The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition 9781503616950

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THE LEGEND OF FREUD

Cultural Memory

m the ~~~~~~

Present Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

THE LEGEND OF FREUD EXPANDED EDITION

Samuel Weber

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2000

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 1982 by the University of Minnesota Press "The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment" appeared originally in MLN88 (winter 1973-74), pp. II02-33; reprinted with permission. Reprinted by Stanford University Press in 2000 by arrangement with the University of Minnesota Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Card Number: 99-67023 ISBN: 978-0-8047-3121-8 ISBN: 978-0-8047-3120-1

For jacques Derrida In Admiration and Friendship

Contents

Preface Uncanny Thinking PART I.

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I

PSYCHOANALYSIS SET APART

Going My Way

35

A Problem of Narcissism Observation, Description, Figurative Language Metapsychology Set Apart PART 2. THE OTHER PART

The Meaning of the Thallus

IOI

The Joke: Child's Play

121

The Shaggy Dog PART

3·

LOVE STORIES

The Analyst's Desire: Speculation in Play

159

The Fort!

175

Speculation: The Way to Utter Difference

186

The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment

207

Notes

239

Index

255

When breath threatened to foil me in the struggle, I prayed the angel to desist, and that is what he has done ever since. But I did not turn out to be the stronger, although ever since I noticeably limp. -S. FREUD

Preface

In his essay, "What is an Author?" Michel Foucault distinguishes between the foundation of scientific disciplines and the initiation of what he calls discursive practices. "In a scientific discipline," he writes, "the founding act is on an equal footing with its future transformations: it is merely one among the many modifications it makes possible." The founder of a discipline establishes a clearly defined space, within which or with respect to which his successors work, developing the intrinsic implications of the doctrine, "rediscovering" analogies with "current forms of knowledge," or transposing the founding discourse "into totally new domains," a process Foucault designates as "reactivation." The case of discursive practices, however, is radically different: The initiation of a discursive practice ... overshadows and is necessarily detached from its later developments and transformations .... If we return [to it], it is because of a basic and constructive omission, an omission that is not the result of accident or incomprehension. In effect, the act of initiation is such, in its essence, that it is inevitably subjected to its own distortions .... The barrier imposed by omission was not added from the outside; it arises from the discursive practice in question, which gives it its law.... In addition, it is always a return to a text in itself ... with particular attention to those things registered in the interstices of the text, its gaps and absences. We return to those empty spaces that have been masked by omission or concealed in a false and misleading plenitude. 1

Foucault, who names Marx and Freud as examples of initiators of discursive practices, could have been paraphrasing the latter's remarks on the interpretation of dreams. To interpret dreams or any of the other articulations of the unconscious, Freud taught, is to "return" to a text that is not merely distorted, entstellt, but that distorts its distortions by producing a

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facade of "false and misleading plenitude." Such a "return," moreover, can only reveal these distortions by participating in them: by repeating them, which is to say, by transforming them. If such self-dissimulating distortions have long been recognized as the privileged object of Freudian psychoanalysis, it is only recently that this domain has been extended to encompass the workings of psychoanalytic discourse itself. The writings of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have put into question the status of Freud's discourse itself, not simply by applying the concepts and categories of psychoanalysis to the work of an individual, Freud, and thereby performing a psychoanalysis of the initiator of psychoanalysis, but by posing the problem of a theory that, in deriving the functions of consciousness from the conflictual dynamics of the unconscious, cannot but dislocate the conceptions of cognition and of truth on which theory has traditionally depended. The question that thereby imposes itself, and that this book seeks to address, is: can psychoanalytic thinking itself escape the effects of what it endeavors to think? Can the disruptive distortions of unconscious processes be simply recognized, theoretically, as an object, or must they not leave their imprint on the process of theoretical objectification itself? Must not psychoanalytical thinking itself partake of-repeat-the dislocations it seeks to describe? To address this question is to "return" to the texts of Freud, in the sense described by Foucault. For if psychoanalytic thinking participates in what it describes, the writings of Freud comprise a privileged, if by no means unique, scenario of that participation. Or rather, of that struggle: for the enterprise of constructing a theory of the unconscious inevitably entails the struggle to wrest meaning from a process that entails the deliberate dislocation of meaning. It is the mark, the stigma of this struggle that I have sought to retrace. In so doing, I have had no choice-though it was also a pleasure!- bur to return to the German in which Freud wrote. Not so much because Freud's German is closer to his original intentions, which of course is true, but rather because the dislocation of those original intentions is graphically inscribed there, in a manner that must inevitably elude any translation that conceives of itself as a repetition of the same. And this conception never fails to inform the standards of the Standard Edition, which presumes that its "original" text knows

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what it is talking about, or at least what it wants to say. If such a presumption almost always guides the translation of "theoretical" or "cognitive" writing, it is considerably less self-evident in the case of a discourse concerned above all to demonstrate the ubiquity of forces that compel language to say something different from what the subject consciously means to say. 2 It is this difference that makes the German texts of Freud a privileged theater in which the questions and struggles of psychoanalytical thinking play themselves out. In those texts, explicit propositions and assertions must be read with the same circumspection that Freud applied to discourse represented in dreams, or indeed to all dream-representation: the latter, it will be recalled, furnishes only the material with which the dream constructs its disfiguration, its Entstellung, and is generally all the more deceptive for its apparent clarity. That the "figure" of Freud which emerges in this book should seem disfigured, with respect to that of the Standard Edition and the conceptions deriving from it, is hardly surprising. References to the Standard Edition in this text are given precisely to enable the reader to recognize this disfigurement and to reflect upon it. For it is only in remarking the differences between a Freud who has grown all too familiar and another, less comforting, figure that his legend can regain the uncanny force we have "known" all the time, but of which we think less and less.

Uncanny Thinking

Two Notes ... The three essays that constitute the first edition of The Legend of

Freud, written some twenty-five years ago, sought to explore how Freud's writing and thinking are progressively caught up in what they set out primarily to describe and elucidate. Such involvement of the observer in the observed contrasts with the efforts of most scientific or scholarly texts to keep their subject matter at a safe distance. The assumption of an extraterritorial position with respect to the matter being considered is constantly called into question by the very movement of the Freudian text, and this in turn demands a certain type of reading. It is a reading that is traditionally more at home with literary than "theoretical" texts. A text can be considered literary to the extent that its propositional, semantic, thematic content is exceeded or undermined by its syntactic movement. What it says is never separable from the way it says it. Moreover, the articulatory "how" is in literature never merely an instrument of a semantic "what." This is a trait that the texts of Freud share with "literature": they call for a mode of reading that is prepared to follow a movement of signification even where the latter surpasses or undercuts the explicitly intended meanings. In contrast to certain literary texts, the propositional content of a Freudian text is never to be taken lightly. But it is also not

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necessarily to be taken as the final word. As a result, the relation of "thinking" to "knowing," of "perceiving" to "observing"-and of all of these to writing-is no longer to be taken for granted. Such an exigency is not, of course, original with Freud. Ever since Kant, at least in the history of philosophy, "thinking" has been carefully but emphatically distinguished from "knowing." In a footnote to the preface to the second edition of the Critique ofPure Reason, Kant elaborates this distinction as follows: In order to know an object, I must be able to prove its possibility, either from its reality, as attested by experience, or a priori by means of reason. But I can think whatever I please, provided only I do not contradict myself, that is, provided my conception is a possible thought, though I may be unable to answer for the existence of a corresponding object in the sum total of all possibilities. 1 To qualify as "thinking," a thought need not correspond to a really existing object: it need only avoid contradicting itself. For instance, Kant continues, an idea such as "freedom" can be thought even if it cannot be "known" theoretically, in the sense of being identified with a determinable entity or attributed to a determinable action. Ir can nonetheless be both a legitimate and necessary thought. It can even entail a kind of knowing, albeit one that does not contribute to theoretical understanding. Kant calls this kind of knowledge "practical," since it has to do more with doing than with understanding. The distinction between "knowing" and "thinking" thus implies, in Kant, a distinction within knowing itself, between the theoretical knowledge of an object that is determinable in spatial-temporal terms, and a practical knowledge of things that elude such determination, bur that nevertheless can still qualify as "thoughts," as long as they do not contradict themselves. Compare this Kantian distinction with that of Freud, who, on the threshold of his discovery of psychoanalysis, recounts an exchange with "Miss Lucy R.": (Freud:) If you knew that you were in love with the Director, why didn't you tell me that? (Lucy:) I didn't know it or rather, I didn't want to know it, I wanted to get it out of my head, never ro think about it again.

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Another and better depiction of the peculiar condition in which one both knows something and at the same time doesn't know it I could never obtain. 2 Lucy "knew" about her amorous feelings for "the Director" all the while she was being treated by Freud, but it was only after a certain lapse of time that she was able to acknowledge this "knowledge." Previously, then, she knew something without knowing (that she knew) it, or rather, as she puts it, without wanting "to think about it again" (my italics). Which is to say, without wanting to dwell on it, to repeat it, quite literally, to recognize it. Repeating without recognizing the repetition is perhaps what makes possible that "peculiar state" of knowing without knowing. Nothing could be further from the Kantian definition of a thought, which demands for it an inner consistency free of all contradiction. In not wanting "to think about it again," Lucy does her best to fulfill the Kantian demand. But although she may not want to think about it, "it" certainly "thinks" about her. She acknowledges as much by admitting to Freud that she "knew it all the time," even if she didn't think about it as such. Freud knows that his future readers will probably react no differently to this exchange from the way Lucy herself initially reacted: if a thought is not consistent, it is not worth thinking. Hence, he does not try to convince them of the enormous implications of Lucy's admission, of the "peculiar state" (eigentUmlichen Zustand) that such "knowing without knowing" entails. Instead, he merely confirms that they will not be able to understand what he has just recounted unless they are willing to acknowledge that they have already "found themselves" in such a state. Since this is not something one can command or presuppose, Freud takes a different tack. He tells a story drawn from his own experience. Only those who have at some time found themselves in such a state can apparently understand this. I have a very conspicuous memory of this sort, one that stands vividly before my eyes. If I try to remember what went on in me at the time, the result is disappointing. I saw something at the time that didn't fit in with my expectation, and not in the least did I allow my expectation [Absicht] to be shaken, even though it should have been eliminated by this perception. I was not aware of the contradiction nor did I take any more note of the affect of repudiation [A./Jekt der Abstofung] that doubtless was responsible for the fact that this perception did not have any influence on my psyche. I was struck by that

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"blindness with seeing eyes" [Blindheit bei sehenden Augen] that is so admired in mothers with respect to their daughters, men with respect to their wives, rulers with respect to their favorites. 3 The story, it turns out, is hardly any less bizarre or eigentiimlich than the state it is designed to recall and explore. On the one hand, Freud begins by declaring that he "disposes over a very conspicuous memory of this sort, which stands vividly before my eyes." He can understand what Lucy has gone through because, unlike many of his readers, he has already been through something similar himself. On the other hand, when he makes the effort "to remember what went on in me at that time," he has to admit that "the result is disappointing." And indeed, readers who were expecting a juicy anecdote must be not only disappointed, but also puzzled. Does Freud remember or doesn't he? Is he merely pretending to remember, to entice his readers into making the effort? Is he purposefully disappointing his readers because he does not want to disclose what it is that he remembers? Or could it be that he remembers without remembering, in a manner akin to Miss Lucy R.'s knowing without knowing? In any case, his story turns out to be remarkably abstract and general: no concrete situation, no specific event, merely the general parable of a "perception" that did not "fit in" with his "expectation" of the time, but which, instead of leading him to revise his expectation, was itself dismissed. Moreover, not only does Freud reject the evidence of his own two eyes, but he also admits that he remained unaware of the "contradiction" in which he was thereby caught. It is this latter absence of awareness that will later earn the name of the "unconscious": not merely a lack of consciousness with respect to an object, but a blindness of consciousness with respect to its own activity (of dissimulation). In view of this blindness, the "affect of repudiation" of which Freud writes (Ajfekt der Absto.fung) must be understood as affecting not merely the perception qua object, but the agent as well. In short, the movement goes both ways, rejecting the perception but at the same time splitting the subject off from itself, dispersing it in an action-not repressing the perception so much as denying its implications-that is essentially inaccessible to consciousness. 4 It is the dynamics of this dispersion and its ramifications that distinguish Freud's writing and thinking from that not just of non psychoanalytical authors, but of most psychoanalytical writers as well. Such scat-

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tering marks the movement of metapsychological conceptualization, and endows Freud's use of concepts with its distinctive instability and ironic openness. But this dispersion can also be discerned in Freud's style of writing, which, as in the passage quoted here, makes use of narrative and autobiographical discourse, but in a way that undercuts the stability of both. For neither narrative nor autobiography come full circle. Rather, they are inscribed in scenes that subvert their self-identity. It is this process of scenic inscription that I want to examine. Although Freud, whether deliberately or not, does not go any further into the contents or ramifications of the "conspicuous memory" that "stands vividly before [his] eyes" but yields such meager results, a similar experience (and story) occupies a decisive place in his later writings. In these subsequent texts, however, it is not Freud in particular, but all children, and in particular all male children, who find themselves confronted by a perception that doesn't "fit in" with what they expect. What they expect is more of the same: the ubiquity of the male sexual organ. What they are confronted with is the "anatomical sexual difference" through the perception of the female genitals. The rejection of this perception ushers in the story of "castration"-but also its foundering as story-its Untergang-in the "downfall of the Oedipus complex." Castration in Freud's writing is above all the title of a story that children of both sexes tell themselves, but from a single point of view-that of the male child-in order to render the perception of sexual difference compatible with the "expectation" of male identity. The perception of the female genitals doesn't "fit in" with the expectation that all human beings should be identically equipped with the male sexual organ. Through the construction of a story, the perception of feminine genitals is not simply rejected outright, but is, as one might say today, "contextualized"-framed in a narrative that transforms sexuality from a differential relationship into the expression of a positive self-identity. The narrative construction can thus be described as performing two -functions. First, it permits the child to retain an "expectation" of a single, unified identity by "temporalizing" difference and thereby redefining it as a modality of identity. 5 "Once upon a time," the story goes, the penis was there; today it is no longer there, and if I am not careful, tomorrow it may be my turn." Through such a narrative, the future is thus rendered com-

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patible with the narcissistic "expectation" of a self that wants to see itself as intact, whole, and autonomous. The second function of the narrative construction is related to the first: it suggests that, qua storyteller, the ego can assume a position sufficiently separated from the events it is recounting so as to remain impervious to them. The 'T' that tells itself this story thereby strives to secure its position as mere "observer," situated at an ostensibly safe remove from the disturbing possibilities it seeks merely to describe or retell. But the story does not end there, as the "downfall" or Untergangof the Oedipus complex indicates. This downfall calls into question, or into play, precisely the position of a contemplatively detached, omniscient observer and narrator. And in so doing, the narrative reveals that what is also, and perhaps above all, at stake in its performance is the position of the narrator. The telling of the story itself becomes part of the "action," a performance inscribed in a scene that is not separated from what it describes. The "I" or ego reveals itself to be not so much a speaker as an addressee, someone spoken to. 6 The structure of the psyche is thus irrecoverably dispersed among a multiplicity of instances that are both interdependent and irreducibly discrete. The Oedipus complex goes under because the separation it sought to dominate is now experienced not as an obstacle to be overcome by an ego but as a constitutive force of an irrevocably scattered and singular self. The site of the subject is no longer unified and self-contained; it is a scene from which "others" can never be fully excluded. In "going under," the story of Oedipus and castration is reinscribed as a scenario. Through the intrusion of these others, the narrative function and position of the self "finds itself" in a theatrical space. A space is theatrical when the representation that takes place "in" it plays to the "gallery," to others out "there." Representation is thus turned inside-out, but the audience, conversely, can be said to be turned outside-in. This redefinition of "positions" can be compared to the different perspectives in the daydream and the (night) dream. In the daydream the position of the dreamer appears to be unified and set apart from the spectacle. This kind of dream is also commonly known as "fantasy." In the night-dream, by contrast, the position of the dreamer can not be assimilated to that of a detached observer, despite the ostensible distance of the subject who recollects the

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dreaming of the dream. The dream is both distant and all too close. Indeed, distance and proximity are no longer mutually exclusive and the space or scene of the unconscious must be rethought to take account of this non-exclusivity. The "I" that remembers, like the 'T' of the dreamer, finds itself scattered throughout the dream despite its apparent distance from it. To be both nearby and far away at one and the same time is to be subject to the effects of a certain dispersion. And indeed, Freud insists that the dream can only be understood as a form in which the I abandons itself to such dispersion? This dispersion is what marks the space of the dream, and that of the unconscious, as an "other scene" that is irreducibly theatrical. Like a theatrical stage, this scene is relatively delimited, localized, singular. But its limits are never fixed, once and for all, because they must be open to the other without encompassing it. A theatrical scenario thus never takes place "once and for all" but rather "one scene at a time." It is singular and yet repetitive, ongoing and yet never complete. It is both nearby and distant, familiar and strange, present and passing. It is marked not by acts or even by actors but rather by acting. Its tense and temporality is that of the present participle. "Presenting" rather than "present," it entails a participation that never comes full circle, never forms a whole. This is what distinguishes all theatrical staging, including that of the Freudian text, from "art" in the aesthetic sense: the former results not in a work, but (at most) in a "working-through." In its immediacy and elusiveness, such theatricality is familiar and yet strange. Strange in its familiarity. I want to argue that this uncanny theatricality is indissociable from Freud's writings, and perhaps from psychoanalysis as a whole, without being reducible to either of them. Through a reading of two texts, which stand in very different relationship to psychoanalysis, I want to explore certain aspects of this uncanny theatricality.

Taking the Plunge: "The Sandman" The first text, or rather, one scene from it, is at the heart of Freud's essay on the uncanny. It is inscribed at the beginning of E. T. A. Hoffmann's celebrated tale, "The Sandman." The story as a whole revolvesand the word here is no mere metaphor-around a series of encounters

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and memories: encounters that provoke memories and memories of encounters. In a letter to his fiancee's brother, Nathanael, a young student, recounts an ostensibly banal event that recently "happened to me" (mir widerfohr): "An eyeglass vendor walked into my room and offered me his wares. I bought nothing and threatened to throw him down the stairs, whereupon however he left on his own." 8 In order to explain his surprisingly violent reaction to this apparently anodyne scene, Nathanael recalls another encounter he had experienced as a young boy, when his house was regularly visited by an ominous "Sandman" whose identity remained concealed from the boy for a long period. All he knew was that whenever this mysterious Sandman came to visit, the children were sent off to bed by their parents. These visits were accompanied by a sense of gloom and foreboding, and yet were apparently impossible to avoid. Nathanael's parents seemed incapable of keeping the Sandman out, just as Nathanael himself, so many years later, is unable to stop the eyeglass vendor from simply coming "into my room" (in meine Stube trat); it is almost as if neither walls nor doors presented the slightest obstacle. Although Freud does not comment on it, this is not the least ominous sign of the Sandman's overwhelming power: his ability to penetrate domestic space, suddenly to be there, his arrival announced by the sound of his "heavy, slow steps mounting the stairs" (332). The abruptness with which the Sandman suddenly and irresistably appears, or rather is heard, suggests the vulnerability of a domestic space permeated by forces that can drive it asunder. How does Nathanael respond to this truly terrifying situation? He seeks to locate the threat. To do this, he attempts to turn what is initially an acoustical encounter into a visual one, at first by asking his mother: "Mama, who is the evil Sandman, who always drives us apart from Father?-What does he look like?" (332). To determine the identity of the Sandman is to know what he "looks like," wie er aussieht. But the name and story of the Sandman already anticipates this effort and incorporates it, as it were, into the threat. The Sandman, Nathanael is told by his mother, "doesn't exist," except possibly as a turn of phrase: "When I say, the Sandman is coming [der Sandmann kommt], that only means that you children are sleepy and can barely keep your eyes open, as though sand had been thrown into them [als hdtte man euch Sand hineingestreut]" (322). Let me interrupt my recounting of this story to note a curiosity in

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translation. In German, Nathanael's mother uses the present indicative to describe the turn of phrase: der Sandmann kommt. But in translating this into English, I have shifted the tense to the present participle, for the Sandman does not "come," once and for all, the way a factual event might be said to take place. Rather, it seems inevitable to say that he is "coming," in the more ambiguous sense of an action that is announced, one that may even be audible, but is never definitively completed. The Sandman is insofar as he is coming; Nathanael's problem is related precisely to the ubiquitous possibility of this coming, an eventuality that cannot be foreclosed by any of the borders with which we seek to wall in our spaces and control access to them. The power of the Sandman, then, inheres in his ability to invade and occupy what in the modern period is considered the most sacred of spaces: the private space of the family, the home. At the same time, however, as he turns the home inside-our, he also reaffirms domestic space, but in a way that transforms it from a place of security into one of dread and danger. 9 After he is told by his mother that the Sandman is merely a figure of speech, albeit hardly an arbitrary one, Nathanael receives a very different account from the "old woman" who takes care of his youngest sister. She tells him that the Sandman "is an evil man who comes to children when they won't go to bed and throws a hand full of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out (herausspringen); then he throws the eyes into his sack and carries them to the half-moon to feed his children, who are sitting there, in their nest. They have beaks like owls, which they use to peck the eyes of those misbehaved children" (332-33). The disruptive threat of the Sandman is thus inseparable from that which it threatens, the domestic interiority of the small, nuclear family "nest." However, the nest is no longer entirely intimate or self-contained: it is duplicated, doubled, but in the process also dehumanized (the Sandman's children are like owls, with razor-sharp beaks). The family nest still revolves around the meal shared in common, bur that meal, far from stabilizing and confirming the integrity of the bodily subjects that participate in it, marks their vulnerability: the separability of eyes from bodies, for instance, becomes the conditio sine qua non of that other family, that other nest, the other scene that takes hold of Nathanael and never lets him go. The effect of this doubling is twofold. First, Nathanael is increas-

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ingly gripped by the "uncanny specter" (unheimlichen Spuk), by "the image of the horrible Sandman," by the "fantasy ... of investigating thesecret myself, all by myself, of seeing the fabulous Sandman." This fantasy does not merely take hold of his "childish mind": it occupies it as though it were a nest (sich einnistet). The effect of this occupation is literally inscribed in the syntax of the German phrase with which Nathanael describes his compulsion to uncover the mystery: 'aber selbst-selbst das Geheimnis zu erforschen, den fabelhaften Sandmann zu sehen" (333). This repetition of the word selbst precisely articulates the ambivalence that informs Nathanael's "fantasy" while also exceeding it. The desire to have the "secret" all to oneself confirms the disuniry of that self, which is double before being single. It is this splitting of the self-or rather, the emergence of a self that only "is" in being duplicitous (zwiespiiltig)-that the "coming" of the Sandman underscores, acoustically rather than visually. Thus, the decisive moment arrives at the stroke of nine in the evening (aufden Schlag neun Uhr). Although the German word Schlag emphasizes the "blow" that marks the hour, thereby situating a certain violence at the core of chronological time, its English equivalent, "stroke"-with its more erotic connotations-is not entirely inappropriate, as we shall see. But before we do see, we must first proceed to what could well be described as the Urszene of this story, and perhaps also of Freud's psychoanalytical thinking in general. What qualifies this scene to be described as "primal"-or rather, more literally and closer to the German, as "originary" or originating-is that through its particular contents it stages the abrupt emergence of the scene as such, which is to say, the transformation of a "story" into a "scenario." The scenario goes something like this. The sound of the Sandman's heavy steps mounting the stairs, and Nathanael's realization that he must leave, go to bed, get out of the way, separate from his parents-all of this provokes great anxiery in the young boy, against which he reacts with the scopophilic desire to see the Sandman and thereby to discover just who he really is. This defensive and reactive desire impels Nathanael to slip into his father's study sight unseen and hide "behind the curtain of an open wardrobe standing right next to the door, in which my father's clothes hung" (333).

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Barely hidden behind his father's clothes, Nathanael takes up his precarious position as observer while the menacing steps of the Sandman grow ever louder. He hears human noises, albeit involuntary ones such as coughing, together with animal and inanimate sounds such as growling (brummen) and rustling (scharren). The noises come ever closer before suddenly being punctuated by a series of more definitive sounds: ''A sharp step-a violent blow on the doorknob, the door springs open, rattling (rasselnd)," and Nathanael finally sees "the Sandman standing in the middle of my father's study, the bright glow of the lights shining in his face! The Sandman, the fearful Sandman, is the old lawyer, Coppelius, who sometimes eats lunch with us" (334). Nathanael believes he has finally penetrated the mystery, discovered who the Sandman is, and can put him in his place. But where is that place? The Sandman stands bathed in light, as though lit up by a spotlight, at the center of a stage ("in the middle of my father's study"). Nathanael thinks he can finally identifY this figure once and for all, which means identifYing him by name. But that name is framed, as it were, by a strange and indeed uncanny predication. "The Sandman is ... " No English translation, including this one, can capture just how singularly odd this "is" turns out to be in the German text. For the "is" does not stand alone: it is echoed by another word that is almost its phonetic double, or Doppelganger, and which thereby inscribes what should be a proper name in a most improper and inappropriate wordplay: "Der Sandmann ist der alte Advokat Coppelius, der manchmal bei uns zu Mittage iBt" (334; my emphasis). Just when it seems that the Sandman is finally locked into place as an object of sight, and also as an object of recognition, he turns out to be part of a bad joke. For the place he occupies is the center of a stage, and the scenario that is playing itself out there is anything but clear and distinct. There is the shock of recognition, to be sure, but that recognition-and everything uncanny entails such a recognition-is at the same time a misrecognition, a misapprehension, for reasons that are condensed in this play of or on words. For recognition presupposes repetition or recurrence, but what repeats and recurs never entails simply the return of the same. What recurs is in its recurring tendentially different from what came before while at the same time partaking of what it alters. 10 All of

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this is condensed in the repetition of the two German words ist and ift: "is" and "eats." The Sandman is recognized as Coppelius, the lawyer, a frequent lunch guest at the family table. Coppelius's "Law," perhaps, is that he only is insofar as he eats. At least that is how he presents himself to Nathanael. The old woman's story about the Sandman feeding his young in their nest thus comes home to roost, as it were. To understand how this strange homecoming transforms the family roost, we need only read further. No longer invisible, the Sandman can now be described, compared, identified. But the answer to the question, "What is the Sandman really like?" remains less than reassuring. Because what the Sandman turns out to be like is that to which he should be most unlike, since it is of an entirely different genre. What he is like is above all the inhuman, whether animal or inanimate. His traits, for instance, are described as feline, although the reference is not necessarily to house cats: "Bushy, gray eyebrows, below which a pair of piercing, green catlike eyes emerge sparkling [ein paar griinliche Katzenaugen stechend hervorfonkeln]" (334). This allusion repeats the motif of the old woman's tale and anticipates the Augenangst upon which Freud will place such emphasis in his attempt to interpret the story, and the uncanny generally, in a sense that is appropriate to and appropriable by psychoanalytical theory. But these eyes that "emerge sparkling" resist all such efforts at identification and integration; they do not so much join as separate. The Sandman's eyes are described as "piercing"-literally puncturing, stechend-as virtually leaping our of their sockets (hervor-fimkelnd). Instead of being put in their proper place, once and for all, the eyes here emerge as an exemplary instance of the failure of things to stay put, the failure of places to be proper. But it is not only his eyes and their surroundings that seem to exceed the bounds of the human. ''A strange hissing noise" is described as "escaping through clenched teeth." And what most revolted the children, Nathanael recalls, were "his large, gnarled, hairy fists," so much so that everything they touched at the table became repugnant. Instead of helping feed the children, this Sandman touches the food their mother seeks to give them and makes it off-limits. At least the Sandman is now identified, recognized, remembered. From his place of hiding, Nathanael feels himself absolutely "spellbound"

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(fostgezaubert)-paralyzed and unable to move. In order to see, he must stick his head through the curtain that separates him from the spectacle. "To work!" cries the Sandman, whereupon he and Nathanael's father throw off their everyday clothes and put on "black smocks." Then, Nathanael's father opened the folding doors of a wall closet; but I saw that what I had long taken to be such was in fact not a wall closet at all, but rather a black crevice [schwarze Hohlung] in which there stood a small oven. Coppelius approached it and a blue flame crackled up [knisterte . .. empor] over the hearth. All sorts of strange utensils [Gerate] stood around. Oh God!-as my old father bent over toward the fire he appeared completely different [da sah er ganz anders aus]. A gruesomely convulsive pain seemed to have twisted his soft and honest features into a detestably repulsive and diabolical image. He looked like Coppelius. The latter swung the glowing red tongs, plucking out of the thick smoke brightly blinking masses upon which he then meticulously hammered. To me it was as if human faces appeared all around, but without eyes-instead, disgusting, deep black holes. "Bring the eyes here ... here!" cried Coppelius in a muffled, threatening voice. I screamed, and seized [nfofl't] by panic, I plunged from my hiding-place onto the floor. Then, Coppelius grabbed me [Da ergriffmich Coppelius]. (335-36) 11

In what sense is this nightmarish scene an Urszene? To be sure, it does not directly depict the parental coitus that Freud usually associates with the concept of "primal scene." But what it does show is no less passionate, and no less erotic: two men undressing before the eyes of the transfixed child, who is medusized, as it were, before the unexpected spectacle that unfolds before him. The "wall closet" opens its doors to disclose not another domestic space, filled with clothes, but a "dark crevice" containing an oven. This oven, although it resembles the domestic hearth, turns out to be far more dangerous. The heat and light it generates fly off as sparks that mimic the separation of eyes from their sockets, of the seen from the familiar: "Oh God," Nathanael sighs, as he sees how different his "old father" looks from what he expects and remembers. In the light of the fire, Nathanael's father looks not like his usual reassuring self, but rather convulsed, in pain (or in pleasure?): "He looked like Coppelius." And what Coppelius looks like, he now sets about performing: he ist was he ij?t, and he "eats" not just eyes, but bodies, human bodies which are expected to appear as the epitome of organic wholes, beauti-

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ful, self-contained forms. His taste for eyes, however, is hardly arbitrary, since eyes are the bodily organ to which the expectation of bodily unity is traditionally attached. What can be seen with one's "own two eyes" can be identified: to find out "who the Sandman is" is to discover "what he looks like." The Sandman, however, turns the tables: not only does he not look like anything familiar and recognizable, but he makes others look like him. To Nathanael, for instance, his poor old father suddenly looks like the Sandman; which means, he looks convulsive, repulsive, diabolical, "ganz anders." If Coppelius is a lawyer, the Law he observes is not simply the Law of the Father. Except perhaps in the sense of that nom du pere of which Lacan insisted that les non-dupes errent-that those who look to such a law to provide the basis of reliable recognition are bound to go the furthest astray. In a certain sense, this is Nathanael's fate. In the hopes of putting an end to the specter of the Sandman by discovering who he is, whom he resembles, he discovers that the Sandman names the violence of a certain disassemblage, which provokes fear and loathing, to be sure, but which also evokes fascination and desire. For what is perhaps most noteworthy about this scene-and the point where it ceases to be mere story and spectacle and becomes a theatrical scenario instead-occurs when Nathanael, haunted and tempted by those eyes without bodies, leaps out of his hiding place and throws himself at the Sandman's feet. In so doing he forsakes his role of spectator, seeing but unseen, and takes the plunge ... onto the stage, into the theater, abandoning himself to the dangerous sight of others, despite (and perhaps because) of the risks such exposure entails. The convulsive and painfully passionate scene he has just witnessed overwhelms him and literally hurls him screaming onto the stage. It is a fateful plunge that will be repeated at the end of the story. Indeed, it gives the story an ending. When Nathanael, having climbed the tower with his fiancee, Clara, in order to take in the view, is seized by a fit of madness; he tries to throw Clara from the heights and finally takes the plunge himself. Hoffmann's tale, then, is framed between two violent and involuntary plunges. First there is a plunge from the ostensibly hidden and protected security of an unseen viewing position onto a stage whose borders are difficult to define, since they change in function of movements they cannot simply contain or situate. The spasmodic con-

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vulsions of disembodied eyes suggest one such movement, which is, however, by no means limitable to that particular bodily organ. Coppelius, having seized hold of Nathanael, first goes for his eyes. But upon the supplications of Nathanael's father, he accepts a substitute: "Let the boy keep his eyes to cry his heart out in the world; instead we will take this opportunity to observe closely the hands and feet." Thereupon he took hold of me so violently that all joints cracked, he screwed my hands off, and my feet as well and replaced them first here, then there .... And everything around me grew dark and black, a sudden spasm shot through my nerves and bones and I felt nothing any more. (336)

Nathanael, in short, takes the plunge, leaps from the womb, plunges onto the stage (the German word, stii.rzt, designates "plunging" in both senses: taking a fall and being thrust or thrown off balance). This second birth thus involves a fall from the security of the audience onto and into the exposed space of the stage. And the site of such exposure is, first and foremost, the body. Or rather, not just "the body," as though there were such a thing, but rather the narcissistic conception of the body as a matrix for the ego: self-contained, unified, integrated. It is this conception of the body that is dismantled on the stage. Nathanael's limbs are un-screwed, his body dismembered, and as a result, he loses consciousness in a "sudden spasm." This loss of consciousness is tied to the narcissistic conception of the body as an integral whole: when it goes, so does consciousness-which must always be consciousness of an object, which is to say, consciousness of an object that is one. When the object is revealed as being more or less than one, as split or doubled, like the space itself of the scene we are rereading, what results is a "sudden spasm" in which it is probably impossible to separate pleasure from pain. 12 In his reading of this text, Freud insists that "intellectual uncertainty''-the term introduced by Jentsch, his predecessor in the study of the uncanny-is not what counts. It is not, he insists, uncertainty or delusion concerning Olympia that is uncanny in this story, but rather the {castration) anxiety associated with the figure of the Sandman, and hence with the fear of losing one's eyes. And yet, despite the fact that Freud presents this interpretation with great conviction and force, "intellectual uncertainty'' returns throughout this essay to haunt its main thesis, and in fact

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to help dismember it, scattering it into a variety of different theses, of which the discriminations between repression and overcoming, between fiction and reality, are only the most manifest examples. If castration anxiety has a structural significance for psychoanalysis, it is to the extent that it returns to haunt the story the subject would like to tell itself in order to confirm its self-identity as an "I." But anxiety in general, and castration anxiety in particular, as Freud was later to maintain, mark the danger that all subjectivity construed as an ego cannot escape: it can only respond to this danger in different ways. One-if not the major-response to this danger is, of course, anxiety, and the uncanny presupposes anxiety. Such responses, to be sure, are never made once and for all: the temporality of the unconscious, and in particular of its originating scene, its Urszene, is never linear or punctual, but always subsequent, nachtraglich, apres-coup. What the uncanny suggests, above and beyond Freud's explicit discussion of it, is that the structure in which that subsequence articulates itself is precisely that of the "coup de theatre," of theatricality as a coup, a blow or a Schlag that gives the beat, marks time, but also interrupts the expectation of a continuous, progressive, linear-teleological course of events. In short, the uncanny is that resurgence or repetition which abruptly, but also subsequently, belatedly, reveals its "coup" to be split into a present that never comes full circle and a future that is always oncoming but never fully here. What is shattered by this blow, this Schlag, this coup, is ultimately the unity of place, which becomes the disunity of the stage. Why is the stage disunited? Because it cannot be seen, taken in, from any one perspective. Nathanael's story cannot be told from a single point of view, but must first be written in first-person discourse, in letters to his friend, and then, following an abrupt and awkward shift, continued in the discourse of a third-person narrator. It has been said, again and again, that the uncanny cannot be treated as a serious object of study because it entails feelings and is therefore not sufficiently objective or objectifiablc. And yet, the uncanny is neither simply subjective feeling nor objective event. Rather, it marks the confounding of this polarity: of first-person and third-person discourse. But the instability is not just between narrative positions: it is already within both of them, just as the Sandman is already within the walls of the household. This becomes clear in what is perhaps the most uncanny

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moment of the entire text, at least upon repeated reading. Once the reader has discovered the "contents" of the story, "intellectual uncertainty" or undecidability can no longer relate to simple events or facts but rather to their significance. The most striking element in this text is one whose significance emerges in stark contrast to the apparent nullity of its content. It is a casual remark, which, however, triggers the fatal denouement. At the top of a tower the two have climbed to take in the panoramic view, Clara calls Nathanael's attention to a bizarre sight: "Look at the strange little grew bush that seems to be coming toward us" asked Clara. Nathanael grasped mechanically his side-pocket; he found Coppola's glasses (Perspektiv), he looked sideways-Clara stood in front of the glass!Thereupon his pulse and veins began to throb convulsively-deathly pale he stared at Clara, but soon streams of fire coursed and sparkled through those rolling eyes, he cried out horribly, like a hunted animal; then he sprang high into the air and laughing monstrously in between, he cried out in a cutting tone, "Wood puppet turn around, turn around wood puppet"-and with enormous force he seized Clara and tried to throw her off [the platform]. (362)

Since I have already commented on the strange move sideways, 13 I will limit myself here to a remark on the short sentence that triggers the advent of madness and the effort to throw Clara to her death. It is a phrase no more obtrusive, no more dramatic, than the banal scene with which the story began, the entry of the salesman, Coppola, trying to sell his wares. The phrase, which Freud completely ignores in his commentary, and yet which is placed in the decisive position, is simply this: "Clara stood in front of the glass!" (Clara stand vor dem Glase!). What I want to point out is something equally simple: that this statement, especially its exclamation point, is a clear case of what is known in French as "style indirecte libre" and in German as erlebte Rede. It is grammatically couched in the third person, and thus implies a certain separation from what is being described; but the use of the exclamation point creates an urgency that corresponds to a first-person perspective. It is this inextricable confounding of the perspectives of first and third person, of ego and id (and we should remember that in German, Freud uses the far more idiomatic pronouns lch andEs) that marks the uncanny discovery Nathanael cannot bear, and that transforms what grammatically would be a simple constative into an exclamation: "Clara stood before the glass!"

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But what of the glass before which Clara stands? In German, the word used throughout for glass is Perspektiv. It is clear that since the seventeenth century this word designated a telescope-a prosthetic, optical device to supplement the organs of sight. Nothing could fit better with the Freudian story of castration: the telescope would be the technical device predestined to produce, in the here and now, the impossible desire to make the invisible visible, so as to discover everywhere the Same. But instead of the Same-the same closet, for instance, or the same paternal clothes-what the prosthesis brings closer is the inescapability of separation: the separation of eyes from sockets, of the perspective from that which it reveals and that which sees through it. The "other side" of Coppola's "perspectives" is what his name signifies in Italian: eye socket. The socket is what is left of the body when its members have separated themselves from the whole and taken on a life of their own, "turning about" like "wood puppets," revolving in a circle without end. All that is left for Nathanael is the circle itself, condensing both the hope of the sight he will never see and the confirmation of its fatality, were he ever able to see it: "Circle of fire turn around" (Feuerkreis dreh dich) (362). Within this circle no one, nothing can remain what it is, and so Nathanael has no choice but to leave the circle, and once again to take a second plunge: this time not toward a birth on the stage but toward his death. It should be noted that Coppola is a vendor of wares, of merchandise, of commodities: of "beautiful eyes" (Skone Oke in a German cut apart by the "foreign language," Italian), which are in fact technological prostheses, confirming the absence of a certain power to see. Those Skone Oke are the distant but recognizable precursors of what today is called television-with effects that are hardly any less uncanny. 14 This final scene, then, reveals that the uncanny cannot be separated from the question of perspective, in both senses of this German word. No point of view is proper and self-contained; hence the inevitability of a prosthetic supplement, of a PerpektiZJ. But like the commodity, this Perspektiv can never be definitively appropriated: it only is in circulating, and in circulating it merges with and diverges from other perspectives. Such circulation never comes full circle and therefore leaves no place undisturbed, no body whole. Letters arrive at unintended destinations, eliciting unwanted and unexpected responses. Nathanael's let-

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ter to his friend Lothar is mistakenly addressed to Lothar's sister Clara, who, much to his annoyance, replies to the letter she was not designed to read (for now-obvious reasons: the letter should have remained Mannersache, a matter among men). But this unexpected and unavoidable interference of the other-of the other woman, of woman as the othercan only appear, from a certain perspective, as uncanny: all too familiar and yet irreducibly alien. No appeal to authentically lived experience-be it that of the "new" third-person narrator in Hoffmann's story or that of Freud in his account of Miss Lucy R.-can overcome this uncanniness; for, like the Sandman, it is already busily at work at the heart and hearth of every home, contaminating and corrupting all authority, just as the style indirecte libre blurs the boundaries between authoritative third-person and engaged first-person narratives. 15 It is not just the authority of the "third-person," but also the position of the reader as spectator that is called into question. Indeed, the theatricality of the uncanny consists precisely in inscribing every perspective into a scenario that can therefore no longer be taken in simply as a spectacle. This is also what distinguishes such theatricality from "theory" in the traditional sense: there is no longer the possibility of a stable separation from that which is under consideration. A certain promiscuity marks the inscription of spectator into the scene, of narrator into the scenario. "Positions" and "perspectives" become "roles" and "parts" of a process that never gets its "act" together to become a whole, or a "work." And the recognition that this process has always been "at work'' behind the scenes of the ostensibly stable dialectic of subject and object is what causes it to be put aside as all too familiar and even as slightly disreputable. Nevertheless, the shunting aside of the uncanny by most "scholarly" discourse and research doesn't succeed in putting it to rest. Rather, like the Sandman, the uncanny crops up again and again, with surprising resilience, where it is least expected: as a figure of speech, an atmosphere in a story, an allegorical instance. Announced by the sound of approaching steps, of heavy breathing, wheezing or coughing, or other semi-articulate sounds, uncanny figures and situations return to remind us of the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between language and reality, between feelings and situations, between what we know and what we ignore. Defig-

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uring of the figure, the Sandman marks the spot where what is (there) and what is not, presence and absence, coming and going, can no longer be clearly distinguished. This uncontrollable possibility-the possibility of a certain loss of control-can, perhaps, explain why the uncanny remains a marginal notion even within psychoanalysis itself. For psychoanalysis, today as in Freud's lifetime, seeks to establish itself in stable institutions, to ground itself in a practice and a theory that rarely question the established conceptions of truth and the criteria of value that prevail in the societies in which it is situated. These conceptions and criteria, however, presuppose precisely the kind of space, place and positioning that the young Nathanael seeks to assume but is forced to abandon under the impact of the spectacle he first witnesses, then enters: the position of the detached spectator. In taking the plunge, however involuntarily, he abandons a distance that has never really protected or prevented him from participating in the scene. What changes with his position is his role. And it is this role, perhaps, that makes the uncanny itself so uncanny: so familiar, even banal, and yet so elusive and unmanageable. As Freud himself was forced to acknowledge, however implicitly, the uncanny is difficult to separate from "intellectual uncertainty" because it calls into question the basis of all judgment; the position from which distinctions are drawn. Ever since Descartes, the search for "certitude" has been the force driving the project of constituting and securing an autonomous subject. This project is the condition of the Uncanny, which "returns" to haunt it as its shadow. Whereas for Descartes the essential condition for attaining certitude was the subject's withdrawal from a world that in its alterity could no longer be relied on, it is precisely the discovery that such withdrawal is a fata morgana, an unsustainable construct, that informs the misrecognition that constitutes the uncanny. The uncanny is nourished by the ineradicable suspicion that the reflexivity of the Cartesian cogito is no less mediated, no less distant from itself, and hence no less "certain" or secure than the world it seeks to supplant. Hidden behind his curtain, Nathanael believes he has discovered, with his own two eyes, just who the Sandman really is. He believes he has replaced the figurative designation "Sandman" with an authentically proper name. But the name he comes up with turns out to be a link in a signifYing

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chain that unravels what it is intended to close up: "Coppelius" becomes "Coppola," the vendor of Perspektiven, whose name, as already noted, signifies "socket" or "hollow," but also recalls, phonetically, copula. The Sandman "is" the lawyer who "is(st)."The lawyer "is" the vendor of prostheses, whose name recalls the operator of predication itself. But the "is" ijft, and in thus consuming its univocal meaning, this is(s)temerges as the disjunctive junction of that which diverges and yet coexists, as a part that never becomes a whole. It is an Ur-teil that merely is, without judging. "Clara stood before the glass!" We are never told if Nathanael saw her, or didn't see her there, standing before the glass. All we are left with, as readers, is the power of that exclamation point, which punctuates without forming a period. Clara stood before the glass! Period. Perhaps this replacement of the period by the exclamation point can help to explain why the uncanny has remained so peripheral an issue in theoretical discourse, psychoanalytic or not. For it confounds predication, judgment, and lets a certain form of "constative" discourse reveal itself as always already "performative." This mixing of the genres poses a challenge to a notion of scholarship that still insists that knowing and not knowing are mutually exclusive.

