13-35.

39



e Two Form ofMute Speech

thought of the third person" who haunts the

dialogue the confrontation with the Unknown,

with the anonymous and meaningless forces of

life. The language of motionless tragedy" tran-

scribes the unconscious movements of a being

reaching luminous hands through the battlements

of the artificial forress in which we are impris

oned"0 the knocking of a hand that does not

belong to us [and) strikes the secret gates of ou

instinct" These doors says Maeterlinck in sum

cannot be opened but we can listen to theknocking behind the door" We can transpose the

dramatic poem, formerly dedicated to an

0 Jles Hret "Conversation avec Marice \aeterlinck and

Maeterlinck, Confession de pote in Maetelinck Intduc-

tion a une pholog ds onge et atre (Brussels: abor986) pp 156 and 8L

11 Maeterlinck Small Talk The Theater in Symbolit Ar To

ri: A Crtal Atholo, ed Henri Dorra (Berkeley Universiy

o Califoia Press 1995 p 14. I am well aware that Maeter

Iinck places himsel in the lineage of Emerson and the mystial

tradition not in that of chopenaerian nihilis Bt what

interests me here - and what moreover makes possible the

confsion of the two traditions is the same stats they give to

voiceless speec as the expression of an nconscios willing

o eistene

40



e Two rm ofMu Speech

aangement of actions" into the language of

hese blows, the speech of the invisible crowdthat haunts our thoughts Perhaps what the stage

needs is for this speech to be incarnated in a new

body no longer the human body of the actor/

character but that of a being who would appear

to live without being alive" a body of shadow orwax granted to this multiple and anonymous

voice12 From this Maeterlinck draws the idea of

an android theater that links Villiers de L!sle

Adams novelistic reverie with the future of the

theater from Edward Gordon Craig's berMari

onee to Tadeusz Kantors Dead Class.

The aesthetic unconscious consubsantial with

e aesthetic regime of ar, manifests itself in the

polariy of this double scene of mute speech: onthe one hand a speech written on the body that

must be restored to a linguistic signification by a

labor of deciphering and rewriting; on the other

he oiceless speech of a nameless power that lurks

behind any consciousness and any Signication, to

2 Maetelnck mall Talk p 5.

41

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/voice.12

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/voice.12



T Two Forms (M Sp

which voice and body ms be given The cos,

however may be ha his anonymos voice andghostly body lead e hman sbjec down he pah

of he grea rennciaion oard he nohingness

of will whose Schopenhaerian shadow eighs so

heavily on he lierare of he nconscios

42



5 I From One Unconscious to Another

he goal of his oline of he lierar and philo

ophical gre of he aesheic nconscios i

may bear repeaing is no o provide he model

for a ne genealogy of he Fredian nconscios

We have no inenion of forgeing he medicaland scienific conex in which psychoanalysis

wa elaboraed nor of dissolving he Fredian

concep of he nconscios, he economy of he

drives and he sdy of he formaions of he

unconscios in a cenr-old idea of nknonknowing and hogh ha does no hink Nor is

here any poin in ring o rn he game arond

and show how he Fredian nconscios is

nconsciosly dependen on he lierare and a1

whose hidden secres i claims o nveil. ha

maers is raher o poin o he relaions of

complici and conic esablished beeen he

43



Frm One Unconscious to Another

aesthetic unconscious and the Freudian uncon

scios. We can dene the stakes of the encounter

between these two versions of the unconscious

on the basis of Freud's own indications when he

recounts the invention of psychoanalysis in e

Interetation of Dreams. His narrative posits a

contrast between psychoanalysis and the notion

of science associated with positivistic medicine,

which treats the peculiarities of the sleeping mind

as negligible data or attributes them to deter

minable physical causes In his battle against this

sort of positivism, Freud calls on psycoanalysis

to forge an alliance with the old mythological

heritage and poplar belief concerning the signi

cation of dreams. But there is another alliance

woven into The Interetaton q Dreams, whichwill become more explicit in the book on

Gradva: an alliance with Goethe and Schiller

Sophocles and Shakespeare as well as oter writ

ers less prestigious but nearer to him suc as

Popper-Lynkeus and Alphonse Daudet Freud isdobtless playing the athority of the great names

of clture off against those of the masters of

4



Frm One Unconscou., to Another

cience Bt, mor e f undamentally these gr eat

names nction as guides in the jouey acr oss

e Acher on under aken by the new science. If

ide ar e necessary it is pr ecisey because te

pace beteen positive science and popular

elief or legend is not empty The aesthetic

nconscious took possession of this domain by

edef ining te tings of ar as specic modes of

nion beeen the thought that thinks and the

thought that does not think It is occupied by te

ite atur e of travel into the depths, of the

her meneutics of mute signs and the transcription

f voiceless speech. This liter atr e has already

c eated a link betw een the poetic practice of

dipaying and inter pr eting signs and a par ticular

idea of civilization, i ' br illiant appear ances and bcur e depths it sicknesses and the medicines

apprpr iate to them This idea is not limited to the

naturaist novel's interest in sterics and the

ynd omes of degeneration. T he elaboration of a

new medicine and science of the p s y ch e is poss-ible because a w ole domain of thoght and w rit-

ing separates science and sper stition But the

45



From One Unc onscous to Another

fact that this semiological and symptomatological

scene has its own consistency makes any simply

utilitarian alliance between Freud and writers or

artis " impossible. The literature to which Freud

refers has its own idea of the unconscious, the

p at h o s of thought, and the maladies and medi-cines of civilization Pragmatic utilizaton is no

more possible than unconscious continuity Te

domain of thought that does not think is not a

realm where Freud appears as a solitary explorer

in search of companions and allies. It is an already occupied territo where one unconscious enters

into competition and conict with another

In order to grasp this twofold relation we must

pose the question again in its most general form:

what business does Freud have in the history ofar? The question is itself double What pushes

Freud to make himself into a histoan or analyst

of art? What is at stake in the llscale analyses

that he devotes to Leonardo to Michelangelo's

Moses or jensens Gdiva or in his shorter

remarks on Hoffmanns Sandman or Ibsens

Rosmerholm? Why these examples? What is he

46



From One Unconscious to Another

looking for in them and how does he treat them?