The Uncanny Happening The second text I want to reread could hardly, on the surface at least, be more different from Freud's. To be sure, it entails a reading of a literary text. The text in question, however, is not modern, concerned with problems of self-consciousness. Rather, it is concerned with the essence of human being, or so at least it is presented. The text is the second Chorus from Sophocles' Antigone, and the reader is Martin Heidegger, who, in the final chapter of his Introduction to Metaphysics, comments upon this text in the context of his discussion of Parmenides' celebrated and enigmatic dictum, to gar auto noein estin te kai einai, usually rendered as "thinking and being are the same." 16 According to Heidegger, this conventional translation is deceptively simple and requires extensive reworking. His decision to recur to the text of Sophocles is the first step in that process. The use of a poetical text here thus follows a long and deeply ingrained philosophical tradition: recourse to a literary text serves as a propaedeutic in approach-

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ing the more difficult, more serious, less accessible philosophical one. As with Freud, then, in Heidegger's reading the uncanny occupies an eccentric position with respect to the central task of advancing our understanding. The understanding at stake for Freud is of course that of the psyche; for Heidegger, it is that of Being. In both bodies of work, the discussion of the uncanny will therefore occupy an important but clearly delimited space: neither Freud nor Heidegger will return to the subject once it has been dealt with explicitly (Freud in his essay on the uncanny, Heidegger first in Being and Time [1927] and then, a second and final time, in the Introduction to Metaphysics, lectures first held in 1935). In introducing Sophocles' text Heidegger makes it very clear why, despite the importance he accords to this text and to its articulation of the uncanny, the latter topic can only serve as a transitional term for him. In the Chorus, argues Heidegger, "the decisive determination (entscheidende Bestimmung) of human being" (r12/r46) 17 is articulated. But that which is "decisive," ent-scheidende, is also that from which one has to depart (scheiden), namely, from the term "human." In short, what is uncanny, for Heidegger at least, is the recognition of the "human" as that which defines itself by departing from itself and becoming something else, something all too familiar and yet irreducibly alien, strange, and singularly overpowering. It is precisely this emphasis on power rather than fear, anxiety, or desire that distinguishes Heidegger's discussion of the uncanny from Freud's. Heidegger's translation of the Chorus-which I have retranslated into English (adding italics for emphasis) with as much "syntacticalliteralness"18 as possible-makes this perfectly clear: Multiple is the uncanny, yet nothing shows itself, beyond man more uncannily jutting forth. He sets out on the foaming tide in the south storm of winter and crosses the crests of the wildly cleft waves. Of the Gods even the most sublime, the Earth, he exhausts, indestructibly inexhaustible overturning it from year to year, driving back and forth with steeds the plows.

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Also the light-winged flock of birds he entraps and hunts the beasts of the wild and the ocean's native .hostscircumspectly meditating man. He overwhelms with tricks the animal that roams the mountains by night and wanders, the raw-maned neck of the steed and the untamed bull with wood the neck enclosing he forces under the yoke. Also in the resonances of the word and in wind-swift all-understanding he found himself, also in the courage of rule over cities. Also how to escape he has considered, from exposure to the arrows of the weather, also the inclemency of frost. Everywhere making his way, but with no way out he comes to naught. Against one assault only unable, against death, through any flight ever to defend himself, even if debilitation through illness he has successfully avoided. Possessed of his wits, fabrication skillfully mastering beyond all expectation, he succumbs at times to misfortune still, at times accomplishes great things. Between the laws of the Earth and the conjured order of the Gods he wends his way. Rising far above the sites, deprived of the sites, is he, to whom always Unbeing being for the sake of the venture. Not my hearth will be familiar to such a one, nor share with me his madness my knowledge, who brings this to be in a work. (II2-13fi46-48)

The italicized words and phrases have one thing in common. They are all adverbs or adverbial phrases constructed around the present par-

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ticiple: jutting, foaming, overturning, driving, meditating, enclosing, making, mastering, rising, and, above all, unbeing being. Man is thus defined in terms of a way of "being" for which "unbeing" and "being" are no longer simply opposable or distinguishable. The linguistic "tense" in which this convergence of being and unbeing tends to articulate itself is that of the present participle and the adverbial nouns that are formed from it-nouns such as "being" and "unbeing." What could be more common, more familiar, more "heimisch" than the present participle, which commonly designates those activities and processes that are going on around us all the time? But if we inspect this tense more closely, we discover that such goings on, repetitive and recurrent, never come full circle, never come "home," and are never complete. The present participle thus signals a departure from other forms of the present construed on the basis of the present indicative, the "is," which Heidegger, in The Introduction to Metaphysics, singles out as the paradigm of the "forgetting of being," or rather, of the ontological difference between "being" and "beings."19 It is immediately apparent, however, that in English this difference is already obscured, insofar as Sein, the infinitive noun, is rendered through the gerund, being, from which Heidegger precisely seeks to distinguish it. It is as if the English language were itself the repository of Seinsvergessenheit, of the forgetting of being, of the ontological difference. Unless ... Unless that ontological difference is itself inescapably associated with the present participle and its various derivatives. It is precisely this suspicion that Heidegger's translation and, even more, his discussion of the Chorus from Antigone encourage us to explore. His reading of that text is divided into three Gange, or "run-throughs" (bearing in mind, of course, that a thinker like Heidegger walks, even marches at times, but never runs). The first reading, which aims at discerning the inner structure of the text, begins with a discussion of the ambiguous meaning of the Greek, deinon, of which the superlative, to deinotaton, is used to designate "man": deinon is translated by Heidegger both as the "overpowering" and as the "powerful," as overwhelming force and as the exercise of power. Man is the most uncanny, to deinotaton, in forcing his way beyond the limits of the familiar towards the "overwhelming." It should be noted that like Freud, Heidegger approaches the un-

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canny through the ambivalence of the word itsel£ But is it the same ambivalence? For Freud, "uncanny" (unheimlich) is a subset of "canny," heimlich, which in itself contains the notion of "familiar" but also that of "concealed." Heidegger, on the other hand, appears to accept the logic of opposition in explaining why deinon should be translated as unheimlich: "We understand the uncanny to be that which throws us out of the 'homey' [ ... ] The uncanny does not let us be at home (einheimisch). This is what makes it over-whelming." "Man," however, he immediately goes on to argue, experiences this not as a force external to him but rather as part of his innermost being. According to the Chorus, man is impelled to forsake the borders of everything familiar-home, country, familyand this constraint under which he must make his way exposes him to the overwhelming. It is the making and losing of one's way that Heidegger reads out of the Greek "pantoporos aporos ep'ouden erchetai," which might be rendered succinctly as "always, no way"-or more comprehensibly as "everywhere making his way, but with no way out I He comes to naught." This verbal antinomy is repeated, Heidegger points out, in the next strophe with respect to the polis: hypsipolis apolis, which one might be tempted to render as "hyperpolitical apolitical," were it not for Heidegger's warning that the "polis" in question is neither simply a political notion nor simply the city-state. Rather, he insists, it is the site where history happens. Such happening cannot be derived from the institutions we recognize as political, because it is only by virtue of such historical happening that such institutions are founded in the first place. It is this site that man, in his uncanny violence, can never really occupy. True violence consists therefore in the inability of human beings to "have" a site, to inhabit a place, to accept its laws and observe its boundaries. It is precisely this inability that defines human being in terms of an uncanny convergence of power and vulnerability. This brings Heidegger to his second run-through, in which he proposes to retrace the dynamic evolution of the text, now paying attention to the sequential, syntactic relation of its elements, within which the semantic content discerned in the first run-through is now to be reinscribed. Indeed, it is precisely the notions of content and containment that are implicitly at issue in this second reading. Somewhat paradoxically, this reading is more concerned with place and space than with time:

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man gives up the firm ground under his feet in order to set out into the unknown, and this "beginning" harbors all the rest. In leaving what he knows for the unknown, man seeks to impose his order on all areas of life. But although he succeeds in developing great skill in organizing and opening realms of being, he finds himself thrown back again and again onto the paths he has already traversed. In short, like Nathanael in "The Sandman," man here is caught in a circle. In it, "he turns around and about in his own circle" (nrlr57), caught in the rut of the all too familiar, and however agile and ingenious he may be in discovering all sorts of paths, there is no way out. In death even the most powerful human abilities meet their match: for death "surpasses all completion, [ ... ] exceeds all limitation." (I2rhs8). And it is here that the uncanny emerges: But this uncanny, this un-homey, dieses Un-heimliche, that expels once and for all from the home, is no special event that deserves mention simply because in the end it also occurs. Humans have no way out of death not merely when the time comes to die, but constantly and essentially. Insofar as man is, he stands in the blind alley of death. Being-there (Da-sein) is thus un-canniness happening. (12Ih58; my emphasis) It should be noted that when it comes time to formulate just why and how the uncanny is "nothing special," neither monumental nor compartmentalizable, and that it has nothing to do with dying considered as an actual event, Heidegger resorts to the present participle of the verb "to happen" (geschehend) in order to designate the temporality that distinguishes the uncanny as happening from death as an empirical event. This is of particular interest given his preceding remarks on the circularity of the paths that mark one's history and on their tendency to revolve around themselves. "Circle of fire ... " The circle of familiarity, of the home, tends to turn into the less virtuous circle of solipsism, tautology, and even death, from which one can easily yearn to escape, to break out in search of adventure and of the unknown. But such yearning supposes that one can find the beginning of the beginning, the circumference of the circle of the familiar and of the family. Otherwise, how can one hope to escape? Although we begin to see why Heidegger resorts to a term with military connotations to describe this move outwards-aus-rucken, colloquially translated as "to move out," as an army would do-the term has

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another connotation that is also of interest here: literally, aus-rncken means to "back out." And since, as Heidegger's own choice of texts indicates, any move forward also involves a move backwards, breaking out can at the same time entail backing out or up. The purely martial tone of this discourse is thus overtaken by an uncanny shadow. Could such a convergence of moving out and moving back be one of the dimensions of the uncanny happening? The convergence of breaking out with backing out would be uncanny in its confounding of the directional poles of forward and backward, progress and regress. What sort of "history" as happening, upon which Heidegger so insists, would then be thinkable? In any case, it is clear for Heidegger that "with the naming of this force (Gewaltigen) and uncanny (Unheimlichen) the poetical outline ofbeing and of human being reaches its intrinsic limits." What follows, then, can be nothing more than the summing up of what has previously been said, by relating it to its "fundamental trait": the duplicity of deinon already discussed. This duplicity is now developed with respect to two other terms: techne and dike. Techne is not simply technology, but rather what Heidegger first translates as Gemache, and subsequently, in his commentary, as Machenschaft. I translate the first as "fabrication," the second as "machination." Dike, which Heidegger translates as Fug, might be rendered in English as "articulation." Fortunately, what is more important here than the (impossible) translation is the result of the conflictual interaction of these two forces or stances, which elaborate and further determine the relation of the "overwhelming" (Fug) to the "violent" (Gewalt-tiitiger). Techne, Heidegger argues, is above all a kind of "knowledge," but not that which simply recognizes what is. Rather, it entails know-how, "the ability to put Being to work as the being of such and such a being" (das Ins-Werk-setzen-konnen des Seins als eines je so und so Seienden) (122ir59). And to describe the distinctive nature of this process, Heidegger once again resorts to the present participle: "The setting-towork is the disclosing wreaking of Being in being" (ero./fnendes Er-wirken des Seins im Seienden) (122ir59). It is as if the decisive movement of opening up here requires the present participle (ero./fnendes, er-wirkende). And again in his resume of the process: "Violence [Gewalt-tiitigkeit] is the using of force [Gewalt-brauchen] against the Overwhelming [das Oberwiiltigende]: the knowing [wissende] struggle to bring hitherto contained

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being to appearing [Erscheinende] as the being [als das Seiende]" (r22lr59). This brings Heidegger to his third reading. The process of opening up being in a determinate work yields a result that is as fragile and ephemeral as it is conflictual. A different kind of movement has to be described from that with which we are familiar. Time draws the human towards its end not merely by moving it toward the moment of its disappearance, but by allowing it to define itself, to be what it is in an endless circle of tautological repetition. The only escape from the demonic tautology of this repetition lies not in breaking out or away, but in backing out, as it were, by backing up and making way for repetition to recur as something other than simply the return of the same. This occurs through the breaking up of the work, through a work constructed in order to allow such a break-up to occur. This is the work, and the human considered as "breach," and it requires a very special kind of place: "The human is however forced into such being-there, into the necessity of such being, because the Overwhelming, as one such, in order to appear [in its] prevailing [waltend zu erscheinen], needs for itself the site of openness" (124h63). The breaking up of the work opens the place of the human as a breach, into which Being emerging breaks (erscheinend hereinbricht, 124h63). Dike shatters the dike of the human, of its techne and work, all of which are there ultimately for the sake of being overwhelmed. In being thus overwhelmed as breach, human being is forced to open itself to alteration, transformation, deformation. For it is only in this forced and violent opening, which can also entail violence and even disintegration, that there is space for something else to happen. Despite the apparent stasis of Heidegger's categories, especially that of being, his discussion of the uncanny is framed by what might be called a temporality of disjunction, that which alone, he insists, deserves to be called "historical," geschichtlich in the sense of geschehend, of happening. Such happening is never fully predictable or calculable, never simply a particular dependent upon a general the way a part depends upon a whole. A happening is historical when its singularity resists such subsumption (or sublation in the Hegelian sense). And the way such resistance is articulated most powerfully, most simply, in its familiarity and strangeness, is in the uncanniness of the present participle, in which the

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part is brought before our eyes and ears as a reiteration that is forever incomplete, never coming full circle, always open to change. Where is the presence of the present participle to be found? In the interstices of its reiterative recurrence. The present participle thus best articulates what Heidegger finally describes as the definition of human being: a Zwischen-fall, an "in-cident," literally a "fall-between." Human being can thus be said to "fall between" the recurrences of the present participle, marking the disjunctive incidence of such presenting, those discontinuous goings-on that participate in the "here and now" while also being "there and then." How are we to construe this strange "place" that is both here-and-now and there-and-then? Heidegger, as is well known, will designate it as a "clearing," a Lichtung. But in the strange chiaroscuro that marks the uncanny, another name for this site suggests itself, one that implies both delimitation and openness. This site discloses that which can never be seen as such. In his translation of the passage from the Introduction to Metaphysics quoted above, Ralph Manheim inscribes this name almost as an afterthought: "Man is forced into such a being-there, hurled into the affiiction [Not] of such being, because the overpowering as such, in order to appear in its power, requires a place, a scene ofdisclosure" (163). The site (or Stiitte) that opens up to disclose the overwhelming in and as the happening of the uncanny is designated here as a "scene." Nowhere, to be sure, does Heidegger (in contrast to Freud) use any equivalent term in German: Statte, site, has nothing particularly theatrical about it. And yet ... only a certain kind of theatricality can fulfill the purpose that Heidegger assigns to this place, not only because this place is one of disclosure or of exposure, but also because it entails dissimulation and misrecognition. In a somewhat embarrassed and cursory comment upon the last strophe of the Chorus, Heidegger finally takes cognizance of the Chorus as such, acknowledging that the latter exists as a singular instance, that it is situated, if not in a theater, then at least in relation to what it has been describing, the conflictual interrelation of dike and techne, the conflictual interdependence of the "overwhelming articulation" ( uberwaltigende Pug) and the "violence of knowing" (Gewalt-tatigkeit des Wlssens) (126II6s). The final words of the Chorus, which no longer state what is but rather utter a wish or an admonition, depart from the ostensible neutrality and trans-

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parence of the Chorus's previous discourse and demonstrate a profound involvement with what is being said: an involvement that expresses itself defensively, precisely in order to protect its home and hearth (dem Herde) from what has just been described. But, as young Nathanael's discovery of a Herde ("a small oven") in the false wall-closet, suggests, for the Chorus, too, the enemy is already intra muros, inhabiting the home as the privileged stage of human finitude. The Chorus, speaking in the subjunctive in Heidegger's translation, utters the fearful wish and resolution that its "knowledge" (mein Wissen) be protected from the "delusions" (Wdhnen) of those it has just described. But what it has just described is not a particular type of heroic personality, but rather, according to Heidegger at least, human being itself How then can mein Wissen, my knowledge, be protected from human being, which is necessarily involved in desire, fantasy, delusion-in Wdhnen? Not by way of the defense of the hearth and its institutions (as Antigone amply demonstrates), nor in the creation of the play as a work, as certain other texts of Heidegger might suggest. Rather, knowledge is preserved, if not protected, precisely in that breakdown of the work that Heidegger chooses to ignore, although he describes it with great precision as the ambivalence of the Chorus-the entity that participates in the play while striving to keep a safe distance from it. It is this impossibly split desire that is staged in and as the theatricality of a work that is also a Stiick, a piece, a play that is a part but that never adds up to a whole. It is precisely in the theatrical derangement of the "work" that the uncanny takes place, and it is this, perhaps, that ultimately distinguishes theater as medium from art as genre, as prescribed by classical aesthetics. Unlike the work, the play is never self-contained: it only "is" in its "execution," which entails not so much form as performance, or rather, deformance; its temporality is that of the unexpected and the discontinuous, the Aristotelian peripeteia, the coup de theatre. Theatrical performance is suspended between this "coup" and the traces it leaves. Theater, as Walter Benjamin put it, is most of all "Exponierung des Anwesenden," an "exposing of the present" or more literally, of "presenting." 20 The present participle irrevocably exposes the present to a movement that is both uncanny and theatrical, but once again also somehow disreputable. Correlatively, what is theatrical, in the sense of the medium or the scene, is held to be a mere

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diversion from what is considered essential: the thing itself. One need only reread the Poetics to see how Aristotle avoids valorizing anything directly related to the scenic medium, preferring instead to discuss the way tragedy represents a certain content, an action, so that the latter becomes meaningful and integrative. But in place of the Aristotelian call for "synoptic" viewing, what we find, both in the text ofHeidegger and in that of Freud, is the inscribing not just of the spectator, but also of irreducibly multiple and split perpectives, in the scene and its scenario. Why, Freud asks again and again, do certain themes and eventssuch as a hand that has been severed from the body-sometimes appear uncanny, and sometimes not? This recurring question marks Freud's own intellectual uncertainty, which haunts all of his efforts to dismiss Jentsch's notion of "intellectual uncertainty" and thus to wrench possession of the uncanny from his predecessor in the field. Here then is Freud's final attempt at a definitive response to this question. The answer is easy to give. It goes this way [Sie lautet]: In this tale we are focused [wir (werden) eingeste!lt] not upon the feelings of the princess, but on the superior cunning of the "master thief." The princess may well not be spared the uncanny feeling, we will even concede as plausible that she has fainted, but we feel nothing uncanny, for we do not put ourselves in her place but rather in the place of the other. 21

In the end, then, the uncanny is inseparable from questions of perspective, of positioning, and hence from a relation of spectator to scene and of scenario to spectator. What is at stake in the uncanny is nothing more nor less than the disposition to "put ourselves in the place of the other." For Freud, the place of that other is occupied not by the "Princess," to be sure, but by the cunning "master thief." But-as Heidegger's reading of the Chorus suggests-no amount of "cunning" will ever be great enough, no thief masterful enough, to steal away from a being that is forever presenting itself in the multiply ambiguous perspective of a participle that never adds up to a whole. SAMUEL WEBER PARIS, JULY

1999

Going My Way

In the year 1920, Freud, hard-pressed financially in the aftermath of the war, considered writing a series of articles for an American magazine. The title he proposed for the first of them was: "Don't use Psychoanalysis in Polemics. " 1 The suggestion was indicative of the importance polemics had assumed for psychoanalysis in the years preceding. The resistance aroused by Freud's thought and practice had begun to assume new forms starting in 1910. Before then, opponents of psychoanalysis had preferred to ignore the new movement rather than to confront it directly. Once psychoanalysis had succeeded in establishing itself to an extent, however, such tactics were no longer sufficient. The turning point can be associated with the founding, on Freud's initiative, of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Four years later, in 1914, Freud described the factors motivating this initiative as "the favorable reception in America ... the increasing hostility in the German-speaking countries, and . .. the unforeseen acquisition of support from Zurich" (S.E. 14, 42). 2 The Psychoanalytic Movement was emerging from its isolation. But with its growth, increasing recognition, and interest there carne new problems, some of which Freud hoped to counter with the new Association: I considered it necessary to form an official association because I feared the abuses to which psychoanalysis would be subjected as soon as it became popular. There

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should be a headquarters whose business it would be to declare: "All that nonsense has nothing to do with analysis, it is not psychoanalysis." (S.E. 14, 43)

Designed to serve as a supreme tribunal, as guardian of the purity and unity of psychoanalysis, the Association was directed less against attacks from without than against attempts to blur the very distinction of without and within. This border was henceforth to be secured, definitively, by the IPA. At the same time, it also had the task of strengthening the movement from within, both by regulating the training of analysts (i.e., the transition from outside to inside), and by encouraging "friendly communication ... and mutual support" among members of the movement through regular meetings it was to sponsor (S.E. 14, 44). 3 The communication that ensued, however, proved to be far from friendly. Instead of a source of "mutual support," the IPA became almost at once a battleground, and thereby demonstrated that the most serious threat to psychoanalysis no longer came exclusively from without but from within. The history of the splits and conflicts that dominated the early years of the IPA, effectively paralyzing it and almost destroying the movement that it had been established to defend, is well known. The question of the significance of those struggles, however, has scarcely been raised, much less explored. Ernest Jones, chronicler of the movement in which he played a leading part, seeks to explain-or to explain away-those early conflicts by portraying them as a kind of infantile malady, the growing pains of a precocious science, and as such destined to disappear with increasing maturity. Jones points to the then undeveloped state of analytical training, and above all to the absence or inadequacy of training analyses, as a major factor in causing what he considers to be an essentially individual problem: the neurotic behavior of certain analysts unable to accept the authority of Freud. 4 This explanation, however, which echoes that given by Freud himself at the time, is not able to account for what Jones himself considers to be a distinctive feature of psychoanalysis: that, by comparison with other "sciences," analysis has had a particularly difficult time coping with its internal conflicts. Jones traces this problem to the specific kind of "data" with which the "investigation of the unconscious" is concerned, and which, he argues, is especially prone to reinterpretation "in terms of some

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personal prejudice." 5 Why this should be so, however, and whether it might not point to structural peculiarities that distinguish psychoanalysis from natural science-or perhaps from "science" as such-is a question that Jones himself does not pursue. Nevertheless, the possibility that the dissentions that arose immediately following the initial attempt to institutionalize the psychoanalytic 'movement' might have been a product of this movement itself, rather than merely a result of individual deficiencies and of collective immaturity, is one that demands investigation. 6 But before we begin to explore this question, let us briefly recapitulate the pertinent events. One year after the founding of the IPA, in 19II, Alfred Adler, who had been Freud's choice to succeed him at the head of the Viennese Group, resigned and established a "Society for Free Psychoanalysis." The next year, Wilhelm Stekel, who had been editor of the Zentralblatt for Psychoanalyse, official organ of the IPA, defected from the movement. Finally, 1913 saw the irreparable break with Jung, first president of the Association and designated successor of Freud. The loss of Jung, upon whom Freud had hoped to "transfer" his own authority, can therefore be described as the first critical case of "negative transference" affecting not simply individuals, but the institutions of psychoanalysis. If, however, the use of such a term can be justified here, "outside" of the analytical situation qua therapy, it is not merely because Freud himself resorts to the word in describing his relation to the defectors, Adler and Jung.? Far more significant is that his description situates that conflict squarely within the force field of transference, inasmuch as it was determined, Freud argued, by unconscious factors. In discussing that process (in the History ofthe Psychoanalytic Movement, S.E. 14), however, Freud curiously reverses the usual distribution of roles: unlike the situation in analysis, here it is the transferring subject-Freud himself-who is said to act voluntarily and consciously, whereas those who are the 'objects' of the transfer, Adler and Jung, are described as being constrained by unconscious motivations. "Incapable of tolerating the authority of another," Freud writes, Jung was "still less capable of wielding it himself" (S.E. 14, 43). The force of the unconscious, by implication, manifests itself here not in the act of transferring, but in the refusal to accept what is being transferred. The most obvious effect of such a refusal is to call into question both the transferring subject and the subject of the transference:

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Freud and his authority. 8 The founder of psychoanalysis did not underestimate the seriousness of this challenge, one that no longer could be ascribed to uninformed outsiders. Nonetheless, he hoped to avoid an open confrontation. Shortly before the break with the Zurich group he wrote to Ferenczi: We possess the truth; I am as sure of it as fifteen years ago .... I have never taken part in polemics. My habit is to repudiate in silence and go my own way. 9 And indeed, had Freud's way been as straightforward as such a statement implies, there would have been no need for him to engage in polemics or otherwise take notice of former adherents who had now strayed from the way. However, in the eyes of the uninitiated at least-and perhaps not only in theirs-the defections of such eminent persons as Adler and Jung suggested that a variety of ways might be possible, each with a claim on the truth. Confronted with this situation, Freud could hardly avoid defending the legitimacy of his way, and thus performing the function that the IPA had originally been created to fulfill, that oflaying down the law as to what deserved to be called psychoanalysis, and what did nor. This task thus fell to Freud, and his History was the result: Although it is a long time now since I was the only psychoanalyst, I consider myself justified in maintaining that even today no one can know better than I do what psychoanalysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psychoanalysis and what would better be described by some other name. (S.E. 14, 7) Where the name of psychoanalysis is at stake, who but its founder and father can decide what merits it and what does not? And yet, Freud's defense of that name is more vulnerable than his position might lead one to suspect. For the good name of psychoanalysis can be defended only to the extent that it permits itself to be defended. It is precisely here that difficulties arise. Psychoanalysis, although a theory of conflict, is according to Freud itself a most unsuitable medium of conflict: Analysis is not suited, however, to polemical use; it presupposes the consent of the person who is being analyzed and a situation in which there is a superior and a subordinate. Anyone, therefore, who undertakes an analysis for polemical purposes must expect the person analyzed to use analysis against him in turn, so that

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the discussion will reach a state which entirely excludes the possibility of convincing any impartial third person. (S.E. 14, 49) Such considerations lead Freud to restrict his objectives in dealing with the renegades: he will, he asserts, seek neither to analyze them as individuals nor to pass judgment upon the inherent quality of their ideas, but instead merely "to show how their theories controvert the fundamental principles of analysis (and on what points they controvert them) and that for this reason they should not be known by the name of analysis" (S.E. 14, 50). Although Freud makes this assertion at the outset of the polemical third section of his History, what he then goes on to do is precisely what he declared he would avoid: personal analysis of his opponents and evaluation of the intrinsic validity of their ideas. In itself, this turnabout is hardly surprising; polemical demarcation inevitably includes devaluation, since the affirmation of difference is rarely separable from the assertion that the other position is inferior to one's own. What distinguishes Freud's polemics, however, is that such affirmations are neither simple nor clear cut, and that they do not have the last word. The arguments that he introduces in order to disqualifY the "secessions"-the German word Abfollsbewegungen is far more suggestive than this translation would imply-fall back (flillt ab, or zuriick) on what they were intended to set off, elevate, and protect: upon psychoanalysis itself Psychoanalysis is thereby first tainted, and then drawn into a confrontation it had sought to avoid, one in which the fronts become increasingly blurred, until one begins to wonder what exactly psychoanalysis is-or where it is going.

A Problem of Narcissism

The condemnation of heresy implies the affirmation of orthodoxy. To say what psychoanalysis is not, Freud must state what it is. He therefore begins his polemics against Adler and Jung by naming the three essential positions of psychoanalytical doctrine, which, he asserts, his former followers have abandoned. The theories Freud mentions are that "of repression, of the sexual motive forces in neurosis, and of the unconscious" (S.E. 14, 50) . Having thus established the indispensable foundations of psychoanalysis, Freud then goes on to demonstrate exactly how the two renegades diverge from it. What emerges in the ensuing discussion is that their departure from psychoanalysis is not limited to individual points of doctrine but rather involves something much more fundamental: the very mode of thinking that produces theoretical insight. Psychoanalysis, Freud asserts, has "never claimed to provide a complete theory of human mentality in general" (S.E. 14, 50), and this deliberate, self-imposed limitation distinguishes it profoundly from the theories of its former adherents. The case of Adler being the more straightforward of the two, Freud begins with it: The Adlerian theory was from the very beginning a 'system'-which psychoanalysis was careful to avoid becoming. It is also a remarkably good example of 'secondary revision,' such as occurs, for instance, in the process to which dreammaterial is submitted by the action of waking thought. In Adler's case the place

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of the dream-material is taken by the new material obtained through psychoanalytic studies; this is then viewed purely from the standpoint of the ego, reduced to the categories with which the ego is familiar, translated, twisted and-exactly as happens in dream-formation-misunderstood. Moreover, the Adlerian theory is characterized less by what it asserts than by what it denies. (S.E. 14, 50)

Freud thus invokes the psychoanalytic theory of dreams to criticize, and ultimately to disqualifY, Adler, whose thought is equated with the "secondary revision" of the dream, designed to distort its true significance. Adler, despite-or rather because of-his claims to provide a general theory, a system, can be all the more easily incorporated and comprehended by psychoanalysis. The latter, precisely because it seems to "know" its own limits, Freud implies, can absorb and account for the Adlerian "system," assimilating what little it may have of value, and eliminating the rest. Such elimination is no more than befits what Freud constantly refers to as an Abfollsbewegung: the word signifies not merely a falling-away, a deviation from the right path of psychoanalysis, but also a movement of waste products. The scatological connotation is, moreover, anticipated by the epigraph, from Goethe's Faust, that Freud uses to introduce this third section: "Mach es kurz! Am Jiingsten Tag ist's nur ein Furz!" (Roughly translated as "Be short and tart! Come Judgment Day it won't be but a fart!") But the process of absorption and of elimination proved to be less simple than Freud had anticipated, as can be adduced from a remark he made. In 1932, many years after Adler and psychoanalysis had parted company, Freud noted that Adler's psychology still managed to lead "a kind of parasitic existence ... at the expense of psychoanalysis" (S.E. 22, 140). That even a parasite cannot thrive without a certain complicity of its "host" was an aspect of the matter Freud preferred not to consider. It is surely significant, however, that in one of his last writings, ''Analysis Terminable and Interminable," he concluded not merely with a reference to what he called the "rock of castration," but with an allusion to the Adlerian theory of "masculine protest," which he had condemned so emphatically years earlier. 1 Such a continuing fascination on Freud's part is all the more remarkable in view of the specific charge he directs at Adler.. For to assert that a theory functions in the manner of secondary revision is not merely

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to maintain that it does not know what it is talking about (serious enough for a theoretical discourse), but even worse, that it is designed to keep others from knowing. "Secondary revision" names not merely ignorance, but a strategy of dissimulation and deception; and we need only turn to The Interpretation ofDreams, where Freud first discusses the term, to discover how and why. Freud introduces the notion in the context of his chapter on the "dream-work," as the fourth mechanism of symbolization by which the dream both articulates and conceals conflictual desires. In contrast to the three other procedures, however-condensation, displacement, and considerations of representability (Riicksicht auf Darstellbarkeit-a term which would be better rendered as "scenic staging")-secondary elaboration or revision, although essential to the dream, is in no way peculiar to unconscious activity. On the contrary, it involves "a psychic function which is indistinguishable from our waking thoughts" (S.E. 5, 489). It is by virtue of this very familiarity that it can accomplish its task in the dream-work: that of producing a semblance of rationality, a specious intelligibility designed to conceal the dissimulation of the dream, and thus to render it acceptable to consciousness. Through secondary elaboration, the elements of the dream "appear to have a meaning, but that meaning is as far removed as possible from their true significance." (S.E. ), 490) Secondary elaboration thus is described as a process of interpretation, essentially unconscious, designed to throw the dreamer off the track by reorganizing and presenting its material in a manner that seems to conform to the logical and rational expectations of the waking mind. The result is that precisely those dreams that seem most coherent and transparent are in reality the most deceptive: If we analyze them, we can convince ourselves that it is in these dreams that the secondary elaboration has played most freely with the material and has least retained the relations inherent in them. Such dreams might be said to have been already interpreted once, before being submitted to waking interpretation. (Ibid.) If this mechanism is attributed to the "censoring agency, whose influence we have hitherto recognized only in limitations and omissions in the dream-content," here a new, more positive role of the censor becomes ap-

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parent. Through secondary elaboration it produces "interpolations and additions," (S.E. 5, 489) and such effects are described by Freud as a continuation of conscious thought: Our waking (preconscious) thinking behaves toward any perceptual material with which it is confronted in just the way the function we are considering behaves toward the content of dreams. It is the nature of our waking thought to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole. In fact, we go too far in that direction. An adept in sleight-of-hand can trick us by relying upon this intellectual habit of ours. In our efforts at making an intelligible pattern of the senseimpressions that are offered to us, we often fall into the strangest errors or even falsify the truth about the material before us. (S.E. 5, 499) The first example that Freud cites of such a tendency involves reading: In our reading we pass over misprints which destroy the sense, and have the illusion that what we are reading is correct. (Ibid.) It is just this desire to make sense out of what we see that provides the condition of possibility for the trompe I' oeil of secondary elaboration: our waking mind is so eager to find meaning that it will readily ignore absurdities to get at what seems to be sensible. Such credulousness, Freud insists, is not limited to particularly gullible individuals: it is a characteristic of waking thought as such, which thus opens the way to the "tendentious revision" of secondary elaboration. Freud's use of the word "tendentious" here anticipates his study of jokes, which he will divide into the two basic categories of "harmless" and "tendentious." But the affinity between secondary elaboration and jokes goes further than the aggressive intent shared by both. What is significant is that such aggression is in both cases linked to the manner in which the unconscious enlists the support of rational thought to impose its own ends. The Witz, like secondary elaboration, is made possible by "expectations of an intelligible whole." I will have occasion to return to this point in more detail later, in discussing Freud's theory of jokes. Here, I want only to call attention to the way in which Freud describes the operation of secondary elaboration as a kind of joke played by the unconscious against, or at the expense of, consciousness:

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If I look around for something with which to compare the final form assumed by a dream as it appears after normal thought has made its contribution, I can think of nothing better than the enigmatic inscriptions with which the Fliegende Blatter [Drifting Leaves, a humoristic magazine] has for so long entertained its readers. They are designed to make the reader believe that a certain sentencefor the sake of contrast, a sentence in dialect and as scurrilous as possible-is a Latin inscription. For this purpose the letters contained in the words are torn out of their contexts, reduced to syllables and arranged in a new order. Here and there a genuine Latin word appears; at other points we seem to see abbreviations of Latin words before us; at still other points in the inscription we may allow ourselves to be deceived into overlooking the senselessness of isolated letters by assuming them to be defaced or fragmentary. If we are to avoid being taken in by the joke [wenn wir dem Scherze nicht aufiitzen wollen], we must disregard everything that makes it seem like an inscription, look firmly at the letters, pay no attention to their ostensible arrangement, and so combine them into words belonging to our own mother-tongue. (S.E. 5, 500-501) To read the dream, we must resist the habit of "making sense" in terms of the given sequence; instead, we must be prepared to analyze, to decompose the apparent units into the individual, component letters, in order then to rearrange them into a language that, though it is less familiar, can nonetheless be compared with "our mother-tongue." Such a process of reading presupposes that the readiness to play with language is strong enough to check the desire to recognize the familiar (the pseudo-Latin of the "inscription"), and thus to accede directly to meaning. This desire-which presents the major obstacle to dream-interpretation-is, according to Freud, characteristic of a category of persons who are therefore almost by definition destined to "fall" for such jests (dem Scherze . .. aufiitzen): philosophers. The philosopher, Freud notes, citing Heine, seeks to fill "the holes in the cosmic plan ... with the bits and bonnets of his pajamas," just as secondary elaboration fills in "the gaps in the dream-structure" (S.E. 5, 490). In its propensity to become the ideal "fall guy" for the ruse of secondary elaboration, philosophy reveals itself to be less the love of wisdom than the ftar of it: phobosophie. This characterization of philosophy, or of a certain form of rationalistic thinking, receives renewed attention in Totem and Taboo, where Freud once again takes up his discussion of secondary revision. In the context of his description of "animism" as "the first complete theory of

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the universe" (S.E. 13, 94), Freud uses the notion of secondary revision to explain the implications of such systematic thinking from the perspective of psychoanalysis. The secondary revision of the product of dream-activity is an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. (S.E. 13, 95)

By comparison with his use of the notion in the Interpretation ofDreams, Freud has considerably extended the scope of secondary revision. Its dissimulating function now appears to be no longer restricted to the dreamwork, but rather to characterize systematic thinking in general. Such an extension, however, raises a new question: if in the dream secondary revision operates under the influence of the censoring agency, itself a function of the conflicts involved in the dream-wish, what is the equivalent of the censor operating in conscious, systematic thought? "There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity," Freud asserts, but in so doing he only displaces the question. For how can a "function" demand? With what resources? Or, more precisely: under what conditions can such an "intellectual function" acquire the force to make demands, and the power to impose them? Although this question is never made explicit in Totem and Taboo, Freud's discussion of animism is informed by it, and offers a partial response. What makes animism not merely a phylogenetic forerunner of systematic thinking, bur rather its paradigm, is its tendency "to grasp the whole universe as a single unity from a single point of view" (S.E. 13, 77), its effort to "explain the essence of the universe entirely" (ibid.). Unity and totality are the categories informing animism, and they make it the model of all systematic thinking: everything must be assimilated, with nothing left over or outside. This all-embracing, comprehensive quality of animistic thought points to its psychological correlative: narcissism. At the time he wrote Totem and Taboo, Freud still construed narcissism largely as a genetic phenomenon, rather than in the more structural terms of his later theory. Freud consequently describes narcissism as a period, in which

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[t]he hitherto isolated sexual drives have already come together into a single whole and have also found an object. Bur this object is not an external one, extraneous to the subject, but is its own ego, which has been constituted at about this same time. (S.E. 13, 89)

The animistic attempt to comprehend the external world in terms of unity and totality corresponds to the newly formed unity within the psyche: the narcissistic ego. The single point of view and the all-embracing comprehension it permits thus reflect the composite unity of the ego. And since "this narcissistic organization is never wholly abandoned"; since "a human being remains to some extent narcissistic even after he has found external objects for his libido," there is no reason to assume that animisll), like narcissism, will not persist, in the history of peoples no less than in that of individuals. One of the forms in which this occurs appears to be precisely systematic thought. If, then, that "intellectual function," which demands "unity, connection, and intelligibility," is able to impose its demands, the energy it requires to do so seems now to have an identifiable source: the libidinally cathected, narcissistic ego. Systematic thought organizes the world in the image of this psychic organization. The intellectual construct we call a "system" reveals itself to be narcissistic, in its origin no less than in its structure: speculative, in the etymological sense, as a mirror-image of the ego, and "phobosophie" as well. If it is driven to fill in the "gaps and cracks" in the edifice of the universe, the fissures it fears are much closer to home. The "expectation of an intelligible whole" described by Freud, the expectation of a coherent meaning, appears thus to denote the reaction of an ego seeking to defend its conflict-ridden cohesion against equally endemic centripetal tendencies. The pursuit of meaning; the activity of construction, synthesis, unification; the incapacity to admit anything irreducibly alien, to leave any residue unexplained-a ll this indicates the struggle of the ego to establish and to maintain an identity that is all the more precarious and vulnerable to the extent that it depends on what it must exclude. In short, speculative, systematic thinking draws its force from the effort of the ego to appropriate an exteriority of which, as Freud will later put it, it is only the "organized part." 2 Returning now to Freud's assessment of Adler, we will no longer be

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puzzled to find what otherwise might be considered a simple contradiction: the characterization of Adler as possessed of "unusual ability, combined with a particularly speculative disposition," on the one hand, and yet as having only a mediocre "gift ... for judging unconscious material" on the other (History, p. 50). For speculation, which Freud associates with narcissism, systematization, and secondary revision, would be a form of thought ill-suited to "judge unconscious material" inasmuch as it is driven precisely to deny the influence of its own unconscious. This, at least, is the essence of the verdict that Freud pronounces on Adler and Jung. The implication of this position is, inescapably, that genuine psychoanalysis stands in the same relation to its Abfallsbewegungen as does the unconscious to secondary revision: the latter is fully controlled by the former, which it serves precisely by obscuring. But just how far can we take this analogy? Can we conclude that the renegades of psychoanalysis not only conceal their veritable dependency on it-as Freud asserts-but that in so doing they also serve its interests (which Freud would obviously have denied)? This would imply that, as with the unconscious, the interests of psychoanalysis, as an institution, would depend upon a certain kind of self-dissimulation, just as the dream, to fulfill its function, must dissimulate both its true nature, and also that it so dissimulates. In view of the fact that psychoanalysis entails both a practice and a theory, how are these to be construed if their condition of possibility entails such a double dissimulation? Such questions-however sophistic they may seem-are difficult to avoid inasmuch as Freud refers to the unconscious in order to establish the authority of psychoanalysis over and against its competitors. It is o~ly by speaking in the name of the unconscious that psychoanalysis can claim such authority, and concomitantly qualify the doctrines of Adler and Jung as theoretical versions of "secondary revision"-that is, as a form of pseudo-rationality that in fact does not really know what it is talking about. But if the theories of Adler and Jung are examples of secondary revision, what about those of Freud himself? Can the theoretical effort of psychoanalysis to conceive and to articulate the unconscious and its effects be free of the narcissistic tendencies Freud attributes to all systematic thought? Is Freud's assertion that psychoanalysis never claimed to be

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a W't>ltanschauungsufficient to exempt it from the traps that seem to beset all rational explanation and theorization, inasmuch as any theory must rely on systematic comprehension? One way of pursuing this problem-and it is one that will concern us throughout this book-is to shift our attention for a moment from the general critique under which Freud subsumes both of his adversaries, to the manner in which he distinguishes their two systems. For despite his polemics, Freud insists that there is an important difference between Adler and Jung, and he makes no secret of his preferences. Of the two movements under discussion, Adler's is indubitably the more important; while radically false, it is marked by consistency and coherence. It is moreover, in spite of everything, founded upon a theory of drives. Jung's modification, on the other hand, loosens the connection ... with instinctual life [ Triebleben]; and furthermore ... is so obscure, unintelligible and confused as to make it difficult to take up any position towards it. Wherever one lays hold of it, one must be prepared to hear that one has misunderstood it; one is thus at a loss to know how it should be properly understood. It presents itself in a peculiarly vacillating manner [Sie stellt sich selbst in eigentumlich schwankender Weise vor ]. 3 Freud's comparison of the two theories leads him to a curious conclusion: he condemns Adler for being excessively systematic (i.e., narcissistic) but finds Jung even worse for being insufficiently so. Adler, he argues, is at least "radically false," but Jung is not even that: his doctrine is so elusive, so schwankend, that it is difficult to pin down at all. If, then, a modicum of coherence, consistency, and systematicity is indispensable to a theory, the question remains: how much? or perhaps, also, of what kind? That Freud eschewed confronting such questions head-on is well known. After the previous discussion, the reasons for his reluctance may be more understandable. One of the rare occasions when he does address this question occurs in The Interpretation ofDreams where-almost parenthetically and in passing-he risks a succinct definition of what a theory should be: A proposition [eine Aussage] concerning dreams, which seeks to explain as many as possible of their observed characteristics from a particular point of view, and which at the same time defines the position occupied by dreams in a wider sphere of phenomena, may be called a dream-theory. (S.E. 4, 75)

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To qualifY as a theory, an explanation must be inclusive, comprehensive, generalizable: in short, systematic. And the point of departure for such explanation must consist in observations made from a particular "point of view." But can such a point of view avoid becoming just what Freud condemns in others: a standpoint of the ego? To what extent can theory escape the self-deception constitutive of narcissism? These are the questions posed by Freud's polemics, and their addressee is not merely the "Abfallsbewegungen," but psychoanalysis as well.