This rst series of questions, as we have seen

plies another how should we think of Freuds

place in the history of ar? Not only the place of

Freud as an "analyst of art but of Freud the

scientist the doctor of thepsyche, interpreter of itsformations and their disturbances? The histor of

ar in this sense is something quite different from

he succession of woks and movements It is the

history of regimes of thinking about art that is of

paricular ways connecting practices to modes ofmaking those practices visible and thinkabe. In

the end this means a histoy of ideas of thought

itself13 The double question can then be reformu-

lated as follows what is Freud looking for and

what does he nd in the analysis of the works or

hought of aists What lin does the idea of

unconscious thought that animates these analses

have with the one that defines a historical regime,

he aesthetic regime of ar?

13 Sec on this poin Jaques Ranr, Te Poltcs ofAsthtics: TD trbuton o th Snsbl, tra. Gbl Rokhll (London:

Contnum 2001).

47

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/itself.13

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/itself.13



From One Unconscious to Ano her

We can pose these questions on the basis of to

theoretical signos. The first is posed by Freudhimself, the second deived from the works and

characters privileged by his analysis. As we have

seen, Freud rms that re is an objective alliance

eeen the psychanalyst and the t, and paic

ularly beeen the sychoanalyst and the poet

"Creative writers are valuable allies he asserts at

the beginning of lusions and Dreams in jensen s

Gdva14 Their kowledge of thepche, the singu

lar formations and hidden operations of thehuma mind is ahead of that of the scientiss ey

kno things that the scientists do not for they are

aare of the imortance and rationality roper to

this phantasmatic component that positive science

either sees as cmercal nothingness or atributesto simple physical or hysiologil uses Poes and

novelists are ths the allies of the psychoanalyst

the scientist who sees all the manifestations of the

mind as equally imorant and knos there is aprofound rationali to its "fancies abeations and

14 Sigmund Freud, Deluion and ream n jenen' "GradivC.Standard Eitn, vol 9 p. 8

48

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/Gradiva.14



From One Unconscious o Anoher

n-sense This imoran oint is too often

derestimated: Freud's approach to a is not ine least motivated by a desire to demysti the

limities of oetry and art and reduce them to

e sexal economy of the drives His goal is not

exhi the dirty (or stupid) little secret behind

e grand myth of creation. Rather Freud cals on

art and poetr to bear positive witness on behalf

f the profound rationality of fantasy (antaisie)

ad lend suppor to a science that claims in a

cein way to put fantasy poe ad mythologyack within the fold of scientific rationalty This is

hy the declaration of alliance is immediately

accmanied by a reproach the poets and novel

are in fact only halfallies They have not given

enough credence to the rationali of dreams and fancy not taken a clear enough stand on behalf of

he meaninglness of the fantasies they have

porayed

The second signpost is provided by the figures

chosen as examples by reud A certain number

f them are drawn from contemporary literature

fm the aturalist drama of destiny as found in

49




Ibsen or from a fantastic tradition exemplied by

Jensen or PopperLynkeus and reaching back toJeanPaul Tieck and Hoffmann But these

contempora works stand in the shadow of a few

great models First are the two great incarnations

of the Renaissance: Michelangelo the somber

demiurge of colossal creations and Leonardo d

Vinci the artist/scientist/inventor the man of

great dreams and great projects whose handl of

realized works appear as the various figures of a

single enigma. Then there are the two romanticheroes of tragedy Oedipus bears witness to a

savage antiquity that stands in sharp contrast with

the polite and polished antiqUiy represented in

French tragedy and to a pathos of thought that

overurns the representative logic of the arrange-ment of actions and its harmonious distribution of

what can be seen and what can be said. Hamlet is

the mode hero of a thought that does not act or

rather a thought that acts by its ver inertia In

shor in opposition to the classical order there is

the hero of savage antiquity as celebrated by

H6lderlin or Nietzsche and the heroes of the

50



Frm One Unconscious to Another

avage Renaissance that of Shakeseare but also

that studied by Burckhardt or Taine. As we haveeen the classical order is not sply the etiquette

of a Frenchsle courtly art It is properly speak-

ing the representative regime of art, the regime

hose rst theoretical legitimation is found in

stotle's elaboration of the noton of mimesis, its

emblem in classical French tragedy and ts

systematization in the great treatises of the French

eigteenth centuy from Batteux to La Harpe by

way of Volaires Co mmentires sur Co rneile. Atthe hear of this regime was a conception of the

poem as an ordered arrangement of actons

moving toward resolution by way of a confronta-

on beteen characters who pursue con1ictng

goals and manifest their wills and sentiments inheir speech following a system of rules of suit-

ablity This system submitted knowledge to the

authority of history and visiblty to the autho

of speech in a relation of mutual restraint beeen

what can be seen and what can be said. It is this

order that is split apart by the romantic Oedipus

the hero of a thought that does not know what it




knows wants what it does not want, acts by

suffering and speaks through muteness If Oedipus and the whole lineage of great Oedipal

l\;HJ along with him - is at the center of the

Freudian elaboration, it is because he is the

emblem of this regime of art that identiies the

things of art as things of thought insofar as they

are tokens of a thought that is immanent in its

other and inhabited by that other that is ever-

where written in the language of sensible signs

and withdrawn into its own obscure heart.