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If Freud rejects the Adlerian notion of "masculine protest," it is because he considers the latter to take for granted what in fact can be properly understood only in relation to the context out of which it emerges: the ego. Far from considering the ego to be the basis on which a psychology can be founded, Freud regards it as a "composite entity" (zusammengesetzte Einhelt), derived from and dependent on processes that transcend its domain and demand intensive investigation. In his essay on Narcissism-which in certain regards develops his critique of AdlerFreud emphasizes that "it is impossible to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego can exist in the individual from the very start; the ego has to develop" (S.E. 14, 77). The history of this development is inseparable from the dynamics of narcissism, and from the libidinal conflicts to which it responds. Adler's notion of "masculine protest" as the motor of psychic development presupposes a sexually differentiated subject already endowed with an identity to be defended. If the Freudian notion of narcissism located the conflict within the subject, and ultimately within the ego itself, the idea of "masculine protest" situates it between the ego and the other. This presupposition of an originally constituted ego or self is what Freud criticizes in the following passage:

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Psychoanalytic research has, from the very beginning, recognized the existence and significance of the "masculine protest" but has always regarded it, in opposition to Adler, as narcissistic in nature and derived from the castration complex. It appertains to the formation of character, into the genesis of which it enters along with many other factors, and it is completely inadequate to explain the problems of the neuroses, in which Adler will take account of nothing but the manner in which they serve the interests of the ego. (S.E. 14, 92) For Freud, what is involved here is not merely a difference in conception, but also a difference in the very mode of theoretical construction. He seeks to elucidate this difference by recourse to a highly significant example: Let us consider one of the fundamental situations in which desire is felt in infancy: that of a child observing the sexual act between adults. Analysis shows, in the case of persons with whose life history the physician will later be concerned, that at such moments two impulses take possession of the immature [unmiindigen] spectator. Where the latter is a boy, one is the impulse to put himself in the place of the active man, while the other, the opposing tendency, is the impulse to identifY with the passive woman. Between them these two impulses exhaust the pleasurable possibilities of the situation. Only the first can be assimilated to the 'masculine protest,' if th~t concept is to retain any meaning whatsoever. The second ... Adler disregards ... he takes account only of those impulses that are agreeable to the ego and are encouraged by it. (S.E. 14, 54) For Freud, the situation of the subject in the primal scene is characterized by a constitutive disunity: the child is impelled by its desire in two different and mutually exclusive directions. The point of departure is a confl.ictual position, to which the ego will attempt to respond. But its identity and unity will, for Freud, always be marked and structured by the disunity it seeks to organize. Adler, Freud argues, will acknowledge only the one striving, the tendency to identifY with the "active man." Instead of being defined as the product of a confl.ictual desire, the Adlerian subject confronts the conflict as a threat from without, against which it protests. That the subject fears what it desires and desires what it fears; that it would seek to be in two places at once, or perhaps in three, is a conception that has no place in Adler's theory, which presupposes an originally unified subject. At the same time, such a unity would also characterize the viewpoint of

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the theory that situates itself with regard to this subject: the unity implicit in the notion of "masculine protest" would be that of the theory it seeks to found. As theoretical construct and object, the notion of "masculine protest" endows the Adlerian theory with a firm, stable viewpoint. It is this that Freud criticizes as the "standpoint" of the ego: a point on which the subject-ultimately, the theoretical subject-can take its stand. In this sense, the Adlerian theory implies not simply the abandonment of one or more psychoanalytical notions, but also, perhaps more important, the inability to sustain a mode of thought that seeks to articulate complex, conflictual processes without the aid of an original, founding, and unifYing point of reference. Since the identity of a theory is determined by the objects it constructs, that of psychoanalysis must be prepared to recognize the dynamics of conflict it seeks to delineate as part of its own movement as well. If, for psychoanalysis, the identity of the subject is no longer an original or ultimate point of reference, but rather-as the "ego"-a highly ambivalent, more or less precarious 'compromise formation,' the resultant of a conflict of forces that it seeks to organize but can never fully control, then the theory that endeavors to articulate this state of affairs will itself be no less precarious or ambivalent. For, like the ego itself, it will be unable to define itself in terms of a fixed, undivided and transcendent point of view. To assume such a standpoint, as Adler attempts with his notion of masculine protest, is to condemn oneself to systematic self-deception; deception by virtue of the presupposition of Self and of System. Freud elucidates this deception by referring to another scene, and another spectacle, although one not unrelated to the Urszenewe have just encountered: The ego here plays the ludicrous part of the clown in the circus, who, by his gestures, tries to convince the audience that every change in the circus ring is being executed in response to his command. Bur only the most youthful in the audience are taken in. (S.E. 14, 53) The clown-in German, "der dumme August"-is Adler's theory, which, like the ego it posits, pretends to control the show in which it in fact plays only a modest role. Yet that role consists precisely in the mimicry Freud describes. Which explains why the ego is the site both of cognition and of illusion, and why the one is difficult to separate from the other. If a dis-

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tinction is possible-and this is, of course, the necessary premise of any theory, including that of Freud-it can be only by an effort of reflection that takes the topography of the scene into account. The distinctive feature of that topography is that it can never be fully, exhaustively seen: just as the clown is part of the show, so too is the audience. If its most youthful members allow themselves to be taken in by the clown, it is because of their reluctance to be taken in by the spectacle itself. And, as the Urszene demonstrates, the ego of the child has a legitimate interest in keeping its distance. But that distance can only be specious, since the "circus ring" is merely another figure of that "other scene" as which Freud described the unconscious. And in the theater of the unconscious, there are no simple objects to be seen, as Freud makes clear in regard to the dream, that most "visual" of all unconscious articulations: The dream-phantasy does not stop at the mere representation of an object; it is intrinsically compelled to involve the dream-ego in what it represents, thus producing an action or plot [Handlung]. For instance, a dream caused by a visual stimulus may represent gold coins in the street; the dreamer will pick them up delightedly and carry them off. (S.E. 4, 84-85) The dream may represent the dreamer absconding with the loot, but in so doing it has simultaneously represented the basic situation of all dreaming: the loot is a lure to draw the dreamer out and into the dream. The result is that all objects and incidents represented in the dream become "Handlung"-not merely "events," but' also and more importantly: stories, scenarios, plot. And if the ego of the dreamer is a participant, an actor, the role it plays is not of its own making. This role is rarely a simple one: the ego may be represented in various figures of the dream. But the ego's performance goes beyond the represented content of the dream to include the process of representation itself: the narration ofthe dream. Contrary to expectations of common sense, the narration does not merely represent a dream that in some sense is already present-to-itself; the dream only comes to be in and through a process of narration that Freud significantly labels not Darstellung (presentation), but Entstellung: distortion, dislocation, disfigurement. If such distorted articulation can be "true" to the dream, it is only because the latter is already a process of dis-

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tortion, Entstellung. The distance that separates narration from narrated, like that which separates spectator from spectacle, is not an empty interval, not the space ofDarstellung but ofEntstellung. It is, in short, a space on the move. What room does this space leave for theory-for a theory that rejects the specious security of the "standpoint of the ego"? We return to Freud's critique of Adler in search of an answer: The system is complete; to produce it has cost an enormous amount oflabor in the recasting of interpretations, while it has not yielded a single new observation. I fancy I have made it dear that it has nothing to do with psychoanalysis. (History, pp. 57-58) The category that Freud invokes here-as in the passage cited earlier from the Interpretation of Dreams-to characterize an authentic theory, is: observation, Beobachtung. The narcissism of speculative, systematic theories, Freud insists again and again, is manifest in the poverty of their observations. For Adler, Freud asserts, "observation has served merely as a springboard, to be used for elevation and then forsaken" (History, p. 54). Similarly, Jung, "in order to preserve [his] system intact," finds it necessary to turn entirely away from observation and from the technique of psychoanalysis." (History, pp. 62-63) "From observation and from the technique of psychoanalysis"-are they then one and the same? Freud, at least, seemed often to think so. In his essay On Narcissism-a text that bears the marks of his polemical separation from Adler and Jung-Freud emphasized the significance of observation for psychoanalysis in a highly programmatic manner: Conceptions such as that of an ego-libido, ego-drive energy [Ich- Triebenergie], etc. are neither particularly clear nor sufficiently differentiated [inhaltsreich genug]; a speculative theory of the relations involved would first and foremost want to establish a sharply defined concept as its basis. But in my opinion this is precisely the difference between a speculative theory and a science constructed upon the interpretation of empirical data [Deutung der Empiric]. The latter will not envy speculation its privilege of a smooth, logically unassailable foundation, but will gladly settle for nebulously elusive, barely imaginable basic conceptions [kaum vorstellbaren Grundgedanken], which it hopes to apprehend more clearly in the course of its development, but which it is also prepared to replace if need be. For

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it is not these ideas which are the foundation upon which everything rests, but rather observation, and nothing else [dies ist allein die Beobachtung]. (S.E. 14, 77)

The claim that Freud appears to make for observation: that it and it alone provides science with its "foundation" and distinguishes it from speculative forms of thought-seems clear and unequivocal enough. And yet here as elsewhere, an attentive reading of Freud's text reveals the assertions it contains to be more complex than they seem at first sight. And indeed, the basic problem circumscribed here is precisely the question of "first sight." For if Freud opposed observation to speculation, it is not in the name of an immediacy of perception, a notion that everything in psychoanalysis would tend to exclude. Thus, whereas Freud insists that "observation alone" must be the foundation of scientific thought, the science he describes is "constructed upon the interpretation of empirical data." The problem, then, becomes that of specifYing the relation between observation, on the one hand, and interpretation on the other. In a late text-the Outline ofPsychoanalysis, written in 1938-Freud returns to this question, while endeavoring to describe the kind of observation peculiar to psychoanalysis: All sciences are based upon observation and experiences that are mediated by our psychic apparatus. Since, however, our science has just this apparatus as its object, the analogy ends there. We form our observations by means of the very same perceptual apparatus, precisely with the help of gaps in the psyche, by supplementing what has been left out with conclusions that lie close at hand, translating the omissions into conscious material. (S.E. 23, 159)

It might seem here, again at first sight, that Freud seeks to derive the specificity of psychoanalytical observation solely from the fact that its object is defined negatively rather than positively, as "gaps in the psyche." This would not be entirely wrong. Yet a closer reading of Freud's text reveals something more: if analytic observation depends on "the very same perceptual apparatus" and on "the help of gaps in the psyche," such gaps (Lucken) must be as much a part of the observer as of the observed. And this applies not merely to the observer considered as an individual, but to the process of analytic observation itself. If it is important to stress this difference, it is because what is at stake here is not merely the fallibility of psychoanalysts as individuals, but the possibility of a new conception of

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"science" in which such fallibility-the effects of the unconsciOuswould play a constitutive part. Certain formulations in the passage cited tend to obscure this distinction: Freud writes as though analysts, like the philosophers of Heine's poem, could hope to fill the "gaps" of the universe with "conclusions that lie close at hand" (durch naheliegende Schlussfolgerungen ergdnzen), and thus to achieve a perfect "translation" of unconscious into conscious "material" (es in bewusstes Material ubersetzen). But if such conclusions lie "close at hand," the question remains: whose hand? Is this hand any less marked by the "gaps" of the unconscious than the perceptual apparatus itself? In any event the problem Freud describes is more suggestive, more forceful, than the solution he appears to offer. In the absence of further qualification, his allusion to "naheliegende Schlussfolgerungen" can refer only to that most immediate but least reliable of psychic agencies: the (narcissistic) ego. It is this ego, in fact, that is responsible for the production of the very earliest theories, the "infantile sexual theories," in which, for the first time, desire takes the form of the "urge to know," the Wisstrieb. An example: for the child, nothing seems more obvious, ndherliegend, than the fact that all adults should be endowed with a penis. And hence, nothing is more justified than for the child to reinterpret observed material in the light of this expectation: The little boy undoubtedly perceives the distinction between men and women, but to begin with he has no occasion to connect it with any difference in the genitals. It is natural for him to assume that all living beings, persons and animals, possess a genital organ like his own .... This part of the body ... never ceases to provide new problems for his investigative drive [Forschertrieb]. He wants to see the same thing in other people, so as to compare it with his own .... We know how such children react to their first perception of the lack of the penis [Penismangel]. They deny this lack and believe they see a penis all the same; the contradiction between what they observe and what they expect [der Widerspruch zwischen Beobachtung und VtJrurteil] is temporized by the notion that the penis is still small and will grow; gradually they come to the conclusion, fraught with emotional consequences, that at least it was there once and then had been removed. The lack of penis is construed to be the result of a castration, and now the child is faced with the task of dealing with the relation of castration to himself [sich mit der Beziehung der Kastration zu seiner eigenen Person auseinanderzusetzen]. (S.E. 19, 142-43)

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Reading this description of the "castration-complex," one can hardly avoid being struck by what for Freud doubtless seemed an obvious conclusion, so close at hand: that the perception of the female genitals is nothing more or less than that of a Penismangel: that is, an absence or lack that implicitly installs the penis as the measure of all genitality. "It is natural," Freud asserts, for the boy to make this supposition, and it is no less so for Freud to adjust his terminology accordingly. Indeed, it was only with Melanie Klein that the possibility of other fantasies involving the female body and genitals intruded on Freud's penis-centered perceptual model. 1 Here, then, we have an instance of "conclusions" -those of the child, but also those of Freud, who adopts, as it were, the "standpoint" of the male ego-that are ready at hand and yet are nonetheless neither innocent nor unproblematic, for all of their apparent proximity and self-evidence. But if Freud's account of the development of the castration-complex does little to instill confidence in the notion of "naheliegenden Schlussfolgerungen" as the answer to the epistemological questions raised by psychoanalysis itself, it does allow us to investigate the interaction of observation and interpretation in a situation that is clearly central to the Freudian conception of the subject. If the child denies the evidence of his observations, this demonstrates the power and primacy of the "expectations" or "prejudices" ( Vorurteile) that preside over the child's early psychic development. Although Freud designates this Vorurteil as "natural," his description of it anticipates what will later be known as narcissism. The driving impulse of the child is toward a particular kind ofvisual experience: "He wants to see the same thing in other people .... " Perceptual recognition, the observation of what is already familiar-"the same thing"-is what the child desires, and this desire is strong enough to bend perceptual "data'' to its needs. The development of desire, as Freud describes it in The Interpretation ofDreams, is tied not to the perception of objects, but to their hallucination.2 The decisive modification implied by the "castration complex" is that the deployment of desire implies not merely the production of hallucinations, but their organization into a story. The story of castration attempts to temporize the contradiction between "perception'' and "prejudice" by temporalizing it: Once upon a time, there was a penis .... " The "infantile sexual theories" are thus stories the child tells itself to

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confront the "narcissistic" shock which Freud always characterizes as "castration." The story allows for the Vorurteil that is absolutely constitutive for narcissism, and hence also for the development of the ego: the conviction that the child inhabits a world of "sameness," in which difference and alterity can be regarded merely as privative, negative forms of an original and pervasive identity: as a Mangel or loss of what once was. 3 But this original identity, which the castration-story seeks to confirm, dialectically as it were, is increasingly subjected to the difference it seeks to deny. The term that Freud uses to designate this process of subjection, which is also the process by which the subject is constituted, is: Auseinandersetzung: "and now the child is faced with the task of dealing [sich auseinandersetzen] with the relation of castration to himself." The German verb (sich) auseinandersetzen is so charged, and so important for Freud's thought, that there seems little choice but to retain it here. In current use it signifies both the act of addressing, dealing with an issue, a problem, or a person (such auseinandersetzen mit ... ) and the kind of polemics Freud practiced in regard to Adler and Jung. Taken more literally, i.e., analyzed into its components (that is, auseinandergesetzt), the word designates a process of decomposition or analysis that we have already had occasion to encounter at least twice: first, as the kind of reading Freud describes as necessary to decipher the dream (taking apart the speciously meaningful sequence of the dream-text, in order then to recompose it in a different manner); and second, as the divergent striving of the child in the Urszene, who literally splits itself apart in order to accomplish the double identification with "active" man and "passive" woman." 4 Between these different meanings a highly complex configuration begins to emerge, in which the postulation (Setzung) of identitybe it that of the subject, the object, or of meaning itself-appears increasingly to be the effect of a process of reduplication or of reciprocal separation (aus-ein-ander). Such a process seems to necessitate a form of articulation that is inevitably narrative: the "story" that "begins" with the primal scene, and which continues in the denials of difference that constitute "castration," culminates in the Auseinandersetzung with the relation of castration to the developing subject. What seems characteristic of this Auseinandersetzung is precisely its tendency to shifi: from the hallucination of objects (penis absent or present), to the problem of relations,

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in which the subject itself is inextricably engaged and set apart. The setting apart of the subject, its Auseinandersetzung, culminates in the relation between ego and superego. This relation marks a turning point in the "story'' or history that leads from the primal scene to castration. For if castration can be considered to embody the ego's narcissistic effort to maintain the fiction of an undivided identity by constructing a narrative in which its heterogeneity assumes the form of a loss, the institution of the superego transforms the space in which-or rather, with which-the ego has hitherto sought to delimit its relation to alterity. The space of Freud's second topology (of id, ego, and super-ego) is no longer neutral, empty, or continuous; it is no longer a space in which the ego can confront its nonidentity in the form of an object or a perception, or temporalize that other in the form of a loss. For this space is not one of extension, in which discrete and self-identical entities all occupy fixed and determinable places. Rather, it is a space marked by overlapping: the ego only comes to be by setting itself apart from the id, as the latter's "organized portion," yet it remains a part of the id; similarly, the identity of the ego is no longer merely a function of its own "organization" but rather of its (ambivalent) relation to the superego, which in turn is both heir to the ego's narcissism and product of the id. The ego thus sets itself apart not merely in opposing itself to what it is not, but in dispersing its Self in conflictual relations to other "agencies" that it can never either fully assimilate or entirely exclude. 5 If, then, the ego articulates itself by setting its Self apart, the space of this Auseinandersetzung cannot be construed in terms of observation; that is, it can never be observed as such, nor is it compatible with observation conceived as the act of a subject confronting and apprehending an object. Observation, as Freud is well aware, is a function of conflictual desires, and not merely the response or reaction to an object. But if Freud "knows" this, he often "forgets" it, for the simple but compelling reason that such knowledge cannot but affect the status of psychoanalytic cognition itself If the latter is not grounded in observable data, then Freud's effort to set psychoanalysis apart from the narcissistic theories of Adler and Jung, for instance, becomes immeasurably more complicated and more difficult. A significant instance of this "forgetting" is provided by the most

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speculative of Freud's essays, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In that text Freud is constrained to defend his own speculative hypotheses of the repetition-compulsion and the death-drive by distinguishing them from mere, that is, merely narcissistic, speculation. This defense takes the form of contrasting his new hypotheses with the earlier ones: I do not ignore the fact that the third step in the theory of drives, which I take here, cannot lay claim to the same degree of certainty as the two previous ones: the extension of the concept of sexuality and the hypothesis [Aufstellung] of narcissism. These two innovations were direct translations ofobservation into theory, and were no more open to sources of error than is unavoidable in such cases. It is true that my assertion of the regressive character of the drives also rests upon observed material, namely, on the facts of the repetition-compulsion. It may be, however, that I have overestimated their significance. 1'

If the "third step" that Freud here takes is indeed more speculative and conjectural than the first two, none of the three can be adequately described as "direct translations of observation into theory"; rather, even the first two "translations" entail constructions and concepts that are in no way simply derived from observed data. The description of hysteria as the conversion of conflictual desire into physical symptoms, or the analysis of the dream as dissimulation both involve the interpretation of "gaps" in consciousness in which discontinuities are bridged by the construction of concepts designed to explain them (such as "primary" and "secondary" process). However, where the context of his argument is proleptic-that is, designed to meet and answer anticipated objections-Freud adopts the convenient strategy of appealing to a conception of observation that his entire approach to the psyche otherwise undermines. For what distinguishes psychoanalysis from science in its more familiar forms is precisely the nonobservabiliry of the "phenomena" it addresses: We need not feel greatly disturbed in judging our speculation upon the life and death drives by the fact that so many bewildering and obscure processes [befremdende und unanschauliche Vorgdnge] occur in it-such as one drive being driven out by another, or a drive turning from the ego to an object and so on. This is merely due to our being obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language [Bildersprache] peculiar to psychology (or more precisely, to depth-psychology). We could not otherwise describe the processes

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in question at all, and indeed we could not even have perceived them. (Beyond, p. 54; my emphasis) Given the Unanschaulichkeit of the processes with which psychoanalysis is concerned, perception-and hence a fortiori "observation"-cannot provide a ground for the "direct translation" of data into theory." Moreover, those processes themselves are invariably described by Freud as consisting in a kind of translation, be it in the sense of an Ubertragung (transfer) of energy or in that of a displacement of representations. Far from translating observed data into the language of theory, what psychoanalysis actually does, according to Freud, is to transcribe a translation that itself is rendered perceptible, observable, cognizable only through the Bildersprache that repeats and replaces it. It is inevitable that this characterization of psychoanalytic discourse as a process ofUbertragung-transference-cannot but affect the nature of the cognitive insights that are thereby produced: The indeterminacy of all our discussions that we call metapsychological is of course due to the fact that we know nothing of the nature of the excitatory process that takes place in the elements of the psychic systems, and that we do not feel justified in framing any hypothesis on the subject. We are consequently operating all the time with a large unknown fa«:tor-a capital X-that we are obliged to carry over into every new formula. (Beyond, pp. 24-25) At the heart of psychoanalytical theory, then, is not, as Freud would have us believe, a privileged proximity to observed data, but rather a singular relation of cognition to the unknown, figured and disfigured-enme//tin that "capital X," that here emerges as the chiasmatic cipher of the metapsychological Auseinandersetzung itself. For psychoanalytic theory sets itself apart in an ambivalent movement that both disperses itself in categories that overlap and converge with each other, and at the same time projects its constitutive dislocation as an outward movement of heretical divergences, as a "falling away" (Abfollsbewegung) it can then appear to confront and condemn. As we shall see, this is precisely the movement that Freud describes as being that of the ego in repression, symptomformation, anxiety, and its other defensive strategems. Nor should this surprise us, since description, as we have just read, is a function not so much of the object described as of the Bildersprache that describes it.

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Does this not condemn the theoretical discourse of psychoanalysis as tautological? As narcissistic and speculative, in much the same way that Freud criticized in Adler and Jung? The response would be easy to give if the Auseinandersetzung of psychoanalytic metapsychology could be identified as a closed, and self-identical circle. But as we shall try to demonstrate, the movement disfigured by Freud's "capital X" is precisely not circular and hence impossible to identifY, once and for all. The trajectory it follows is also that which it describes: one of Ent-stellung, a dislocation that can be retraced and retold, but never comprehended as such. For every effort to determine it-i.e., to recognize it-is inevitably caught up in that ambivalent movement in which "economic," "topical," and "dynamic" perspectives converge, overlap, and set themselves apart in the chiasmatic, noncircular, elliptical Bildersprache of Freud's metapsychology. To demonstrate the noncircular, nontautological character of this Bildersprache we must turn away from it, for a moment-away from its immediate manifestations, from its formulas and formulations, to one of those "descriptions" that Freud refers to as the "direct translation" of observation into theory. This detour is inevitable for at least two reasons. First, Freud scrupulously avoided developing a systematic and extended reflection upon the language he employed, and he was surely justified in so doing. For such a reflection would, by its very nature, have entailed the premise that the figurative language of metapsychology could give way to a metalanguage capable of recognizing its basic rules and procedures. To make this assumption, however, would imply nothing less than the possibility of determining the Bildersprache of metapsychology from the fixed and immovable "standpoint of the ego"-from the vantage point, that is, of one of its elements or effects. To thematize or objectifY metapsychological discourse as such would therefore be to fall prey to the pretensions and pretenses of the ego. By not making this gesture, Freud-at the risk of seeming epistemologically naive-refuses to submit metapsychological discourse to the authority of a reflexive metalanguage. Second and more important, Freud practiced what he did not (want to) preach. He used that Bildersprache to describe a phenomenon that almost looks like its mirror image. I am referring to his description of the language of the dream as a Bilderschrift: a pictorial script, an ideogrammatic text. This script, of course, is precisely not a theoretical discourse, in any traditional

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sense, for rather than seeking to disclose and discover, it is epistemophobic, striving to dissimulate and, moreover, as we have seen, to dissimulate its own dissimulation. In describing this Bilderschrift, Freud was inevitably led to touch on the manner in which that script must be read: The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is as it were given in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], whose characters [Zeichen] must be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thought. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their semiotic relations [Zeichenbeziehung], we should clearly be led into error.... A dream is a picturepuzzle. (S.E. 4, 277) Freud's conception of the dream-language seems structuralist avant Ia lettre: it is not the representational, thematic, "pictorial" content of the dream-signs that determines their "value," but rather their relations to other signs. These "other" signs are, first of all, those represented "in" the dream. But this limit-and in general, the distinction between an imide and an outside of the dream-will be progressively undermined in the course of Freud's discussion. Before we arrive at this distinctive and decisive aspect of Freud's conception, however, let us first note that the "logic of relations" here described is identical with that already encountered in our discussion of secondary elaboration. To read the dream properly, its manifest sequence must be disregarded, or rather, it must be intensely regarded, but not from the standpoint of its apparent meaning. The meanings represented in the individual ideograms are themselves signifYing elements, subordinated to a logic-or rather, a "graphics"-in which the spatial, syntactic relations of the individual signifiers is often determining. The dream, Freud observes, renders logical connections as simultaneity.... Whenever (the dream) shows us two elements dose together, one can be certain that there is a particularly intimate [innigen] connection in the dream-thoughts that correspond to them. This resembles a system of writing: "ab" means that the two letters are to be pronounced in a single syllable. (S.E. 4, 314) What characterizes the mode of articulation of the dream is that particularly "intimate" or "inward"-innigen-semantic relations are transcribed into and as "outward" relations of signifiers or graphemes. Mean-

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ings, generally regarded as inhering in objects (the objects of consciousness), are literally and graphically spaced out, with the result that in the script of the dream it is the syntactic arrangement itself that becomes the bearer of meaning. This applies to the relation of individual signifiers within a single dream no less than to the relation of dreams to each other. But perhaps most important, it also applies to the relation of the dream "itself" to its narration. For, if the dream is itself the result of a retraDscription of "thoughts" and wishes existing prior to it, this process continues and culminates in the process of repetition and of dissimulation by which the dream is articulated: the process of its narration. Freud's emphasis on the synchronic character of dream-articulation -another striking parallel with structuralist, and above all Saussurean semiotics-includes, however, the very diachronic dimension that the Geneva linguist sought to banish from his conception of la langue. Dreamarticulation for Freud is diachronic in two senses: first, the dream reproduces preexisting wish-conflicts by transcribing them into the apparently static synchrony of its Bilderschrift; second, this script only comes to be post facto, as it were, in the narrative discourse of the dreamer recalling and recounting the dream. The term that Freud uses to describe this process is: Entstellung, signifying, as already mentioned, both distortion and disLocation. If these two terms generally imply their opposites-that is, an undistorted original, and a proper place-Freud's use of the word explicitly excludes such an implication. It is surely no accident that the passage in which he makes this clear is once again marked by a proleptic anticipation of the Auseinandersetzung his conception is bound to provoke. At the beginning of chapter 7 of The Interpretation ofDreams, Freud addresses possible objections that might be made to his analysis of dreams as elaborated in the first six chapters of the book. One of these is the contention that all of Freud's previous discussion might well be nothing but mere projection of the author, since it is based not on direct contact with the dream itself, but only on testimony after the fact, which is neither reliable nor verifiable. Freud's response is, as it were, to up the ante: It is true that we distort [entstellen] dreams in attempting to reproduce them; here again we find at work the process that we have described as the secondary {and often misleading) elaboration of the dream by the agency of normal

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thought. But this distortion [Entstellung] is itself nothing but a part of the elaboration to which the dream-thoughts are regularly subjected as a result of the dream-censorship. (S.E. 5, 514) By conceding the objection, Freud seeks to deprive it of its critical power. Yes, he admits, the dream-narration is a reproduction, one that inevitably distorts-entstellt-the dream itself. But that dream "itself" is already a distortion, and this is precisely what legitimates the subsequent distortions it undergoes. They are all part of a general process of Entstellung, in which the narrating subject is as much implicated as the dreamer during the dream. The apparent synchrony of the dream thus tends to become unraveled in the dissimulating diachrony of its narration. In the process, the standpoint of the dreamer as spectator is revealed to be an element of the scene, or rather of the scenario, just as the child is progressively compelled to abandon his position of observer (of the primal scene) and to assume that of storyteller, in "castration." Thus, like the child, the dreamer participates in the story told, but his participation encompasses the telling itself. Narration therefore emerges as the theater in which the dream is both situated and dislocated. In this sense, the synchronic aspect of the dream-which, taken by itself, would like all synchrony, imply the reference to a transcendent standpoint-is caught up and displaced by the narrative that retells it. When Freud thus replaces the category of Darstellung by that of Entstellung to characterize the dream; when he stresses that it is neither the manifest nor the latent content that constitutes its specificity "as a particular form of thinking," but rather the "dream-work" (S.E. 5)-i.e., the work of Entstellung-he is not merely replacing a false determination of the dream by a true one. For if the dream is constituted by and as Entstellung, this is tantamount to asserting that its limits are determined by a process that itself cannot be free of the very distortion it seeks to define. And a "theory'' that seeks to assume this position, it is clear, does not merely provoke Auseinandersetzung from without: it carries it "within," by depriving itself of the traditional basis of theoretical legitimization, the recourse to a given, self-identical, generalizable object. Short of calling this notion of the object into question, and of elaborating other forms of "legitimization," Freudian thought is indeed caught

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in a double-bind: its Bildersprache can be successful only by reproducing and continuing the distortions it seeks to describe, as in the case of the Bilderschrift of the dream. Its individual propositions and assertions can function only by the distortions and dislocations they trace, not by what they represent (darstellen). Or rather, the descriptive, cognitive value of its figures depends on the movement of their inscriptions, the style and sequence of their arrangement, and the relations they establish with each other, rather than on the referents they seem to denote. This in turn requires a readiness to read, not in terms of Setzungen (positions or propositions) but in those of an Auseinandersetzung, a movement of conflictual decomposition and recomposition in which that which is posited (gesetzt) sets itself apart: that is, both demarcates itself from an other to which it is opposed; and de-marks itself by prescribing yet another, third term, which inexorably replaces and displaces the other two. 7 It is the story of this other Auseinandersetzung that must now be retold.

Metapsychology Set Apart

That Freud's "metapsychological" speculations might bear any kind of structural relationship to his polemics against Adler and Jung would at first glance seem itself to be far-fetched speculation. The effort to integrate his observations and descriptions into a larger, theoretical framework-the motivation and purpose of the metapsychology-can be traced back to Freud's earliest analytical writings. The Project of 1895 and the seventh chapter of The Interpretation ofDreams are elaborate, if preliminary, essays in metapsychology. Moreover, the project of composing a coherent body of theoretical texts under the general tide, "Prolegomena to a Metapsychology" (Zur Vorbereitung einer Metapsychologie) is first mentioned by Freud in 1915, a year and a half after the break with Jung. Freud himself certainly would have denied any such connection. Indeed, his overall conception of intellectual and literary endeavor leaves little place for the influence of others: No one writes to achieve fame, which anyhow is of a very transitory nature, nor for the illusion of immortality. Surely we write first of all to satisfY something within ourselves, not for other people. Of course, when others recognize one's efforts, it increases the inner gratification, but nevertheless we write in the first place for ourselves, following an inner impulse. 1

And yet, Freud's entire theoretical effort to articulate the importance of the unconscious belies the clear-cut distinction between "inner impulse"

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or gratification, and "other people." If the unconscious means anything whatsoever, it is that the relation of self and others, inner and outer, cannot be grasped as an interval between polar opposites but rather as an irreducible dislocation of the subject in which the other inhabits the self as its condition of possibility. Such dislocation is perhaps most evident in Freud's final "topology" of the psyche, and in particular in the relation of ego to superego. The superego defines the aporetic identity of the subject: it represents both the ideal toward which the ego strives, and the interdictory limit it can never attain. As such, the superego embodies the indispensable and irreducible element of alterity, in which both intrapsychic and metapsychic moments converge. "Inner gratification" thus depends on recognition by this instance, which combines both the history of the individual subject and that of the society and culture to which it belongs. If the "something within ourselves" that comprises the addressee of writing is bound up with the superego-and according to this last conception of Freud, it must be-this is tantamount to acknowledging that in writing for "ourselves," we inevitably write for an other that can never be identified with the self, since the latter defines its identity in relation to that other. If the subject can thus articulate itself only in and through an ambivalent relation to an other that it can neither fully assimilate nor totally exclude, the same holds for the psychoanalytic project itself. To define itself, it must simultaneously set itself apart from what it is not. That such a setting-apart is ineluctably haunted by what it seeks to exclude is particularly striking in regard to Freud's metapsychology, which, he writes, is intended "to clarify and deepen the theoretical assumptions upon which a psychoanalytic system could be based" (S.E. 15, 219). Written in 1916, this assertion comes a scant two years after Freud had definitively condemned and excommunicated Adler and Jung from the psychoanalytic movement precisely because their thought was too systematic, speculative, and narcissistic. But if the metapsychology is to provide the theoretical foundations for "a psychoanalytic system," will it be any less speculative and narcissistic? If psychoanalysis itself cannot avoid a certain systematicity, it can also not disregard the problems raised by its critique of Adler and Jung. It must therefore demonstrate that its own "translation" of unconscious "material" does not succumb to the same falsifications and re-

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ductions it attributes to its competitors. Freud's attempt to establish a basis for this distinction, in the essay intended to inaugurate the series of meta psychological texts, Drives and their Vicissitudes, indicates some of the difficulties this entails: The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then proceeding to group, classifY and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the materials at hand, ideas derived from various sources and certainly not the fruit of the new experience only. Still more indispensable are such ideas-which will later become the fundamental concepts of the science-as the material is further elaborated. They must at first necessarily possess some measure of uncertainty; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their contents. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by repeated references to the material of observation, from which we seem to have drawn our abstract ideas, but which is in point of fact subject to them. (S.E. 14, 117) This passage, which also serves as a general methodological introduction to the metapsychology, exemplifies Freud's mode of thinking and of writing. For the passage is remarkable not simply for what it asserts but perhaps even more so, for the manner in which those assertions are inscribed: read in relation to one another, the individual statements undermine and displace the propositions they advance. Thus, if Freud begins by designating "description" as "the true beginning of scientific activity," he then proceeds to argue that description is never simply a beginning at all, inasmuch as it presupposes always and inevitably, "certain abstract ideas," which themselves derive not solely from experience-from individual experience, that is-but from "various sources." Far from establishing the "true beginning of scientific activity," then, Freud's text demonstrates that there is no such "true beginning." Instead of a reassuring answer to a familiar question, we are left with a problem: how do those "abstract ideas," drawn from "various sources" and not from individual experience alone, operate? The answer is not to be found in explicit discussions but in Freud's metapsychological "practice" itself: that is, in a style of writing that ineluctably diverges from the propositional content of its individual assertions. The term most apt to designate this dynamic divergence, by which Freud's concepts articulate and disarticulate themselves, is: Auseinandersetzung. I shall retrace it at

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work in three of the most important metapyschological notions: primary and secondary process, repression, and anxiety.

Primary and Secondary Process Freud's effort to articulate the psyche in terms of a primary and a secondary process is as old as psychoanalytic thought itself. In the Project of 1895 Freud distinguishes "primary psychic processes," in which "the wish-cathexis tends towards hallucination, which in turn entails the full development of displeasure and of defense," from "secondary processes," which involve "moderation of the former ... through correct evaluation of reality-signs," and which "are only possible by virtue of an inhibition of the ego" (Origins ofPsychoanalysis [New York, 1977], pp. 388-89). It was not until the seventh chapter of the Interpretation ofDreams, however, that Freud attempted to give a comprehensive account of these two psychic processes. This elaboration was inscribed in the train of reasoning that led Freud to the conclusion that "the most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness" (S.E. 5, 593). The theory of primary and secondary processes emerges as an attempt to account for this possibility. The point of departure is Freud's analysis of the dream-work: It will be seen that the chief characteristic of these processes is that the whole stress is laid upon making the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and the proper meaning of the psychic elements to which the cathexes are attached are treated as being of little consequence. (S.E. 5, 597)

Freud's earlier-quoted warning against interpreting the dream-images in terms of their pictorial (or representational) content, rather than by virtue of their relations to one another, finds its objective correlative and explanation in what he designates as the "primary process," that mode of articulation in which "the content and the proper meaning of psychic elements" count less than their capacity to render energy-cathexes "mobile and capable of discharge." Mental energy is tenuously "attached" to a representation, while remaining ready to detach itself if and when tension rises above a certain threshold. To understand the implications and consequences of the mobility of

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energy-cathexes, which is the distinctive feature of the primary process, it is helpful to recall the manner in which Freud derives this process from what he calls "the exigencies of life" (die Not des Lebens). Such exigencies first make themselves felt as the child's "major somatic needs," whichgiven the helplessness of the infant-only "outside help" can fulfill. Such needs and the alleviation of the tension they produce constitute the first "experiences of satisfaction," when the "internal stimulus" and the unpleasant tensions it engenders have been reduced by external intervention (most often on the part of mother or nurse). However much Freud begins by stressing the quantitative, energetic, "economic" aspect of this experience of satisfaction, he does not fail to underscore its equally important qualitative side. For it is precisely through this qualitative element that the process ceases to be merely organic or physiological and becomes psychological. Freud links this qualitative side to the operation of perception and of memory:

An essential component of this experience of satisfaction [Befriedigungserlebnis] is a particular perception (that of nourishment, in our example), the memory image of which remains associated thenceforward with the memory-trace of the excitation produced by the need. (S.E. 5, 565)

The next time the excitation occurs, the same memory image is produced automatically, through a kind of reflex: An impulse of this kind [i.e., one that seeks to reproduce the previous perception] is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfillment of the wish, and the shortest path to the fulfillment of the wish is one leading directly from the excitation produced by the need to a complete cathexis of the perception. Nothing prevents us from assuming that there was a primitive state of the psychic apparatus in which this path was actually traversed, that is, in which wishing ended in hallucination. Thus, the aim of this first psychic activity was to produce a "perceptual identity" [eine Wahrnehmungsidentitiit]-a repetition of the perception linked to the satisfaction of the need. (S.E. 5, 566)

This offers a dynamic explanation of why the figurative writing of the dream does not operate with simple, straightforward images. What Freud here calls the "perceptual identity" is formed from the material of perception, but that material does not function by virtue of what it represents. For its representational,,or ideational content-its Vorstellungsinhalt-

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functions only as a sign of something radically different, something that is unrepresentable as such, since it consists of a change in tension, a quantitative, differential alteration in the distribution of energy, producing a qualitative effect: the transition from pain to pleasure. What is decisive in the notion of perceptual identity is that the identity involved is the result of a repetition in which the qualitative content functions simply as a formal support for the unpresentable experience of satisfaction it is meant to conJure. As long as the cathexis of representations-i.e., of memory-images -occurs under the direct domination of the pleasure-principle; as long, that is, as the psychic stability and accessibility of such cathexes remain a function of their proximity to pleasurable experiences (which, for Freud, means the avoidance of tension rather than the search for pleasure), it is the primary process that characterizes psychic operation. Under the pressures of the "exigencies of life," however, the psyche is constrained to develop another mode of operation, the secondary process: The bitter experience of life must have changed this primitive thought-activity into a more expedient secondary one. The establishment of a perceptual identity along the short path of regression within the apparatus does not have the same result elsewhere in the mind as does the cathexis of the same perception from without. Satisfaction does not follow; the need persists .... In order to arrive at a more efficient expenditure of psychical energy, it is necessary to bring the regression to a halt before it becomes complete, so that it does not proceed beyond the memory image, and is able to seek our other paths which lead eventually to the desired perceptual identity being established from the direction of the external world. This inhibition of regression and the subsequent diversion of the excitation become the task of a second system. (S.E. 5, 566) In other words, once it is clear that the impulses of the primary process are not only nonproductive but counterproductive, allowing tensions to mount rather than eliminating them, the psyche is forced to develop a mode of influencing the external causes of tension in order to change them in the desired manner. This, however, presupposes an activity other than hallucination; reality must be apprehended, inspected, even and especially where it has become a source of pain and of discomfort (Unlust). The psyche must develop the capacity of forming representations (perceptions, memory-images, concepts), even if these are associated with un-

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pleasant experiences. The mobile cathexes of the primary process must therefore yield progressively to the more stable ones of the secondary process. Or, as Freud puts it, the "regressive" tendencies to hallucinate must be "inhibited." The problem, of course, is to provide an adequate account of how such inhibition takes place. At this relatively early stage in his thinking, in the Interpretation ofDreams, Freud tends to construe the process in terms of a quasi-automatic reflex-reaction of a self-identical subject to the external "exigencies of life." But this binary model leaves him unable to explain the manner in which such a subject passes from a "primary" to a "secondary" process, which, if it is obviously necessary to its survival, is not therefore intelligible. To argue that such a development must happen, if the child is to survive, is not to explain how it happens. However, if the author of the Interpretation ofDreams is not yet in a position to account for the inhibition of regression in emphatically psychoanalytical terms, he is able to indicate the decisive element of such an account: the process of "binding," by which mental energy is "attached" to representations. The quality of this attachment is what distinguishes the mobile cathexes of the primary process from the more stable ones of the secondary process. But to evaluate the nature of the rwo different types of "binding," we must reflect for a moment on the very distinction Freud makes berween "primary" and "secondary" processes, a distinction that prefigures subsequent oppositions such as primary and secondary narcissism, masochism, and repression. The relationship "primary/secondary" is described by Freud as being both structural and chronological; at the same time, however, he acknowledges that it is a "theoretical fiction": When I described one of the psychical processes occurring in the mental apparatus as the "primary" one, what I had in mind was not merely considerations of relative importance and efficiency; I also intended to choose a name which would give an indication of its chronological priority. It is true that, so far as we know, no psychical apparatus exists which possesses a primary process only and that such an apparatus is to that extent a theoretical fiction. But this much is a fact: the primary processes are present in the mental apparatus from the first, while it is only during the course of life that the secondary processes unfold and come to inhibit the primary ones; it may even be that their complete domination is not attained until the prime oflife. In consequence of the belated appear-

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ance of the secondary processes, the core of our being, consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible to the understanding and inhibition of the preconscious. (S.E. 5, 603)

If Freud designates the primary process as a theoretical fiction, it is only by virtue of its nonobservability; the "fact" that such a process is present in the psyche "from the first" is not affected by this admission. And yet, Freud's own description suggests that the "fictionality" of the notion of primary process may be far more radical in scope. For there is another aspect of the primary process that renders its primacy highly questionable: for any cathexis whatsoever to be formed, even the highly mobile cathexes of the primary process, energy must be bound to representations so as to insure a minimal reproducibility of those representations, for instance as "perceptual identities." Yet in describing the primary process as a reflex-action of hallucinatory reproduction, Freud is unable to offer any explanation of how such reproduction effectively occurs. "Inhibition," necessary for the stability of a cathexis, is associated exclusively with the secondary process. If this is so, than either the primary process is not a process of cathexis, or, if it is-as indeed it must be for it to be distinguishable from a mere reflex-then it must already entail, from the first, the inhibition of the secondary process in order to constitute itself at all. The "fictionality" of the primary process would then relate not merely to the empirical unverifiability of what it seeks to designate, but to its own structure as a theoretical concept. For the condition of the primary process, entailing the binding of energy to representations (cathexis), would be the inhibitory force of the secondary process Freud seeks to oppose to it? The result of this "theoretical fiction," then, is by no means simply negative: if the primary process is unthinkable except as an effect of the secondary process, what is primary-in the sense of being theoretically, and practically, irreducible-is the notion of inhibition as the necessary condition for cathexis. This "primacy" of inhibition is even more the inhibition of the Primary. As such, however, it marks much more than a mere paradox in Freud's thinking. Rather, it indicates the necessity of a shift in conceptualization, from terms that designate self-identical objects, to those that signal irreducible conflict.

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Repression Freud's differentiation of the psychic apparatus into primary and secondary processes culminates in the question: how is libidinal energy bound to representations? The problem of binding, involving the "inhibition" of the tendency for energy to distribute itself in accordance with the "pleasure principle," is at the heart of Freud's theory of repression: "Let us bear this firmly in mind, for it is the key to the whole theory of repression: the second system can only cathect an idea if it is in a position to inhibit any development of unpleasure that may proceed from it" (S.E. 5, 601). Repression is thus situated at the juncture of primary and secondary processes, which are separated and distinguished from one another by the degree of "inhibition" they admit. At first, Freud tends to describe repression as an immediate effect and element of the primary process: "This effortless and regular avoidance by the psychical process of the memory of anything that had once been distressing affords us the prototype and first example of psychical repression" (S.E. 5, 6oo). The "prototype and first example" of repression is described here, in accordance with the general character of the primary process, as operating in an "effortless and regular" manner, thus bringing about the quasi-automatic avoidance of the distressing memory-image or trace." But if we scrutinize Freud's use of the term, we discover that this "prototype" (in German: Vorbild, literally: prefiguration)-the primary, original form out of which the more observable, secondary phenomena are said to develop-distinguishes itself from the latter by lacking what is precisely their essential characteristic. In the case of repression, what the prototype lacks is the element of conflict. The "first example" of repression is described as a movement of "avoidance," Abwendung(literally: turning away from). This notion of repression as a kind of flight will provide Freud with a major point of reference in seeking to conceptualize the term. However, if the comparison is useful, it is ultimately by virtue of the dissimilarity it engenders. For what distinguishes repression from flight in general is that it can never escape from what it is fleeing, since the latter, as Freud repeatedly insists, is endopsychic. And the psyche cannot simply flee from what it in some sense "con tams. . " In short, if repression is the response to, and articulation of, an en-

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dopsychic conflict, it must involve not merely an action, "flight," but an interaction constituting a reciprocal alteration of the agents concerned. Such a process of interaction, although not discussed explicitly by Freud in his first attempts to come to grips with the notion, is nevertheless implied in the term he uses: Abwendung, which might best be translated not as "avoidance," but as "aversion." For the German word signifies both a turning away of the subject, in the sense of avoiding an unpleasant perception or memory, and also a warding off of the undesirable object ("eine Gefahr abwenden" =to avert a danger). If, in the passage cited, the syntax makes it clear that Abwendung is being used to describe only the evasive movement of consciousness, in subsequent discussions Freud will acknowledge that the process of repression must be considered as a double movement that affects not merely the repressing instance but also that which is being repressed (the originally cathected representation). But to construe repression in this manner, as simply a redistribution of energy from one representation to another, fails to resolve the problem posed by the notion of primary and secondary process. For if their distinction presupposes the efficacy of "inhibition" to bridle the volatile energy of the primary process, the manner in which this operation is to be conceived remains a mystery. In introducing and elaborating the notion of repression, however, Freud takes a decisive step toward conceptualizing the irreducibly conflictual nature of the psychic processes he seeks to describe. The two terms in which this conceptualization of conflict3 articulates itself are anticathexis (Gegenbesetzung) and hypercathexis ( Uberbesetzung). These terms-the transcription of that "capital X" into the apparently more familiar figural language of the metapsychological Bildersprache-stand in very different relation to the process of repression. Since that of anticathexis is far more explicit, I will discuss it first. If a representation can be shunted aside, excluded from consciousness, this can occur only by means of another representation taking its place. The representation that replaces that which is repressed Freud designates as an "anticathexis." The latter functions as a kind of counterweight, absorbing some of the energy hitherto attached to the representation that is now excluded from consciousness. Gegenbesetzung thus designates both the substitute-representation, and the process of cathexis by which such substitution is effected. Such a process is not accomplished in a single act,

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once and for all; it must be constantly renewed, demanding an incessant expense of energy and a series of reiterated events. These reiterations are by no means simple repetitions of the same, since they often involve shifts, both in the relation of the conflicting cathexes to one another, and in the individual representations employed. Although the relation of anticathexis to repression is thus clear and explicit in Freud's work, that of hypercathexis is not. Freud used the term primarily to designate the economic process by which a particular representation becomes conscious by drawing attention to itself. Since hypercathexis is thus related to consciousness, it would seem to have little significance for repression, which designates the process by which representations are barred from consciousness. The conflictual dynamics of repression entails, however, not merely the exclusion of ideas from consciousness, but concomitantly and necessarily their replacement by other ideas-anticathexes-which in turn are conscious. A durable repression, therefore, entails the formation not merely of anticathexes, but of hypercathexes as well. Indeed, it could be argued that anticathexis and hypercathexis name the same process, the former from a dynamic (conflictual) perspective, the latter from an economtc one. The problem that thereby emerges for the metapsychology is to articulate the precise relation between these two perspectives, or aspects, of repression. The question thus posed by the relation of anti- and hypercathexis is, in short, none other than that of the mechanism of inhibition, as the following passage from The Interpretation ofDreams makes clear: The tendency of thinking must therefore move in the direction of acquiring ever greater freedom from the exclusive regulation by the unpleasure principle, and of keeping, through intellectual effort, the development of affects to a minimum, which can be exploited as a signal. This more sophisticated achievement is to be attained through a new hypercathexis effectuated by consciousness. (S.E. 5, 6o2)

Inasmuch as repression entails the substitution of one representation by another, which is accessible to consciousness, repression depends on a process of hypercathexis that Freud, in this passage, associates with the formation of what he calls a "signal." In regard to repression, then, hypercathexis designates the process by which the repressed representation

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is replaced by another representation, which gains access to consciousness as a "signal" of the unpleasurable, repressed idea. Since repression, in Freud's work, ultimately designates the conflictual process by which the psyche articulates and differentiates itself, the importance of his notion of signal can hardly be overestimated. For it marks the manner in which consciousness develops its organization under the sway of the unpleasure principle. The significance of this conception of signal is demonstrated, negatively as it were, by Freud's efforts to provide an account of the mechanism of repression without including the signal in his explanation, as for instance in the following passage, also from The Interpretation ofDreams: The memories, on the basis of which the unconscious wish brings about the release of affect, were never accessible to the Pes (Preconscious); hence, this release cannot be inhibited either. Precisely by virtue of this development of affect, the representations remain inaccessible even by way of the preconscious thoughts to which they have transferred their wishful force. Instead, the unpleasure-principle takes over and causes the preconscious to turn away [sich abwendet] from these transference-thoughts. They are left to themselves, "repressed," and thus it is that the presence of a store of infantile memories, inaccessible to the Pes from the very first, becomes the precondition of repression. (S.E. 5, 604)

Instead of describing "inhibition" as the active force, intervening to curtail the "release of affect" (Ajfiktentbindung), Freud introduces the notion of "repression" to designate the more passive move of the preconscious, turning away from the unpleasant thoughts, which, "left to themselves," somehow constitute an original nucleus of "infantile memories ... the precondition of repression." The tautology of this account is unmistakable: to explain repression, Freud posits (setzt) an origin in which it has already taken place: the constitution of a "store" of memories, excluded from consciousness "from the very first." Such circularity haunts all of Freud's repeated attempts to explain the conflictual workings of the psyche in genetic terms, by going back to an origin-a "primary" state-from which the more observable phenomena can be derived. This is why the perspective he adopts toward the problem fifteen years later, in his essay on "Repression," represents a significant and productive shift:

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Psychoanalytic experience ... forces us to the conclusion that repression is not a defense-mechanism present from the very beginning, and that it cannot occur until a sharp distinction has been established between conscious and unconscious activities. (S.E. 14, 147) In thus restating the problem, Freud begins to move away from a genetic model toward a more structural one: "Until we have learnt more about ... what differentiates consciousness from the unconscious ... all we can do is to assemble in purely descriptive fashion" material gleaned from clinical observation, Freud concludes. His next move, however, is not to "assemble" clinical observations, but rather to offer a highly speculative hypothesis that appears to be a relapse into the genetic mode of explanation already discussed: We have reason therefore to assume a primal repression [Urverdriingung], aninitial phase of repression which consists in denying [versagt] mental representations [ Vorstellungs-&prasentanz] access to consciousness. This is accompanied by a fixation; from this moment on, the representation concerned remains unchanged together with the drive that is attached to it. (S.E. 14, 140) Despite appearances, the hypothesis of an Urverdrangung does not merely repeat the previous distinction of primary and secondary processes: it combines the two by associating them with what Freud calls "fixation." The point of departure is no longer described as a pure state of unbound energy, but rather as a particular combination of binding (Bindung) and release (Entbindung). Freud's thinking thus shifts from a binary scheme, based on the original priority of one of its terms, to a ternary model in which no one term is conceivable apart from its relation to the others. Bindung and Entbindung thus emerge, not as the poles of an opposition, but as aspects of a process of Verbindung (combination, connection): "We are inclined ... to forget too readily that repression does not hinder the drive-representative from continuing to exist in the unconscious, from organizing itself further, forming offshoots and developing connections [ Verbindungen anzuknupfen]" (S.E. 14, 149). What now appears to characterize unconscious cathexes is neither their mobility nor their stability, but the particular manner in which the two are combined.

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The [repressed drive-representative] develops in a more unchecked and luxuriant fashion if it is withdrawn by repression from conscious influence. It proliferates [wuchert] in the dark, so to speak, finding extreme forms of expression which, when they are translated and presented to the neurotic, seem not only alien to him, but also ... terrifYing. (S.E. 14, 141)

Freud's figural description of repression thus implies a nucleus of representation-the Triebreprdsentanz-which is by no means stable, self-identical, or static, but rather metastatic, weaving a terrifYing tissue of relationships that only becomes accessible to consciousness in its outlying reaches. But if "fixation," and hence repression, can no longer be conceived in terms of the simple polarity of bound and unbound energy, we still have no account of the factors involved in the establishment of such fixity. We know only that it entails both the proliferation of Verbindungen, and the exclusion of such Verbindungen from consciousness. If, however, we reread the formulation in which Freud describes this exclusion, we find, barely legible, the hint of a possible explanation. In the passage already cited, Freud writes that repression "denies mental representations access to consciousness." But the English translation eliminates a connotation of the German text. The word translated into English as "denies" is versagt: "Die Obernahme ins Bewusste [wird] versagt." Versagen literally signifies interdict, and the linguistic reference it contains is bound up (verknupfi) with another linguistic figure, used to designate the "passage" or transition from the unconscious to consciousness, and which, precisely, appears to be interdicted by repression: the term, "Obersetzung," translation. One of Freud's earliest descriptions of repression, in a letter to Fliess, speaks of it as "the interdiction of translation," "die Versagung der Obersetzung" (Origins, p. 175). All of the questions we have been addressing-the nature of cathexis (Besetzung), its relation to hypercathexis and countercathexis (Oberbesetzung, Gegenbesetzung), the operations ofbinding, unbinding, and combining (Bindung, Entbindung, Verbindung)-converge in the essay "The Unconscious," in which Freud "discovers" what in a certain sense he "knew'' all along: that the "sharp distinction" he has been searching for, between conscious and unconscious, involves nothing other than a particular form of translation and of interdiction ( Versagung):

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It strikes us all at once that now we know what the difference is between a con-

scious and an unconscious representation .... The conscious representation comprises the thing-representation [Sachvorstellung] plus the corresponding word-representation [plus der zugehorigen Wortvorstellung], the unconscious one consists in the thing-representation alone .... The system Ucs contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and authentic object-cathexes; the system Pes originates in a hypercathexis of this thing-representation through its being linked [durch die Verknupfong] with the word-representations that correspond to it [mit den ihr entsprechenden Wortvorstellungen uberbesetzt wird]. It is such hypercathexes [ Uberbesetzungen], we may suppose, that bring about a higher psychic organization and make it possible for the primary process to be succeeded by the secondary process which dominates the Pes. We can now also formulate precisely what it is that repression denies to the rejected representation in the transference neurosis: the translation into words capable of remaining attached to the object [die Ubersetzung in Worte, welche mit dem Objekt verknupft bleiben so/len]. The non-verbalized representation, or the non-cathected act, then remains repressed in the Ucs. (S.E. 14, 201-2) The difference between conscious and unconscious thought Freud declares, with an inhabitual enthusiasm (to which we shall return shortly), is nothing more nor less than the possibility of verbalization; that is, of a certain translation. In the case of conscious thought, the hypercathexis (Oberbesetzung) of the "corresponding word-representation" permits the "object-representation" to be translated appropriately; in the case of unconscious thought, we are left with "the thing-representation alone." The seductive simplicity of this account, however, does not resist a moment's reflection. For it presupposes just what Freud's general conception of the primary process excludes: that "the first" cathexes were also "authentic" representations of the objects they cathect. Nothing could be further from Freud's notion of mental development, as we have had occasion to discuss in regard to the concept of "perceptual identities." The latter, it will be recalled, are in fact the most "inauthentic" representations of objects, with which they are linked metonymically, as it were, by the concomitance of an experience of satisfaction that itself bears no intrinsic relation to the objects cathected. Such qualitative nonidentity is precisely what characterizes the cathexes of the primary process, as opposed to the more stable cathexes of the secondary process. To describe those "first" object-cathexes

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as "authentic" is once again to presuppose identity instead of explaining how it comes about. And yet, Freud's entire "discovery" here is based on just such a presupposition. The notion of "translation" that he employs to distinguish conscious from unconscious thought requires the existence of stable, self-identical "object -representations" prior to their verbalization. What Freud is trying to argue is that repression denies the translation of one kind of identity (object-cathexes) into another (word-cathexes); that, in short, repression is merely a privative process, contributing nothing of its own to the articulation of the psyche but only depriving the latter of self-consciousness. Read in this light, one can interpret the enthusiastic tone with which Freud announces this discovery as itself the symptom of a repression, or, as Nietzsche would have put it, of a very "active forgetting." For, taken at face value, Freud's assertion does little more than repeat the observations he had made some twenty years earlier, in the Project of 1895, where he had conjectured that "speech associations" were responsible for the emergence of "conscious, observant thought," as well as of"memory." 4 The problem, then as later, remains that of explaining just how this linguistic function is to be conceived within the context of the mental operations being described. In the earlier text, Freud touches on one aspect of "word-images" that seems relevant to this question, without elaborating upon it: the peculiar advantage of such associations, he suggests, relates to the fact that words are "closed (few in number) and exclusive." If Freud does not take up this remark later, it is probably because his work on dreams demonstrated that word-associations need not necessarily be "closed," even if the words themselves are "few in number"; on the contrary, he discovered that words lend themselves to the condensations and displacements of the dream-work precisely because they are open and overdetermined. In short, words need not function to establish stable "correspondences," but on the contrary, to dissolve them. When Freud therefore contends, in the passage cited, that repression denies the translation of thing-representations into the "corresponding" word-representations, he is in fact not presenting a solution as much as indicating, implicitly, a problem: that of how such verbal correspondences are constituted for the psyche. It is in response to this question that the relation of repression to translation must be rethought. For Freud's assertion

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notwithstanding, our previous discussion has demonstrated that repression itself entails a certain form of translation: an objectionable representation is repressed only insofar as it is replaced by-i.e., translated intoan amicathexis, which is simultaneously hypercathected as the conscious surrogate of the repressed thought. The difference between the translation of repression, in this sense, and the translation that repression is said by Freud to impede thus emerges as the difference between two different kinds of translation. What distinguishes the translation of consciousness from that of the unconscious is not, as a rapid reading of Freud might suggest, verbalization as such, but rather a specific kind of verbalization. Consciousness entails a translation into words that correspond to an object in an enduring manner. But this notion of correspondence-upon which Freud's entire differentiation of consciousness from the unconscious here ultimately depends-again raises more questions than it answers. First, as we have seen, there is the question of just how object-cathexes themselves come to be stabilized. Second, there is the question of the relation of the psychic to the social order, inasmuch as enduring and corresponding verbal associations imply the relation of the individual subject to a preexisting language-system, and hence to a social and cultural context. Third, in view of the overdetermined nature of words, manifest in dreams, jokes, and other articulations of the unconscious, the notion of "correspondence" raises the question of the intrapsychic mechanism that establishes verbal identity. If the verbal discourse of consciousness tends to be "closed and exclusive," how does this closure and exclusion come about? This last question impels us toward a response that runs counter to the explicit assertion of Freud in the passage cited above, and yet one that, I believe, is alone compatible with his general account of repression: repression, far from simply blocking the verbalization of conscious discourse, is also its indispensable precondition. By excluding certain representations from consciousness, and by simultaneously replacing them with others, repression arrests what would otherwise be the interminable and indeterminable play of the primary process under the rule of the pleasure principle, and thereby allows all cathexis to take place. In short, the hypercathexis of verbal-representations can operate only by virtue of the exclusions operated by repression, through the mechanism of anti-

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cathexis. Or again: only through being anticathecred do words acquire the quality of closure and exclusivity that render them the privileged and distinctive medium of consciousness. Repression, then, emerges as nothing less than the condition of identity in the psychic order; but if this is so, we can begin to understand the difficulties faced in trying to identify repression itself For although it is the condition of identity, whether that of the "thing-representation" or of the "word-representation," repression is not identical-to-itself, and this for two reasons. First, because it produces the conditions of identity, that is of a certain closure, only by excluding: that is, by installing a relation to exteriority at the core of all that is enclosed. This is why every cathexis, and in particular the hypercathexes of consciousness, is also inevitably an anticathexis. But if this is so, then the same must hold of "repression itself": the hypercathexis of the word, "repression," designating the conflictual operation of ~he psyche, is itself an anticathexis. Just what it counters we have already touched on; the intrapsychic mechanism of repression, as word and as object, is in turn dependent on interdictions that antedate and transcend the realm of the purely psychic: repression depends on systems of social constraints and sanctions. Its power to exclude and hence to enclose-which is nothing short of its power to allow cathexes and, hence, the psychic, to take place-depends on a place that it does not constitute, but that is already structured by metapsychic forces and traditions. The nature of this dependency is suggested by the two words that Freud uses to designate what in English we have had to translate as "correspondence": zugehorig and entsprechend. The first term is formed from the root, hiiren, to hear or listen; the second, from sprechen, to speak. If the "word-representations" of conscious discourse can hope to "correspond" to "object-representations," it is by virtue of "listening" and "addressing," two processes about which we will have more to say in connection with Freud's theory of jokes. Here it will perhaps be sufficient to note that such listening and addressing reinscribes the problem of consciousness and of the unconscious in a discursive process that can no longer be construed dyadically as the relations of "words" to "things," nor as being purely "psychic" in character. Repression, in short, consists not merely in the denial of translation,

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but in its interdiction. This Versagung, however, is not merely the absence or negation of language, since it itself constitutes a mode of translation. But the translation of Vt-rsagung is ambiguous and ambivalent: it effectuates both the exclusion necessary for the cathexis of a "closed and limited" number of word-representations, and at the same time, by determining those cathexes as anticathexes, it places them in relation to what they exclude. In this sense, the Versagung of repression is nothing other than the "saying" of an Other, or, as Freud will call it, a signal. For the significance of the signal is always elsewhere, different from and deferring that which it represents, designates, reproduces. This is why the "object" of the signal is inevitably a danger, and its subject: anxiety.

Anxiety The position of anxiety in Freud's thought is a curious one. On the one hand, it is closely related to his conceptions of the primary and secondary processes, and of repression, and as such is situated close to the center of his concerns. Indeed, for many years Freud considered anxiety to be the direct product of repression, before he then reversed this view, declaring anxiety to be not the effect but the cause of repression. 5 On the other hand, notwithstanding Freud's lifelong interest in the problem, anxiety stands apart among the phenomena with which he dealt. Unlike the other major categories we have discussed, "anxiety" was not a term introduced by psychoanalysis, nor did it designate a phenomenon whose significance was so decisively transformed by Freud's work that it could be said to have been rediscovered by him-as was the case, for instance, with sexuality or hysteria. There has, therefore, been little tendency among students or followers of Freud to assign anxiety that signal importance for psychoanalysis that Freud himself never doubted it possessed. 6 "The problem of anxiety," he wrote in the Introductory Lectures, "is a nodal point in which the most diverse and most important questions converge, an enigma, the solution of which would doubtless shed considerable light upon our entire psychic life" (S.E. 16, 373). Given the importance Freud attributed to the problem, it is not surprising that anxiety drew his attention from his earliest attempts to articulate a systematic account of the psyche. The "enigma" it posed also constituted a major challenge to the

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science psychoanalysis sought to become: could it succeed in giving a more satisfactory account of the problem than had hitherto existed, its claims to scientific credibility would be difficult to dismiss. Freud's various efforts to explore and explain anxiety in psychoanalytic terms invariably provide us with a demonstration of their theoretical fecundity as well as of their limitations. In his initial writings on the subject (1893-1895)/ Freud seeks to explain anxiety by reference to sexuality, and along much the same lines as hysteria. In this account, anxiety results when sexual tension has accumulated to a point where the psyche is incapable of dealing with it; the excess excitation is thereby "converted" into the physical manifestations characteristic of anxiety, such as heart palpitation, sweating, shortness of breath, etc. Such manifestations, Freud argued, were to be understood as "surrogates of ... the specific action" toward which "sexual excitation" tends: discharge, which had been blocked. What distinguishes anxiety from hysteria, therefore, is the specific kind of blockage at work; in the case of anxiety, the blockage consists in a purely somatic process, which, as opposed to hysteria, is not susceptible of any further psychological analysis. Thus, if hysteria derives from a conflict of desire, anxiety was to be considered as the product of an obstacle standing in the way of the fulfillment of a purely physical striving: that of sexual energy to attain discharge. Unable to reach discharge, such energy becomes "free-floating" and is discharged through the surrogate symptoms that provide the physical accompaniment to the "anxious expectation" in which Freud discerned the "core-symptom of (anxiety) neurosis," and which consists in the tendency of the free-floating energy to "attach itself to any suitable representation at any time" (S.E. 3, 93). Thus described, anxiety is located on the periphery both of the psyche and of psychoanalysis itself. As the result of the interruption of what Freud construed as a self-contained, physical process, anxiety excludes any further psychological analysis: that is, any further psychoanalysis. At the same time, it represents virtually a prototype of the kind of conflict psychoanalysis came to declare as its privileged domain: inhibited or conflictual sexuality. The peculiar position of anxiety, marginal and central at once, is particularly manifest in Freud's identification of its primary or character-

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istic cause: coitus interruptus. This term designates the blockage of sexual discharge that Freud conceived to be at the source of anxiety. But in another, more figurative sense, the term also can be seen to describe not merely the cause, but the effect of anxiety. For if the latter consists in the accumulation of energy in a "free-floating" state, then what has been interrupted is the "coming-together"-the coitus-of such energy with mental representations. What characterizes anxiety, then, is precisely what characterizes the "primary process": the absence of stable, enduring cathexes as the precondition of pleasurable discharge. It is no wonder, then, that Freud soon came to identify anxiety with the manifestation of the "unpleasure principle," and hence also with repression. In The Interpretation ofDreams, he describes anxiety as resulting when repression breaks down and the repressed begins to reimpose itself upon consciousness. Freud thus conceives repression as the condition or cause of anxiety, which is associated with the return of the repressed. Nevertheless, his subsequent reversal of this conception is already implicit in his "economic" theory of anxiety. For if repression presupposes the existence of "cathexis," anxiety calls the very process ofcathexis itselfinto question. To employ Freud's later characterization of repression: if repression consists in the nontranslation of a "thing-representation" into its corresponding "word-representation," anxiety entails an even more radical nontranslation, that of energy ("excitation") into representations. The specific problem posed by anxiety, then, is that of the relation of the psychic to the nonpsychic, or in other words, the delimitation ofthe psychic as such. But if anxiety poses this problem, its examination and solution are complicated by the fact that anxiety itself both simulates and dissimulates the relation of psychic to nonpsychic, of "internal" to "external": The psyche arrives at the affect of anxiety when it feels itself incapable of fulfilling, through the appropriate reaction, a task (danger) emanating.from without; it develops anxiety-neurosis when it notes [merkt] its incapacity of alleviating (sexual) excitation that has arisen endogenically. It acts, therefore, as though it had projected this excitation outwards. (S.E. 3, n2; emphasis in original) It would not be an exaggeration to assert that this passage, from Freud's first published essay on the subject ("On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia as 'Anxiety-Neurosis'," r895) con-

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denses both his later approach to the problem and the difficulties he will encounter in attempting to resolve it. On the one hand, anxiety is described as a reaction of the psyche to an external danger; on the other, that reaction entails the "projection" of the dangerous "excitation" outwards. Such a projection thereby creates a second exteriority, which in a certain sense takes the place of the first. As we shall see, it is not always easy to tell the two apart, whether for the anxious psyche, or for the theory that seeks to comprehend it. All of Freud's efforts to render anxiety intelligible, therefore, will hinge upon the manner in which he determines the external danger to which anxiety reacts, the process, that is, in which the extrapsychic imposes itself upon the intrapsychic. The ambiguity of the problem is already dearly inscribed in the passage cited: the danger that the psyche confronts approaches it from without ("eine von aussen nahende . .. Gefahr"); but the "excitation" that constitutes the immediate form of that danger arises from within, "endogenically." The difficulty of reconciling these two assertions will be to explain just how the psyche can "note" (merkt) a danger that is both exogenic in origin and endogenic in operation. This difficulty in turn relates to what Freud from the very first recognized to be the double character of anxiety: on the one hand, it entails a psychic reaction that is often expedient and functional in the face of "real" danger; on the other, it can become a reaction that reproduces, as it were, the very danger it strives to react against. An adequate theory of anxiety must therefore be able to explain the phenomenon both as a normal, necessary, and useful defense, and as a neurotic, dysfunctional threat. If Freud's initial approach to the question focused primarily on the latter aspect, he came increasingly to see neurotic or pathological anxiety as an offshoot of its realistic or expedient form. The text in which he finally sought to articulate this position most fully is, of course, Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety, the last of the great metapsychological essays, published in 1926. This study was written in response to the most serious challenge posed to Freud's thought since that of Adler and Jung: Rank's theory of the birth trauma. This theory posed a danger to Freud not merely because of the renown of its author, who had been one of his closest collaborators, but because it in substance appropriated many of Freud's own concep-

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tions concerning anxiety. The idea of the birth trauma, as Freud put it, not without malice, "was originally my own."8 Had Freud sought to describe anxiety as the reaction of the psyche to an external, ultimately non psychic, real danger, then Rank's hypothesis of the birth trauma carried that approach to its logical conclusion. For what danger could be both more "real" and more original than that of birth? "I was obliged," Freud writes, "to go back from the anxiety reaction to the situation of danger that lay behind it" (Inhibitions, p. 87). The manner in which Freud does this constitutes the essence of his effort to rearticulate the problem of anxiety. It is, therefore, of some importance to note that his treatment of anxiety is itself provoked by the challenge-or should we say "danger"?-posed to psychoanalysis by the development of one of its followers. In readdressing the question of "danger," then, Freud is also striving to defend psychoanalysis itself from a threat that, although originating "internally," is now projected as emanating from without. What is at stake, in short, both for the conception of the psyche and for psychoanalysis itself, is the integrity and coherence of a certain "within" in its relations to the "outside"; and that integrity can only be defended by redrawing and reinforcing the lines that set apart inside from outside, psychoanalysis from birth-trauma, Freud from Rank. The problem, however, is that those dividing-lines converge and blur in the notion of danger. Freud thus attacks the problem by seeking to unravel this knot and "nodal point": But what is a 'danger'? In the act of birth there is an objective danger to life. We know what this means in reality. But psychologically speaking this tells us nothing. The danger of birth has as yet no psychical content. (Inhibitions, p. 6)

"Reality," in short, is not sufficient to establish the psychological significance or intelligibility of a danger. And yet, Freud himself will not cease to stress the "real" nature of the danger from which anxiety ultimately arises. And indeed, he must do so if his explanation of anxiety in terms of the danger to which it reacts is to be plausible: if that danger is not determined so as to be independent of the reaction it produces, it will not provide the explanatory basis of the theory Freud is seeking to construct and to defend. Thus, it is not the "reality" of danger as such that Freud will criti-

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cize in Rank, but rather the latter's specific conception of this reality. Rank's effort to retrace all forms of anxiety to the trauma of birth, Freud objects, is based on the assumption that the infant has received certain sensory impressions, in particular of a visual kind, at the time of birth, the renewal of which can recall to its memory the trauma of birth and thus evoke a reaction of anxiety. This assumption is quite unfounded.... It is not credible that a child should retain any but tactile and general sensations relating to the process of birth. (Inhibitions, p. 6) The hypothesis ofRank, Freud therefore implies, errs in much the same way as did that of Adler (to whom he compares him): by hypostasizing the ego. In declaring the birth trauma to be the origin of anxiety, Rank must attribute to the infant mental capacities that in reality are acquired only gradually, with the development of the ego. If birth is a trauma, Freud suggests, it is not one that leaves perceptual, visual traces, but only "tactile and general sensations." Thus, although Freud will agree that anxiety entails the reproduction of a previously experienced "trauma," the manner in which he determines that trauma will diverge radically from that of Rank. Trauma, for Freud, cannot designate any particular, determinate objective reality, for what it entails is precisely the inability of the psyche-or more specifically, of the ego-to determine, its inability to bind or to cathect an excess of energy that therefore tends to overwhelm it. This is why Freud's definition of the trauma is inevitably vague: it derives from a "situation of helplessness." Thus, if the trauma constitutes the point of departure for the development of anxiety, what is decisive is the first displacement of the anxiety-reaction from its origin in the situation of helplessness to an expectation of that situation-that is, to the danger-situation. (Inhibitions, p. 93) This first displacement is decisive because it marks the emergence of subject-object relationship. In marking the shift of energy from an unbound to a bound state, it provides the indispensable condition for the constitution of stable object-cathexes. The reality of an object, as Freud had written in his essay on "Negation" ( Verneinung), is not something that is "discovered" but rather that is "rediscovered," 9 a cathexis that entails the

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repetition of the same. The possibility of such a repetition hinges on an inhibition or deflection of the unpleasure principle that dominates the primary process, which otherwise would tend to produce ever-changing cathexes as an effort to reduce tension. Thus, what Freud here calls the "first displacement" is, strictly considered, not first at all but rather the displacement of the displacements of the primary process, which in turn have culminated in the "situation of helplessness." Through a process of repetition, then, the psyche displaces the displacement of "helplessness" and thus alters the incessant alteration implied by the primary process. It does so by the production of what Freud calls a signal: The signal announces: "I am expecting a situation of helplessness to set in," or "The present situation reminds me of one of the traumatic experiences I have had before .... Anxiety is therefore on the one hand an expectation of a trauma, and on the other, a repetition of it in a mitigated form. (Inhibitions, p. 92)

Through this production of the danger-signal, itself the reproduction of a trauma, what Freud is in fact describing is nothing less than the manner in which the ego constitutes itself by setting itself apart from the indifferentiation of the primary process. If the latter can be said to consist in the incessant alteration of ever-different cathexes-that is, in an indeterminable alterity-anxiety entails the alteration of that alterity through a process of repetition that organizes space and time in terms of a dyadic opposition: that of inner/outer and past/future. In so organizing space and time, anxiety situates the ego as the dividing line between the two opposing poles. In a double, ambiguous but also ambivalent sense, then, anxiety sets the ego apart: it repeats the trauma, bur in an altered form, as something recognizable: "A danger-situation is a recognized, remembered, expected situation of helplessness" (Inhibitions, p. 92). But it also, more literally, sets the ego apart by virtue of the fact that the trauma it repeats, recognizes, and remembers is "itself" both unrecognizable and immemorial. It is unrecognizable because it consists of ever-changing cathexes that can be "recognized" only by being displaced, dislocated, disfigured (ent-stellt). And it is immemorial, because the "actual" situation of helplessness resists the bifurcation into past and future that is the condition of memory and of anticipation.

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This is why the peculiar kind of apprehension that characterizes anxiety and distinguishes it from "fear" is marked by a certain "indeterminancy and objectlessness" (Inhibition, p. 92); for the "danger" that it recognizes and anticipates-that it represents-is in fact as trauma never present as such. The trauma is always in excess of its recognition or representation, and hence danger is only present, or presentable, as the approach of something else. Anxiety thus emerges as the conflictual, contradictory process by which the ego seeks to represent the unrepresentable, to alter alteration and thereby to organize itself: for, as Freud insists, the ego is an organization ... [whose] desexualized energy betrays its origins in its striving for binding and unification, and this compulsion to synthesize increases in proportion to the strength of the ego. (Inhibitions, p. 24)

In signaling the approach of a danger, the ego does not merely react to a given state of affairs that constitutes a potential menace to its organization-although this is how Freud explicitly attempts to present anxiety; rather, it seeks to consolidate its identity by projecting the trauma as an event it can then confront. In short, it seeks to appropriate the "economic" disturbance of incessant displacement by displacing it outwards and forwards, by making it into a Vor-stellung: a re-presentation, to be sure, but also, literally, something that is placed-out-in-front, spatially as well as temporally. Through this process of Vor-stellung, what the ego pre-sents or introduces (again: vor-stellt) is the disfigurement of itself: itself as Entstellung. And it does this by the cathexis of perceptions. If the ego is able to set itself apart from the id, Freud reminds us, it is "in virtue of its intimate connections with the perceptual system-connections which, as we know, constitute its essence and provide the basis of its differentiation from the id" (Inhibitions, p. 18). To be more precise, the ego develops its organization through the formation or cathexis of perceptual objects. These are precisely not the "perceptual identities" of the primary process, which, as we have argued, are not identities at all but rather constantly shifting alterations. But if the question of how such perceptual identities could in fact become identical-the question of the possible "inhibition" of the "unpleasure principle" has hitherto remained unanswered-and

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as such, the driving force of Freud's Auseinandersetzung, first of the primary and secondary processes, and then of repression-a possible response now begins to emerge. For in developing the capacity of indicating the presence of danger, and thereby of temporalizing and temporizing the trauma, the psyche can be seen as striking a compromise with the unpleasure-principle that would allow the repetition of difference, the mobile cathexes of the primary process, to be repeated as more of the same, a movement of identity. A perception that functions as dangersignal signifies not merely the object it represents but the unrepresentable loss of perception itself. The disruptive force of the trauma is thus temporalized, as potential (future) loss, and thereby temporized, since it remains cathected to an object or situation, albeit an ambiguous one. Moreover, the dyadic or dialectical notion of loss implies both that what is perceived as lost was once possessed, and that such possession can be regained through the avoidance of the danger that impends. Thus, if "what is decisive is the first displacement ... from ... the situation of helplessness to an expectation of that situation," the form this expectation assumes (for the ego) is that of a loss of perception: The first condition of anxiety that the ego introduces is therefore that of the loss of perception, which is equated with the loss of object. (Inhibitions, p. 96)

With this introduction-Vorstellung-o f the loss-of-perception, the ego is able to install its organization in face of the id, and give itself a history. 10 This history recounts the ego's loss and its effort to reappropriate what it strives to consider its original property. This, of course, is the story of castration-a story that the narcissistic ego tells itself in order to organize and to appropriate the alterity on which it (id) depends. The ego perceives the anatomical sexual difference as the loss of the phallus; it "recognizes" the female genitals as "castrated," and thus conserves the belief in the ubiquity of the phallus; that is, in its own ability to recognize and to repeat difference as identity. The "danger" that it thereby signals is thus interpreted as one that is external to its organization, and hence, as one that in principle at least, can be avoided. Freud, in seeking to establish the ego as the "site" and the "source" of anxiety, is invariably led to retell this story, as evidence of the reality both of the ego and of the danger to which it reacts. Just as the ego seeks

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to master the indifferent alterity of the trauma by temporalizing and temporizing it through the construction of a narrative, with beginning, middle, and end, Freud too seeks to master the elusive, ambiguous, and ambivalent phenomenon of anxiety by isolating and dividing it into two distinct forms: neurotic and "real" or "realistic" anxiety. This division is in turn dependent on an anterior distinction of danger: Real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic anxiety is anxiety abour a known danger of this sort. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger. Neurotic danger is thus a danger that has still to be discovered. Analysis has shown that it is a danger deriving from drives. (Inhibitions, p. 91)

"Analysis," which shows that "neurotic anxiety" derives from a danger produced by the drives, also seeks to show that the danger entailed by the latter is ultimately a real danger. This, at least, is what Freud seeks to argue when he contends that castration, the paradigm of neurotic anxiety, is ultimately derived from a real, external sexual danger. We should not be threatened with castration if we did not entertain certain feelings and intentions within us. Thus, such drive-impulses are determinants of external dangers and so become dangerous in themselves. (Inhibitions, p. 71)

However, Freud's effort to insist upon the ultimately realistic nature of the danger from which anxiety-even in its neurotic, purely psychic formderives; his effort, in short, to replace his economic theory of anxiety by a topical explanation that would explain it as an essentially functional, purposive, and expedient response, founders upon the very "historical" character that Freud attributes to the phenomenon, as the reproduction of a previous experience. For what anxiety repeats, above and beyond all the particular and determinate dangers that the ego has experienced, is the economic turmoil of a trauma that can never be repeated as such. Freud implicitly concedes as much, when he acknowledges that the external (real) danger must also have managed to become internalized if it is to be significant for the ego. It must have been recognized as related to some situation of helplessness that has been experienced. (Inhibitions, p. 94)

But the "experience" of that "situation of helplessness" is, in itself, incognizable, for it has no "self." It is a process of displacement that makes

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place for the ego by being displaced, in and as anxiety. If the ego is therefore the "seat" of anxiety, anxiety is equally the site of the ego. And in this site, the ego is never comfortably set. Nor is the theory, that seeks to "grasp" anxiety by deriving it from the ego: The time has come to pause and consider. What we clearly are seeking is an insight that will make the essence of anxiety accessible to us, an either/or that will separate truth about it from error. But that is difficult to obtain, anxiety is not simple [einfach] to grasp. Up to now we have reached nothing but contradictions, among which it was impossible to choose without prejudice. I now propose to proceed in a different way: we will try to collect everything that can be said about anxiety impartially, and thereby renounce the expectation of a new synthesis. (Inhibitions, p. 58)

But the "renunciation" of the "expectation of a new synthesis"-like all renunciation-is easier said than done. For even the apparently modest and prudent project of "collecting everything that can be said about anxiety impartially" presupposes that one can know what cannot be said about it; that is, that one possesses precisely .that "either/or" that will enable one to "separate truth about it from error." This difficult renunciation marks the ambivalence of Freud's arguments in this essay: on the one hand, he seeks to reject his earlier, "economic" explanation of anxiety as the automatic transformation of libido and to replace it with the more "realistic" topical explanation of anxiety as a function of the ego. Such an attempt is entirely informed by the very "either/or" alternative that Freud wishes to renounce. On the other hand, however, he is constrained to acknowledge the ambivalent nature of anxiety, as both "automatic transformation" of energy and as the intentional, purposive, expedient reaction of the ego to danger. Since he cannot simply ignore or deny these two aspects of anxiety, Freud simply seeks to keep them apart, and then to declare his disinterest in the former: "Our former hypothesis of a direct transformation of libido into anxiety possesses less interest for us now than it did" (Inhibitions, p. 88). In so arguing, Freud reproduces a mode of thinking that he has described, earlier in his paper, as one of the defensive strategies the ego uses to avoid danger. It is the mechanism of "isolating," in which an event or idea is notrepressed, but rather separated "from its affect" and from "its associative re-

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lation ... so that it stands as though isolated." 11 Although this defensive mechanism is most manifest in cases of obsessional neurosis, Freud is quick to point out its affinity to more "normal" forms of thought: The normal phenomenon of concentration provides a pretext for this kind of neurotic procedure: what seems to us important in the way of an impression or piece of work must not be interfered with by the simultaneous claims of any of her mental processes or activities. But even a normal person uses concentration to keep away not only what is irrelevant or unimportant, but above all, what is unsuitable because it is contradictory. He is most disturbed by what once belonged together but has been torn apart in the course ofhis development. ... Thus, in the normal course of things, the ego has a great deal of isolating work to do in its function of directing the current of thought. (Inhibitions, p. 47; my emphasis)

In separating "automatic" anxiety from ego-anxiety, Freud repeats precisely what he describes the ego as having to do to constitute itself; keeping apart "what once belonged together" but what "is unsuitable because it is contradictory." And yet, what is unsuitable here is nothing but anxiety itself, or rather: anxiety as affect. For as an affect, anxiety "disturbs" and "interferes" with the theoretical effort to identify it, to explain it in terms of cause and effect. What Freud is therefore constrained to do is to separate anxiety from its affect, which is also its effect. For that effect cannot be limited to or determined exclusively as the ego's response to a danger, since anxiety can itself become the danger to which it reacts. Freud's attempt, in seeking to replace his earlier "economic" theory by a "topical" one, is intended to put anxiety in its proper place. But his own discussion demonstrates that anxiety has no proper place: it marks the impossible attempt of the ego to construct or delimit such a place, but this place is inevitably displaced, dislocated, entstellt. 12 Freud seeks, in short, to situate and "grasp" anxiety in the dyadic, dichotomized space and time that anxiety itself engenders and disrupts at once. He seeks to ground anxiety in a danger that would be "real" in the sense of external, objective, and self-identical. But in determining anxiety as the reproduction of a trauma, he is inevitably compelled to return to the "economic" factor he sought to exclude. For if the "danger" to which anxiety reacts is real-that is, distinct from the ego, the "organized part" of the "id,"-it is not therefore self-identical. It is, Freud acknowledges, "the economic disturbance caused by an accumulation of amounts

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of stimulation which require to be disposed of ... [and] which is the real essence of 'danger"' (Inhibitions, p. 63). But such a reality can never be fully grasped by theoretical "insight," since it can never be seen, named or recognized as such. 13 This is why "reality" consists in precisely that "capital X," the unknown variable that "we are obliged to carry over into every new formula." This "X" marks the spot to which psychoanalytic thinking is constrained, often against its will, to return, a spot that is impossible to occupy (besetzen) because it is impossible to locate. Any attempt to identifY it, situate it, name it-for instance, as "trauma''-must be regarded as the signal of a danger that can be apprehended, but never recognized as such. 14 The "capital X" of Freud's metapsychology can therefore be designated as the signal ofpsychoanalytical thinking. But if Freud's effort to replace the economic with the topical, and thereby to put anxiety in its place, proves unsuccessful, it is not insignificant: for the result of his displacement is to underscore the only "explanation" that psychoanalytic thinking has to offer, and that is neither simply "economic," in the sense of dealing with pure quantity, nor simply "topical," in the sense of dealing with pure place; rather, what emerges from the Auseinandersetzung of the two points-of-view is the ineluctable imposition of the dynamic, conflictual factor as that which characterizes the psychoanalytic conception of the psychic. The latter can neither be opposed to the non psychic, nor derived from it; it cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect, outer and inner, reality and unreality, or any other of the opposing pairs to which Freud inevitably recurs. But if conflict characterizes the psyche, it is also inscribed in psychoanalytic thinking itsel£ And nowhere, perhaps, is this more striking than in the assertion with which Freud seeks to counter the theory of Rank: "It is unnecessary to suppose that the child carries anything more with it from the time of its birth than this way of indicating the presence of danger" (Inhibitions, p. 63). But if the child must be conceived as possessing the capacity to indicate danger ftom the very first, this is tantamount to acknowledging what no causal explanation can admit: that there is no "very first," since from the first there is repetition, i.e., indication. There is, therefore, no possibility for a theoretical discourse to accede to a time or place "beyond" or "before" the operation of such indication and repetition. But if there is no such Beyond, there is also no simple Here either: and the psychoanalytic

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articulation of anxiety is thus suspended, as is anxiety itself. Anxiety, Freud writes, is always ''Angst vor etwas"-a phrase that is impossible to render in English, the Standard Edition notes (p. 91). For the "vor" that positions anxiety means both "before" and "in front of." If we keep this ambiguity in mind, the English translation "about" ("it is anxiety about something") can be suggestive, especially in its spatial indetermination: anxiety is about and around that which it seeks to recognize. And psychoanalysis, for which "thought" was always a matter of "signals," thinks no differently: it repeats the anxiety it describes. In so doing, psychoanalytic thinking sets itself apart.