52



6 I Freud's Corrections

A Freud makes an appeal to artists he remains

n the other hand objectivey dependent upon

te presuppositions of a determinate regime of

art. We now need to understand the specificity of

e conection between these to facts whichcstitutes the specicity of Freud's interention

wth respect to the aesthetic unconscious His

rmar goa as we have already noted is not to

establish a sexual etiology for artistic phenoena

but raer to within the notion of

unconscious thought that provides the produc-

tins of the aesthetic regime of art with their

norm. Freud seeks that is to reestablish proper

rder in te way art and the thought of art situatethe relations between knowing ad notknowing

sense and nonsense logos and pathos, the rea

and the fantastic. His interention is rst of all

53



Freud's Corection

designed to discredit an interpretation of these

relations that plays pon the ambiguit of the realand the fantastic or sese and non-sense and

leads the thoght of art and the interpretation of

the manifestations of "fantasy toward a pure and

definitive affirmation of pathos, of the brte

meaninglessness of life He wants to contribute to

the victor of a hermeneutic and explanator

vocation of art over the ihilist entropy inherent

in the aesthetic configuration of art

In order to nderstad this we need tocompare preliminary remarks made by Freud in

o different texts At the beginning of e Moses

of Michelangelo Fred explains that he is not

interested in artworks from a formal perspective

but in their "sbject-matter, in the intention that isexpressed and the content that is revealed IS At

the beginning of the Gradiva he reproaches poets

for their ambiguiy with respect to the signifca

tion of the minds fantasies We cannot derstand Freuds declared choice of the content

I' Freud, The Moses oficelangeo, Standard Edton vol. 13, pr.211-12.

54



feud Correction.

ne of works unless we see it in relation to the

cond position The qest for the content as wew enerally leads toward the discover of a

ressed memor and in the nal instance

ard the original moment of infantile castration

xiety This assignation of a nal cause is geer

ly mediated through an organizing fantasy

(ntsme) a compromise formation that allows

e rtists libido (most ofte represented by the

ro) to escape repression and sublimate itself i

e work at the cost of inscribig its enigma thereThis overhelming precoception has the singu-

r consequece of transforming fiction into bi

raphy. Freud ierprets the fantastic dreams

d ightmares of Jense's Norber Hanold Hoff

anns Nathaniel and Ibsen's Rebecca West as if ey ere pathological data peraining to real

eole and jdges the writer according to the

lcidiy of the analysis he gives of them The lmit

example is fond in a note to the discussion ofTe Sandman in e Uncanny where Fred

adduces the proof that the optician Coppola and

te lawyer Coppelis are one and the same

55



Freud's Coection

person, namely te castrating fater He tus

reestablises te etiolo of Nataniel's case Inis role as a fantasy doctor, Hoffmann blurred tis

etiology but not to te point of iding it from is

knowledgeable colleague, for "Hoffmanns igi-

native treatent [PhantasieJ of is material as

not made suc wild consion of its elements tatwe cannot reconstruct teir original arrange-

ent16 Tere tus exists an original arrangeent

of te case of NatanieL Beind wat te writer

presents as te product of is unfeered imagina-tion we must recognize te logic of te fantasy

(antasme) and te primal aniety tat it

disguises: little Nataniel's castration anxiety an

expression of te familial drama experienced by

Hoffmann imself as a cildTe sae pcedue rns trug te wole

book on Gdiva. Beind te arbitrary decision

and te fantastic story of tis young man wo as

fallen in loe wit a gure of stone and dream to

te point of being unable to see te real woman

1( Freud "T 'Uncany S Eii vol 17, p. 232 not

56



Freuds Coetions

aning more tan a pantasmatic apparition

tis antique gure Freud attempts to reestab-h te true etiology of te case of Norbert

aold te repression and displacement of te

dlescents sexual attraction for young Zoe Tis

oection obliges Freud to found is reasoning

the less tan irmly establised fact of teal existence of a fictional creation But more

portantly it requires a mode of dream interpre-

ton tat seems sligtly naie wit respect to

euds own scientific prnciples. e iddenssage is in fact proided by a simple translation

the dream gure into its real equvalent you

re inteested in Gradiva because in eality it is

Ze yu are intested in. Tis synopsis sows

hat someting ore tan just te reduction of tectional to a clinical syndrome is going on ere

ud een calls into doubt wat migt ake te

ydrme interesting for a doctor namel te

diagnosis of fetisistic erotomania He furter

eglects wat migt interest te scolar

concerned wit relating clinical practice to te

history of m namely te long istory of ms

57



Freud's Coectio

exemplied by Pygmalion, about men who fall in

love with images and dream of actually possess

ing them. Only one thing seems to interest Fred

reestablishing linear causalit in the plot even if

this requires him to refer to the unverifiable facts

of Norbert Hanold's childhood Even more thanthe correct explanation of Hanold's case his

conce is to refute the status that ensens book

gives to literatures "inventions. His retation

bears on two undamental and coplementar

points: first the authors airmation that thfantasies (anames) he describes are the sol

invention of his fanciful imagination (antaisie);

second, the moral that the author gives to his

stor, namely the simple triumph of "real life in

lesh and blood and good old plain German

which through the voice of its homonym Zo

mocks the folly of the scholar Norbert and sets

its simple and joyous perpetuit in contrast with

his idealistic reveries The authors insistencupon the freedom of his imagination is obviously