The Meaning of the Thallus

Every science is informed by a notion of meaning, which serves to legitimize the knowledge it seeks to produce. That such a notion presided over the emergence of psychoanalysis is clearly indicated by the programmatic statement with which Freud begins The Interpretation ofDreams: In the pages that follow I shall bring forward proof that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that, if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itselfto be a meaningfUl structure [ein sinnvolles Gebilde] which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life. (S.E. 4, 1; my emphasis)

The condition that Freud here mentions, the "procedure" or "technique" (Technik) to be used, is of course the specific kind of interpretation elaborated in his study of dreams. From the very first, then, Freudian psychoanalysis was bent upon demonstrating both the ubiquity of "meaning" in the realm of mental activity and the peculiar interpretive techniques required to get at such meaning. One of the primary obstacles that Freud faced in this context was the traditional conception of meaning, which construed it either as the implementation of conscious, volitional intention, or as the expression of organic, physiological processes. It is this alternative-conscious intentionality and/or physiology-and above all, its first term, that Freud attacked from the start. Throughout The lnterpreta-

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tion of Dreams he insisted again and again that "the most complicated mental achievements are possible without the collaboration of consciousness" (S.E. 5, 593), and hence that meaning, in respect to mental activity, could not be restrictively identified with conscious intentionality or thought. "Psychiatrists have been far too ready ... to abandon their belief in the connectedness of psychical processes" (S.E. 5, 528-29), he argued, precisely because they have construed such connectedness and purposivity exclusively in terms of conscious thought. The method of interpretation developed in Freud's study of dreams is presented as the mirror-image of the dream-itself: reversing the path traveled by the psyche in composing the dream, interpretation seeks to travel the same road but in reverse, proceeding from the "manifest" content to the dream's hidden, "latent" meaning. No wonder, then, that the essence of the Freudian conception of dreams came to be identified with this dualistic structure of manifest/latent content. Such identification entails a basic misconception that Freud, in a long note appended in 1925 to the sixth chapter of his book (dealing with the dream-work), sought to set straight: I used at one time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dreamthoughts .... But now that analysts at least have become reconciled to replacing the manifest dream by the meaning revealed by interpretation, many of them have become guilty of falling into another confusion to which they cling with equal obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking.... It is the dream-work that creates the form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming-the explanation of its peculiar nature. (S.E. 5, 506-7)

All dreams, like mental phenomena in general, are, Freud insists, meaningful, but it is not their meaning as such that constitutes their "essence." The distinctive structure of the dream resides not in the semantic content of the "latent" dream-thoughts, but rather in the particular form that the dream-work impresses on those thoughts. The characteristics of that "particular form of thinking" are summed up in Freud's term, Entstellung, a term that can be understood properly only when placed in contrast to the notion of Darstellung. To identifY the essence of the dream with its hid-

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den, "latent" content would be acceptable only if the dream were in fact a Darstellung, a form of representation in which one set of thoughts was simply and directly replaced by another, corresponding set. But this, Freud insists, is not the case. Although in dreams there is, of course, substitution and replacement of "latent" dream-thoughts by "manifest" dream-content, such processes cannot be considered as instruments of the representation of one (self-identical) set of thoughts by another. The dream is motivated not by the goal of representing, but rather-if a neologism may be permitted-de-presenting, and this despite the fact, to which Freud alludes, that the dream depicts its images in the present. For the presentation of (predominantly visual) images in a dream is governed by the syntax of a scenario, the defining relations of which cannot be comprehended in the present tense. The operative mechanisms of that syntax-the language of the unconscious-coincides with the four kinds of dream-work: condensation, displacement, representability, 1 and secondary elaboration. These operations are what make the dream a "particular form of thinking" distinct from our waking conscious thought. If the latter articulates itself through predications, propositions, and assertions, in conformity with the law of identity and noncontradiction, the language of the dream is one in which identity and noncontradiction are strategic, calculated, and misleading after-effects of differential relationships, transformations, and displacements. If the language of the dream is that of the "unconscious," it is not primarily because certain "wishes" cannot be consciously "fulfilled," but rather because the dream works in and through a medium that is structurally irreducible to the predicative grammar of conscious thought. Consciousness requires identical terms: subjects, objects, predicates, in order to be or become conscious (i.e., conscious of some-thing); as Ent-stellung (disfiguration, but also dislocation), however, what the dream does is to operate changes of place, and through such changes, alterations of identity. Moreover, as we have seen in our discussion of "secondary elaboration," the dream does this in a characteristic way: not only does it disfigure, distort, dislocate, (the dream-thoughts, or wishes), but it also dissimulates this very process of distortion. The logic of identity takes its place in the dream's strategy of displacement as that which dissimulates the distortions that have taken place, have taken the place of the conscious mind precisely by seeming to yield to it.

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The effects of this peculiar and distinctive dream-operation are more obvious and easier to deal with in regard to the dream considered as an object than in respect to the subjects who interpret, or theorize, dreams. That the dreamer is necessarily deluded is easy enough to assert and to accept, as long as such delusion serves to establish the insight and authority of those who make such assertions. That psychoanalytically schooled dream-interpreters may themselves be deluded, in equating the dream with the meaning their interpretation reveals, is less comfortable but still tolerable as long as there is something, or someone, to which the delusion does not extend; the theory of the dream-work, "Freud." But what if that is no longer the case? What if the analysis of the dream as Entstellung points to the fact that the interpretation of meaning, at least as traditionally construed and practiced, is itself only part and parcel of a larger process, one of verstellenden Entstellung (dissimulating dislocation)? Where would this leave the interpreter of dreams, or the theorist of dreaminterpretation? Such questions are at work in the first pages of the seventh and final chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams. The chapter begins as follows: Among the dreams, which have been reported to me by other people, there is one which has special claims upon our attention at this point [der jetzt einen ganz besonderen Anspruch aufunsere Beachtung erhebt]. (S.E. 5, 509)

That "point" in time (jetzt) at which the dream Freud is about to recount makes its special claim upon our attention is a decisive one. It follows the long, elaborate and central chapter in which the dream-work, "essence" of the dream, has been discussed and described. And it both precedes and introduces an entirely new dimension of investigation, in which the "psychological"-or as Freud will later say, the "metapsychological"-implications of phenomena, such as the dream, are to be studied. These introductory pages, and above all the particular dream they deal with, have the function of effectuating and motivating the transition from the descriptiveanalytical account of dreams to their synthetic-theoretical conceptualization; in other words, the task of preparing a certain speculation, toward which, as we have seen, Freud is irresistibly drawn. This speculation manifests its ambivalent attraction here-"jetzt"-with strange clarity. Freud continues his introduction of the dream:

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It was told to me by a woman patient who had herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is still unknown to me. Its content made an impression on the lady, however, and she did not miss the chance of "redreaming" it, that is, of repeating elements of the dream in her own dream, in order through this transfer [ Obertragung] to express agreement [ Obereinstimmung] in one particular point. (S.E. 5, 509) What this particular point is, we are never told. All the more striking, however, is the distinct description of the network by which the dream has been transmitted (in German, another meaning of Obertragung). Inscribed in a sequence of repetitions and recountings, its "actual source still unknown," this scene recalls, or anticipates, another scenario, with which we will deal in the following section: Plato's Symposium and the use Freud makes of it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As in Plato's text, it is a woman who serves as the agent of the immemorial recounting, but here, in The Interpretation ofDreams, the woman remains nameless, described and situated only as "a woman patient," impressed by what Freud himself will call a "vorbildlichen" dream: a "model dream," exemplary, but also, perhaps, one which is premonitory, prefigurative: The preliminaries to this vorbildlichen dream are as follows: A father has been watching beside his child's sick-bed day and night on end. Af-

ter the child has died, he goes into an adjoining room to rest, leaves the door open, however, so that from his bed chamber [Schlafraum: literally, sleepingspace] he can look into the room where the corpse of the child lies in state, surrounded by tall candles. An old man has been hired to keep watch and sits next to the corpse, murmuring prayers. After a few hours' sleep, the father dreams that the child is standing at his bedside, grasps him by the arm and whispers reproachfully to him, "Father, don't you see that I'm burning?" He wakes up, notices a bright glare coming from the next room [Leichenzimmer], hurries there, finds the old watchman dozed off, the coverings [die Hullen] and one arm of the cherished body burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them. 2 (S.E. 5, 509) The dream itself, we see, continues the series of repetitions that marks its transmission: the father, watching over his son's sickbed, is replaced by "an old man" who watches over the deathbed. The father falls asleep, the old man dozes off. The son "awakes," and wakes the father, who sees the light that the old man cannot see. And, as we shall "see," the repetitions

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by no means stop here. But let us follow Freud, as he proceeds to interpret the dream-or rather, to recount the interpretation of a dream that, he will contend, is so simple that it indeed needs no interpretation: The explanation of this moving dream is simple enough and, so my patient told me, was correctly given by the lecturer. The glare of light shone through the open door into the sleeping man's eyes and led him to the conclusion he would have arrived at if he had been awake, namely that a candle had fallen over and set something alight in the neighbourhood of the body. It is even possible that he had felt some concern when he went to sleep as to whether the old man might not be incompetent to carry out his task. (S.E. 5, 509-10) Dead son, slumbering old man, and, in between the two, a father whose vigilance falters after the death of his son, to revive just in time to save the mortal remains of the child, with only a singed arm and "wrappings"-Hullen-as marks of the near-catastrophe. This "moving" dream, Freud asserts, presents absolutely no difficulties to its interpreters: be it "the lecturer," the woman patient, or the author of The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream, according to Freud, "is simple enough" and it is precisely this simplicity that will be of interest. But first, in what does this alleged simplicity consist? First, in the effect of the glare, and of the other "day-residues" in producing the dream; such residues include, apparently, the father's possible "concern" with the "incompetency" of the old man to perform the task assigned to him. Second, there is "the fulfillment of a wish" residing in the desire of the father to see his child live once again. Having thus asserted the simplicity of this dream, Freud goes on to explain why he has introduced it at this very point in his text: There can be no doubt as to which peculiarity of this little dream has captivated [fosselt] our interest. Hitherto we have been predominantly concerned with thesecret meaning of dreams, the ways in which it can be discovered and the means employed by the dream-work in order to conceal it. And now we stumble upon a dream which poses no problem of interpretation, whose meaning is obvious and unveiled [dessen Sinn unverhiillt gegeben ist], and yet we observe that this dream still retains the essential characteristics through which dreams diverge so conspicuously from our waking thought and provoke our need for explanation. (S.E. 5, 510) And the conclusion that Freud draws from this appreciation of this modeldream is nothing less than the radical mise-en-question of everything he

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has hitherto written on the subject of dreams: "It is only after doing away [nach der Beseitigung] with everything that concerns the work of interpretation that we can notice how incomplete our psychology of dreams has remained" (S.E. 5, sro-u). Freud's conclusion calls to mind the jingle that occurs to Leopold Bloom at various points in Ulysses: What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss. What is a dream-theory without a metapsychology? Incomplete, writes Freud. With it, an abode of bliss, to be sure. But the path to this abode is as dark and uncertain as it is unavoidable: Hitherto, unless I am greatly mistaken, all the paths along which we have travelled have led us toward the light-toward elucidation and fuller understanding. But as soon as we endeavour to penetrate more deeply into the mental processes involved in dreaming, every path will end in darkness. (S.E. s, sn) The way to speculation is obscure because it leads away from the known toward the unknown, away from elucidation (Aujkliirung) and into the murky realm of hypothesis and supposition (Annahmen). Even in the best of cases, Freud concludes, where errors in the calculation and combination of such hypothetical constructs are kept to a minimum, no definitive insight will be attainable through the study of dreams alone: The psychological hypotheses drawn from our analysis of dream-processes will have to wait at the station until the transfer comes along [an einer Haltestelle warten mitssen, bis sie den Anschluss . .. gefonden haben], linking them with the results of other investigations that seek to penetrate the nucleus of the same problem by other points of attack. (S.E. 5, sn) That the description of metapsychological speculation here slides into the language of warfare and transport should, after our discussion of Auseinandersetzung, no longer come as a total surprise. Indeed, the remainder of this introductory section of the metapsychological seventh chapter of The Interpretation ofDreams stands entirely under the sign of a proleptic Auseinandersetzung with possible objections that might be addressed at the previous discussion of dreams.

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What captivates our interest here, however, is the manner in which Freud introduces and prepares that Auseinandersetzung, by himself seeming to pull the rug out from under his preceding theory. The "little dream" is exemplary, vorbildlich, he claims, in that it demonstrates how little questions of meaning and interpretation suffice to account for the specificity of the dream. This, Freud asserts, must convince us of the incompleteness of the previous study. Were we, however, to take Freud's interpretation of this dream at face value: namely, as a dream which neither needs nor suffers any further interpretation, since it presents its meaning without veils, unverhullt-the consequence would not simply be the "incompleteness" of Freud's first six chapters, but their fundamental inadequacy. For the result of those chapters is, as we have already suggested, nothing more or less than the conclusion that the dream is-essentially and structurally-a dissimulating distortion, eine verstellende Enstellung, and hence, that it always and inevitably requires interpretation to be understood. Either the very notion of a fully transparent dream, one whose meaning is unverhullt gegeben, is a non sequitur; or the theory of the dream as a particular form of unconscious thought characterized by the dissimulating activity of the dream-work must be drastically revised. But does Freud really claim that the meaning of this dream is "obvious," transparent, "unverhtillt gegeben"? He does, inasmuch as the assertion stands explicitly in the text. But, in accordance with the graphics of Auseinandersetzung, he also undermines the simplicity of that assertion with a discreet but indelible remark, one that I have hitherto omitted from my previous discussion of this passage since its obvious discrepancy with the main thrust of Freud's argument would have rendered any summary impossible and incoherent. That incoherence, of course, is just what demands that we return to it now. Having apparently endorsed the "simple" explanation of the dream as given by the lecturer and relayed by the woman patient-that it was the glare from the neighboring room that alerted the father to the fire-Freud adds the following, seemingly innocuous qualification: Nor have we any changes to suggest in this interpretation, except perhaps to add the requirement that the content of the dream must be overdetermined and the words uttered by the child composed of words really uttered while alive, in connection with events possessing importance for the father. (S.E. 5, 5ro)

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This modest addition does nothing less than to dislocate the interpretation of the dream as one whose meaning is given "without veils." The "requirement" (Forderung) that this dream, like all others previously analyzed, "must be overdetermined" reintroduces the necessity and centrality of interpretation that Freud is at pains here to call into question. For if the model dream is overdetermined, the interpretation that Freud seeks to privilege by no means suffices to demonstrate the limitations of interpretation as such in accounting for the peculiarities of dreams. Above all, the little dream ceases to operate as Freud would like it to: to demarcate a clear-cut border separating the previously explored realm of light and meaning, the interpretation of dreams, from the hypothetical speculation that will seek to map out the obscure context of the phenomenon. Freud's dream here is of a sphere beyond-jenseits-interpretation, an uncharted field shrouded in darkness, waiting to be discovered, a virgin land. It is the desire to mark out the necessity and the integrity of this promised land that leads him to attempt the sacrifice of the "child" he has just spawned, by pointing up all of its inadequacies. This gesture-which will recur frequently throughout Freud's writings-is, of course, always made with a view toward subsequent reappropriation and gain: if the dream-theory is still incomplete, what is to come will insert it in a larger and more powerful whole, provided that one has the necessary courage, intelligence, and above all, patience to wait at the station (Haltestelle) until the right connection (Anschluss) comes along. The question that persists here concerns the itinerary of this trip and the space that it traverses. Looking back on the distance hitherto covered, Freud seeks to divide that space into a neat opposition of light and dark, black and white; but his daydream is disrupted by the night-dream that is summoned to confirm it. Instead of demonstrating the transparency of meaning and thus pointing toward the necessity of a theoretical speculation beyond all interpretation, jenseits, this model dream suggests that interpretation has not yet really begun, even while going on all the time. If this little dream can be regarded as exemplary, it is because it indicates precisely what Freud here seeks to deny: that interpretation and speculation cannot simply be opposed to one another, since a certain form of speculation is already at work within the interpretation of dreams, even and especially in what may seem to be its most obvious instances. "Don't

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you see?" The child's admonition to the father is, in the context of The Interpretation of Dreams, also a reproach directed by the text at its "father." For although the father of the "little dream" will discover that both the child's "arm" and his "veils" (Hiillen) have been burned, the father of The Interpretation ofDreams wants to separate the two: his child from the veils in which he has been clothed. "Father, don't you see?" And yet, in a certain sense Freud does see here, he sees without seeing. By mentioning, and be it in passing, that these words of the child must relate to "events of importance to the father," he points directly to what his interpretation seeks to obscure: the conflictual ambivalence that characterizes desire in general and infantile desire in particular, and which is responsible for the inevitable (and structural) overdetermination of dreams. Freud "sees" all this but seeks to avoid its consequences by the use of a mechanism discussed earlier in this book, that of isolation: the fact of overdetermination is noted, but its implication: that the meaning of this dream cannot be simply unveiled, "unverhiillt gegeben," is ignored. It would, no doubt, be interesting to speculate about the desire that produces Freud's interpretation-to-end-all-interpretation: the desire for a dream that would simply mirror a reality and speak for itself, for a meaning given without veils, for a world neatly divided into light (the past) and dark (the future). One would doubtless come back to an insight that psychoanalysis will articulate again and again, in different forms: that there are times and spaces where light can be more threatening than dark, especially when the two can no longer be simply opposed to one another as discrete entities, but cohabit the same space; when, for instance, a Leichenzimmer can no longer be opposed to a Schlafraum (as reality to a dream) or clearly separated from it. The dream of the burning child, together with the interpretive discourse it elicits, stages this cohabitation or convergence in what might be called an Urszenario, where narrator and narrated come strangely to resemble one another. Less speculatively, it may be noted that the immediate effect of this model dream within the economy of Freud's text is quite the opposite of what it is explicitly intended to bring about: instead of moving beyond interpretation, the dream is followed by some of the most extensive and probing discussions of interpretation and meaning that Freud will ever

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undertake. These discussions suggest that what this "moving" dream in fact moves us toward is less the necessity to transcend hermeneutic questions as such, but rather that of widening and transforming their scope. Here, Freud's argumentation progresses with the lack of logicality that he has previously ascertained to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of dreams. Having identified the model dream as one that speaks simply, clearly, and univocally, Freud goes on to discuss a number of further, somewhat disconnected points on the subject of interpreting dreams .... It is only with the greatest difficulty that the beginner in the business of interpreting dreams can be persuaded that his task is not at an end when he has a complete interpretation in his hands-an interpretation which makes sense, is coherent and throws light upon every element of the dream's content. For the same dream may perhaps have another interpretation as well, an "overinterpretation," which has escaped him .... The reader will always be inclined to accuse the Author [dem Au tor vorzuwerfen] of squandering his wit unnecessarily; whoever has acquired this experience for himself will know better. (S.E. 5, 523)

The child's reproach to the father ("Don't you see?") is here repeated as the anticipated reproach that the reader will direct at the author. Could the attempt to find a dream that requires no further interpretation be the effort of Freud to elude this reproach? If such is the case, however, it is bound to fail, since there is always the possibility-and indeed, usually the necessity-of an "over-interpretation," not in the sense of an excessive, overingenious, and superfluous exercise of "wit," but rather as one demanded by the structural tendency of the dream to be overdetermined. Interpretation, we sense, begins to become a problem, not because there is too little meaning in dreams, bur rather because there is too much: confronted by "the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, striving to find expression (and) active in our minds," how can the interpreter know for certain which train he should take, which connection is the "right" one? To refer the skeptical reader to "experience" can hardly be sufficient, since the latter is nothing but the conscious residue of the same conflicts that produce the uncertainty in the first place. If there is no simple answer to the question of certainty, what does emerge is that the position of the interpreter, and the activity in which he is engaged, can no longer be construed on the model of contemplation: the interpreter is no longer, as traditionally construed, essentially a spec-

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tator or an observer; he is also and at the same time a protagonist, and the results of his actions are determined by a relation of forces in which he is inscribed: The question whether it is possible to interpret every dream must be answered in the negative. It must not be forgotten that in interpreting a dream we are opposed by the psychic forces which were responsible for its distortion [Entstellung]. It is thus a question of relative strength whether our intellectual interest, our capacity for self-discipline, our psychological knowledge and our practice in interpreting dreams enable us to master our internal resistance. (S.E. 5, 525) In short, the very forces that make interpretation possible-by forming the dream in the first place-also render its results uncertain, incalculable, and impossible to verify (or to falsify) definitively. For there can be no such "definitive" instance precisely because there is no Archimedean or transcendental point from which such a definition or delineation could be established. The topographical structure of the dream seems designed in a way that renders such demarcations impossible. This, at least, is what emerges from what is surely the most celebrated passage in this entire section-and perhaps in the book as a whole-where Freud attempts to describe what he calls "the navel of the dream": Even in the best interpreted dreams, there is often a place (eine Stelle) that must be left in the dark, because in the process of interpreting one notices a tangle of dream-thoughts arising (anhebt) which resists unravelling but has also made no further contributions [keine weiteren Beitriige] to the dream-content. This, then, is the navel of the dream, the place where it straddles the unknown [dern Unerkannten aufsitzt]. The dream-thoughts, to which interpretation leads one, are necessarily interminable [ohne Abschluss] and branch out on all sides inw the net!ike entanglement [in die netzartige Verstrickung] of our world of thought. Out of one of the denser places in this meshwork, the dream-wish rises [erhebt sich]Jike a mushroom out of its mycelium. (S.E. 5, 530) Here, perched on the threshold of metapsychology, on the border that ostensibly divides the transparent realm of dream-interpretation from the obscurities of speculation, Freud looks back, only to discover, or describe, a shadowy place in the midst of the light. And yet, there is no tone of anxiety, no sense of shock, no cause for concern, for the "place that must be left in the dark," "even in the best interpreted dreams," can still be put

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squarely in its place, despite-or rather because of-its obscurity. It is as if its shadowy contours are all the more readily identifiable, localizable, by virtue of the clarity against which they are silhouetted. However impenetrable this "tangle" may be, however much it resists unraveling, there is no question-for Freud, at least-that these dream-thoughts have "made no further contributions to the dream content." No fUrther contribution? Just enough to put us on the track, to guide us to this curious place, nothing more, or so Freud implies. But if the tangle of thought eludes further analysis and interpretation, how can we be so certain that it has made no further contribution to the dream? Freud, in any case, seems content to leave it at that. Having "isolated" the tangle, he proceeds to name and describe it, in a figure that has caught, indeed captivated the imagination of his readers. The figure he thus creates is so striking and graphic that it appears to resolve all obscurities in a single illuminating stroke: the navel of the dream. What could be more reassuring and familiar, more primordial and powerful than this reference to the place where the body was last joined to its maternal origins. That this place is also the site of a trace and of a separation, but also of a knot, is a reflection that carries little force next to the reassuring sense of continuity, generation, and originality connoted by the figure. Transposed or transcribed into the text at this point, the navel of the dream thus appears doubly consoling: its impenetrable obscurities mark the identifiable site and sight of the dream-wish, source of the dream's meaning. Out of its shadowy tangle, this dream-wish surges into view, thus providing elucidating interpretation with its ultimate object and confirmation. Or so it might seem to the reader of the Standard Edition who lacks access to the German text. Such a reader is liable to read quickly over Freud's description of the interminable nature of the dream-thoughts without stopping to consider its ramifications, since the Strachey translation renders them far less striking than they are in the German. For Strachey, the dream-thoughts "branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought." But Freud's "net" is not merely intricate, in the sense of being infinitely complex: it is also, and perhaps above all, a trap. Traps, particularly those of the unconscious, are rarely less effective for being ignored.

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The words of Freud's German, which the Standard Edition translates as "intricate network," are "netzartige Verstrickung." The inversion of the terms emphasizes the alteration: the "net" at work in Freud's text is not a stable or distinct object but a movement in which one becomes entangled, verstrickt. Or rather, the tangle (Knauel) of dream-thoughts does not stay in its place, it begins to invade the thoughts that constitute the light of day, of our waking, conscious life. But with this movement, the dream-navel branches out not so much into the reassuring solidity of a tree, as the Standard Edition would suggest, but rather into the more disquieting snares of a trap. The consoling inexhaustibility of infinite ramification is overshadowed in Freud's text by the unsettling entanglement in a familiarity that is no longer quite as familiar as it seemed. Above all, the clear-cut difference between dreamthoughts and waking thought begins to be blurred; the fact that the one expands into the other, "ohne Abschluss," as Freud writes, leaves us unable to distinguish the two as clearly as before. Since our first reading of this passage is "ohne Abschluss," "inconclusive," let us retrace our steps and start again. If, in even the "best interpreted" of dreams, we must nonetheless leave one area shrouded in darkness, it is first of all because we see or notice-"man ... merkt"that place in a certain way. The "tangle of dream-thoughts" is unmistakable not merely as a spot of darkness in a sea of light, but also as something that rises (anhebt) above the rest. Although we cannot disentangle the strands of the figure, its position seems strikingly dear: it "straddles the unknown" (dem Unerkannten aufsitzt). Its site, therefore, marks the point where interpretation reaches its enabling limit, but also threatens to get out of hand. Hence, the implicit injunction in Freud's description of the dream-navel: "this far and no further," since were we to continue, we would doubtless lose track of the dream, of the wish it fulfills, and begin to lose ourselves in the labyrinth of our everyday thoughts. Since those strands make "no further contributions" to the dream, there is no need to go any further. We can, must, and indeed should stop right here, contemplating the navel. But just where is this "here"? This dense and shadowy place where "the dream-wish rises (erhebt sich) like a mushroom out of its myceliurn''? The figure of the navel would suggest a position towards the cen-

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ter of the dream, a point from which the dream is generated. Such a place, at the originating center of the dream, is that usually ascribed to the dream-wish. And yet, as we have already seen, the dream-wish as such does not comprise the "essence" of the dream: it antedates the dream and moreover is formulated in the language and logic of conscious thought. The "essence" of the dream is the movement of dislocation to which that thought, that wish, is submitted in and through the dream-work. The specificity of the dream is thus constituted by the transcription of dreamwish into dream-facade: by the tissue or "meshwork" (Gejlecht) woven by the different chains of dream-thoughts. As we follow the movement of these chains or trains of thought, we move away from the manifest form of the dream and toward its latent content, the dream-wish. But we also move away from the dream as such and toward its ramifications in our overall world of thought (Gedankenwelt). This is why, if we did not know precisely where to stop, we might lose track of precisely what we are seeking: the dream "itself." Fortunately, Freud assures us, we do know where to stop: there (dort), where the different strands come together to form a positively impenetrable but unmistakable knot: a knot composed of we know not what. The question that remains, indeed insists, is: how can we know just when and where we have reached this crucial place in our interpretation of dreams? Is our inability to continue our interpretation a sufficient sign that we have reached the impenetrable core of the dream? And can we even be certain that this curious navel is in fact at the center of the dream, since our interpretation moves us ever further from the dream's manifest form, and ever closer to "our world-of-thought"? What we need is a guide, to orient us in this confusing space and place. Indeed, in recent years, just such a guide has presented himself, in the person of Jacques Lacan. At the beginning of his lectures of 1964, now published as The Four Basic Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan announced to his listeners (and future readers): "When you read the texts of Freud, you can rely upon the terms I have introduced to guide you." 3 There can be no doubt that the terms introduced by Lacan have guided many of those who heeded his appeal for a "return to Freud." All the more significant, therefore, that the discourse of Lacan, within which

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these terms are inscribed, leads directly to the place with which we are here concerned: No discourse can, in this respect, be inoffensive, and the very discourse that I have been able to conduct during the past ten years derives at least some of its effects from this fact. It is never without consequences when, even in a public discourse, one aims at subjects, touching what Freud called the navel-the navel ofdreams, he writes, thus designating, in the final analysis (au dernier terme), the center of the unknown-which, like the anatomical navel itself, its representative, is nothing but the abyss (beance) of which we speak. 4 Whatever else may be unclear in Lacan's discourse, there seems little doubt that, "in the final analysis"-au dernier terme-its terms lead us to the "center of the unknown," and to derniers termes such as beance. Lacan here repeats the gesture that we have retraced in Freud: the gesture of the final analysis itself, of a certain termination and determination: that of the dernier terme designed to put an end to the indetermination of an interminable proliferation. The final term, here beance (there manque), designates the place where one can stop and get off the train, having finally arrived at the desired destination. It is the final station, the Terminus or Terminal, where every voyage begins and ends; very different from the obscure, out-of-the-way Haltestelle, where, according to Freud, one must be prepared to wait patiently for a connection (Anschluss). The certitude with which Lacan designates the precise site of the dream-navel, first placing it at the "center of the unknown," and then identifying this center with the "beance of which we speak," reposes upon a certain conception of the Freudian Bildersprache that allows Lacan to declare that the dream-navel and "the anatomical navel" stand in a relation of representation to one another, and that this relation in turn is derived from a property common to (present in) both: that of the beance, the gap or abyss that both are said to entail. Paradoxically enough, then, it is this very absence, split, or void, that of the beance, that gives the reader, guided by the terms of Lacan, something firm enough to hold on to: If you keep this initial structure in hand, you will not run the risk of losing yourself in this or that partial aspect of the unconscious ... you will see, more radically, that the unconscious must be situated in a dimension of synchrony ... a

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dimension where the uttering subject [sujet de l'enonciation] both loses and finds itself again in both its phrases and its modes ... in short, at a level where everything in the unconscious that unfolds, is diffused like a mycelium-as Freud says in regard to the dream-around a central point. 5 Were it only a question of what Freud said, or wished to say, we might indeed go along with Lacan here and follow him toward a place that in the final analysis is as central as it is empty: the site of what Lacan calls "the subject qua indeterminate."6 Were it a question of what Lacan and Freud might have wished to see: for instance, the meaning of the dream rising majestically out of its mycelium, the meaning of the phallus, Lacan's Baedeker might suffice. But, quite apart from Freud's proclaimed distaste for such Baedekers/ his texts resist the mappings of such guides. In the case at hand, for instance, nothing in them permits us to conclude that the navel of the dream is either central or empty. On the contrary, it seems curiously full, oversaturated, and if it presents difficulties to our understanding, it is because it contains too much rather than too little. In short, whatever else it may be, a Knauel is not simply a beance (or an Abgrund). And, above all, nothing permits us to assert that the chains and trains, strands and snares that compose the meshwork of the "navel" are neatly "diffused" around a center. If Freud's description of this navel differs from Lacan's, it is precisely because it brings into movement just what Lacan seeks to arrest: the very notion and place of a center. Freud's navel neither contains a center, nor comprises one. It does something very different: it straddles the unknown, "dem Unerkannten aufsitzt." Let us therefore reflect for a moment upon the peculiar posture or position of the dreamnavel, perched on, straddling the unknown. And let us begin by examining-clinically, as it were-some of the meanings of the word "straddle." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word derives from the verb, to stride; but the meanings that the dictionary lists underscore the transformation that the word has undergone. From a verb designating forward movement, progression, straddle has come to signifY various kinds of arrested movement, and hence, the assumption of a certain kind of position. Among the meanings given by the O.E.D. we find the following: intr. To spread the legs wide apart in walking, standing, or sitting. b. of the legs: To stand wide apart. c. Of a thing, esp. of a thing having legs; also, to

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sprawl. 2. To walk with the legs wide apart. 3· To set (the legs) wide apart (in standing or walking). 4· To sit, stand, or walk with one leg on either side of; to stride over; to bestride. b. To stand or lie across or on both sides of (something). 5. US. colloq. To occupy or take up an equivocal position in regard to; to appear to favour both sides of. 6. Poker. To double (a stake, bet). 7· Gunnery. To find the range of (an object) by placing shots first to one side of it and then on the other. And, at the end of the article, a synonym: "Bor. divaricate." Just when we think that we have arrived at the conclusion, au dernier terme, we come upon a final, puzzling reference. And so, to make absolutely certain that nothing important has escaped us, we turn to:

Divaricate: (fr. Dis-+ varicare, f. various, straddling). r. intr. To stretch or spread apart; to branch off or diverge; in Bot. and Zoo!. to diverge widely. 2. trans. To stretch or open wide apart or asunder. 3· To cause or spread out in different directions. The English rendition of Freud's ''Aufsitzen" thus as "straddling" thus appears to condense the very movement we have traced in the first part of this study, that of an Aus-einander-setzung, both transitive and intransitive, a process of divergence. Only here, this movement is not one of ideas or concepts, but of a body: in particular, of legs: standing, sprawling, walking with one's legs stretched far apart. "To occupy or take up an equivocal position ... to favour both sides," also reminds us of the "occupation"-the "Besetzung" or "cathexis" of "representations" by unconscious drives (Triebe), for is not every such posture deceptive, an imposture designed to "impose" an impossible compromise? Does not such a compromise also imply a kind of poker in which you inevitably have to up the ante to stay in the game? Freud's "legs" are thus planted squarely on both sides of an untenable alternative, which he "straddles" in all of the meanings suggested so provocatively by the O.E.D., and of which the so-called primal scene is perhaps only the most graphic figuration. But we are not yet done with the ramifications of Freud's Bildersprache, a language that does not so much re-present as it de-presents, "ent-stel!t." For Freud does not simply stop at the designation of the dream-navel as the "place where (the dream) strad- · dles the unknown;" he describes that unknown, or rather, what emerges from it: the dream-wish, surging forth "like the mushroom out of its my-

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celium." The dream-wish, which both emerges from the navel of the dream and also renders its "unknown'' aspects knowable, is thus inseparable from something called a "mycelium." What, then, is there to be said about a mycelium? Once again, we turn to the O.E.D. for a response, and once again we are not disappointed:

Mycelium. (f. Gr. Mjkes mushroom, after epithelium.) Bot. The vegetative part of the thallus of fungi, consisting of white filamentous tubes (hyphae); the spawn of mushrooms.

If the dream-wish erects itself, phallus-like, out of the mycelium, the latter serves to remind us of what the Lacanian reading would like to forget: that the dream-navel cannot be reduced to a question of the phallus, of the beance, split or absent center of a subject, for one simple reason: the thallus. The dream-navel, as it is inscribed and described in Freud's text, points us in another direction, less visible, but not invisible either. The question raised here concerns the site of the navel, the place on which the dream-wish rises. The question, in short, is that of the signification du thallus. For one last time, we consult the O.E.D., to discover a curious definition: one which consists almost entirely of negations:

Thallus, (Gr. thallos, green shoot, f. thdllein to bloom.) Bot. A vegetable structure without vascular tissue, in which there is no differentiation into stem and leaves, and from which true roots are absent. No wonder that it is so difficult here to "see more radically," as Lacan promises ("You will see, more radically, that ... ").For the essence of this curious figure can, it would appear, be articulated only in negations, that is, in precisely that form of language that the unconscious employs to render itself accessible to consciousness while avoiding repression. 8 We begin to understand why Freud stopped his description at the mushroom and its mycelium, without mentioning the thallus. For what could he have told us about it, except what we now know, and don't know: that it is a structure "without vascular tissue," lacking "differentiation into stem and leaves," and above all, "from which true roots are absent." The "root" of the dream-wish, its foundation, is defined by this absence of true roots. Does this mean that there are false ones contained within its tissue?

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Compared with the thallus, Lacan's "signification du phallus" appears to be child's play: manque d'un manque, beance, signifier of the effects of the signifier-all such formulae move easily within the stable, homogeneous spatial continuum that the thallus distorts and distends, dislocates and disfigures. Perhaps this indicates the limits of a reading of Freud that takes his Bildersprache as the representation of something that can be grasped, named, once and for all, au dernier terme. Perhaps a different kind of reading is called for, one prepared to straddle Freud's text in another manner. For, if at the limits of interpretation we discover, not the abyss of an absent center, but a navel and a thallus, the very notion of meaning has begun to change before our eyes-particularly if our eyes are directed at Freud's text. For the word we have been translating as "straddle" has yet another meaning in German: jemanden or etwas aufiitzen can also signify "to be duped or deluded by someone or something." By the unknown (das Unerkannte), for instance. Or by the terms introduced by Lacan: for instance, that of the Nom-du Fere (Name-of-the-Father), which, he suggested, must also be read as: les non-dupes errent (the non-dupes err). Yet if this error must be understood as constitutive of the very gesture of denomination itself, then this cannot be without consequences for every form of discourse that seeks to articulate truth by means of naming: be it that of Freud, of Lacan, or of this text itself. From this vantage point, the meaning of the thallus begins to appear to be-or rather to play-a very bad joke on all attempts to articulate meaning. For the ramifications of Freud's description of the dream-navel suggest that interpretation originates and ends in a kind of calculated deception: in a posture necessarily, and structurally, an imposture, and perhaps also an imposition. In any case, it is beyond doubt that such questions were what impelled Freud to move-walking, striding, straddling-from his interpretation of dreams, the royal road to the unconscious, to the less regal realm of jokes. As we shall see, this was, and is, no laughing matter.

The Joke: Child's Play

One of the earliest criticisms that Freud encountered in regard to

The Interpretation ofDreams came from his "first reader and critic," Wilhelm Fliess, to whom Freud sent portions of the manuscript. Fliess, "representative of the others," 1 as Freud called him, was the first to formulate an objection that psychoanalysis was to elicit again and again, in a variety of forms, the most general of which was surely that made famous by Karl Kraus, who contended that "psychoanalysis is the illness it claims to cure." Fliess's version of this suspicion was directed at the surprising ingenuity demonstrated by the dreams that Freud purported to interpret. How, in effect, he asked, could a mental activity so far removed from conscious volition display a characteristic hitherto associated exclusively with consciousness? Perhaps, he suggested, what Freud took to be characteristic of dreams as such was in reality only the product of his own interpretation. Freud's response to this objection was twofold. On the one hand, he defended the ingenious, witty aspect of his interpretation as a quality of the dream itself: It is certainly true that the dreamer is too ingenious and witty [zu witzig], but this is neither my fault nor does it justifY a reproach [einen vorwuif]. All dreamers are just as insufferably witty, and they have to be, because they are under pressure, the direct way is barred to them .... The apparent wit of all unconscious processes is intimately connected with the theory of wit and of the comic.2

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To his first reader's murmured reproach, the father of psychoanalysis replies in an ostensibly straightforward manner: it's not my fault, he declares, if the dream is witty, even insufferably so-it cannot help being so; it has no other choice, since it cannot be as straightforward as I am, here and now, in my response to you. But Freud's response is itself less straightforward than it might seem. For, while appearing to exculpate himself from the charge of overingenuity and falsification-ultimately, the rebuke ofEntstellung-Freud undercuts this argument with his concluding conjecture. The semblance of wit displayed by all unconscious processes, he writes, "is intimately connected with the theory of wit and of the comic." Theory, however, is not written by the unconscious itselfnot directly, at least-but by a conscious subject. The appeal to the object, to "all dreamers" or "all unconscious processes," cannot therefore simply exempt theoretical interpretation from all suspicion. The question thus shifts: if the witty character of dreams can be attributed to the conflictual situation which they articulate and to which they respond with their characteristic Entstellungen, to what extent is this also a characteristic of the theory that seeks to comprehend these processes? In short, to what extent is the theory of Entstellung itself an Entstellung? The tenacity of this problem determines Freud's second response. Having first denied all personal responsibility for the ingenuity of dreams, Freud then acknowledges a certain dissatisfaction with his previous attempts to formulate the matter adequately: The dream business itself [die Traumsachen selbst] I consider to be unassailable; what I dislike about it is the style, which was incapable of finding the simple, elegant expression and which lapses into overwitty, image-searching circumlocutions [in witzelnde, bildersuchende Umschreibungen verfollen ist]. I know that, but the part in me that knows it, and knows how to appreciate it, unfortunately does not produce. 3 The "I" that "knows" all about the problem is, "unfortunately," unproductive: it is only a part "in me," and it is another part that produces the style which so displeases Freud. In other words, like the dreamers he studied, Freud had no choice but to lapse into those "wirzelnde, bildersuchende Umschreibungen" that cast such grave doubts over the scientific objectivity of his investigations, because the "direct way" was barred to

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the author of The Interpretation ofDreams. Like the dreamers, he had to search out images that could not but seem contrived, "witzelnd." In his Auseinandersetzung of dreams and of the unconscious processes they entail, Freud's language is, by his own admission, contaminated by its "object." And this is no laughing matter, since such contamination places the very integrity and reliability of his analyses in question. For the authority of a scientific discourse that treats of distortion, deception, and deformation depends on its keeping itself free of the phenomena it seeks to comprehend. Yet, just this freedom and distance is at stake here, and Freud admits as much in his next letter to Fliess, when he concedes that the latter's objections are not without foundation: Somewhere inside me there is a feeling for form, an appreciation of beauty as a kind of perfection; and the tortuous sentences of my dream-text, vaunting their indirect words, squinting after thoughts [die gewundenen, aufindirekten WOrten stolzierenden, nach dem Gedanken schielenden Sitze meiner Traumschrift], have sorely offended an ideal in me. I am therefore hardly unjust in deeming this lack to be the sign of deficient command of the material. You must have sensed the same thing. 4 The sense of regret, the acknowledgement of his "deficient command" of the material, is the index of a serious problem: to interpret dreams at all, the interpreter must allow himself to participate in the very movement of Entstellung that produces and reproduces the dream, Indeed, the dream -as we have noted-only comes to be in and through such Entstellung and repetition. And yet, if the interpretation hopes to be taken seriously, the logical, chronological, and structural series, the sequence, must not be fully disrupted. The interpretation ofsomething other than itself, something that precedes it in principle if not in fact-such at least is the presumption under which Freud operated, and under which most scientific discourse even today continues to work. What is at stake, implicitly, in the reproach of the "representative of the others," is nothing less than the authority of Freud's theoretical discourse. From this vantage point, Freud's contention that "the apparent ingenuity [der scheinbare Witz] of all unconscious processes is intimately connected with the theory of the witty and of the comic," takes on an additional connotation: the "connection" (Zusammenhang) marks precisely

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the problem. The status of Freud's theory depends on its connection to the scheinbare Witz: either it is able to pierce that Schein and penetrate to the essence it conceals, that of the unconscious as a serious, substantial entity; or the scheinbare Witz will end up by making a laughingstock out of the theory. Freud's decision to make the Witz an object of investigation thus responds to a dilemma in which nothing less than the authority and autonomy of his entire theoretical undertaking is at stake. The precautions taken at the outset of his study are indicative of his effort to establish a context in which these stakes will be barely obvious. The very tide of his bookThe joke and its Relation to the Unconscious 5-tends to suggest what readers have taken for granted ever since: that the investigation of jokes is nothing more than a case of applied psychoanalysis, in which the latter's theoretical acquisitions demonstrate their fecundity by illuminating a question with which psychoanalysis as such is only marginally concerned. Jokes, the title tells us, are to be studied "in their relation to the Unconscious"-that is, in relation to the major theoretical discovery of psychoanalysis. Throughout Freud's book, psychoanalytic theory appears to serve as the foundation, the point of reference from which the phenomenon of wit is approached, analyzed, and elucidated. One would hardly suspect that in this study, perhaps more than in all others, it is psychoanalytical theory itself that is in question. That question, of course, is never posed directly. It emerges only gradually, but following a pattern with which we are slowly becoming familiar: Here, as with the dream, the sign or symptom of this pattern crystallizes in the difficulty of delimiting the object of study. The problem appears in the very first pages of Freud's "Joke-Book": in order to place the Witz in relation to the Unconscious, it must first be localized, identified. And it is here that a major obstacle arises: that of determining authentic and reliable examples on which an analysis of jokes as such can be based. Freud remarks upon the curious way in which his predecessors have confined themselves to a small number of canonical jokes in their investigations: "It is striking with what a small number of examples of jokes, recognized as such, the authors are satisfied in their enquiries, and how each takes over the same ones from his predecessors" (joke, p. 15). Although Freud is prepared to accept this traditional canon, treating his predeces-

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sors with more respect than was the case in The Interpretation ofDreams, he nevertheless insists on both the necessity and the obligation of widening it through the inclusion of new examples of jokes, which, although lacking the authority of a long tradition of inquiry, have "most struck [us] in the course of our life and have made us laugh the most" (Joke, p. 15). In the first section of the book, Freud thus proceeds to accumulate a variety of such jokes, but as their number increases, the increase is accompanied by a growing sense of doubt as to the precise status of these examples, drawn largely from personal experience. Exemplary of the difficulties involved in the accumulation of such examples is the case of jokes utilizing the technique of "analogy" (Gleichnis): We have already admitted that in some of the examples examined we have not been able to banish a doubt as to whether they ought to be regarded as jokes at all; and in this uncertainty, we have recognized that the foundations of our enquiry have been severely shaken. But in no other material do I feel this uncertainty as strongly and as frequently as in jokes of analogy [Gleichniswitze]. The sensation, which ... tells me "this is a joke, this can be presented as a joke," even before the concealed character of the joke has been discovered-this sensation leaves me in the lurch most readily with such joking analogies [witzigen Vergleiche]. (Joke, p. II4)

It is as if Freud had begun to doubt whether the joking analogy is a valid species of joke, or the illusory analogy (Gleichnis) of one. And it seems to be of particular significance that the problem of identifying the joke in its essential authenticity is posed precisely with reference to the use of analogy. Analogy, it will be recalled, was the point of departure for the modern reflection on the Witz in the eighteenth century. For Kant, the function of wit was to "bring together (assimilate) heterogeneous representations," and he defined it as the "faculty of producing resemblances" ( Verahnlichungsvermogen).6 That Freud's uncertainty about the status of wit should be provoked by just this aspect of its activity is indicative of what distinguishes his approach from that of his predecessors. For analogy or resemblance is a property of representations, and it is precisely this function of representation, traditionally used to define the Witz, that Freud rejects. For him, the specificity of Witz cannot be tied to representations alone, or more generally, to the operation of a cognitive faculty, as Kant, for instance, had argued. ("Wit ... pertains to the Understanding ... insofar as

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it subsumes objects under genres." 7) Rather, the distinguishing property of wit, for Freud, resides in the peculiar effect it produces, an effect that both gives us the certitude that something is indeed a joke, and at the same time renders everything else uncertain. This effect is laughter, and laughter seems just what is usually lacking in jokes using analogy: If to begin with I unhesitatingly pronounce an analogy to be a joke, a moment later I seem to notice that the enjoyment it gives me is of a quality different from what I am accustomed to derive from a joke. And the circumstance that joking analogies are very seldom able to provoke the explosive laughter which signalizes a good joke makes it impossible for me to resolve the doubt in my usual way-by limiting myself co the best and most effective examples of a species. (joke, p. 82) A joke that does not produce "explosive laughter," Freud will argue, cannot be considered a joke at all. The essence of the joke is thus inseparable from the effect of laughter that it produces. This feature, however, raises particular difficulties for any theoretical discussion of jokes. For the property of laughter is not merely one among others; if it allows us a measure of certainty in identifYing jokes, it simultaneously poses an obstacle to their analysis and comprehension. It does this by introducing what might be called a discontinuous temporality into the structure of the Witz. For, as Freud stresses repeatedly, in order for laughter to "break out" or "explode"-and these are the metaphors used to describe the result produced by the joke-it is necessary that the person who laughs not know what he is laughing at. The constitutive condition of laughter is that one be ignorant of its object. In contrast to all forms of comparison, in which recognition of the similar plays a decisive role, the process of laughter can never be directly related to an object or a representation as such. This, at least, is the conclusion that Freud draws from his accumulation of "examples" and his categorization of them in terms of the "techniques" they use: [A] joke may be of great substance [gehaltvoll], it may assert something of value. But the substance of a joke is independent of the joke and is the substance of the thought, which is here, by special means, expressed as a joke. No doubt, just as watchmakers usually provide a particularly good movemenc [Werk] with a similarly valuable case [Gehause], so it may happen with jokes that the best performances [ Witzleistungen] may use the most substantial thoughts as their guise [Einkleidung]. (joke, p. 92)

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Freud's witty comparison of the joke with the watchmaker confirms in practice what he has been affirming in theory: that witty comparisons alone do not necessarily produce vigorous, explosive laughter. Except, perhaps, if one adds another comparison to those we have been working with: comparing, for instance, the translation of the Standard Edition, which symptomatically inverts what Freud has written in the German text (and what I have translated above). Dedicated above all to the production of a clear and meaningful text, the Standard Edition simply reverses the admittedly unusual but also decisive relation that Freud is at pains to articulate. For Strachey, meaning must be the essence and nucleus of any comparison, including those of Freud; and so we read in his translation of the passage just cited that "the best achievements in the way of jokes are used as an envelope for thoughts of the greatest substance" (my emphasis). What Strachey has difficulty in accepting is precisely the point Freud, in his study of jokes (and indeed, in his entire psychoanalytic theory), is striving to make: that "the most substantial thoughts," products of conscious intentionality, are used by the unconscious as a foil, "envelope," or guise (Einkleidung), to disguise and conceal its operations. This lapsus of the Standard Edition, by pointing up the chasm that separates "the most substantial thoughts" of Freud from those of his most celebrated English translator, serves to underscore the specific peculiarity of that "substance": thoughts, in the articulations of the unconscious, serve as foils, lures, and snares for something else, far more difficult to articulate. And this holds as much for Freud's own language, his Bildersprache, as for that which it seeks to describe-in this instance, jokes and their relation to the thoughts they "express." If the essence of the joke is precisely not to be found in those thoughts-in its contents (Gehalt)-this is tied to the peculiar nature of laughter as a specific form of ignorance. And yet, it is just this ignorance that makes it particularly difficult to develop a theory of jokes. For such a theory must rely upon the identification-that is, upon the recognition-of authentic examples of jokes in order to arrive at generalizable insights concerning the structure of jokes in general. But if the specificity of the joke is inseparable from the momentary effect of a laughter that precisely excludes knowledge, then how can one be certain that the jokes that one remembers are in fact authentic specimens? How can one know

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that one's examples are in truth exemplary? The discontinuous temporality of the joke excludes, in principle, its indefinite repetition; and yet, the reflecting recollection of jokes is the indispensable condition for the accumulation of "data'' on which any theoretical study must be based. If all that we can retain and repeat in a joke is its Gehalt, but not the laughter it evokes, are we not left with the mere Ekleidung? This dilemma notwithstanding, the would-be theoretician of jokes has no choice but to collect such guises, and disguises, since there is no other access to what he is seeking. At the very beginning of his book, Freud describes this desideratum by criticizing the deficiencies of his predecessors in the field. Their studies, he asserts, have tended to identify partial aspects of the joke but failed to bring them together into an organic whole: They are disjecta membra, which we should like to see combined into an organic whole. Ultimately they contribute to our knowledge of jokes no more than would a series of anecdotes to the characterization of a personaliry about which we have the right to ask for a biography. (Joke, p. 14) But is it certain that we do have the right to ask for the "biography" of a "personality"? Does psychoanalysis have this right? Can the various "case studies" to be found in the writings of Freud be assimilated (wittily or otherwise) to "biographies," in the sense of the "organic whole" that Freud finds wanting in his predecessors? Such questions are even more difficult to answer in the affirmative in the case at hand, where it is not "personalities" that are to be "characterized," but a phenomenon whose essence is not merely hidden behind a guise of meaning, but situated elsewhere, in a burst of laughter, the convulsive singularity of which seems to resist all objectification and even description. Read with these questions in mind, the first section of Freud's jokebook appears as an enormous and ultimately futile effort to determine the essential characteristics of a phenomenon that, by essence, eludes characterization for the simple reason that, confronted with theory, the joke inevitably has the last laugh. Or rather, because that laugh does not last: it erupts, passes, and recurs as the silent accompaniment of each of Freud's efforts to track and capture the "hidden, essential character of the joke" (Joke, p. 82). Thus, after he has isolated all of the various "techniques" em-

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ployed in the examples of jokes he has collected, Freud must still admit that the essence has escaped him: "It can no longer be doubted that technique alone is insufficient to characterize the nature of jokes. Something further is needed which we have not yet discovered" (joke, p. 73). The search therefore continues. Following his description of the joke's techniques-reducible to the two mechanisms already analyzed in his study of the dream-work, displacement and condensation-Freud proceeds to investigate jokes in terms of their function or strategy: what he calls their "tendentiousness" (a word whose aggressive connotations the Standard Edition neutralizes to mere "purpose"). Having distinguished four major types of "tendencies": obscene, hostile, sophisticated, and skeptical, Freud once again sees himself confronted by the question of the character of jokes, of their organic unity: "If it is correct to say that the pleasure provided by jokes depends on the one hand on their technique, and on the other on their tendency, what common point of view will enable such different sources of pleasure to be brought together?" (Joke, p. u6). And, we might ask further, will that "bringing together," that Vereinigung be merely witty, or based on true understanding? Will it be good theory, or merely a good joke? The theory of the joke, or a joke (on) theory? Freud's initial effort, at the beginning of the "synthetic part" of his joke-book, to uncover the essential, hidden character of the joke, culminates in his assertion that it is "the principle of economy" that unifies the various aspects of the Witz and endows it with its essential character. "All these techniques are dominated by a te~dency to compress, or rather to save. It all seems to be a matter of economy. In Hamlet's words: "Thrift, thrift, Horatio!" (joke, p. 42). According to this thesis, what the joke "saves" is "having to express a criticism or give shape to a judgment" (43). Were this hypothesis to hold, the joke would also "save" the theory that seeks to comprehend its diverse manifestations, its "examples," by bringing them together under a single tendency or characteristic. But no sooner has this conjecture been formulated than the author-or should we say, narrator-of the joke-book is overcome by doubt, not entirely unlike the Shakespearean to whom he here appeals. "It all seems to be a matter of economy," he asserts, but is that semblance to be trusted?

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It may be that every joke-technique shows the tendency to save something in expression, but ... not every economy of expression ... is on that account a joke as well. There must therefore be some peculiar kind of abbreviation and economy on which the characteristic of being a joke depends. And let us, further, have the courage to admit that the economies made by the joke-techniqu e do not greatly impress us .... What does a joke save by its technique? ... Is not the economy in words uttered more than balanced by the expenditure of intellectual effort? And who saves by that? Who gains by it? (Joke, p. 44)

The notion of "economy" is thus unsatisfactory, since it leaves both the subject and the object of the "saving" unaccounted for. A more complex explanation is required, one that Freud attempts to develop in the "Synthetic Part" of his book. If jokes produce a "saving," this cannot be construed in purely quantitative terms. The pleasure that it affords, Freud argues, consists of two elements: first, in the temporary lifting (Aujhebung) of existing inhibitions (Hemmungen), and hence of the energy-expenditure required to maintain them; and second, in the (verbal) reduction of what would normally be a complex train of thought. These two forms of economy are described by Freud as constituting the envelope (Hulle) and the nucleus (Kern) of the joke, respectively: "Accordingly it can be said that the pleasure of jokes exhibits a nucleus of original pleasure in play and an envelope of pleasure consisting in the lifting of inhibitions" (joke, p. 138). Although these two facets of the joke-pleasure are equally indispensable to its workings, they do not share the same structural or psychological status. The pleasure in play-Spiell ust-is "original" and archaic, and Freud therefore seeks to retrace the development of the joke by elaborating what he calls its "psychogenesis." This leads him into a discussion of the nature of play in its earliest manifestations in children, a discussion that touches upon some of the same questions that we have come across before. Indeed, one can already discern what will subsequently be his critique of Adler in Freud's treatment of the theory of Gross, who seeks to derive play from an impulse to dominate. Freud rejects such an explanation, while at the same time accepting Gross's description of play as a rediscovery of the familiar, as re-cognition. Play is pleasurable, he asserts, not because it involves a "joy in power ... in the overcoming of a difficulty," but simply because "recognition is pleasurable in itself-i.e. through relieving psychical expenditure" (joke, pp. 121-22).

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Freud's effort to develop a genetic explanation of the joke, by tracing it back to an original tendency to reduce psychic expenditure, merely transposes the problem of economy onto a different, apparently more fundamental ground: that of the play of the child, construed as the effort to avoid the more onerous activity of discrimination by means of analogization. Wit develops our of play, because play, in the child, is witty to begin with. But-and here Freud seeks to account for the conflictual aspects associated with all manifestations of the unconscious, including jokes-the childish pleasure in play is made inaccessible to the adult by the claims of reason (and ultimately by the reality principle). There comes a time when the pleasure in recognizing the same can no longer be readily indulged in, when "one does not venture to say anything absurd" (Joke, p. 126), when "the meaningless combination of words or the absurd putting together of thoughts must nevertheless have a meaning" (Joke, p. 129). And it is this development that ushers in the phenomenon of the joke, by making the pleasure of play no longer directly accessible as such. The joke, Freud now asserts, arises out of the conflict between play and meaning, Spiel and Sinn. If play is thus the "origin" of the joke, it is only through its negation or inhibition, imposed by the demands of meaning and of the critical intellect, that the joke proper is forced to emerge. Its initial form is that of the "jest" (Scherz). Although the jest represents a lowly and rudimentary form of the joke (a distinction somewhat obliterated by the English word, "joke," which overlaps with the German Scherz), Freud emphasizes that this evaluation does not affect its structural status as a joke, for the jest already contains and fulfills all the essential conditions of the joke. What distinguishes jest from joke, and creates what might be called their qualitative difference, is precisely the inessential aspect of wit: the particular meaning articulated. For if the meaning of the joke (Witz) is important, whereas that of the jest is usually trivial, this does not in any way affect the latter's standing as wit, since meaning only operates wittily inasmuch as it functions to distract and immobilize the inhibitory force of critical reason. Meaning, in short, has for the Witz no intrinsic value; it is only instrumental, serving to eliminate temporarily the barriers to play. The result of this determination of meaning is not without a certain paradoxical element: if the "jest" relates to the "joke" as does the "bad" to the "good," Freud is neverthe-

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less constrained to conclude that '"bad' jokes are by no means bad as jokes, that is, unsuitable for producing pleasure" (joke, p. 121). But there is another paradoxical aspect of Freud's treatment of meaning in the joke: by determining it to be the external facade, the instrumental envelope of the joke, as opposed to its original core of play, Freud seeks to construct the joke as a proper, i.e., meaningful, object of theory. The essence of joke, his theory contends, resides in the manner in which meaning is placed in the service of play. Freud's "psychogenesis" of the joke, seeking to retrace it to an origin of pure and simple play, is the theoretical strategy by which this conception is articulated. To work, however, the play that Freud places at the origin of the joke-and of the pleasure it entails-must indeed be pure and simple. This is why he criticizes Gross's effort to derive play from power: "I see no reason to depart from the simpler view that recognition is pleasurable in itself," Freud contends. One can, of course, relate this critique to Freud's refusal to hypostasize the kind of constitutive subject chat every such notion of an original will-to-power inevitably implies. But in stressing rhe simplicity of play and of the pleasure it affords, and in asserting that "recognition is pleasurable in itself" because it entails a reduction in "psychical expenditure," Freud also presupposes the existence of an originary, constitutive subject, in terms of whose unity such "expenditure" can be calculated. If one asks, as Freud himself does, who benefits from the economies of play, and how, the response must be: the ego, and this in the emphatic sense of the term that Freud will theorize only many years after the writing of his joke-book. If processes of repetition, rediscovery, and recognition, as the recurrence of the same, afford pleasure, it is not because of an intrinsic property (which is both tautological as explanation and incompatible with the Freudian conception of the psyche), but rather because of a process he will come to describe as that of narcissistic identification, through which the ego is cathected and constituted as a libidinal object. The ego takes its place by taking the place of the other, by replacing that other within itself and by seeking to deprive it of its alterity. One of the most powerful forms this process can take is precisely the desire to rediscover the same, to repeat, to recognize, and thus to transform a movement of difference into one of identity.

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In 1905, as Freud wrote his text on jokes, he had yet to work out his theory of narcissism and his second topology of the psyche. In 1920, however, both of these developments had already taken place, and taken their place within the corpus of psychoanalytical theory. It is therefore all the more conspicuous that when Freud returns to this question of the play of the child for the last time, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his discussion of it seems little influenced by the theoretical acquisitions made since the earlier study of jokes. Nevertheless, however implicit the influence of such theories may be, it is nonetheless profound and transforms the very framework in which Freud approaches the phenomenon of play. This transformation, it is true, is inscribed in a place that easily eludes observation: on the margins of his text, as it were, on the borders of a scene that has captivated all eyes from the very first. Let us recount that celebrated scene once again, to call attention to its less famous reflection, situated unobtrusively off in the wings, as it were. But first, to the center stage: The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive "o-o-o-o." He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful "da" ("there"). This, then, was the complete game-disappearance and return. (Beyond, p. 9) In his discussion of this scene of "child's play," Freud collects a variety of possible interpretations of the motivating force behind it. By comparison to his analysis in the joke book, however, what is striking is the total absence of any reference to any economy or saving of energy. Instead, we discover what might be called a return of the theoretically repressed: the reference to power that Freud was so eager to dismiss in his critique of Gross: At the outset [the child] was in a passive situation-he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable as it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery. (Beyond, p. ro) A further motive, Freud continues, could be the desire of the child "to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him" (Beyond, p. ro). Active control, revenge, rivalry, and the desire to "make themselves mas-

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ter of the situation" dominates Freud's conjectures as to the impulses behind the playing of children, even and especially where it is evident that the experiences thus repeated could not, in and of themselves, be sources of pleasure. If such game-playing nevertheless does not contradict the pleasure principle-and this is of course the perspective from which Freud approaches the phenomenon in Beyond the Pleasure Principle-it is "because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one" (Beyond, p. 10). What this other kind of pleasure might be, Freud does not explicitly tell us, not at least in the body of his text. Bur it is this open question that should alert us to the subsidiary scene inscribed on the margins of the main text, more precisely, in a footnote, where yet another recurrence of the Fort-Da game plays itself out. This time, however, the future that disappears is neither the mother, the father, or any other relative, but rather the child himself: One day the child's mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words "Baby o-o-o-o!" which was ar first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himselfdisappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image "gone." (Beyond, p. 9) If, then, the activity of producing a disappearance is the more pleasurably intense of the two moments that comprise the game of Fort-Da, as Freud suggests; and if this activity is linked to the establishment of control, of mastery, then it is this marginal scene, itself a repetition of the "primary" game, that indicates unmistakably what the "subject" of this power-game must be: the narcissistic ego, in the process of consolidating itself in what Lacan has taught us to recognize as the "mirror-stage." According to Lacan, a certain attempt at identification with the mirror-image serves, genetically and structurally, as the prototype for the narcissistic formation of the ego, which can only establish its identity by engaging in the Sisyphean task of taking the place of another that, qua image, appears to possess the unity that the subject itselflacks. Such an aporetic project in turn determines the narcissistic identity of the ego as one that is inherently ambivalent, since it is constantly engaged in a relation of rivalry with that

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other whose unity it both postulates and simultaneously denies (by the very effort to appropriate it). 8 The Lacanian theory of the mirror-stage, with its stress on the ambivalent identity of the narcissistic ego, could be taken as a direct commentary on this marginal scene. And yet, the footnote plays no major part in Lacan's discussions of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for reasons that are as illuminating in regard to Freud as to Lacan. For Lacan, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is above all the text that describes the entry of the subject into the realm of the Symbolic, that is, of language structured by the Signifier. As such, the move it is held to describe is one precisely away from the ambivalent dimension of the Imaginary, associated with the mirror-stage and the narcissistic ego that emerged from it. What Freud's footnote demonstrates, on the contrary, is that there is an other scene of the Symbolic, of the Fort-Da game, and it is precisely: the Imaginary, in all of its aggressive, narcissistic ambivalence. Far from relating to one another as an alternative, or as a simple opposition-itself a highly "imaginary" form of relation-symbolic and imaginary, language and mirrorimage, signifier and signified are inscribed in a scene that repeats itself, marginally, in a movement, or scenario, from which a certain narcissism seems to be inseparable. And this applies not merely to the scene being described, but also to the theoretical mise-en-scene that reinscribes it. For both theoretical description and the game it describes participate in a similar game, a kind of child's play, but one which is by no means limited to children. For both seek to assign names to the elusive phenomena or activity they perform. For Freud, these names are: pleasure principle, mastery, repetition, and finally, death drive. For Freud's nephew, the child playing the game of Fort-Da, the names are precisely: Fort and Da. But this aspect of the game Lacan's theory of the Symbolic cannot accommodate and must therefore overlook: for if this game marks an "entry" into the Symbolic order of language, the latter is not characterized, as Lacan asserts, by pure Signifiers, in the sense of differential elements. "Fort" and "Da" are not primarily signifiers, but rather words, semantically determined marks used to designate determinate "signifieds." And if the signified states designated by those words entail the important activity of departing and returning, what Freud's description of the child's game suggests is that the subject who articulates the absence of the other-the

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mother, but also of itself-is one that seeks to remain (itself), in spite of the other. In short, the narcissistic ambivalence toward the image of (and as) the other seeks to affirm its self-identity precisely in and as (what Lacan would call) the symbolic subject of the utterance, sujet de l'enonciation, dialectical subject par excellence. Freud, read through the categories of Lacan, thus disrupts the latter's authoritative-authorizing hierarchy based on the primacy of the Symbolic, a primacy that is no longer tenable. The Symbolic emerges as yet another lure of the imaginary, particularly powerful in the realm of, conceptualization peculiar to theoretical discourse. But Lacan also disrupts and displaces the explicit assertions of Freud by pointing to the implicit instance that underwrites the "pleasure of play": the narcissistic ego. Returning to Freud's joke-book, we can conclude that the play with language, which is presented as intrinsically pleasurable, original, and innocent, is in fact pleasurable only for the narcissistic ego, and hence, neither original nor innocent. The diverse forms of repetition, such as the use of rhythmic patterns or rhyme, peculiar both to children's language and to certain joke-techniques (but also to poetry), produces a pleasure not merely because the identification of the same is "easier" than the discrimination of difference, but rather because it serves the interests of the narcissistic ego bent upon reducing alterity to a variation of identity. Seen in this perspective, Freud's effort to construe the relation of play and meaning in terms of an opposition between two, essentially unrelated terms loses much of its force. For play and meaning now appear not as oppositional activities, but as complementary ones, both deriving from the effort of the narcissistic ego to appropriate the other upon which it depends and in the image of which it constitutes its identity. If the pleasure of play is thus replaced and "inhibited" by critical reason, it is only better to serve the goal that both play and meaning are designed to further: the narcissistic recognition of the Same. Considered from this standpoint, Freud's discussion of play in Beyond the Pleasure Principle illustrates another aspect that is missing from his earlier treatment of the subject, and it is a lack that is all the more serious since it touches on a central aspect of jokes. In his initial determination of play as the origin of jokes, Freud is unable to account for one of the most decisive aspects of the Witz as a linguistic phenomen: the

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place of the other in relation to language. In his account of the Fort-Da game, that place is indicated even if it is never mentioned as such by Freud. It is marked in the punctuation that Freud gives to the phrase, "Fort! Da!"-the exclamation point that characterizes the utterance as one directed to another person, endowing it with an imperative (Go!), rather than merely a constative tone. Indeed, the very essence of such play as a power-game resides in the manner in which a constative use of language transforms itself into a performative, perlocutionary, "symbolic" one, intent on producing effects, and thereby implying determinate addresses. By thus speaking, exclaiming, commanding, the child seeks to break that "solitude" to which Freud refers. The commanding subject of Freud's Fort-Da! game positions itself in relation to another: not merely the absent mother, but an other specifically summoned by the command itself. Indeed, if this other seems destined to replace the absent mother and to revenge the child, it would provide us with yet another reason for regarding the Symbolic as a lure of the Imaginary, as the discursive continuation of the ambivalent strategy of narcissism. Freud, to be sure, will have nothing of this in his endeavor to trace the joke back to an origin that is as pure as it is innocent: the pleasure of play-child's play. For such play is designed to provide the ground and kernel not merely of the joke alone, but also of the theory that seeks to comprehend and to master the joke. This theory, we recall, seeks to succeed where others-Freud's predecessors-have failed: to organize the "disjecta membra" of the joke into an organic whole. But the psychogenetic derivation of the joke from play is still lacking what is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the joke. And that, we repeat, is no laughing matter.

The Shaggy Dog

If Freud's psychogenesis of the joke, his attempt to derive it from play, does not have the last word, it is because the determination of the joke as "developed play'' fails to account for the effect that every joke must produce in order to be one: that of laughter. Freud, it is true, does endeavor to provide an "economic" description of laughter, one that would relate it to play, or rather to the inhibition of play through the critique of reason. Laughter, he asserts, results when the energies that are otherwise consumed in the maintenance of critical inhibitions are momentarily liberated from this task by a joke and thereby channeled into laughter. But already this explanation presupposes a shift in the economic model implied by Freud's notion of "saving": for laughter results not from energy saved, but rather from redistribution ofenergies within a conjlictual forcefield. In Freud's terminology, the word "saving," Ersparung, is replaced by the more dynamic, conflictual "relief," Erleichterung. The question now becomes, not who saves what, but who is relieved of what and how? The joke begins to emerge, not as the development of a pure, original, and innocent play, but as the effect of a state of tension. In this sense, Freud's attempt to theorize the joke as the saving of energy is interrupted by that curious after-effect, which, while not pertaining to the joke as such, is nevertheless indispensable to its function and, hence, to its essence: laughter. Concerning this laughter, Freud insists on

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two points: first, that it is tendentially an explosive, uncontrollable, convulsive movement that is difficult to domesticate or even to understand; and second, that it is exclusively the listener, the addressee of the joke, and not its narrator, who can laugh. The narrator thus depends not only on laughter, but upon the laughter of another to succeed with the joke. This dependence on the laugh of the listener-the "third person" as Freud calls him-adds a new wrinkle to the already exceedingly complex "characterization" of the joke. For up to now, Freud has already operated a curious inversion of the traditional relation of language and meaning, outside and inside, in that he has relegated meaning to the "envelope" (Hiille) of the joke, and placed its linguistic "expression" as play in its center (Kern). What he now proceeds to do is to further dislocate the joke by splitting that center, or rather by displacing it: the indulgence in play no longer suffices to define a joke (this would leave laughter fully unaccounted for); rather, it is the rechanneling of inhibition in and as laughter that must be explained. Inhibition is no longer merely a negative obstacle standing in the way of play: it becomes a positive precondition oflaughter. Such decentering of the joke recalls Freud's approach to the dream, which only comes to be in its aftermath, in its (re-)narration or repetition, which is also irs (further) distortion (Entstellung). The joke too is ent-stellt: dislocated and distorted in and as the laughter it must evoke but from which it is separated. In contrast to the dream, however, the dislocation that constitutes the joke post facto, as it were, cannot in any way be conceived or confined within a closed, "intrapsychic" space; on the contrary, Freud writes, comparing it to the dream, "a joke ... is the most social of all the mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure. It often calls for three persons and its completion requires the participation of someone else in the mental process it starts" (Joke, p. 179). The question, then, that the relation of the joke to laughter imposes on Freud concerns the peculiar role of this other, the third person, in regard to the joke: "Why is it, then, that I do not laugh at a joke of my own? And what part is played in this by the other person?" (Joke, p. 144). The fact that the "first person"-the joke-teller-cannot laugh at his "own" joke, indicates that the lifting of inhibitions must function differently in the listener and in the teller. In the case of the former, the energies that are freed (from maintaining inhibitions) by the joke are not

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bound to other mental representations by further intellectual activity and hence can be channeled into laughter. 1 In the case of the joke-teller, however, inhibitory cathexes are not simply dissolved, they are shifted to the narration of the joke itself, which absorbs the energy, "binds" it, and hence prevents it from being converted into laughter, except, as Freud notes, "par ricochet" (Joke, p. 156). Thus, it is only through the effect produced upon the listener, who is moved to laughter, that the teller can "relieve" himself: "It [the joke-process] seems not to come to rest until, through the mediation of the interposed third person (der eingeschobenen dritten Person) it achieves general relief through discharge" (Joke, p. 158). With the "interposition" of the Other, the "third person" who listens and laughs, Freud's effort to theorize the joke gains in complexity but loses in the coherence that he had initially set himself as goal. Instead of a harmoniously organized "whole" we find a scene with three protagonists: a jittery if genial "first person," marked by a tendency toward exhibitionism (Joke, p. 143); a voyeuristically inclined third person, "corrupted" (bestochen) by the promised "gift" of pleasure (joke, p. 148), and a "second person," who need not be a "person" at all, but rather an inacceptable idea. And yet, if this scene appears to lack the unity that Freud had declared to be his goal in constructing a coherent theory of jokes, the relations of its principal figures coalesce when Freud, again apparently only in passing, on the margins of the main text or argument, as it were, recounts another kind of story. He comes upon this story in the context of his discussion of the "tendencies" of the joke, which he divides into the main categories of "hostile" or "obscene." In previous studies of jokes, Freud notes, the obscene variety of tendentious joke has been given far less attention than has the aggressive type, perhaps because of a taboo. Within the variety of obscene jokes, Freud turns his attention to a "border-line case" (einen Grenzfoll), which, despite or perhaps even because of its peripheral position, "promises to shed light on more than one obscure point" (Joke, p. 97). This marginal case of joking is that of "smut" or the dirty joke (die Zote). Freud begins his discussion of the dirty joke by reviewing the traditional conception of it, according to which it entails "the intentional bringing into prominence of sexual facts and relations by speech." But this definition is inadequate, for the simple reason that the dirty joke cannot

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be satisfactorily described exclusively in terms of its content or object: it must be grasped as discourse that is not merely about but also directed at a particular addressee. The key to the dirty joke resides in this addressee: The dirty joke is thus originally directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction. If a man in the company of men enjoys telling or listening to dirty jokes, it is because the original situation, which owing to social inhibitions cannot be realized, is simultaneously imagined. A person who laughs at the dirty joke he hears, laughs as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression. (Joke, p. 97) If the thematic object of the dirty joke ranges it among the category of "obscene" jokes, it also places the joke simultaneously among that of the "aggressive" variety, thus blurring the distinction between the two types. It is therefore not by a static taxonomy that one can hope to grasp the essence of the dirty joke, but rather by reviewing its development, the story of which Freud proceeds to tell. Its point of departure, as already indicated, is a frustrated attempt at seduction, but one in which we already find the trio of personages that will characterize the joke-structure itself: The ideal case of a resistance of this kind on the woman's part occurs when another man, a third person [eines Dritten], is present at the same time, since in that case immediate submission of the woman is as good as out of the question. This third person soon acquires the greatest importance in the development of the dirty joke. (Joke, p. 99) The significance of this "third person" for the dirty joke, Freud continues, resides in the manner in which "he" comes to replace "the female" (das \.reib) as the primary addressee of the joke: "Gradually, in place of the woman, the onlooker, now the listener, becomes the person to whom the dirty joke is addressed, and owing to this transformation it is already near to assuming the character of the joke proper [des Witzes]" (Joke, p. 99). It is only through the simultaneous presence, and interference, of a third person that the dirty joke is really constituted as a joke. The dyadic relationship implied in the relation of subject to object, seducer to seduced, must be disrupted by the presence of another, and this, as we shall argue, endows the joke with its peculiar logic, one which is also that of all articulations of the unconscious and which defies the constitutive rule of traditional logic, tertium non datur. For wherever jokes are concerned, and

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wherever the unconscious is at work, there must be a third, excluded from but also including the other two, con-cluding as well. If there is a logic of the unconscious, both the joke in general and the dirty joke in particular point to its basic rule: tertium datur. 2 And it is precisely this rule-a bad joke by any traditional standard of logic, and yet no worse as a joke for its badness-that makes the joke a laughing matter. For it is only with the advent of the third person that a space is opened in which laughter can break out. Freud tells us the story of how this comes about. At first, the third person appears as an interloper, thrusting himself between the desiring first person and the desired second. The mere presence of this other man inhibits the fulfillment of desire. The third person, the other man, embodies the moral code and its interdictions. But then, "gradually," a change transforms the relation of first and third persons: their rivalry or conflict is replaced by a kind of complicity in which the aggressive tendency is displaced onto "the female," who remains inaccessible. And the attempted seduction is similarly displaced from the unattainable woman to the other man: "Through the first person's smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido" (Joke, p. 100). The "satisfaction" that the dirty joke procures for its participants, and first of all for the third person, is evidently related to the imaginary mastery exercised over the desired bur inaccessible woman. If, as Freud remarks, sexuality was originally closely bound up with sight (Schaulust, voyeuristic pleasure, as well as its inversion, Exhibitions-drang), the dirty joke reenacts this scopophilic aspect, by exposing through verbal imagery the absent object of desire, and thereby producing, as laughter, the convulsive discharge of energy previously frustrated by the woman's inaccessibility. In this respect, Freud includes the dirty joke among the more general category of psychic acts bent on "undoing renunciation and retrieving what was lost"

(Joke, p. 101). But this explanation cannot account either for the necessity of a third person's being present or for the phenomenon of laughter. Nor can the "loss" of the desired object as such suffice to motivate the existence and efficacy of those inhibitions that normally stand in the way of the kinds of representation practiced by the dirty joke. Indeed, toward the end of Freud's discussion of the dirty joke, it becomes evident that its op-

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eration entails more than merely the actualization or making-present of what has been "lost." Freud is describing one of the favorite techniques of the dirty joke, that of "allusion-that is, replacement by something small, something remotely connected, which the hearer reconstructs in his imagination into a complete and straightforward obscenity'' (Joke, p. wo; my emphasis). "Something small," Das Kleine, is described in The Interpretation of Dreams as a phrase designating (female) genitals; in later texts it will be interpreted as symbolizing both the penis and the child. 3 Here, the technique of "replacement by something small" used by the dirty joke designates not merely the general tendency of the joke to use indirect means of articulation to escape censure and critique, but more important, a conception of sexuality quite different from that which Freud's rather realistic account of the dirty joke would seem to suggest. The "sexual" aspect of these jokes would, in this reading, consist not so much in the effort to compensate for a loss by imaginary representation as in the use of certain techniques of substitution. The pleasure afforded by such jokes would then be more closely tied to games of substitution than to imaginary actualization or restoration. Such a notion of sexuality as substitution rather than as presentation or reparation seems in any case necessary if one is to understand the importance that dirty jokes assign to the excremental: The sexual material which forms the content of smut includes more than what is peculiar to each sex; it also includes what is common to both sexes and to which the feeling of shame extends-that is to say, what is excremental in the most comprehensive sense. This is, however, the sense covered by sexuality in childhood, an age at which there is, as it were, a cloaca within which what is sexual and what is excremental are barely or not at all distinguished. (Joke, pp. 97-98)

Just such a distinction will, in fact, be introduced by the development of the sexual significance of the excremental. Together with this emerges "the history of the first prohibition that the child encounters" and that will prove to be "decisive for its entire development" (S.E. 7, 187). On the one hand, this prohibition consolidates the distinction of self and other, inner and outer, own and alien, proper and improper, by valorizing the first term of the opposition positively, the second negatively: "The 'Anal' becomes henceforth the symbol of everything that is to be rejected, to be

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cut off from life" (S.E., 7, 187). In so doing, the prohibition strengthens the ego's narcissism. On the other hand, and simultaneously, the same prohibition drives the ego ever further into what can best be designated as a crisis ofnarcissism, which culminates in the "castration complex." For the prohibition separates desire from its objects, the body from its products, the ego from others. In adults, it is precisely the ambivalent nature of this "first" prohibition that characterizes what must be regarded as the quintessence of character as such, the so-called "anal-character," with its tendency to exaggerated orderliness, frugality, obstinancy, etc. Something very much like these "characteristics" seem also to "characterize" Freud's own theoretical endeavor in seeking to ferret out the hidden "character" of the joke. First, he seeks to accumulate and to order a confusing proliferation of "examples," above all by subsuming them under the general concept of "saving" or economizing (Ersparung). Then, he seeks to develop this notion of economy in two principle directions: as the development of an original, "pure" pleasure in play (playing with feces is, of course, one of the first expressions of anal eroticism, and the first object of that "first prohibition"); and as the "lifting" (Aujhebung) of an inhibition standing in the way of such play-an inhibition that is "discharged" (abgefohrt) as laughter and thereby produces "relief" (Erleichterung). Moreover, the joke-pleasure is presented as a gift to the third person, and as such becomes the successor of the very first gift that the child offers: his feces. But perhaps all this is merely wit gone wild, overingenious analogizing lacking sensitivity to the necessary discrimination. Perhaps. But anyone sensitive to the language Freud uses to describe the "making" of the joke itself will find it difficult to reject this "characterization" out of hand: We speak, it is true, of "making" a joke, but we feel that when we do so we behave differently from when we give a judgment or make an objection. A joke has quite outstandingly the character of being an involuntary "discovery" [Einfolls]. One has no idea a moment beforehand just which joke one will make, and which then needs only to be clothed in words. Rather we foe! something indefinable, which I can best compare with an "absence," a sudden discharge [Auslmsen} of intellectual tension, and then, with one fell swoop [mit einen Schlagel, the joke is there, as a rule together with its verbal costume [Einkleidung]. (Joke, p. 167; my emphasis)

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Small wonder that Freud is so bent upon distinguishing the joke's envelope from its core, Htille from Kern; and also small wonder that in the process of establishing such distinctions, the latter tend to turn themselves inside-out: the outer garment of verbal play reveals itself to be the inner nucleus of the joke, while the semantic material that usually makes up the interior domain is here only a facade. The prohibited game returns in and as this smearing of oppositions that are seemingly clear-cut. Is this then the "hidden character" of the joke? Of its theory? Its proper meaning? And yet, perhaps Freud's theory, like the joke it describes, has no meaning that would be purely and entirely "proper." Perhaps it too only "makes sense" in and through another, a third person, who is neither simply a part of it nor simply distinct from it: the reader, whose role would not be so different from that of the listener in the joke. That "first prohibition," we recall, requires a third person for its implementation. The history of that prohibition, and the third instance it entails, is also that of the narcissistic striving of the ego to be, or become a "first person." The history of this ego thereby emerges not as that dialectic of Self and Other as which it is generally construed, but as an Auseinandersetzung that entails three participants, three "persons." Let us briefly recapitulate the history of this Auseinandersetzung. It "begins" with an impossible and yet self-evident presupposition: For the male child it is self-evident to presuppose (vorauszusetzen) that all persons that it knows are possessed of genitals like his own, and therefore impossible to reconcile the lack of such with his idea of these other persons. (S.E. 7, 195)

The narcissistic belief in the continuity of Self and Other, which underlies the self-evident presupposition of the child, is severely challenged by the first prohibition that occurs in the anal phase, which establishes the idea of separation, and installs an unbridgeable gap between desire and the desired. But this development culminates decisively only in the castration-complex, where the (male) child must renounce, once and for all, the object of its narcissistic desire, and hence abandon the self-evident presupposition that all others are really just like himself, "possessed of genitals like his own." The recognition of others can no longer be modeled on the recognition of the same; the ego is forced to confront the nonego differently. The latter can no longer be regarded as merely a vari-

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arion of the first person, distinct from and yet subordinated to it. The other is also no longer simply "out there," removed from the ego. And it is precisely at this point that the "third person" comes in: that is, enters the scene as the intrapsychic instance or agency (Instanz)'' that is also the repository of the metapsychic values that constitute a culture: the superego. This superego is heir to the ambivalence that characterizes the narcissism of the ego from the very first: from its refusal to accept an other that would be radically different from its self (that is, from its self-image). In this sense the superego embodies both "the heir of the original narcissism" (S.E. 18, no) and its constitutive limit. "Through its installation (Aufrichtung), the ego has both taken control (sich bemiichtigt) of the oedipus complex, and also submitted to the Id" (S.E. 19, 36). Through its "installation" of the superego, the ego in a certain sense acknowledges the alterity that it has hitherto sought to exclude; but such "acknowledgment" is itself marked by ambivalence. On the one hand, it entails the effort by the ego to assimilate and incorporate the nonego; on the other, it creates a structure of differential articulation that can never be reduced to pure identity, for the superego places the ego in the most classical of double-binds. "Be like me!" it tells the ego, "Be yourself!" And yet, to be oneself is precisely to be diffirentfrom the ideal imposed upon the ego by its "ideal." The superego represents the unattainable identity of the ego, toward which it must strive but which it can never attain. And this relation of superego and ego is precisely one of "third" to "first" person. For the superego speaks the language of the ego, but in the syntax of the id. It is, as Freud writes, "composed of word-representations (concepts, abstractions)" in accordance with its "origin from things heard" (Herkunft aus Gehortem); but the affinity of its discourse with that of the ego is deceptive, since it derives its "cathecting energy ... from sources in the Id" (S.E. 19, 52-53). The most striking manifestation of this impossible communication is surely that described by Daniel Paul Schreber: the voices that he heard addressed him, as Freud notes, "characteristically in the third person" (S.E. 14, 95). The "third person," linguistically and psychically, as Benveniste has observed, 5 is distinguished from the second precisely by being a "nonperson," irreducible to the self-identity of an ego (or to its negative form, an alter-ego). The third person therefore does not merely join the first and

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second to form a trio of individuals, of egos: its "presence" marks the constitutive dependence of the ego as such on something that can never be fully assimilated to any form of self-identity. The "prohibition" that this third person installs-aufrichtet-does not, therefore, come upon the subject from without: it dislocates (entstellt) it from within, as it were, turning it inside-out, turning the "ego" outwards toward the superego, but also the (dirty) joke toward its "listener" or "spectator." Thus, when Freud describes how the third person first hinders the accomplishment of the seduction, and then changes from an interloper into an ally, it is also the structural "resolution" of the Oedipus complex through the installation of the superego that he is anticipating. Whether this implies that the dirty joke is oedipal in structure, or conversely, that the Oedipus complex is a "dirty joke," is a question that will hardly permit a univocal response. But what can be asserted is that their relationship marks the manner in which the ego is subjected to an other in the process of articulating itself. Interdictory tribunal and ideal in one, this other-the third person-is the instance that must decide the fate of every "first person," qua ego. Through it, the ego encounters that measure of alterity which it can never either fully appropriate or flatly reject, since its future articulation depends on its relation to the superego. The paradoxical result of this relation is that-in the psychic development of the subject no less than in the operation of the joke-the "third" person emerges as the condition of possibility (and impossibility) of the first. The resolution of this "paradox," or rather its articulation, is that possibility and impossibility of being a "first person," an "ego," compose that "being" as one of imposability (if not of imposture). The first person becomes himself, a Self, only in and through the struggle to impose that Self on and at the expense of the third person. The process of this imposition is condensed-and, in the diachrony of Freud's development, anticipated-in the tripartite structure of the joke, and in particular in the scenario of the dirty joke, to which we now return. The third person has the power to decide the fate of the joke and hence of the "first person" who tells it. For if that joke does not succeed, as evidenced by the laughter of the listener, the first person is reduced to a nonperson, insofar as the joke is concerned. For the joke, we recall, is no joke without the laughter of its listener.