of a piece with his denunciation of his heros

reveries This congence can be summarized b



Freud s Coections

a single Freudian term, desublimation If there is

e sublimation going on here it is the novelist and

ot the psychoanalyst who carries it out And it

ocides with his lack of seriousness with

respect to the phantasmatic fact

Behind the "reduction of the ictional datum toa non-existent pathological and sexual "reality is

us a polemic seeking to refute the confusion of

e ctional and the real that grounds the practice

a the discourse of the novelist By insisting that

e fantasy is the product of his fanY and retigs characters reverie in the name of the reali

nple the novelist grants himself the capacit

o circulate freel on both sides of the bondar

een reality and fiction Freuds first conce is

o assert a univocal stor against such equivocit

e important point that justifes all the shortcuts

of the interpretation is the identification of the

ove plot ith a schea of causal rationalit It is

ot the inal cause the unverifiable repressionong back to Norberts childhood that interests

reud so much as causal concatenation as such t

atters little whether the stor is real or fictive.

59



Freud Coectons

The essential is that it be univocal tt in contrast

to Romanticism's rendering the imaginary and thereal indiscernible and reversible it set forth an

Aistotelian arrangement of action and knowledge

directed toward the event of recognition.

60



I On Varous Uses of Detai

re the relation between Jreudian interpretation the aesthetic revoltion begins to get compli

te Psychoanalysis is possible on the basis of

regime of art that delegitimizes the represen-

$tie ages wellordered plots and in trn grants

itimac to thepathos of knowledge. Bt reu

kes a distinct choice within the configuration of

e aesthetic unconscious He privileges and

aorizes the first form of mte speech, that of the

ptom that is the trace of a history in opposi-ion to the other form that of the anonymous

oice of nconscious and meaningless life This

opposition leads him to try to recapture the

oantic figures of the equivalence of logos and

athos within the old representative logic Theost striking emple is to be found in the text on

Michelangelos Moses. Ie object of this analysis is

61



On Varo Uses ofDetail

in fact quite unique Freud does not talk here as

he did in the text on Leonardo about a ntasy

found in a note He talks about a sculptural work

that he says, he has returned to see se veral times

His analysis is based an exemplar adequation

between visual attention to the works detail andthe psychoanalytic privilege given to insigni

cant" details As is well known this relation passes

by way of an endlessly commented reference to

Morel/Lermolieff the doctor who became an

expert in artworks and the inventor of a forensic

method of identiing works on the basis of slight

and inimitable details that reveal the artist's indi

vidual touch A method of reading wor ks is thus

identied with a paradigm for research into causesBut this detailoriented method can itself be prac

ticed in two ways which correspond to the o

major forms of the aesthetic unconscious There is

on the one hand the model of the trace that is

made to speak in which the sedimented inscrip

tion of a histor can be read. n a famous text

Carlo Ginzbur g has shown how the reference to

Morellis metod inscribes Freudian interpretation

62



On Varous es q Deil

in the great judicial paradig that seeks t recon-

stitute a process on the basis of its traces.17 But

ere is also the oer model, which no longer sees

the insignificant" detail as a trace that allows a

process to be reconstituted but as the direct mark

of an inarticulatable trth whose imprint on thesurface of the work unoes the logic of a well

ar ranged stor and a rational composition of

elements It is this second model for analyzing

etails that certain art historans will later cham-

pion in opposition to the privilege that Panofsky

ave to the analysis of painting on the basis of the

stor represented or the text illustrated. This

polemic caied on in the past by Louis Marin and

today by Georges DidiHuberman stands underthe authorit of Freud the Freud inspired by

Morelli as the founder of a mode of reading that

locates the truth of painting in the details of indi

vidual works: an inSignificant broken column in

17 Calo Gnzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidentl Pradigm in

Gues, Myth and th Htorcal ethod tns. John nd Anne

Tedeschi (Batimoe The Johns Hopkins Universty Pess 1989)

pp. 9612 5

63

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/traces.17



On Varous Ues ofDetal

Giorgiones Tempest, or splotches of color imitat

ing marble on the base of Fra Agelicos Madonnaof the Shadows.18 Such details functon as part-

objects, fragments that are impossible to integrate

and that undo the order of representation, legit-

imizing an unconscious trth not to be found in an

individual histor but rather in the opposition

between wo orders: the gural beneath thegu-

rative or the vual beneath the represented vis-

ible But wat is today hailed as psychoanalysiss

contribution to the reading of painting and itsunconscious is something that Freud himself

wanted nothig to do with. Nor did he have any

trck with all the Medusas heads representatives

of castration, that so many contemporar commen

tators have managed to discover in every head of

Holofernes or John the Baptist, in some particular

detail of Ginevra de Benci's hair or an individual

vortex drawn in Leonardos notebooks

IH LouisMarin,

On Representation,trans. Cathene Porter (Stanford: Stanord Universt ress 2001; eoges Dd-Huberman

Coronting Image: Quetioning the Ends ofa eain lito/

oA. trans John Goodman Unvesit ark ennsylvana Stae

Universit ess 2005)

64



On Varous ses ofDetail

t is clear that this psychoanalysis of da Vinci as

cticd notabl y by Louis Marin, is not the same

Freuds t might be argued that what interests

Feud in the detail privileged in this wa y is

ther truth of the painted or sculpted gure,

at of the histor of a singular subject symptom

fantasy and that what he is looking f r is the

fatas y that pvides the matrix of an artist's

ativiy, not the unconscious igural order of art.

he example of Moses, however runs against this

ml explanation W hile the statue is indeed hat interests him the principle of this interest is

uprsing. The long anal ysis of the detail of the

sition of the hands and the beard does not

eval an y childhood secret or encr ypted uncon-

cious thought It poses instead the most classic ofquestions: exactly what moment of the biblical

tory does Michelangelo's statue represent? Is it

deed that of Moses f ur? Is he in the act of

dropping the ablets of the Law? Here Freud is as

far as possible from the anal yses of Louis Marin

W e could even sa y that in the debate between

W orringer who tried to ident diff erent visual

65



On Varous Uses ofDetail

orders that coud be correated with dominant

psychoogica traits and Panosky, who made theidentiication o forms secondar to that of the

subects and episodes represented, Freud de acto

takes Panosky's side More undamentay his

attention to detai reers to the ogic o the repre-

sentative order in which the pastic orm was the

imitation o a narrated action and the particuar

subject o the painting was identica with the

representation o the "pregnant moment in

which the movement and meaning o the action iscondensed Freud deduces this moment rom the

position of the right hand and the Tabets. It is not

the moment when Moses is about to strike out in

indignation against the idoaters The moment for

Freud is that o anger mastered when the hanets go of the beard and irmy grasps the Tabets

once again This moment is not of course to be

found in the text of the Bibe Freud adds it in the

name of a rationaist interpretation in which the

man who is master o himse wins out over the

seant of the eaous God The attention to detail

in the end sees to identi Moses position as

66



On Varous Uses ofDetail

estimony to the triumph o the wiL Michean

eo's Mo ses is interpreted by Freud as somethingike Winckemanns Lao co o n, the expression o

e victor o cassica serenit over emotion. In

e case o Moses, it is speciicaly reigious pathos

a is conquered by reason Moses is the hero o

emoion conquered and brought to order It is not

rticuary important whether, as a certain tradi-

ion has it what the Roman marbe reay repre-

ents or the patriarch of psychoanaysis is his

own aitude with respect to his rebeious disci-es Much more than a circumstantia se-

ortrait this Moses reproduces a cassica scene of

e representatie age: whether it be on the tragic

ge in opera seria or histor painting, the

umph o wi and consciousness incarnated by aoman hero who reasserts his mastery o himse

d the universe: Brtus or Augustus, Scipio or

itus. As the incarnation of victorious conscious

ess Freuds Moses stands in opposition not so

uch to idoaters or dissidents as to those who

ve produced nothing and remained victims o

expicated antasy We are of course thinking of

67



O Varous Uses of Detail

ichelangelo's legendar alter ego, Leonardo da

Vinci the man of notebooks and sketches theinventor of a thousand unrealized proects the

painter who never manages to individualize

gures and always paints the same smile in sort

the man bound to his fantasy and stuck in a

homosexual relation to the Father.

6



8 I A Conict beteen Two Kindsof Medicine

There is another "gure of stone that can be setin opposition to this classical Moses: the bas-relief

of Gdiva. Freud judges the similarity of gait

between the stone igure and the living young

woman together with the encounter of Zoe in

Pompeii to be the only invented and arbi

trar element in the presentation of Norbert

Hanolds case 19 I would happily sa the opposite

This young Roman virgin whose gracel gait is

composed of suspended ight and rm touch onthe ground, this expression of lively action and

tranquil repose is anything but an arbitrar inven

tion of Wilhelm Jensens brain On the contrary,

we can early recognize a fgure celebrated

hundreds of times the age of Schiller and

19 Freud, Jense : "Gradiva . Stadard Edtio voL 9, pp. 41-2

6



A Conict beten Two Kinds ofMedicine

yn H6lderlin and Hegel The whole age took

this image of the kre from Grecian urns and theirmemories of the Panathenaia frieze and built

upon it their dream of a new idea of the sensible

community of a life at one with art and an art at

one with life. More than an extravagant young

scholar Norbert Hanold is one of the innumerable

victims whether in a tragic or comic mode of a

cerain theoretical fantasy: the quivering life of the

statue, of the fold of the tunic or the free gait that

incaated the ideal world of a living community.The fantast Jensen finds it amusing to confront

in this way the dreamed life of antique stone

and the community-to-come with the tviali of

petit-borgeois life neighbors canaries in the

windows and passersby in the street The loverof life-incarnated-in-stone is called back to the life

of prosaic and mean-spirited neighbors and the

banality of petit-borgeois honeymoons in Italy

Freud constrcts his interpretation opposton

to Zoes cure which simply liquidates the drea

in this way and leaves no place for emotional

kathais. He denounces the complici between

70



A Conict between Two Kin ofMedicine

e position of the fantast and a cerain prosaic

nd of the dream This denunciation itself is notnew We might recall the pages of Hegels

Lectues n Aesthetics where he denounces the

ritrar character of Jean-Paul or Tiecks fancy

nd its ultimate solidarity with the philistinism of

orgeois life In both cases what is denounced is

certain se of romantic wit (Wtz) by the

fntast ut within this proximity an essential

reversal has occurred. Hegel contrasts the subjec

ve frivolity of Witz with the sbstantial reality ofind Freud reproaches the fantast for his failure

to recognize the substantiality of the play of Witz

egel's primary conce is to set aside an ep

figre of free subjectiviy reduced to its repeti

tive self-aration Freud confronted with thene developments of the aesthetic unconscious

seeks above all to put into question a cerain idea

of objectivity that is summarized by the idea of the

isdom of life. In the case of the laughing Zoe

Bergang and the fantast Wilhelm Jensen this

isdom looks fairly anodyne ut this is not the

case in some other "cures other ways of ending

71



A Conict between Two Kinds ofMedicine

dreams" illustrated by the literary medicine of

the late nineteenth century Here we might think

of o exemplary fictions one invented by a

doctor's son and the other taking a doctor as its

hero. The rst is the conclusion of the Sentimen-

tal Education with its evocation of the failed visitto La Turques bordello which in the collapse of

both their idealistic hopes and their positive ambi

tions represents the best of Frdrics and

Deslaurierss lives Even more signicant no

doubt is the end of Zolas Doctor Pascal, which isalso the conclusion of the whole Rougon