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This dependence of the first person, the ego, on the third person, as articulated in the joke-process, allows us to discern what many readers of Freud have sought in vain: the precise dynamics by which the intrapsychic realm of individual subjectivity is mediated by or interacts with the intersubjective order of society. What we have referred to as the narcissistic ambivalence of the ego constrains the latter to displace its identitywhich is always "ideal" -onto an instance that can only operate effectively as the ambivalent/ambiguous union of specular other (superego as ego-ideal) and of unrepresentable other (superego as derivative of the id). These two indispensable but profoundly heterogeneous aspects of alterity, inseparably bound together in the superego and its avatars, produce a curious but significant phenomenon: the "incarnation" of the superego in the third person of the joke-or, more generally, in the addressee necessarily implied by every articulation of the unconscious-requires that other to be both a determinate individual, acting with a measure of conscious volition, and one who is not fully conscious or in control of his acts. Thus, the decision to tell or listen to a joke depends on a conscious act, whereas the effect that decides the fate of the joke-laughter-lies precisely outside the control of consciousness, consisting as it does in a temporary breakdown of such control. And laughing is a peculiar act, if indeed it can be considered to be an "act" at all: that is, an activity consciously prepared and executed. For what characterizes laughter, at least as Freud describes it in relation to the joke, is that it is only partially volitional. This designates the person who laughs as a "third" in the strongest sense: as a persona, a mask, through which it (id) laughs. The listener can be disposed to laugh, but even that disposition cannot be consciously decreed; laughter of the explosive kind described by Freud cannot be forced, calculated, or fully understood. It must be spontaneous, automatic, no more subject to conscious volition than the "making" of the joke itself For such laughter is characterized, by Freud, above all as a form of non-knowledge, "so that with jokes we almost never know what we are laughing about" (Joke, p. 154). Freud insists on this aspect of the laughter provoked by jokes, although it becomes clear, through his discussion of the function of "inhibition" in the mechanism of laughter, that the nonknowledge he describes as its constitutive condition is in fact another kind

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of knowledge, rather than pure ignorance. This other knowledge entails above all a diversion of conscious attention: "Laughter is in fact the product of an automatic process which is only made possible by our conscious attention being kept away from" the object that will provoke laughter. (Joke, p. 154). Laughter thus requires the diversion of consciousness or, it might be said, a certain divarication of the mind. The conscious part can be "kept away" from the object that will produce laughter only by simultaneously being drawn and bound to other representations or expectations, like that of an "intelligible context" or overall meaning to be transmitted by the joke. It is this expectation of a meaning that thus becomes one of the negative preconditions of the joke, even though such expectation is qualified by the even more comprehensive fact that the joke entails a kind of contract on the part of its participants. A joke is almost always announced as such in advance, explicitly or implicitly, and this entails the expectation of a certain surprise, diversion, laughter. But however inevitable such an expectation may be, the particular "object" of the joke must remain removed from consciousness if the joke is to succeed. All that can be determined, in general, about that object-and it is highly significant for Freud's conception of jokes-is that hearer and teller must share the same inhibitions that the joke is designed to neutralize for laughter to take place. This is tantamount to asserting that the "place" of laughter in the joke-process is socially determined, involving generally held "inhibitions" or taboos (as opposed to purely individual ones). In producing laughter, the joke thus represents a collective if temporary transgression of shared prohibitions. Jokes therefore are always specific to certain groups, which may be more or less extensive, but which are never simply universal. "Every joke," Freud observes, "calls for a public of its own" (Joke, p. 151). The contract that binds the parties engaged in the joke thus diverges from that of liberal, bourgeois jurisprudence: the contracting parties agree to a process of exchange without being certain that they will be able to accomplish the obligations they incur. The listener cannot guarantee that he will laugh, and indeed his laughter, in not being "his" at all, indicates the extent of his nonautonomy, his "heteronomy." What the joke entails is the common agreement to attempt to overstep certain boundaries, of which the consenting parties-in particular the decisive

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third person-cannot even be fully aware before or during the joke. But since the outcome of this contract can never be known or decided upon in advance; since it depends not on conscious volition but on a relation of forces in which that "other part" will be decisive, the joke takes place in an ambience of curiosity, one that aims not simply at discursive knowledge, but at other forms of discovery. "Discovery," however, should not be taken as an exclusively, or even primarily, cognitive activity. In the text that he was writing at the same time as the book on jokes, his Three Essays on the Theory ofInfontile Sexuality, Freud argued that the "desire to know" (der Wisstrieb) develops from the "urge to see" (der Schautrieb) (S.E. 7, 194). The joke demonstrates the force of the desire to see (and to be seen). Underlying the interaction of curiosity, surprise, meaning, inhibition, and play in the joke is precisely the Schaulust. the aggressive "exposure" (Entblossung) of the woman in dirty jokes is perhaps only the most evident manifestation of the intimate affinity of wit and vision. 6 In a sense, all "three" persons are exposed by the joke (just as the latter itself is exposed in, and to, laughter). That the "second person" is always tendentially exposed by the joke is indicated precisely by the joke's general tendentiousness. The first person, Freud observes, will often be possessed of "an ambitious urge to show (his) cleverness, to display himself-an instinct that may be equated with exhibitionism in the sexual field" (joke, p. 143). Structurally, the joke-teller exposes himself to the "decision" of the third person. But what then of this third person? In what way does he participate in the Schaulust, and to what extent is he exposed to, or by, the joke? And what if this "he" were a "she"? Characteristically, the response to these questions is inscribed not in the body of the main text, but implicitly, on its margin: once again in a footnote, and once again, added long after that body was composed. This footnote, through its positioning, resembles (but is this perhaps only idle wit, overingenious analogizing?) laughter, in its Nachtriiglichkeit with regard to the main text: written long after the book itself, touching on a phenomenon for which "there is no appropriate name," and of which one cannot even say for certain whether it belongs to the category of jokes at all. This inscription is doubly marginal: appended in 1912 to a long footnote on "nonsense jokes," it is nonetheless "central" to the theory of jokes.

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As central, that is, as anything could be to a phenomenon in which the core functions as envelope, and the envelope as essence. But let us first look at the note "proper," added to the conclusion of chapter 4 ("Pleasure and the Genesis of Jokes") and treating the problem of "nonsense jokes." The latter, Freud writes, have been somewhat neglected in his discussion and therefore merit "supplementary consideration." The note begins by stressing that it would be a mistake to conclude that "nonsense jokes" are the primary or exclusive form of the Witz. Such jokes embody only one of the two essential components of the jokeprocess, the play with thoughts, which evokes pleasure through the lifting of inhibitions; the other, more original component of joke-pleasure, that deriving from the play with words, is independent of such nonsenseeffects. Freud thereby recurs to the hierarchical opposition of play and inhibition, rhyme and reason, words and thoughts, with which he seeks to organize the diverse manifestations of the joke into a coherent whole. For only in this way can he hope to collect the membra disjecta-the debris of his predecessors-into a theory capable of characterizing the essence of the joke, and not consisting merely in a series of anecdotes. But, Freud immediately acknowledges, it is precisely the duality of the joke, "the twofold root of pleasure in the joke," that is itself the root of the difficulty encountered throughout his own study; what Freud elsewhere refers to as the "Janus-face" of the joke, its double or duplicitaspect," gets in the way of a concise formulation in general statements about jokes" (joke, p. 138). In other words, the ambivalent nature of the "pleasure" produced by jokes "gets in the way," i.e., inhibits, the attempt to comprehend its meaning in a unified theory. It is here that Freud arrives at his most lapidary-and as we have seen, problematical-formulation of the joke as "exhibiting a core [Kern] of original pleasure in play and an envelope [H iille] of pleasure in the lifting of inhibi dons." No sooner is this distinction formulated, however, than it begins to unravel at the seams. Freud's binary classification, which seeks to describe "nonsense jokes" as the envelope of inhibitory pleasure, immediately demands further qualification: "The nonsense that still remains in a conceptual joke acquires secondarily the function of riveting our attention by bewildering us," and thus "serves as a means of intensifying the effect of the joke." But if every joke must produce laughter, and iflaughter derives

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from the deviation and neutralization of energy otherwise absorbed in inhibitions, then this "secondary" function of nonsense in the joke would have to be no less necessary for its functioning than the inhibitions themselves. The clear-cut distinction suggested by the opposition ofHiille and Kern, the distinction between the transgressive and expressive aspects of the joke, would thereby lose its pertinence, since it would be impossible to say just where the inhibitions stop and the game (Spiellust) begins. It is this equivocation-the effort to arrive at a univocal characterization of the joke's duplicity-that compels Freud to return to the problem of "sense in nonsense," first in the main body of the note just reviewed, and then, years later (in 1912), when he adds an appendix to this already extensive footnote. This belated supplement concerns joke-like productions that lack a proper designation and that Freud at first characterizes as "idiocy in the guise of jokes" (witzig scheinenden Blodsinn). Freud's German, unlike the English translation, reminds us that this "idiocy" is still a form of sense: it is "Blod-sinn," a meaning that is inane because it has "bared" or "exposed" itself (the German blod is etymologically related to bloss =bare) as in the Entblossungof the dirty joke. Like the latter, such inanities constitute a borderline case of the joke; if Freud nevertheless mentions them here, it is presumably because, like the dirty joke, their very marginality can help to illuminate the central problem of sense and nonsense in the joke. One of the examples Freud cites of this kind of joke is the following: "'Life is a chain-bridge' says one man.-'What do you mean?' asks the other. 'How should I know?' is the reply" (Joke, p. 139). The problem, of course, is that the listener-here, the reader-never knows in such cases whether to laugh or to cry. Or to get angry. This, according to Freud, is precisely the point of such "extreme examples": These extreme examples have an effect because they rouse the expectation of a joke, so that one tries to find a meaning [Sinn] concealed behind the nonsense [Unsinn]. But one finds none, they really are nonsense. Under the influence of that play of mirrors [Unter jener Vorspiegelung] it has become possible, onemoment long, to liberate the pleasure in nonsense. 7 The kind of joke Freud is discussing (if it is a joke at all) deludes the listener, but in a very "characteristic" manner: it presents him with a mirror

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of his desire "to find a meaning concealed behind the nonsense" (S.E. 5, 506). It is this desire that makes the joke possible, and the example that Freud cites dearly mirrors its peculiar character. "The expectation of a joke" consists in the desire to make sense of the enigmatic assertion with which the joke begins. If the joke then refuses to provide the meaning it dangles before the listener, then its operation cannot be described as pure and simple nonsense. For such jokes "play" games with the desire of the listener to find "an intelligible context," the desire that, as we have seen, is at the origin of "secondary elaboration." This desire involves nothing less than the narcissistic striving of the ego to unifY, bind, and synthesize, and thereby to construct that meaningful, self-contained object against which it can situate itself as an equally meaningful, self-contained subject, a self-consciousness. By rousing this "expectation" and then leaving it unsatisfied, turned back upon itself, such jokes function in a manner very reminiscent of the discourse of the analyst, who refuses to engage in a meaningful dialogue with the analysand precisely in order to confront the latter with the desires that motivate questions in search of an answer. Freud, to be sure, does not mention the affinity such "joke-like productions" bear to analytical discourse. He is, after all, only discussing a marginal phenomenon of a subject-matter that itself is marginal in relation to psychoanalysis "proper." But if we bear the similarity in mind, his concluding remark assumes particular significance: These jokes are not entirely untendentious: they are "shaggy-dog stories," and give the teller a certain pleasure by misleading and annoying the listener. The latter then mutes this annoyance by resolving to become a story-teller himself. (Joke, p. 139)

If the discourse of the joke-teller is not free from aggressive tendencies in regard to its addressees, and if the latter "mute" their frustration by resolving to become tellers in turn-that is, a "first person," an "ego"then this opens up a variety of perspectives concerning the genesis both of analytical discourse and of the ego as such. Both would be the effect of a certain "transference" passing from "third" to "first" person through a process of narration that would rhus emerge as the general context of both the psyche as psychoanalysis describes it, and of psychoanalytical discourse itself. That Freud would have no particular interest in stressing

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this "witty" connection is clear enough. For who could then decide for certain whether psychoanalysis had succeeded in comprehending and controlling the joke-as Freud had set out to do-or whether the joke had once again turned the tables on psychoanalysis, revealing it to be nothing more or less than a particular kind of witty story? 8 And indeed, the story here in question is of such a dubious kind that it would hardly serve to enhance the reputation of the "science" Freud was obliged to defend. And yet, that it is just here that Freud stumbles upon a name for these jokes, for which as he has noted "there is no appropriate name," should give us further pause to dwell on the relation of joke and psychoanalysis. For the term that I have translated as "shaggy dog story," and which the Standard Edition renders as "take-in," is already familiar to us: it is "Aufsitzer," the same word used to describe the position of the dream-navel in regard to the "unknown." If dreams, as Freud claimed, provided psychoanalysis with the "royal road" to the unconscious, the posture that psychoanalysis necessarily assumes in negotiating that road is, inexorably, that of the Aufsitzer. To suggest that the psychoanalytic movement moves with the gait of an Aufsitzer is not, of course, to disqualifY it as a pure and simple imposture, but rather to indicate the manner in which a theory that attempts to take the unconscious into account is inevitably constrained to impose itself To relate this manner of imposition to a "bad joke" such as the Aufsitzer would constitute a criticism only if we were to forget what Freud takes pains to stress: that bad jokes are no less effective than good ones. To condemn psychoanalysis as an Aufsitzer is only possible if it could be judged from a standpoint or tribunal-an Instanz-situated above or outside the story it seeks to judge. Such a court of appeal-the standpoint of the ego-is, however, precisely what psychoanalysis irrevocably dislocates. And it does so by indicating, and indeed by itself exemplifYing, how any such standpoint is inevitably inscribed in the very scenario or story it seeks to retell. This is doubtless why Freud is constrained, many years after the publication of his theory of jokes, to return to the problem of "sense in nonsense" and to address himself to that most shadowy of addresses, the Aufsitzer. For if the ego's expectation of a meaningful whole is the implicit but inescapable condition of the joke, then nowhere is this condi-

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tion more powerfully put into play than in the Aufsitzer, the "take-in" that is also a "come-on." What makes this most dubious of all joke-types so hard to take, is that we, as listeners at least, do not "take" it at allrather, it takes us for a ride, on a road that is anything but regal. For at the end of the road all we find is nonsense: "They really are nonsense," Freud states, thus seeking to reassure us, and himself as well. But if the Aufsitzer is "nonsense," it is also the quintessence of the joke, the joke played on "the expectation of a joke," as well as on our expectation of a theory capable of comprehending the joke. For that theory, as we have seen, is predicated on the possibility of discovering the concealed character of the joke as such, and hence of separating its outer Hiille from its inner Kern. The Aufsitzer, however, demonstrates the impossibility of telling the two apart, of discriminating what wit has brought together. And its demonstration is even more telling if we straddle the borders of the two languages with which we have been concerned, and consider for a moment the English translation that most closely approximates the German for "shaggy-dog story." Attempts to trace the etymology of this expression have been inconclusive, ohne Abschluss. Most such speculation has focused upon the more substantive part of the term, its canine "kernel," but with little success. 9 But if the Pudels Kern has thus proved to be a blind alley, perhaps it is time we cast another look at its Hiille; shag, even today (in British English, at least), means precisely what Zote, the German word used by Freud to designate the dirty joke, used to mean. For Zote stems from Zotte, signifying "unclean hair, pubic hair, unclean woman." 10 In short, both the Zote and the shaggy-dog story designate the kind of disreputable, tangled knot that Freud sought either to ignore, in his story of "castration," or to describe as the site of som~thing far more visible and palpable: the mushroom rising from its mycelium. Zote and the shaggy-dog story thus emerge as versions of the thallus, out of which the phallus rises and falls. But this rise-and-fall of the phallus is already inscribed and prescribed in the Zotte, which also signified "hanging (animal) hair, fleece, rags, bits and pieces, bush," whereas the verb, zotteln, was used to designate a movement of "swinging back and forth." Even more than the Zote, then, the shaggy-dog story leaves us "hanging"-not, however, in the middle of nowhere, in pure "nonsense," but in the midst of all those narcissistic fantasies through which the ego negotiates its way,

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from the "anal" to the "phallic" stages, and beyond. That beyond, which is also a before, is situated in a space that can only be described as thallic. For it is not the presence or absence, the possession or loss of an object that characterizes that space, but rather the texture and rhythm of the elements that inhabit it, "swinging back and forth." 11 Freud, who set out to unify and to totalize the membra disjecta of all previous joke-theories, arrives here not so much at the organic whole he desired as at its shaggy fleece. Instead of baring the essential characteristic of the joke, its innermost Kern, he is left, not unlike Goethe's Faust, with only a veil-or rather, with a patchwork quilt. Have we, has Freud, been "fleeced"? By the "representative of'the others,"' that elusive third person, and first reader? Has Freud's theory turned out, once again, to be corrupted by unsavory wit, the very malady it was designed to cure? Such questions, it is clear, cannot be answered here; the response they solicit must come elsewhere. All I can do, here and now, is to mute my frustration at so much uncertainty by resolving to tell you the following story which I heard many years ago and at which, if I remember correctly, I once laughed: A Jew and a Pole are sitting opposite one another in a train. After some hesitation, the Pole addresses the Jew: "Itzig, I've always been a great admirer of your people, and especially of your talents in business. Tell me, honestly, is there some trick behind it all, something I could learn?" The Jew, after a moment's surprise, replies: "Brother, you may have something there. Bur you know, you don't get anything for nothing-it'll cost you." "How much?" asks the Pole. "Five zlotys," answers the Jew. The Pole nods eagerly, reaches for his wallet and pays the Jew. The latter puts the money away and begins to speak: "You will need a large whitefish, caught by yourself if possible; you must clean it, pickle it, put it in a jar, and then bury it at full moon in the ground where your ancestors lie. Three full moons must pass before you return to the spot and dig it out. ... " "And then?" replies the Pole, puzzled: "Is that all?" "Not quite," smiles the Jew in response. "There are still a few things to be done." And, after a moment's pause: "But it will cost you." The Pole pays, the Jew speaks, and so it goes from Cracow to Lemberg. The Pole grows increasingly impatient, and finally, having paid all his money to the Jew, he explodes: "You dirty Yid! Do you think I don't know your game?! You take me for a fool, and my money to boot-thatsyour precious secret!" And the Jew, smiling benignly: "But Brother, what do you want? Don't you see-it's working already!" 12

The Analyst's Desire: Speculation in Play

Nothing more characterizes the response to Freudian thought than the manner in which its most speculative supposition, the death drive, has been received. As late as 1957 Ernest Jones, commenting on the reception of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, could observe: The book is further noteworthy in being the only one of Freud's that has received little acceptance on the part of his followers. Thus of the fifty or so papers they have since devoted to the topic one observes that in the first decade only half supported Freud's theory, in the second decade only a third, and in the last decade none at all. 1

Yet, at the very time that Jones was writing these lines, another psychoanalyst-whom Jones evidently chose to disregard-was at work developing an interpretation of Freudian theory for which the death drive was to serve as the exemplary articulation. For Jacques Lacan what the death drive sought to conceptualize was nothing less than "the relation of the subject to the signifier," in which, he held, the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis consisted. 2 To the extent to which Lacan's "return to Freud" has increasingly influenced recent discussion of psychoanalysis, above all in France, but not only there, his revalorization of the theoretical importance of the death drive has tended to impose itself as a kind of shibboleth: the Todes-

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trieb has gained wide acceptance as a kind of regulative idea of psychoanalysis. For instance, in his "Presentation" of Sacher Masoch, Gilles Deleuze describes the Freudian move beyond the pleasure principle as an inevitable consequence of this principle irself. 3 Eliminating empirical observations as a possible factor in Freud's move (since observations as such could never call the pleasure principle into question), Deleuze locates the force impelling Freud to revise his previous position in the conceptual structure of the pleasure principle: the latter, Deleuze argues, is not really a principle at all, for it never explains phenomena in terms of causal factors; it only describes, in a general manner, without ever confronting the problem of how or why "pleasure"-or the avoidance of tensions-co uld or should regulate all psychic activity. This decisive theoretical omission, the "unprincipled" character of the pleasure principle, is therefore what leads Freud to seek further for the answer to the riddle of mental life. Deleuze describes this search as taking place in two phases. First, Freud returns to one of his earliest ideas, that according to which psychic energy is necessarily involved, to varying degrees, in a process of binding (Bindung), which in turn serves as a precondition for the discharge, or evacuation (Abfuhr) of energy: i.e., for pleasure. The process of binding thus emerges (or reemerges) as a structural condition of the pleasure principle. But, Deleuze continues, it is not difficult to see that the idea of binding is a precursor of the later notion of eros, which will name the tendency towards unification, the formation of ever-greater unities. Eros, in this perspective, would name the generalized function of binding. This, however, leads Freud to the second phase: for, in order to conceptualize the notion of binding, Freud cannot avoid resorting to that of repetition: as a temporal process, binding is inconceivable except as a form of repetition. Repetition, however, forces Freud beyond the pleasure principle, taken in any simple sense, for it inevitably points back toward-and depends on-someth ing anterior to itself, and which is hence prior to all binding of energy. Thus, if repetition is a necessary aspect of the binding of psychic energy, and hence of the pleasure principle, it nonetheless disarticulates this "principle" by pointing to a realm that is prior to it, not merely chronologically, but logically and structurally. If repetition is indispensable to the process of binding, it simul-

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taneously is out-of-bounds, indicating that the forces at work may themselves be groundless. That Freud's effort to reach a founding principle for psychic activity should thus lead not to a foundation but to an abyss (or more prosaically, to an infinite regress), is taken by Deleuze to be the sign of a "truly philosophical reflection," the essence of which is to be "transcendental."4 Transcendental thought, according to Deleuze, is characterized by its inability to leave well enough alone: that is, by its incapacity to stop where it would like to, for instance at the discovery of eros. Instead, transcendental thought is impelled by its own impetus beyond such comforting, reassuring discoveries, "into the groundless" abyss. For Deleuze, then, the death drive is just such an aporetic conception, the sign of true transcendental-philosophical speculation. Driven by the desire to get to the bottom, to the ground of the pleasure principle, Freud makes his way back to the idea of binding, which in turn involves him in repetition, and finally impels him over the brink, to the death drive. This interpretation of Freud's trajectory has the virtue of setting his speculative activity in a necessary relation to the apparently less speculative, more empirical or clinical work that preceded it. And yet, inasmuch as Deleuze's account tends to place the aporetical concept of repetition in the position of transcendental subject, determining the movement of Freud's thought, it risks assimilating that thought to the very philosophy it incessantly sought to question. For the specificity of psychoanalytical thinking tends to dissolve to the extent to which the unconscious is equated with or conceived of as a "transcendental" subject, however aporetic and "groundless" the latter may be construed. "To transgress" is not necessarily the same as "to transcend." To get at the difference, we need only retrace the manner in which Freud's speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle gets off the ground: What now follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will appreciate or ignore according to his particular perspective [Einstellung]. Furthermore, an attempt to exploit an idea consistently, out of curiosity as to where this will lead. (Beyond, p. 18)

According to Deleuze, Freud's curiosity here would be the manifestation of that transcendental mode of thinking that is destined to pursue its object

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so relentlessly that it lands in the bottomless, aporetic abyss. Freud, however, gives us a quite different account of curiosity. In his Three Essays on Sexual Theory, where he first thematizes the question of Wissgier (the urge to know), Freud emphasizes that it is "not theoretical, but practical interests that set the child's investigative activity in movement" (S.E. 7, 194). And, from a Freudian perspective at least, nothing is less certain than the generally held conviction that such "practical interests" are any less decisive in the quests and investigations of adults. Hence, Freud's account of the "practical interests" presiding over the early development of the "urge to know" merits our attention. The interests at work in the child's first "sexual theories" reveal the concern with origins to be part of the ego's narcissistic effort to consolidate its organization through the "temporalizing-temporizing," i.e., narrative articulation of alterity (as origin, loss, separation). The phantasm of the maternal phallus represents difference as absence, the Other as a variant of the Same, repetition as recognition. In so doing, the narcissistic notion of an original bond or binding, indispensable to the ego's representation of itself, is constituted in the form of an invisible, concealed object that the child seeks to rediscover or reveal. If such inquisitiveness and curiosity-the child's Forschertiitigkeit-leads inevitably to the crisis of castration, and through it to a restructuring of the ego in which its narcissistic identity is definitively displaced, this process (as we have argued in reference to Freud's second topology) is radically different from the kind of "bottomless pit" that Deleuze-but also Lacan-seem to have in mind. Images such as that of an "abyss" or a "beance" are still situated within the phantasmatic orbit of a narcissism that endeavors to reappropriate alterity by structuring it in terms of oppositional categories (plenitude/emptiness, presence/absence, visible/invisible). In particular, Deleuze's notion of "transcendental speculation" remains indebted to a form of narcissistic narrative that Freud's second topology replaces .and dislocates. If the sequel to "castration" entails a story that is radically different from the "sexual theories" of the child, this difference cannot be described either in terms of a "transcendental" logic or of a pure "signifier." For this story tells neither of an (absent) origin nor of an abyss: it leads elsewhere, into regions that are both more and less determinate than any negative ontology (or epistemology) can hope to describe.

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From these regions, a certain narcissism is never simply absent, although its role is anything but sovereign. Just such an absence, however, has been implied by the Lacanian and post-Lacanian tendency to erect the speculation of the death drive into a transcendental principle of psychoanalytic theory, thereby choosing to overlook the fact that for Freud, at least, speculation and narcissism are never completely separable. The possibility that the trajectory that Freud followed in moving first to the repetition-compulsion, and then to the death-drive, could itself be part of the original narcissistic narrative of origins, has received even less consideration on the part of French Freudians than on that of their AngloAmerican counterparts. 5 Both groups, it is true, have shared the conviction that Freud articulated the death drive as an alternative, or even antidote, to the power exercised over his thought by the theory of narcissism. Lacan, as we have noted, construes the death drive as epitomizing the subject's relation to the signifier, and as such, as the paradigm of the "symbolic" order of desire, which he tends, implicitly or explicitly, to oppose to the "imaginary" realm of the narcissistic ego, the self-alienated and necessarily self-alienating moi. 6 But the tendency to conceive of the death drive as entailing a radical alternative to narcissism extends far beyond the limits ofLacanian orthodoxy. Jean Laplanche, who has justly warned against the temptation of confusing the critique of ego-psychology with the resolution (or elimination) or the problem of the ego, has described the introduction of the death drive as the attempt by Freud to restore a certain balance to his thought, which was in danger of being captivated by the notion of narcissism? And for Deleuze, as we have seen, the transcendental character of Freud's speculation on the death drive is, at least implicitly, opposed to the identificatory movement of narcissism. On the other hand, the more traditional attitude toward the death drive shares the same predilection, only with a negative appreciation. Jones, for instance, argues that the discovery of narcissism stood in opposition to the hypothesis of the death drive and led Freud to "Ideas ... of a very different kind," by which Jones means the second topology of id-ego-superego. These two opposing tendencies in Freud's thought, Jones maintains, overlap only in the personal psychology of Freud himself. Dismissing any valid theoretical interest in the death drive, Jones

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views it primarily as a symptom of Freud's personal effort to conserve the (narcissistic) belief in his own immortality through a theoretical construction amounting to a sublimated "introjection" of a "father-image." For Jones, then, narcissism indeed presides and prevails over the conception of the death drive; but whereas he reaches this conclusion only with reference to Freud's personality, Jones's interpretation, especially if taken in conjunction with that of Deleuze, suggests another possibility: that the hypothesis of the death drive emerges not simply as a symptom of Freud's (individual) desire, but also and above all as a result of the exigencies of his thought, of psychoanalytical thinking itself. The power of narcissism, then, would entail not simply the symptom of an individual subject, "Freud," but rather the theoretical project of psychoanalysis itself, putting its limits into play. In a certain sense, therefore, what is at stake here is the possibility of elaborating and rethinking what Deleuze has called the "transcendental" nature of speculation in terms of a certain notion of narcissism, one that is never fully explicated in the writings of Freud, but which is all the more powerfully at work in his texts because it remains, in part at least, implicit. This is the supposition that the following reading seeks w explore. Let us begin, then, with the notion of binding, which, as Deleuze has rightly emphasized, implies a process of repetition. That process, however, displays an aspect that Deleuze does not mention, perhaps because it seems so self-evident. Nevertheless, if we consider it for a moment, we will recognize that this aspect of the binding process is an indispensable constituent of the pleasure principle itself. For the concrete form that repetition takes within the binding process is that of the representation (Vorstellung): if psychic energy distinguishes itself from other forms of energy by its quality of being bound (or bindable), what it is bound to is a representation. Even in the "primary process" this fact still obtains, despite Freud's emphasis on the "unbound" quality of psychic energy in that primary state. For what Freud is describing, in contrasting primary with secondary processes, is a difference in degree, not in kind, at least insofar as the question of binding is concerned. Even the instability of cathexes in the primary process is relative to the greater stability of the secondary process: it is not an absolute. This is why the "primary" process is not simply primary, but depends--psychologically

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and logically-on the secondary process, in the sense we have already discussed. 8 Freud addresses this problem from the very beginning. In The Interpretation ofDreams, he describes the interrelation of binding, repetition, and representation in the primary process: "The first psychic activity, therefore, aims at a perceptual identity, that is, at the repetition of the perception tied [verkniipft] to the satisfaction of need" (S.E. 5, 566). The primary process, in this description, despite (or because of) its unbound quality, strives to constitute a perceptual identity, a representation that repeats an earlier perception, rendering it susceptible of being recognized. This account, however, raises two questions. First, if the earlier perception is described as being "tied (verkni.ipft) to the satisfaction," what factors are at work in creating this bond? Second, the apparently spontaneous character of this Verkniipfung indicates that, for Freud's manner of conceiving the pleasure principle, two elements are required: discharge, but also representations. Indeed, these two elements seem to converge: the constitution of representations as a process of binding through repetition appears not merely as a condition of discharge; it tends to merge with discharge itself. The question that thus emerges, is: what is the precise relation between this tendency to bind, to produce perceptual identities (or-for this seems to be the equivalent-to produce representations), and the tendency to seek discharge or reduction of tension? In what sense can the binding of psychic energy as representation comport or further a discharge? This question, once articulated, will loom ever larger in the thought of Freud, inasmuch as the nexus between "satisfaction" and perception or representation will continue to provide the matrix for all further elaborations of the processes of binding and of repetition. If, then, the binding of psychic energy constitutes not only a condition of discharge, but tends to be identified by Freud with discharge itself, it can only be because what Freud describes as Abfuhr-the evacuation of energy-cannot be considered in purely economic terms, as entailing merely the quantitative reduction of tension; it must be situated topologically, that is, related to particular psychic systems or localities. This is what leads Freud to construct his first topological scheme of primary and secondary processes. But it is evident that this initial topology l:s incapable

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of accounting for the relation existing between the notion of discharge and that of binding, between the reduction of tension and the cathexis of representations. It is only in Freud's second topology, consisting of concepts that do not merely describe conflict, but which are themselves conflictual, that the basis for a response to this problem is developed. The particular system for which the formations (cathexis) of representations can, in and of itself, be a pleasurable activity, entailing the discharge of energy or reduction of tension-that system can only be the constitutively ambivalent, organized part of the psyche that Freud designates as the ego. If the ego organizes itself through a process of narcissistic identification, then the formation of perceptual identities must be the first and indispensable step in that process. Stimuli, impressions, tensions are rendered recognizable, identifiable through a process of repetition in which that which is repeated comes increasingly to be apprehended as the same. "Remembrance" quite literally remembers the disparate impressions as the perceptual object or identity (which therefore is never simply immediately present to consciousness, but always already a product of memory). By thus (re-)assembling the object, the ego gets its self together. And, at least in this initial phase, the struggle for order entails the reduction of alterity and the subordination of difference to identity. In the context of this struggle, the very formation of perceptual identities per se, the process of object-formation and, correlatively, the recognition it entails, would as such become a source of narcissistic pleasure for the ego, that is, for that portion of the psyche laboring on the constitution of its sense of self. None of this is ever made fully explicit by Freud; and yet it is everywhere implicit. For instance, in the remark made in a footnote at the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he observes that "what is essential, to be sure, is that pleasure and unpleasure (Lust und Unlust), as conscious sensations, are bound (gebunden) to the ego" (Beyond, p. 5). The question, of course, is whether pleasure and unpleasure can be conceived as operating independently of the ego; whether, in other words, the "reduction of tension" can be construed apart from the process by which the subject puts itself in the position to recognize the same: first as a perceived object, occupying a fixed place, then as the site that in turn it can occupy (besetzen: "cathect," "invest"). All this would amount to a revision of the generally held conception

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of Freud's thought as dualist, constituted of oppositional categories such as primary/secondary process, pleasure/reality principle; such oppositions would have to be relocated within the conflictual continuity of narcissistic ambivalence. Thus, instead of the static duality of the opposition, Freud's thought would develop according to the paradigm of a dynamic disunity of which narcissism is the organized, if ambiguous, part. "Pleasure" would thereby no longer be the attribute of a self-identical system, but rather a function of the ego's effort precisely to organize such a system. Pleasure, in short, would have to be rethought as a function of narcissism-and hence, of the ego. Thus, in our previous discussion of Freud's theory of play, we have argued that the allegedly "pure" pleasure the child takes in play, consisting in repetition and recognition, cannot, as Freud suggests, be opposed to the later development of the rational, critical intellect, since the latter is in fact the continuation of the narcissistic process of recognition and repetition of the same that already informs the play it replaces; the form of recognition changes, but not its essential function. What is decisive is the faculty to identify, to recognize, to repeat as the same, first in the form of the word, then in the objects it signifies. Far from ignoring the differences between the two, the process of identification alone permits the rigorous determination of those differences, in terms of an increase in the power to recognize sameness in difference (or, viewed from the other side, an increase in the power to exclude and to subsume, to repress). Verbalization, and then conceptualization, would thus not simply put an end to the preverbal and verbal pleasure of play (pleasure in the recognition of phonic or graphic similarities, for instance), but would prolong the narcissistic pleasures of the ego by extending its "grasp," by strengthening its grip on the other, in order to determine the latter verbally as identical-to-itself. Summing up: if Freud in The Interpretation ofDreamscan describe rational thought as a "substitute for hallucinatory desire" (S.E. 5, 567), it is not simply in a limited, functionalist sense (both hallucinated wish-fulfillment and thought have the same goal, the reduction of tension), but because both strive for that goal by the same overall procedure: the identifacatory appropriation of the other in the service of the narcissistic constitution of the ego.

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We need only contrast this account with that of Deleuze to become aware of the issues it raises. For Deleuze, what is at work in the Freudian speculation, in the trajectory it follows from binding to repetition to the death drive, is something not susceptible of further analysis: "transcendental-philosophical" speculation, the search for a foundation that irresistibly precipitates itself into the precipice of the unfounded and the unfathomable. What emerges from our reading, by contrast, is an aspect of speculation that Freud was ready to criticize in others, but which he sought to justify in his own work: the narcissistic striving to rediscover the same. Thus, the earlier, anterior moment that all repetition necessarily implies does not lead us to the unfathomable, as it does Deleuze, but to the more determinate, if ambiguous narcissism of the ego as the ambivalent condition of the "pleasure principle." If, then, repetition leads to narcissism, what of the death drive? Does it articulate, or adumbrate, something radically different? The French Freud discussion, in support of its positive response to this question, often refers to the "silence" attributed by Freud to the death drives, to his statement that "the death drives are essentially mute (stumm) and the sounds oflife generally proceed from Eros" (S.E. 19, 46). What possible justification can there be, from a Freudian perspective at least, in suggesting that "this transcendent, mute instance" (Deleuze) might be just another form of the narcissistic language of the ego? Only this, perhaps: if we listen closely, or rather, if we read attentively, we may remark that the very Stummheit of the death drive precludes it from ever speaking for itself; it is inevitably dependent on another discourse to be seen or heard. And that discourse, however much it may seek to efface itself before the "silence" it seeks to articulate, is anything but innocent or neutral. The death drive may be dumb, but its articulation in a theoretical and speculative discourse is not. To insist upon the silence of what one is at the same time speaking for is, whatever else it may be, a theoretical Fort-Da game par excellence: now you see it, now you don't. Nor is such a game without its own particular history, as we shall soon discover. The silent pathos of the death drive has, at any rate, depended upon a certain nonreading of the text in which it is inscribed. Only such a nonreading could render plausible the transcription of Todestrieb as a

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term, a maitre-mot terminating a movement, and be it as one that is ... interminable. For only such a nonreading could ignore the manner in which the very impulse that drives Freud beyond the pleasure principle to repetition, and beyond repetition to the death drive, also impels him to move beyond the death drive "itself," toward a very different "place," which has little in common with Deleuze's transcendental Abgrund. That other place is far less profound, indeed; it is hardly even "flat." But we are already hurrying ahead when instead patience is needed for the route that lies before us. Let us begin our rereading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle with Freud's discussion of repetition, to be sure, but also, and above all, of its Zwang, the compulsive power it exercises. If Deleuze tends to skip quickly over the question of experience and empirical observation, to arrive at what he holds to be the essentially transcendental structure of Repetition Itself, Freud, by contrast, is more prosaic. He situates his discussion of repetition in a more familiar field, that of the analytic session. This site is worth remarking, since it is here and only here that Freud discovers what he considers to be conclusive proof of the existence of repetitive phenomena that defy the sway of the pleasure principle. The precise place in which such evidence emerges, then, the scene of the repetitioncompulsion, is none other than that of psychoanalytical transference: The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it, Thus he acquires no

sense ofconviction ofthe correctness ofthe construction that has been communicated to him. He is compelled [genotigt} to repeat the repressed material as a present experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as a part of the past. (Beyond, p. 12; my emphasis)

The compulsion here is that with which past experiences are repeated by the analysand, instead of being remembered (i.e., recognized, as a memoryrepresentation). But the force of the transference makes itself felt not merely by its power to elude the memory of the analysand; no less important is the manner in which the repetition of transference imposes itself upon "the physician," who "would prefer to see" the patient remember instead of unconsciously repeating the past. The goal of the analyst is to bring about the recognition of repetition: "He must get him ... to recog-

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nize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of the forgotten past" (Beyond, p. 13). The repetition thus desired by the analyst is one in which repetition is recognized as such, the past is repeated as the past, i.e., remembered, identified. It is this determination of repetitionas an object of recognition, identical-to-itself-that endows the analyst with that "measure of superiority" that Freud, in his discussion of polemics (cited earlier), saw as an essential aspect of the analytical situation. Now, however, we discover, with Freud, that the very lever of analysis, transference, tends to call that "superiority" into question. What makes analysis possible also endangers it. For transference designates the propensity not merely to repeat without knowing it, but also to resist the effort of the analyst to facilitate such recognition, for instance by constructing an interpretation. To the extent that the analysand is submitted to the power of transference, he or she may choose to reject or ignore "the construction communicated," thus defYing the will or wish of the analyst. It is precisely in such situations that Freud seems to perceive a repetitive power that defies the pleasure principle: The new and remarkable fact that we must now describe is that the repetitioncompulsion also brings back those past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure and which even then could never have brought satisfoction, not even of drive-impulses that have since been repressed. (Beyond, p. 14; my emphasis)

If Freud rather precipitously interprets such phenomena of analytical transference as deriving from experiences that could never have been sources of pleasure, and hence whose repetition calls that principle into question, what his account textually describes is something quite different. For the pleasure that the patient's transference resists and defies is not that of a hypothetical past about which any assertion can only be a conjecture, but rather that of the analyst himself, who sees his interpretive constructions rejected or ignored by a patient who refuses to recognize repetition for what it is: that is, as more of the same, and instead insists on repeating without knowing it. What the repetitions of transference call into question, then, is not the pleasure principle as such, but the pleasure of the analyst. But if the analyst's desire is thus put into play in his transferential interplay with the patient, and if the pleasure of seeing his interpretations

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recognized as correct is thereby denied the analyst, there is another pleasure still available to him, especially if his name is Freud: the pleasure of recognizing what it is that stands behind the patient's refusal to recognize. Precisely the absence of recognition in the analysand now becomes the object of a new recognition by the theoretician. "The new and remarkable fact" with which Freud confronts us resides in his conviction that such repetitions draw their force not from the ego-which is otherwise the only source of "resistance"-but from the "unconscious repressed material" (des unbewussten Verdriingten) (ibid.). Freud thereby seems to take for granted that the ego of the analysand could never have the power to resist the desire of the analyst with such tenacity, were it not reinforced by other, more powerful forces. And yet, when he attempts to locate those forces-at least in the intrapsychic domain-he cannot avoid contradicting himself, describing the repetition-compulsion as the "expression of the force of the repressed" (ibid.). The contradiction is blatant: for if the experiences or representations thus repeated could not have been a source of pleasure, neither originally nor even of "drive-impulses since repressed" (selbst nicht von seither verdriingten Triebregungen), then it is difficult to see how such repetition could have anything to do with repression either. For nothing is ever "repressed" that is not, in some way, an object of desire, and hence a possible source of pleasure. One might be tempted to conjecture that just such contradictions were what impelled Freud to attempt to move beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the text of this essay provides no explicit support of such a surmise: Freud never appears to have recognized, much less reflected upon, the problems raised by his description of the repetition-compulsion as a manifestation of repression, on the one hand, and as being independent of the pleasure principle on the other. Nor does he qualifY or even temper that assertion. Rather, he simply drops it. In so doing, his procedure recalls the mechanism of isolation, which, we remember, provides the ego with an alternative to repression. A possible reason for this strange abandonment begins to emerge when we consider the direction in which the emphasis on repression inevitably leads: toward a discussion of "infantile sexual life" and thus into a realm that up to this point at least, has been unthinkable apart from the

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domination of the pleasure principle and the domination of narcissism: "The failures" of infantile sexual striving, "loss of love ... leave in their wake a lasting impairment of self-esteem as a narcissistic scar." Freud observes, as though he might then attempt to derive the repetition-compulsion from such narcissistic reverses: "There are a limited number of types that recur regularly (in later life)" (Beyond, p. 15). But to derive the repetition-compulsion from the "scars" of narcissism is hardly, in and of itself, to move decisively beyond the pleasure principle. Everything depends on the manner in which those scars are conceived. At first, it seems that Freud conceives them here in an extremely realistic manner: "The physical development of the child" is described as responsible for the reverses imposed on its narcissism. All the easier, one might conclude, for the adult to surmount them. Such, however, is seldom the case, Freud continues. Indeed, were it otherwise, the repetition-compulsion would be much less widespread than it is: for Freud now proceeds to cite a variety of instances, drawn from "the life of non-neurotic persons." Everywhere, it seems, Freud suddenly finds the evidence he is looking for: Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have rhe same outcome: the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his proteges, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems destined to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great authority, either for himself or for the public, and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him with a new one; the lover, each of whose amorous relationships passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. (Beyond, p.16)

Everywhere Freud finds ... the same: the same story of ingratitude, betrayal, inconstancy, love-like the child, who not finding what it is looking for, is destined to repeat that search ever after as an adult. Without knowing it, of course. Which is precisely where the analyst comes in: he knows what he is looking for, and what the other is looking for as well. For the analyst is one who knows all the stories, knows them all as the story of the same. And if the analyst's knowledge is rejected or ignored by the patient, then this too is part of the same old story, "transference," "re-

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sistance." If this resistance resists all the efforts of the analyst to bring about a cure, then the man in power "himself upsets the authority" he has installed, the "pleasure principle," and replaces it "with a new one," the repetition-compulsion. But the new one, as in the story Freud tells, is in reality only more of the same. Thus Freud continues to recount stories, drawn not from the experience of psychoanalysis, but from "the lives of normal people": "There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands, each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her to death [von ihr zu Tode gepjlegt werden mussten]" (Beyond, p. 16). This case, Freud remarks, is even more impressive then the previous ones, since it entails "a passive experience" in which the subject has no control over the recurrent destiny she encounters. Is it an accident that the subject of such passivity is female? All she can do, in any event, is to nurse her husbands to death (not, as the Standard Edition translates, "on their deathbeds"). And thus, the first, veiled appearance of the "death drive," here in the stories Freud recounts to demonstrate the ubiquity of the repetitioncompulsion, takes the form of "three successive husbands," each "nursed to death" by "the woman" they have married. Thus, if Freud's initial stories deal with men, betrayal, and ingratitude, death enters the scene with-as?-the passive female. In this perspective, the final story Freud tells in this series appears to condense and conclude the previous tales: The most moving poetic representation [Darstellung] of such a trait of destiny [Schicksalszuges] has been given by Tasso in his romantic epic, Gerusalemme Liberata. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the wound and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in this tree, accuses him of once again injuring his beloved. (Beyond, p. 16) This second story of repetition and death is no longer equivocal: this time, the victims are not "nursed to death," but murdered, albeit "unwittingly." Tancred is active as only the unconscious can be: he acts without knowing it, and his act is to kill the woman he loves. This story, coming as it does after that of the "nurse-unto-death," provides a curious coun-

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terpoint to the latter. The Schicksalszug that Freud asserts it represents is not simply the recurrence of destiny, but a recurrent fatality linked to the female: she either eliminates the male or is eliminated by him. But nothing is more difficult to do away with than this persistent female: you kill her once, and her soul returns, "imprisoned in a rree"; you "slash with (your) sword at (the) tall tree," and a voice returns to accuse you. The activity of the subject, in this final story, consists indeed of a repetition, but what he repeats, actively, is the narcissistic wound that never heals without leaving scars. Freud tells the stories of these scars, but instead of reading these stories as the signal of something else, he sees them as more of the same, as the manifestation of a new and more powerful authority: If we take into account observations such as these, drawn from behavior in transference and from the destinies of men and women, we shall find the courage to assume that there is a repetition-compulsion at work in psychic life that overrides [sich . .. hinaussetzt] the pleasure-principle. (Beyond, p. r6; my emphasis)

Although Freud will immediately qualifY his "observations," with theremark "that only in rare instances can we observe the pure effects of the repetition-compulsion" (Beyond, p. 17), and that in the case of children's play, at least, the repetition-compulsion "seems to converge" with "the pleasurable satisfaction of drives," the stories he has told have had the decisive effect of opening the door to doubt and calling into question the "familiar motive forces" of the pleasure principle. For Freud, then, the stories he has told are not versions of the narrative of narcissism, but evidence of something radically different. And yet, when he seeks to describe that difference, it emerges as more of the same: "Enough is left unexplained to justifY the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat-something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more drive-like than the pleasure principle it overrides" (Beyond, p. 17; my emphasis). For Freud, the stories have done their work, the case for curiosity has been established: "If a repetition-compulsion does operate in the mind, we should be glad to know something about it." Having thus "observed" the unobservable: the absence of the pleasure principle in analysis and in life (Fort!), the search for that which has evicted it (Da!) can now begin.

The Fort!