Macquar cycle and its moral. This moral is

unique to say the least: Doctor Pascal recounts

the incestuos love affair between the old doctor

who is also the family historiographer and his

niece Clothilde. At the end of the book after

Pascals death Clothilde breastfeeds the child

who is the reslt of this incest in the former

doctors office that has now become a nurseryThe child in his innocence of any culural taboo

raises his little fist not to some glorious future but

simply to the blind and brte force of life assuring

72



A Conct between T Kin q edicine

its own perpetuty. This triumph of life affirmed

by a banal and even regenerative incest repre

sents the serious" and scandalous version of

jensens lighthearted fatasy (antaisie) . Zolas

moral represents precisely the bad" incest that

reud refuses bad not because t shocks moraltybut because it is disconnected from any good plot

based on causality - and clpability - and there

fore from any logic of liberating knowledge

I do not now whether Freud ever read Doctor

Pascal. He certainly did read however, and withcare the works of one of Zolas contemporaries

Ibsen the author of exemplary histories of the

souls troubles and of childhood secrets cures

confessions and healings. Freud gives an analysis

of his play Rosmeholm in the essay Some Char

acterTypes Met with in Psychoanalytic Work

This text studies a paradoxical group of patients

who are opposed to the rationality of the psycho

analytic cue some because they refuse torenounce a satisfaction and to submit the pleasure

principle to the reality principle; others to the

contrary becase they ee from their own

73



A Coict between Two Kin of Medicine

success and refuse a satisfaction at the ver

moment the can obtain it when it is no longermarked b the seal of impossibilit or transgres-

sion Such are the young lad who has long

schemed her marriage and the professor who is

about to obtain the chair for which he has long

itrigued and who lee from the success of their

enterprise Freuds interetation is that the possi-

bilit of success provokes the invasion of an

uncontrollable feeling of culpabilt. At this point

he brings in examples drawn from two exemplar

plas Macbth, of course but also Rosmerholm.

Since Ibsen's pla is less well known than Shake-

speares, it is worthwhile to summarize the plot

The setting is an old manor house located on the

outskirts of a small town in Norwa huddled atthe end of a fjord In this manor connected to the

world b a footbridge crossing a turbulent mill-

race lives the former pastor Rosmer the heir to a

long famil of local notables A ear before the

action of the pla his wi suffering from mentl

illness, threw herself into the water In the same

house lives the governess Rebecca who cam

74



A nict hetween Two Kinds ofMedicne

ere aer the death of her stepfather Dr West.

This freethiker had educated Rebecca after her other's death and conveed her to his liberal

deas Rosers cohabitation with the young

woman has two consequences Frst the former

astor is converted to liberal ideas which he

publicl endorses, to the great scandal of his

brotherinlaw headmaster Kroll the leader of the

local par of order Secondly, his intellectual

counit with Rebecca is transformed into feel

gs of love and he proposes marriage to her. But

Rebecca, aer a momentar reacton of jo

decares marrage impossible Whereupon head

aster Kroll arrives to reveal to his brotherilaw

hat his wife was driven to suicide and to Rebecca

hat her birth was illegitmate: she is in fact theatural child of her "stepfather Rebecca energet-

call refuses to believe this She admits however

at she was e one who had insinuated into the

dead womans mind the ideas that drove her to

suicide She then prepares to leave the manor at

hich point Rosmer again asks her to become his

wife She refuses once again saying she is no



A Corict between Two Kin ojMedicine

loger te abitious young woan wo ad

oved ito te ouse and quietly gotten rid of tewife wo stood i er way. If kowing er as

coverted to free tougt se o e

cotrary as been ennobled by contact wit i

Se ca no loger enjoy te success se as won

It is ere tat Freud itervenes oce agai wit

te goal of correctig te explanations give by

te autor ad reestablisig te re eiology of

te case. Accordig to Freud, te oral reason

ivoked by Rebecca is erely a scree Te young woa erself idicates a ore solid

reaso: se as a past Ad it is easy to uder

stad wat tis past is by aalyzig er reactio to

te revelatio about er birt f se refuses so

eergetically to adit tat se is Wests daugterad if te cosequence of tis revelation is to

ake er er criial aeuvers it is

because se was tis so-called stepfaters lover

Te recogition of icest is wat sets off te feel

ig of guilt; it and not er moral coversion

stads i te way of Rebeccas success. I order to

uderstad er beavior we ust reestablis te

76



A Confict btween Two Kinds oj Medicine

tt tat te play does not tell and could ot tell

oter than by vague allsios2But wen e opposes this "te idden reason

to te oralizing one declared by te eroine

Freud forgets wat gives Rebeccas beavior its

nl eaning in bse's eyes. forgets te ed

of te play were neiter moraliZing coversion

nor te crsing weigt of guilt is operative

Rebeccas transforation is located beyond good

nd evil and is anifesed not by a conversion to

orality but by te impossibility of acting, theipossibilit of willing even For Rebecca who no

longer wants to act and Roser wo o loger

wants to know the stor ends i a particular kind

of ystical unio They unite and arch joyously

toward te footbridge were tey drown togetheri te coursing water Tis ultiate unio of

knowledge and nonknowledge of activity and

pssivity fully expresses te logic of te aestetic

nconscous. Te true cure te true ealing is

Scopenaerian renunciation of te will to live,

20 Freud, "Some CharacterTypes Met with in Psyho-analyi

Work, 5'andard Edition, vol. 14, p. 329.

77



A Coict between Two Kin r Medicine

selfabandon to the original sea of nonwilling

the "supreme bliss into which Wagner's Isolde

descended and that the young Nietzsche assimi-

lated to the triumph of a new Dionysos

Such bliss is what Freud refuses Against it he

puts forard the good causal plot te rationalit

of the feeling of guilt liberated by headmaster

Krolls cure It is not the moralizing explanation

but the innocence of plunging into the primor-

dial sea that he opposes. Here again the ambigu-

it of Freuds relation to the aesthetic unconsciousappears in stark relief: faced with this nihilism

this radical identity of pathos and logos that in the

age of bsen, Strindberg and Wagnerism became

the ultimate truth and the moral of the aesthetic

unconscious Freud retreats to what is in the endthe position adopted by Corneille and Voltaire

when confronted with Oedipus's r He seeks to

reestablish against this ath, a good causal

concatenation and a positive virtue tat would be

the effect of knowledge The force of what is at

stake here for Freud can be felt in a rief refer

ence to another of Ibsens psychoanalytic

78



A Conict between Two Kin ofMedicine

dr amas, Te L ad y from the Se a, in which Dr

W angels wif e is haunted by the ir r esistible call of the sea W hen her husband leaves her f r ee to f ollow the passing sailor in whom she r ecognizes

the incar nation of this call Ellida r enounces her

desir e Just as Rebecca claimed that contact with Rosmer has tr ansf or med her Ellida claims to have

been set f r ee by the choice her husband gave her . Since she can choose she will stay with him. T his time however the r elation beeen the author 's

r easons and the inter pr eter 's appear in an inver se r elation Fr eud conr ms the char acter s inter pr eta-tion and sees it as a successf ul cur e" car r ied out by Dr W angeL Ibsens pr epar ator notes

however r educe this f r eedom to an illusor y

status; the plot summar he gives is r esolutely Schopenhauer ian :

Life is apparenty a happy, easy and ively

thing up there in he shadow of the mountains

and in the monoony of tis secusion The

the suggestion is thrown up that this kind of

life is a ife of shadows. No iitiaive; no fght

79



A Conflict between Two Kin o Medicine

for liberty. Only longings and desires This is

how life is lived in the brief lght sumer. Adaerards - into the darkness. Then longings

are roused for the lfe of the great world

outside But what wold be gained from that?

With changed srrondings and wth one's

ind developed, there is an increase n ones

cravngs and longngs and desires. L . ]

Everyhere litation From ths comes

elancholy like a subdued song of ourning

over the whole of hun existence and all the

actvties of en One bright sumer day with

a great darkness thereafter that is all . . ]

Te seas power of attraction The longng for

the sea People akn to the sea. Bound by the

sea Dependent on the sea. Must return to t.

[ J The great secret is the dependence of te

huan wll upon "the wllIess 21

Ths the cycle of seasons in the north s identifie

with the vanishng of the illusions of representation21 Hcnrik Ibsen, Draft or The ady from th Sa in Oxf

Ibsen ed. James Waltr MFarlane (London: Oxord Unversy

Prss 1966), ol 7, pp. 449-50

80



A Coict be/ween Two Kinds Medicine

ito the nothingness of the will that wills nothing.

I this case Freud adopt Dr Wangels ad the Ladyom the Seas moral in oppositio to the one

proposed by the author

We might cosider this to be a "historical issue

bt this does ot mean that there is aythig

circumstantial abot it. Fred was not simply

fightig agaist a ideology present i the spirit of

the age - a age moreover that was already

receding into the past when he wrote these texts.

The battle is between two versions of the unconscios, o ideas of what lies beeath the polite

polished surface of societies two ideas of ciiliza

tions ills and the way to heal them. Since we are

speaking of periods, let s ote precisely whe

this one is located Te Moses ofMichelangelo waswritten in 1914; both he Uncanny and the short

text o Ibsen in 1915. We are not far from the

uing poi i Fred's work constituted by the

introduction of the death drive i Bond the

Pleasure Princle. reud himself explaied this

u in his wor in tes of the dedction of the

death drive om the study of the problematic

81



A Coict between Two Kin Medicine

traumatic neurosis. But its recognition is also

bound to the bow that the war of 1914 deiveredto the optimistic vision that had guided the rst

era of psychoanalysis and the simple opposition

between pleasure principe and reaity princple

There are however reasons to suspect that this

explanation does not exhaust the signicance of

this oment The discovery of the death drve is

also an episode in Freuds long and oen

disguised confrontation with the great obsessive

theme of the epoch in which psychoanalysis wasfomed: the unconscious of the Schopenhauerian

tinginitself and the great literar tions of

return to this unconscous. The ultimate secret of

the whole tradition of the novel of the illusions of

the wi summarizing the literature of a century

the lterature of the aesthetic age is that what life

preseving instincts ultimately preseve for life is

its movement toward its death and that the

"guardians of ife are in fact myrmidons ofdeath Freud never stopped ghting with this

secret Indeed the interpretation of the "reaity

principle ies at the heat of the correctons Freud

82



A Coict been Two Kin of Medicine

kes to Jensens Hoffmas or Ibsens pots

This confrontation with the logic of e aesthetcnconscios is what compes him to reestablish

the correct etioogy of Hanold or Nathaniels case

and the proper ending to Ro smerholm, but also

e coect attitude of Moses, that of the cam

ictor of reason over sacred passon. Eerything

occurs as if these analyses were so many ways of

resisting the nihilist entropy that Freud detects

and rejects in the works of the aesthetic regime of

art, bt that he will also legtimze in his theoization of the death drive

We are now in a position to understand the

paradoxica reation between Freud's aesthetic

anayses and those that will later claim his patron-

age. The intenton of the latter is to rete Freuds

biographism and his ndifference to artistic form

They look for the effect of the unconscious in the

particularties of pictorial touch that silently bele

the guratie anecdote or in the stammengs ofthe iterar text that mark the action of another

language whin language. Understood in this

way as the stamp of an unnamable truth or the

83



A Conit between Two Kinds ofMedicine

shock poduced b the foce of the Othe, the

unconscious exceeds in pinciple an adequatesensible pesentation At the beginning of Te

Moses, Feud evokes the shock povoked b geat

woks and the disaa that can seize hold of

thought confonted with the enigma of this shock

"Possibl indeed some wite on aesthetics hasdiscoveed that this state of intellectual bewilde

ment is a necessary condition when a geat wok

of art is to achieve its geatest effects. t would onl

be with the geatest eluctance that I could bing

mself to believe in an such necessity22 Themainsping of Feud's analses, the eason fo the

privilege he gives to the biogaphical plot whethe

it be the biogaph of the fictional chaacte o of

the artist can be found in the fact that he eses

to ascibe the powe of painting sculptue o

liteatue to this bewildement In ode to ete

the thesis of this hpothetical aesthetician, Feud

is ead to evise an stoy and if necessary even

ewite the saced text. But the aesthetician who

reu, Moes

2- .

84

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A Conit tween T Kin. ofMedicine

was a hpothesis fo Feud is toda an actual

gue in the eld of aesthetic thought a genealrule he elies pecisel on Feud to poide the

gounding fo the thesis that his paton wanted to

efute, the thesis that links the woks powe to its

bewildeing effect 1 hae in mind hee ost

paticulal the analses in which ]ean-FanoisLotad towad the end of his life elaboated an

aesthetics of the sublime whose thee pillas ae

Buke Kant and Feud23 Lotad contasts the

weak-mindedness of aesthetics with the powe of

the pictoial touch conceied as a powe of diestitue. The subject disamed b the stamp of the

aitheton the sensible that affects the naked soul

is cononted with a powe of the Othe which in

the nal instance is the face of God that no one

can look upon putting the spectato in the posi

tion of Moses befoe the buning bush Against

Feudian sublimation Lotad poses this stamp of

23 See Jean-Franois Lyotard Te Inhuman: Refecos on Yme

ans. Bennngton n Rchel Bowlb (Stnford; Stn

ord Pres 992) n Postmodern Fables. ranGeorge Van Den Abbele (Mnneapol

Pres 997o Mnnesot

85

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A Coict tween Two Kinds q Medicine

the sublime producing the triumph of a pathos

irreducible to any logos, a pathos that in the finalanalysis is identified with the power of God

himself calling Moses

The relation beween the wo versions of the

unconscious then takes the shape of a singular

crisscross Freudian psychoanalysis presupposes

the aestheti revolution that rescinds the causal

order of classical representation and identifies the

power of art with the immediate identit of

contraries, of logos and pathos. It presupposes a

literature based on the wofold power of mute

speech. But Freud makes a choice within this

dualit Against the nihilist entrpy inherent in the

power of voeless speech, Freud chooses the

other form of mute speech the hieroglyphoffered to the labor of interpretation and the hope

of healing Following this logic, he tends to assim-

ilate the work of fantasy" and the labor of its

deciphering with the classical plt of recognition

that the aesthetic revolution had reected He thusbngs back within the frame of the representative

regime of art the gures and plot strctures that



A Coict beween T Kin ofMedicine

this old regime had rejected and that it took the

aesthetic revolution to put at his disposaL Todaya diferent Freudianism argues against this return

It puts into question Freudian biographism and

claims to be more respectful of the specifici of

art It presents itself as a more radical Freudiansm

in that it has been freed from the sequels of the

representative tradition and harmonized with the

new regime of art that made Oedipus available

the new regime that equates activi and passivi

by arming both the antirepresentative auton-

omy of art and its forcibly heteronomic nature, its

value as testimony to the action of forces that go

beyond the subject and tear it away from itself In

order to do this of course it relies above all on

Beyond the Pleasure ncile and other texts ofthe 1920s and 1930s that mark the distance Freud

has taken from the corrector of Jensen bsen and

Hoffmann, from the Freud who admired Moses

for having freed himself from sacred fur This

project requires a decision within the contradic-tor logic of the aesthetic unconscious, within the

polari of mute speech opposite to the one

87



A Conict between Two Kns ofMedicine

made y Freud. The voiceless power of the

Others speech must be valorized as something

irreducible to any hermeneutics This requires in

turn an assumption of the whole nihilist entropy,

even at the cost of transforming the bliss of

returning to the original abyss into a sacred rela-

tion to the Other and the Law. This Freudianism

then executes a turning moement around

Freud's theory bringing back in Freuds name and

against him the nihilism that his aestheti analyses

never stopped fighting against This turningmovement affms itself as a rejection of the

aesthetic tradition24 But it might in fact be the

nal trick that the aesthetic unconscious plays on

the Freudian unconscious

24 See Lyor, "Ama Mna n Pst Fbs pp. 235-9

8

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/tradition.24

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/tradition.24



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[jacques ranciere] the aesthetic unconscious(bookfi.org) (1)

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