It is only after he has told his stories, presented as observations, that the game of speculation can begin in earnest. Up to this point, Freud insists, everything, including the hypothesis of the repetition-compulsion, has been derived more or less directly from observation. Speculation, by contrast, is determined not by empirical data, but by "the consistent exploitation of an idea, out of curiosity as to where it will lead." But what is it that makes the exploitation of an idea consistent, "konsequent"? What regulates the sequence, the succession of thoughts that constitute the "exploitation" (Ausbeutung) of an idea? Nothing, it appears, if not the rule of a certain repetition itself: "It is impossible to pursue an idea of this kind except by repeatedly combining factual material with pure conjecture (mit bloss Erdachtem) and thereby diverging widely from observation" (Beyond, p. 53). To exploit the idea of the repetitioncompulsion is inevitably to submit to the compulsion to repeat it in everchanging combinations that move ever further from "observation," which is otherwise, for Freud, the test of speculation and the antidote to its narcissistic tendencies. In the absence of, or distance from, the criterion of observation, the speculation that repeats the compulsion to repeat can be guided only by the consistency or consequence of its own operationguided, that is, by the logical rule of noncontradiction. Such a contradiction mars, as we have seen, the first identification of the repetition-

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compulsion as a force acting both independently of the pleasure principle, and as the expression of the force of the repressed. Since, however, repression is always conceived as functioning under the sway of the pleasure principle, Freud is therefore compelled, by the principle of consistency, to seek another source for the force of the repetition-compulsion. This other origin Freud infers from the "regressive" tendency of the drives not merely to reduce tension ("pleasure"), but to reproduce (to repeat) an earlier state of affairs. Freud, in short, temporaLizes the pleasure principle, and having done so, need only "pursue to its logical conclusion the hypothesis that all drives tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things" (Beyond, p. 31) in order to arrive at the decisive derivation of the repetition-compulsion: Let us suppose, then, that all the organic drives are conservative, historically acquired and directed at regression, at the restoration of an earlier state. ... Those instincts are bound to give the deceptive impression of being forces striving for change and progress, whereas they are merely seeking to reach an old goal by paths old and new. Moreover this final goal can be identified. It would be in contradiction with the conservative nature of the drives if the goal of life were a state that had never before been attained. Rather, it must be an old state, a point ofdeparture which the living being once left [einmal verlassen hat] and to which it strives to return along all the detours of its development. If we may assume it to be true without exception that every living being dies for internal reasons [aus inneren Griinden]-returns to the inorganic-then we can only say: The goal ofall life is death, and going further back: The inanimate was there before [war friiher da] the animate. (Beyond, pp. 31-32; emphasis mine except for the last two italicized passages) Freud's derivation of the repetition-compulsion here follows the very procedure of repetitive combination prescribed as the method of consistent speculation: the drives are first described as "the restoration of an earLier state"; that state is then redefined teleologically as "an oLd goal"; the indefinite article is then replaced by the more determinate this: "This final goal," which in turn is even more definitively situated, in its next repetition, as "an old state, point of departure" for life as such. Finally, this point of departure is assigned a proper name, "death," and a proper place: there (da), before the animate. Repetition is thus put in its place, there, before the Living. From

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this place, this absolute origin, the Living can be determined with perfect consistency as the logical consequence of that other place from which it comes and toward which it goes. By retracing the "organic drives" all the way back there, to a place where they are not, Freud seems to have accomplished the perfect theoretical game of "Fort! Da!": life disappears "there," it is Fort! by not being Da! The Fort! is (the) Da! Freud tells us, both in being there, before the emergence of life, and also by remaining there, in the midst of the Living, which-therefore-"dies for internal reasons," "aus inneren Griinden." Freud's derivation thus presents us with a model of internal consistency: the repetitive movement of the drives is retraced to the one, single, self-identical origin, the Fort! which was There and is There and will be There, before, during, and after all is said and done. There is only one problem: the problem of the one, or rather: of the once. The problem, that is, of the story, which requires not merely a One-an Origin-but also, a "Once": not merely an "ein" but an "einmal" And it is this mal that is missing from Freud's perfectly consistent derivation. That is, it is there, da, inscribed in the text, but in a place that is difficult to situate. For the Fort that is There is such a bastion of identity, its walls so strong and impervious, that there seems hardly any space for life to emerge from it. And yet, we are told that "the living once left" that place, which was there, before. The problem, in short, is that Freud's Fort! leaves no place for the Mal: retracing repetition back to its origin, he leaves no room for the trace without which the Living can never emerge. Freud's Fort! therefore begins to look less like a point of departure or a final goal than like those mysterious, nonphenomenal phenomena that astronomers call black holes, and which, they conjecture, draw everything visible into their invisible mass, from which neither the Living, nor Light itself, can ever reemerge. The same fate threatens Freud's speculative construction: what it seems to exclude, or at least fails to account for, is the force of resistance that would have been required for anything to escape the pull of that original Fort! and thus to originate. Life, and with it the speculative theory of the death drive, would have imploded by virtue of its very immanence and intensity. It would have vanished into its nucleus. And nothing would ever have happened.

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A strange story. And yet by no means one that has been invented post facto, as it were, by an overimaginative reader. Or at least, not by him alone. For the very same problem is explicitly treated in Freud's text. It is just this problem of escaping the impulsive consistency of the speculative black hole-and can we still be certain, as Jones is, that this is fother-image?-that forces Freud beyond mere consistency, toward descriptions that begin strangely to sound more like stories than arguments. Or, more precisely, like stories within which speculations-such as that of the death drive-are inscribed. These stories no longer conform to the narcissistic scheme of beginning, middle, and end, as we can verify by rereading Freud's derivation of repetition, this time, however, restoring the passage we have hitherto omitted: Let us suppose, then, that all the organic drives are conservative, historically acquired and directed at regression, at the restoration of an earlier state. It follows that the achievement of organic development must be attributed to external, disruptive and diverting influences. The elementary living being would, from its very inception, have never wanted to change itself and would only have repeated the same course of life under conditions that remained identical [sich gleichbleibend). But in the final analysis [im letzten Grunde] it must have been the history of our earth and its relation to the sun that has left us its mark [Abdruck] in the development of organisms. Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism's life is accepted by the conservative organic drives and stored up for further repetition. Those drives are bound to give the deceptive impression of being forces striving for change and progress. (Beyond, pp. 31-32) Thus, we see that Freud neither ignored nor evaded the speculative dilemma of the black hole, of a Fort! so strong, so consistent, and selfcontained that it could never be breached by the Life of which it was supposed to be the origin. To account for the origin of life, Freud must abandon the effort to think consistently about repetition by retracing it to a state so original that there would be no place for the trace. In short, Freud must depart from his attempt to think repetition as a movement of identity-to think, in short, repetition as such-and instead attempt to think it as departure. To do this, he must partition the origin so that the walls of its Fort! are no longer impervious to an exteriority, without which Life can never depart. For it is only as the effect of a double or split origin, an origin that is dislocated and disrupted by "external" forces-influences which

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leave their mark upon us-that the drives can be conceived as repetition. 'W'hat they repeat, however, is no longer simply the "same"-the Fort! that is Da!-but rather a d4 that is fort: elsewhere, and yet also here: the "modification'' or "alteration" (Veranderung) which is repeated as the imprint, the Abdruck of an irreducible alterity. This Abdruck, then, is what gives the drives their distinctive character. In the final analysis, "im letzten Grunde," what the drives repeat is neither a ground nor an abyss, but a violent process of inscription, alteration, and perhaps above all: narration. It is the last-named that most philosophical readings of Freud seem unable to conceive, precisely because in the final analysis, the letzer Grund is always conceived as a concept, albeit it an aporetic one, an Abgrund At some time [Irgend einmal] the properties oflife were suscitated in inanimate matter by the intervention of a force that is still entirely inconceivable [unvorstellbar]. Perhaps it was a process prototypically similar [vorbildlich iihnlich] to that which later allowed consciousness to arise in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension that then arose in what had hitherto been inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out [sich abzugleichen]; the first drive had emerged, the drive to return to the inanimate. For living substance at that time dying was still easy, the course of life was probably only a short one, its direction determined by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time living substance may thus have been created anew, again and again [immer wieder], easily dying, until decisive external influences so transformed themselves that they constrained the surviving substance to diverge even more widely [immer grosseren Ablenkungen] from the original course oflife and to follow ever more complicated detours [immer komplizierteren Umwegen] before reaching the goal of death. These detours to death, faithfully retained by the conservative drives, would thus offer us today the image of the phenomena of life. (Beyond, pp. 32-33)

Freud's effort to objectifY, in the form of an event, the decisive but inconceivable (unvorstellbar: unimaginable, unrepresentable) intervention of that external, disruptive force, leads him to a narrative form of exposition whose introductory formula, "lrgend einmal," recalls the traditional "once upon a time" (Es war einmal) of the fairy tale. Freud's story, of course, does not constitute an explanation: to describe a series of intensifications that also comports a dislocation (ever wider divergence, ever more complicated detours) is not to account for the process by which the

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repetition of the same becomes the repetition of difference. Here, as elsewhere, the story leads us to that "capital X" about which we know nothing, the economic increase in energy and tension, the self-transformation of external influences that constrains the repetition of the same to diverge from itself and to become different. Bur Freud's story, which thereby repeats a problem with which we have become familiar, also transforms that problem, in two ways: first, by representing it as the (unrepresentable) origin of Life itself, and hence, of the external, real basis of the life of the psyche; and second, by suggesting that this unrepresentable origin is itself a kind of prefiguration-vorbi ldlich ahnlich-of the origin of consciousness. Suggesting, in short, that the unrepresentable (origin of life) may well be a representation of representation itself. If Freud's story of the origin of life is thereby presented as a possible model of the origin of consciousness, the latter may be considered to be a repetition of the former. This is doubtless the sequence that Freud seeks to suggest in utilizing the word "vorbildlich": if the origin of life may well resemble that of consciousness, it is because the latter repeats the former, follows after it, is its consequence. This, of course, is the only logical, consistent way to conceive the relation of consciousness and life: first there is life, then there is consciousness. But if this sequence would hold for traditional psychology, its validity for psychoanalysis is less evident-first, because the realm of the psyche can no longer be identified with that of consciousness or representation; and second, because the mechanism of repetition that structures the drives, and hence, the psyche, does not conform to the laws of identity and of noncontradiction, which are the laws of consciousness. The opposition of consciousness and life, representation and presence, is precisely dislocated by the narrative that retraces repetition to the inexplicable intervention of exterior forces that leave their mark-for us to decipher, or rather, to repeat by reinscribing it elsewhere, that is, by retelling stories. In any case, what is certain is that if we wish to learn more about that inconceivable, unvorstellbare intervention and inscription, we have no choice bur to return to Freud's account of the emergence of consciousness, in the section of the essay immediately preceding that in which the story of life is told. In chapter 4 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, just after he has formally announced the beginning of his speculation

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("What follows is speculation"), Freud launches into a discussion of the limits of consciousness, as psychoanalysis has sought to put them in question. These limits Freud seeks to localize precisely by stressing the peculiar position of consciousness, situated "on the frontier between outside and inside." To understand consciousness, Freud argues, one must conceive of it topologically, for its borderline site determines its function, consisting in the transmission of "perceptions ... coming from the outside world, and of sensations of pleasure and unpleasure, which can only stem from the interior of the psychic apparatus."' To fulfill this task, consciousness must conserve its receptivity and sensitivity and therefore cannot accumulate "lasting traces" (Dauerspuren) that would sooner or later saturate it and thus reduce its ability to receive new impressions and to transmit them. Consciousness is thus opposed to memory, the guardian of traces, and indeed is described as having arisen "in place of memorytraces" (Beyond, p. 19). If Freud here returns or repeats arguments that go back to his Project of 1895, this repetition is not merely more of the same. For by thematizing the problem of repetition itself as the fundamental characteristic of the drives, all of Freud's earlier conceptions assume new significance. To assert that consciousness arises "in place" (an Stelle) of memory-traces-that is, both replacing it and taking its place-is to demonstrate that the representations of consciousness, its perceptions, including those of pleasure and unpleasure, are all effects of a repetition (a memory-trace) that itself cannot be reduced to the logic of representation. The form in which such repetition, such memory-traces, articulate themselves, can only be that of a speculative narration. And indeed, this is precisely what Freud proceeds to do. Instead of seeking to represent the emergence of consciousness through a genetic argument, Freud appeals to our imagination, our ability to form representations, in order to represent the origin of consciousness: Let us imagine [Stellen wir uns . .. vor] the living organism in its most simplified form as an undifferentiated vesicle [Bliichen] of excitable substance; then its surface, which is turned towards the outside world, is differentiated through its very position and serves as an organ for receiving excitation .... It would then be easily conceivable that through the unremitting impact of outer excitation upon the surface of the vesicle its substance is permanently altered down to a certain depth .... A crust would thus have formed which at last would be so thoroughly

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scorched [durchgebrannt] that it offers the most favorable conditions for the reception of excitation and is incapable of further modification. (Beyond, p. 20)

If the story of life was "unvorstellbar," what Freud here asks us to imagine is hardly less so: an undifferentiated Blaschen, a kind of bubble, or possibly also a blister. Or a bubble that becomes a blister, through the friction of "outer excitation," by forming a crust, which solidifies its borders, demarcating and organizing consciousness in its relation to what it is not, the powerful excitation of the outside world. The emergence of consciousness in the living organism would thus be marked by the formation of a crust consisting of inalterable alterations (recalling our previous description of the operation of anxiety as the alteration of alterity). But the process by which such alteration comes about, the scorching of the organism, still remains to be explained, and this compels Freud to continue-that is, to repeat and to alter-his story of the Blaschen: Bur we have more to say of this living vesicle with its receptive cortical layer. This little piece of living substance is suspended in the midst of an external world charged with the most powerful energies, and it would be slaughtered by them were it not provided with a shield against excitation [Reizschutz]. It acquires the shield in this way: Its outermost surface loses the structure proper to living matter, becomes as it were inorganic and now functions as a special envelope [Hiille] or membrane to resist excitation .... The outer layer has, however, by dying [Absterben] saved all deeper ones from the same fate. (Beyond, p. 21)

In thus telling the story of consciousness, Freud repeats-or anticipates-the story he will later tell of the origin of life itself. Only here, the story is altered by the account of alteration itself For the scorching of the crust and its transformation into a Reizschutz is now described as a process of Absterben, of dying. The outer layers die to save the inner ones: the envelope sacrifices itself for the core. But that process of dying is now recounted as something very different from the "return'' to an inorganic state as which Freud will subsequently represent it. To die, here, designates the manner in which the organism reacts to the impact of external forces, a process of alteration by which further alteration is arrested. To die, then, in the sense of the Blaschen, is to alter alteration until "no further lasting alteration" (Beyond, p. 20) is possible. To describe the emergence of consciousness in this way is, of course,

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to raise questions rather than to answer them. For the kind of consciousness that Freud here asks us to imagine is very different from what we usually call consciousness; it is precisely not consciousness ofanything, and even less is it self-consciousness. Rather, it is a defensive shield incapable of retaining any sensation, perception, or memory, a shield consisting in inalterable alterations. This shield therefore both protects against excess excitation-which would otherwise have a traumatic effect on the organism (the psyche)-and also transmits excitation from the outside to the inside of the organism. Such a double function, that of protection and of transmission, is what the Reizschutz is called upon to accomplish. Just how it does this is, of course, the problem. Freud at first seeks to equate the operation of the Reizschutz with that of the primary process, in which there would be "no bound energy, but only energy capable of free discharge" (Beyond, p. 21). And yet, in the course of his discussion it soon emerges that such a state would be entirely unable to serve as the kind of shield and filter required; indeed, the state of fully unbound energy constitutes precisely the kind of "danger" that the Reizschutz is called upon to avert. Confronted with the problem of the trauma, then, Freud is compelled to recognize that the protection against excessive excitation necessarily entails "mastering the amounts of stimulus that have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of" (Beyond, p. 24). If the Reizschutz dies to save our soul, its death cannot be construed, as Freud initially would have it, as the formation of an essentially inert substance. On the contrary, it must be imagined as the development of a capacity to bind energy, which in turn implies the formation of quiescent cathexes, since the capacity of a system to bind energy varies in proportion with "the system's own quiescent cathexis." No wonder, then, that shortly after this discussion, Freud makes his now familiar reference to the "capital X." The analysis of the Reizschutz has led to the paradoxical conclusion that a certain death of organic substance must be consubstantial with a certain binding of energy. That is, the resuscitation of consciousness from the death of the body must necessarily entail both the binding and the transmission (i.e., a certain unbinding) of energy, and moreover, must entail both at one and the same time. Which amounts to implying, however, that this time cannot be

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simply one and the same. Freud hints at a possible resolution of this problem in a remark that he inserts, parenthetically, in his discussion of the Reizschutz, concerning the mechanisms by which it accomplishes its task of protection. The unconscious, he reminds us, is timeless. "Our abstract notion of time," Freud continues, "seems to be wholly derived from the method of operation of the system Pcpt.-Cs. and to correspond to a perception on its own part of that method of working. This mode of functioning may perhaps constitute another way of providing a shield against stimuli" (Beyond, p. 22). According to this remark of Freud's, "our abstract notion of time" would be the manner in which consciousness represents itself, its mode of operation, to itself. But both this mode of operation as such and its particular self-representation as time would then constitute aspects of the Reizschutz itself. By organizing excitation temporally, consciousness would bind energy and thereby protect the psyche against traumatic excess. Freud describes the general mechanism by which such protection operates in the paragraph immediately preceding this one: the excessive, unbound quantities of excitation are subjected to a process of "sampling," which Freud also compares with "feelers," which are all the time making tentative advances towards the external world and then drawing back from it (Beyond, p. 22). But this process of sampling, which Freud describes here in quantitative and spatial categories, is also associated in his work with the formation of signals, and with thinking as such. In The Interpretation ofDreams, he writes that "thinking must aim at freeing itself more and more from exclusive regulation by the unpleasure principle and at restricting the development of affect in thought-activity to the minimum required for acting as a signal" (S.E. 5, 602). If, then, the qualitative aspect of the protective sampling of excitation entails the formation of signals-which, therefore, are always, tendentially, danger-signals-then the process by which such signals are formed would coincide with the articulation of a temporal structure capable of temporizing the traumatic effects of an excess of energy, effects that could then be projected as being exterior, anterior, or posterior to the position of the psyche. The form such temporalizing-tempo rizing sampling (signalization) would therefore tend to assume would be none other than that of a narration, through which alterity is composed and organized. The "death

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drive" would then be merely another name for a story that seeks to organize the other, precisely by naming it. But in telling his stories, Freud inevitably names too much-and too little: "The relation of our earth to the sun," to those "external, disruptive and diverting influences," to that "still entirely inconceivable power," remains to be conceived, vorgestellt. Which is why Freud's speculation must continue to follow out its idea. For there is still one more story to be told.

Speculation: The Way to Utter Difference

If Freud's speculative effort to think repetition through to its ultimate consequences leads him to question "our abstract idea of time," this merely continues an interrogation that is as old as psychoanalytic thought itself. Already in The Interpretation ofDreams Freud recognizes a major difficulty of his "attempt to penetrate more deeply into the psychology of dream-processes" to consist in the necessity of "rendering the simultaneity of a highly complex configuration [Zusammenhang] through the successivity of description" (S.E. 5, 588). All of his subsequent efforts to construct a topology of the psyche bear witness to the complexity of that "simultaneity" and of the space it entails. If the space that Freud's conception of the psyche implies is difficult to represent-"unanschaulich" and "unvorstellbar"-it is because it is the theater of conflicrual processes that do not take place "in" it as much as they produce the places they take. Conflicts of the sort psychoanalysis seeks to articulate take place as dislocation, Entstellung, and this cannot but affect the nature of those psychic "localities" its topologies seek to situate. The dislocation of psychic space disrupts the traditional idea of "simultaneity" as the coexistence of selfidentical elements, each in their proper place; indeed, the very notion of a proper place is replaced by a conflictual dynamics of displacement, the movement of which is incompatible with the traditional conception of time as linear, irreversible succession. The Freudian notion of Nachtriig-

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lichkeit, "belatedness" or "subsequence," is indicative of this dislocation of temporal successivity, designating not merely how certain psychic events develop their significance "belatedly"-this in itself would in no way disrupt the traditional conception of time-but rather how events such as dreams or jokes only come to be in and through the production of aftereffects from which they are distinctively separated and yet on which they necessarily depend: the dream, in the narration that disfigures it; the joke, in the laughter that displaces it. Such after-effects repeat the event they follow, but they also alter it, and it is precisely this process of repetitive alteration that renders the event effective, psychically "real." If, however, the nature of psychic "reality'' can be designated as one of repetitive alteration, the problem of psychoanalytical exposition (Darstellung) can no longer be the discrepancy between a subject matter that is "simultaneous" and a discourse that is "successive." Rather, it entails the relation between two kinds of repetition: the one entailing a movement of alteration, the other, of identification. To identifY alterity, therefore, can only be to repeat it in a discourse that disfigures what it represents. Such a disfigural representation is what emerges in the course of Freud's speculation upon the repetition-compulsion, and the form it assumes is the compulsion to tell, or retell stories. These stories do not merely repeat an event that is inaccessible to the direct repetition of conceptual analysis; they repeat each other, in a sequence that is both successive and simultaneous. These repetitive narratives, in short, emerge as the ultimate consequence of Freud's "speculation." That is why, after all is said and done, another story remains to be told; and why this other story is inevitably the most decisive, on which all the rest depend: If, therefore, we are not to abandon the hypothesis of the death-drives, we must suppose them to be associated from the very first with life-drives. But we must admit that we are working there [wir arbeiten da] on an equation with two unknowns. (Beyond, p. 51) The speculative reduction of repetition to the Fort! of the death drive has led Freud to a place-da-where he sees himself confronted not merely by the "capital X" that inhabits all metapsychological formulas, but to its duplication, "an equation with two unknowns." Small wonder, then, that

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of this place "science has so little to tell us ... that we can liken the problem to a darkness into which not so much as a ray of an hypothesis has penetrated" (Beyond, p. 51). If this darkness is impervious to scientific elucidation, it is precisely in the sense of a black hole of science itself: the effort to represent the origin of repetition, as the death drive; to render that origin observable, that has, as it were, absorbed all the light that science can shed into its impenetrable Fort! which is Da! If the pleasure principle has proven incapable of accounting for the phenomena of repetition, the construction of the hypothesis of a death drive, taken by itself, is equally untenable. Even the science of biology, which Freud has reviewed in the preceding chapter, fails to offer an explanation of how life could possibly have survived against the irresistible power of the death drive. Freud has no choice, therefore, but to forsake the Fort! that is Da! and instead, to look elsewhere: In a very different place we do meet with such a hypothesis, which however is of such a phantastic kind-surely more of a myth than a scientific explanationthat I would not dare to cite it here did it not folfill just that condition whose foljillment we desire. For it derives a drive from the need to reinstate an earlier state of things. (Beyond, p. 51; my emphasis) The need for another form of repetition, to counterbalance that of the death drive (as repetition of the same), leads Freud back, once again, to the beginning: to a certain beginning. This time, however, it is not that of life itself, nor even of consciousness, qua organism: rather, it is toward the beginnings of our cultural consciousness that he finds himself ineluctably drawn. The beginning is, of course, a myth. For only this can, according to Freud, "fulfill the condition ... whose fulfillment we desire." The repetition of the word "fulfill/fulfillment" (erfollen!Erfiillung) is rare enough in a stylist such as Freud to be worthy of attention; it bears witness, surely, to the power of the desire, the striving (Streben) that drives Freud towards that "very different place" (ganz andere Stelle) to which he assigns the name "myth." And yet once he has thus named this other place, Freud immediately proceeds to modify this name in an attempt to unsay what he has said, under the pretext of clarifying it: "I mean of course the theory which Plato puts into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium, and

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which deals not only with the origin [die Herkunft] of the sexual drive but also with the most important of its variations in regard to its object" (Beyond, p. 51). The "myth" then turns out to be not a myth, "of course," but rather a theory, and Aristophanes merely the spokesman of Plato, the author of the Symposium. The "fantastic" aspects of this pseudo-myth are thus theoretically authorized, as it were, by Freud's attribution of the story to an author who, more than most, can be presumed to have known from start to finish what he really wanted to say. We will return to this attribution and this authorization in a moment. But let us first follow Freud as he makes his way ever further into this very different place, and having first set things straight concerning its fantastic appearance, now proceeds to tell, or rather retell the story, almost but not quite in his own words: Our body, you see, was at first not at all formed as it is now; it was utterly different [ganz antlers]. First of all, there were three sexes, not just male and female, as now, but also a third, which combined the two ... the man-woman .... Everything about these humans, however, was double, they had four hands and four feet, two faces, double private parts etc. Thereupon Zeus was moved [Da liess sich Zeus bewegen] to divide each human in two parts, "as one slices quince apart for pickling.... Because now the whole being had been cut in two, yearning drove [trieb] the two halves together; they entwined themselves with their hands, interlaced with one another in the desire to grow together." (Beyond, p. 51-52)

Once he has thus retold the story, Freud hastens to furnish us with its theoretical interpretation, one designed to provide support for his previous speculations: Shall we, following the hint of the poet-philosopher, venture the supposition that in the process of becoming animate living substance was torn apart into small particles which ever since have striven, through the sexual drive, to reunite? That these drives, in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter persists, in their development through the realm of the protista, gradually overcome the difficulties set in their way by an environment charged with mortally dangerous stimuli that compel them to form a protective cortical layer? That these splintered particles of living substance thereby attain a multicellular condition and finally transfer the drive to reunite in the most concentrated form to the germ-cells? But here, I believe, the place has come to break off. (Beyond, p. 52)

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Freud's interpretation, we discover, gives us: more of the same. Replacing the "phantastic hypothesis" by a theory placed in the mouth of a fictional character by "the poet-philosopher," Freud seeks to surmount the fiction and to restore the truth behind it: an original unity, "living substance," is split apart at the moment of its birth; repetition thus appears, once again, as the restoration of a previous unity, as a "reunification." If this interpretation seeks to authorize itself by appealing to the authority of the author, the "poet-philosopher," this gesture both repeats and initiates what it seeks to confirm: repetition as a movement of the same, originating and seeking to return to a founding identity. The text, as the expression of the "poet-philosopher," repeats what the latter intended to say: namely, that all repetition repeats an original identity, that it seeks to restore: the lovers, their original unity; life, its original death; the text, the original intention of its author. Freud's interpretation thus presupposes the authority of an original identity, the Author, and more precisely, an authorial consciousness and intention as the ground and guarantee of the meaning it attributes to the text. The essence of that meaning, and perhaps of meaning as such, is to portray repetition as a movement of sameness, deriving from an original identity. But in thus interpreting the story of Aristophanes as a repetition of the same, Freud, curiously enough, alters that story. We need only reread the opening lines of the Symposium to discover that the question of who said what is just what sets the scene of the text, and sets it up so as to exclude the possibility of its ever being authoritatively resolved. This is why all the speeches of the Symposium are reported in a blend of direct and indirect discourse, something that Plato, the poet-philosopher, will specifically condemn in the Republic. 1 The Symposium, of course, is generally considered to be an early text of the poet-philosopher. But just how early is precisely the question. For the text begins with Apollodorus telling Glaucon that just two days earlier he recounted the very same story Glaucon asks him to tell. The story concerns a dinner given by Agathon, which Glaucon assumes to have taken place in the recent past, with Apollodorus an invited guest. The latter, however, is quite amused at the assumptions of his interlocutor, whom he astonishes by informing that he was not present at the gathering and could not have been, since the banquet took place many years

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ago, "when we were still children" (173a). Apollodorus, it turns out, does know the story, but only through others, above all, through a certain Aristodemos, who, it appears, really did attend the dinner. "But even Aristodemos did not remember any more everything that was said," Apollodorus adds, "nor do I recall everything that he said to me" (q8a). This, then, is the starting-point, the point of departure for the speech that will constitute the major portion of the Symposium, and nothing is therefore less certain than what Freud so readily takes for granted: who precisely said what. For everything that is recounted is a repetition of a repetition, Apollodorus recounting the words of Aristodemos. And what really was said may never be certain, for it all took place "long ago, when we were still children." The Symposium, then, begins with a series of repetitions, and it is difficult to know where, if anywhere, they stop. Freud, by contrast, is looking for something quite different: an authoritative account of repetition, not one that merely repeats what others (may) have said. He therefore needs authors and authorities and invokes as one such, "Prof. Heinrich Gomperz of Vienna," to establish the authenticity of the myth. The Professor is cited in order to situate the myth of the Symposium as the development of an earlier one, found in the Upanishads, which tells of the "emergence of the world from the Arman" (the Self or the Ego), as Freud recounts in a long footnote. It is as though Freud, backed by the scientific authoriry of Prof. Gomperz, once again seeks to retrace a repetition (the myth of the Symposium) back to its source and origin (the Upanishads), to establish it as a repetition of the same. And yet, right from the start, something very curious happens: Freud invokes the authority of the specialist, Prof. Gomperz, to whom he attributes "the following suggestions concerning the derivation (Herkunft) of the Platonic myth," but when he then proceeds to those "suggestions" ("I would like to call attention to the fact that"), he renders them "only in part in his (Prof. Gomperz's) words." it thus becomes virtually impossible to discern with certainty just who, in this long footnote, is saying what; that is, where the discourse of Professor Gomperz stops and where that of Professor Freud begins-or vice versa. In itself, of course, this would be a trivial matter, but where questions of authority and authenticity are at stake, it becomes an important, if undecidable,

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question. For the entire footnote serves primarily to line up authoritative support for Freud's interpretation of the "Platonic" myth by demonstrating the latter to be merely a repetition of another, an earlier story, whose meaning is clear, once and for all. It is to this end that Freud invokes Professor Gomperz, however vague that invocation turns out to be: I have to thank Professor Heinrich Gomperz, of Vienna, for the following discussion of the origin of the Platonic myth, which I give partly in his own words. It is to be remarked that what is essentially the same theory is already to be found in the Upanishads. For we find the following passage in the Brihad!iranyakaupanishad, 1, 4, 3, where the origin of the world from the Arman (the Self or Ego) is described: "But he (the Atman, the Self or the Ego) felt no joy [hatte auch keine Freude]; therefore [darum] a man has no joy when he is alone. Thereupon [Da] he desired a second. You see, he was as large as a woman and a man intertwined. This his Self he sunders in two parts; out of this [Daraus] husband and wife emerged. Therefore [Darum], measured against the Self this body is as it were a half, thus explained Yagnavalkya. Therefore [Darum] this empty space here is filled by woman." (Beyond, p. 52)

No doubt that Freud here recognizes the possibility of escaping from the joyless solitude of the Fort! Da!, and, with the authority of Prof Gomperz, of transforming it into a "There-fore" (darum), a logically compelling way of departing from the "there" (daraus). No doubt that this version of the myth provides Freud with a mirror-image of the fulfillment he desires: a self or ego alone is no more cause for rejoicing than is a death drive all by itself For there to be joy, Freude, there must be a second, a double, a pair of opposites, joined together, to be sure, in holy matrimony. The other must be different, and yet dominated by the law of the same-that is the condition that Freud's speculation desires to ful611. But if the story he thus retells, partially in the words of another, authorizes such a desire, it also repeats the very problem that Freud has been seeking to avoid: for this narcissistic account of the creation of difference from identity cannot account for the creation-i.e., separationitself Except, that is, by pointing to the lack of Freude that renders that separation necessary, but not necessarily intelligible. The gap, in short, between a "therefore" and a "thereupon," a darum and a da, remains to be bridged. And yet, without this bridge, the fortress of the Fort! Da! has not really been breached.

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This is why Freud may find comfort in discovering an earlier origin of the myth he seeks to found, but also why he cannot dispense with its "Platonic" repetition. For although the story that furnishes him with the hypothesis he desires is spoken by Aristophanes, Freud persists in treating the latter as a mere spokesman for the "poet-philosopher," for whom, as is well known, the comic dramatist had little sympathy. Yet this attribution-of Aristophanes' discourse to Plato-is only one of a number of alterations that Freud's reading of the Symposium imposes upon its "original" text. Let us, therefore, reread the latter as literally as possible, without prejudging the question of who, in the final analysis, im letzten Grunde, is really speaking, or who has the last word. Let us, in short, allow Aristophanes, at least for the moment, to speak for himsel£ He begins his story thus: "Our body, you see, was at first not formed as it is now; it was utterly different." Wilamowitz, whose translation Freud cites, renders the Greek "physis" not, as is often the case, by "nature" but, more concretely, by "body." The story shows that the choice was a good one. For, in contrast to the alleged source in the Upanishad, Aristophanes' story concerns not abstract or incorporeal beings, a "self" or an "ego," but bodies. His story of love begins with the body. Not with the body as we know it today, to be sure, but with one that was "utterly different." Once upon a time (pdlai). Einmal . .. And yet, when those bodies begin to be described, we discover that they were not quite so different after all. What was different was a certain duplication: a double-male, double-female, and that third kind, combining half of each, and which survives only as a name, androgyne. Everything was doubled in these beings, with one notable exception: the head. They kept their heads, as it were, single. Once upon a time, long ago. In the context of Freud's speculations, one might be tempted to see in this initial state not merely duplication, doubling, but also: repetition. Repetition of the same, at the very beginning. But instead of jumping to conclusions, let us listen to Aristophanes, and to what he has to say at the end of his tale. The moral of the story, as Aristophanes describes it, seems to be not so very different from the interpretation of Freud: The cause of all this is that our original nature was thus, and we were whole, and this very yearning and striving for wholeness is what we call love. And before this, as I have said, we were one, but now, because of injustice, we have been

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taken apart by the God and dispersed like the Arcadians before the Spartans. (Symposium, 192-93a)

Like Freud, and most other commentators of this text, 2 Aristophanes seems to state unequivocally that human beings were originally whole and one, and that only as a result of "injustice" were they condemned, punished and estranged from their original unity; that Eros entails the striving to return to this lost unity, to restore that original wholeness. This, at least, is what Aristophanes seems to want to say. Indeed, he seems to leave little room for doubt, that our race would be blessed if we could succeed in love, and everyone was able to win his particular beloved, in order thus to return to our original nature. If this would be best, under the prevailing conditions the best will be what comes closest to that ideal, and that is to find the beloved who most conforms to our wishes. And therefore if we wish to celebrate in song the God to whom we owe this, we must indeed sing the praises of Eros, who nowadays shows us so much good in leading us to those for whom we bear affinities, but who also gives us hope that in the future, if only we prove our respect for the Gods, our original nature will be healed and restored, and we will be made happy and blessed. (193c-d)

Who would wish to spoil such a Happy Ending, or want to say anything different? This, at least, seems to be the effect intended by Aristophanes, for immediately after proclaiming this to be the moral of his story, he turns to the previous speaker, Eryximachos, the physician, with a remark that casts a somewhat different light on that moral: This, oh Eryximachos, he said, is my discourse on Eros, one that is quite different from yours. As I asked you before, please don't make fun of it. (193d)

In view of this plea to be taken seriously, Aristophanes' commentary on his tale now appears as something of a captatio benevolentiae. And, as readers of the Symposium already know, his fears are not unfounded. Nor is he himself innocent in the affair. For earlier in the evening, as it had come time for him to speak, Aristophanes suddenly seemed taken by a fit of hiccoughs which caused him to change places in the order of speakers with Eryximachos, who also gave him the professional advice of sneezing and holding his breath in order to get over the attack. That such remedies were not without their effect can be surmised from the fact that Aristo-

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phanes is able to reply to the physician immediately after the latter has concluded his speech. But Aristophanes' response to the well-meaning inquiry of the doctor as to the state of his hiccoughs, can only be considered an impertinent provocation: Of course it stopped, but not before it was treated with sneezing; and this, he added, makes me wonder why it is that the harmony of the body [one of the basic positions outlined by Eryximachos in the speech he has just delivered] should desire the kind of noise and tickling involved in sneezing; for as soon as I began to sneeze, it stopped straightaway. (189a) Having presumably sneezed and snorted throughout much of the good doctor's discourse, Aristophanes now has the effrontery to cite his own cure as evidence against Eryximachos's panegyrics to love as the harmony of the body. Small wonder, then, that Aristophanes concludes his own speech with an eye cast anxiously in the direction of the physician. For the latter has already given him fair warning: My good Aristophanes, take care! You mock me, as you are about to speak, and compel me therefore to become the judge of your discourse and to make sure that you too do not say anything laughable [geloion], whereas otherwise you could have spoken in peace. (r89a-b) If the scene of the Symposium is from the very beginning agonistic, with the different speakers vying with one another in their praises of Eros, the interchange of Aristophanes and Eryximachos introduces an unmistakable tone of aggressiveness. Henceforth, the speeches will not merely be in competition with one another, and therefore directed at addressees who are also judges: they will also engage the prestige and standing of those who deliver them: Which is why Aristophanes' reply to the physician's warning, while ironically half-hearted, touches the core of the problem: Thereupon Aristophanes laughingly [geldsanta] replied: Well said, Eryximachos, and as far as I am concerned, let what I have said be unsaid. So don't lie in wait for me, since in any case I shall be concerned, not that what I intend to say will turn out to be laughable [geloia], for that would be all to the good and in accordance with my muse, but rather ridiculous [katagelasta]. (189b) But if Aristophanes seeks to unsay what he has said, he knows, no less than Freud, that such an attempt at "undoing" must always leave traces.

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And if he thus chooses the physician, Eryximachos, to be his privileged addressee and judge, is this not his attempt to displace the verdict, upon which his joke, like all jokes, depend, from that other listener, who, for the moment at least, remains silent, awaiting his turn. For if Aristophanes insults and provokes Eryximachos, the author of the Clouds knows full well that his most redoubtable antagonist lies elsewhere. Eryximachos, however, speaks also for the silent Socrates when he reminds the satirist that, notwithstanding his efforts to unsay what he has said, he can expect to be held responsible for his words: Now that you have done, Eryximachos replied, do you think you can get away as easily as that, Aristophanes? Take care, rather, to speak as one who will have to answer for what he says. (189b-c)

It is not simply fortuitous if it is a physician, Eryximachos, who is first charged with calling the mocking Aristophanes to order. From Plato to the present, the doctor has stood as one of the chief guardians of order in the physis, and hence as a model for order in the polis as well. It was Eryximachos who first launched the idea of replacing the usual after-dinner entertainment, music, with serious discourse: Now that it has been decided ... that each shall drink only as much as he likes .... I would like to propose that we ask the lady flutist who has just entered to leave and either play for herself or, if she prefer, for the women inside, and that this evening we entertain ourselves with speeches. (r76e) The lady flutist having thus been excluded, the men, left to themselves, begin to speak seriously their logoi about Love. It is only consistent, then, that it is Eryximachos who has the task of calling Aristophanes to order in the name of seriousness and of responsibility. And it is no less consistent that Aristophanes should therefore conclude his speech with a moral designed to disarm the suspicions he himself has provoked. But what, then, of that speech itself? Aristophanes, it will be recalled, concludes by stressing that it has been very different from that of Eryximachos; he introduces it, however, in precisely the same way: To be sure, Aristophanes said, I intend to speak very differently from the way both you and Pausanias have spoken. For it seems to me that so far people have not at all perceived the true force of Eros. Had they done so, they would have

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certainly built him the most marvelous temples and altars and made the greatest sacrifices in his honor. (r89c) If Aristophanes declares that he intends to speak in a very different manner from that of his predecessors, it is because he is convinced that there has been a problem of perception: the true power of Eros has not yet been properly recognized and therefore remains to be revealed. The discourse of Aristophanes, then, will be different in not taking Eros for granted, for self-evident, but rather as the object of a certain blindness, a kind of malady that he sets about to remedy. Aristophanes, therefore, repeats the gesture of the physician but at the same extends it to cover the operation in which he and the other speakers are engaged. For one can only seriously sing the praises of Eros if one knows what one is talking about. And this, Aristophanes insists, is precisely the problem. His discourse will thus be both revelatory and pedagogic: "I will therefore try to explain his power as well, and you can then be teachers of the others" (r89d). This pedagogic intention, therefore, to reveal the true nature and power of Eros, to remove, that is, a certain blindness, may be what explains the vivid quality of Aristophanes' description of those ancient beings, whom, he asserts, were so utterly different (all'alloia) from those we see today. And yet as we have already remarked, the difference to which Aristophanes refers is rather one of quantity than of quality: a difference, one might say, in economy. For if we look closely at Aristophanes' description of those doublebeings, we discover them to have been very similar: to us, to themselves and to their parents: Because the male was originally an offspring of the sun, and the female a child of the earth, while that participating in both was sired by the moon, which itself participates in both sexes. And they were round and went round, thus resembling their parents. (r9ob) The world of the double-beings was one of resemblances, family and otherwise; and like their parents, they moved in circles, "making cartwheels," as children do "even today." If we compare Aristophanes' double-being with the Atman of the Upanishad, we can see that the solitude of the latter would seem out of place in the world of the former: never being alone, they would never need to create others. And if there is a beginning, it is already doubled, duplicated, full of repetition and of resemblance, circu-

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lar: for "they were round and they went round"-while keeping their heads, that single, "common head shared by the opposing faces." They kept their heads-or did they? Freud's version of the story grows strangely vague at this point: that is, at precisely the point where the actual story, the dramatic conflict as it were, sets in: "Thereupon Zeus was moved .... " The German is even more suggestive: "Da liess sich Zeus bewegen .... " But where, da? If Freud is notably imprecise, Aristophanes is less so. What he has to say shows that Zeus had good reason to be moved. For the double-beings had begun to grow tired of the same, of turning around in circles, and had cast their eyes upward instead: "Now their force and strength were enormous, and their thoughts no less so, and what Homer tells of Ephialtes and Otos applies to them as well, for they wanted to invade the heavens and attack the gods" (r9ob). Freud's "thereupon," that indeterminate but indicative "da," spatial and temporal at once, covers a desire that is distant and yet familiar: the striving to transgress the boundaries separating gods from men, rulers from ruled, the other from the same. And although Freud in his account omits the deliberations that lead Zeus to "be moved," Aristophanes does not: For it was not expedient to kill them [the double-beings], and, as in the case of the Titans, exterminate the entire race, since that would have also meant the loss of all the tributes and sacrifices men give to the gods: but they could not simply be permitted to continue their blasphemous doings either. (r9oc) The deliberations of Zeus indicate what Freud is at pains to ignore: that the law presiding over the Fort(ress)-Da! is none other than that of the oikos: the economy of appropriation and assimilation that characterizes the organization of the ego; in short, the economy of narcissism. In that distant place, utterly different from all that is familiar, we therefore encounter something all too familiar: the narcissistic effort to keep the other in its (proper) place, to subordinate alterity to an economy of the same. In the case, however, of an other that is all the more difficult to control because it is already a mirror-image of the same, radical measures are called for. The other must be altered, in accordance with the laws of narcissistic economics, and this is precisely what Zeus proposes:

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I think, then, that I have found a means that will allow humans to survive and still compel them to cease their excesses for lack of strength. For now, he said, I shall cut each of them into two halves, which will make them weaker and also more useful to us, since there will be more of them, and they will walk upright on two legs. Should I observe, however, that they continue their blasphemous doings and refuse to keep still, he said, I shall cut them apart once again, and then they can hop around on one leg, like tops. (19oc)

Zeus's strategy is doubtless decisive: by dividing the doubles he ups the ante while lowering the risk, and the move can be repeated. It is also fully in accord with the economic law that calls for a lowering in (unbound) energy and an increase in binding. If the energy of the doubles is dangerously unbound, bounding back and forth, as it were, through a mirroring in which the same becomes other and the other, the same, what Zeus suggests is to create a different kind of image; the image of difference "itsel£" Zeus therefore proposes, but it is Apollo-god of the sun, father of the male-who disposes; for after Zeus has made the first incision, he ordered Apollo to turn the face and the half-neck around towards the cut, so that man, confronted with his cleavage, would become more moral, and the rest he ordered Apollo to heal. (r9oe)

"In the final analysis [im letzen Grunde], it must have been the history of our earth and its relation to the sun that has left us its mark. ... " Aristophanes, here, tells us just that story of the mark, left by wounds not of the spirit, but of the body; and these wounds, as both Freud and Aristophanes well knew, do not heal without leaving scars. Or "blisters," as with the scorched crust-scab?-of the Blaschen. Or finally, without marking the place in which all these strands come together to form a single, inextricable knot. [Apollo] therefore turned the face around, pulled the skin from all sides up over what today we call the belly, and just as when one pulls together the strings of a purse, he drew the ends together and tied them up in the middle of the belly in what today we call the navel. The resulting wrinkles he smoothed out for the most part, and moulded the chest with the aid of a tool like that used by shoemakers to smoothe out creases in the leather, except for a few wrinkles that he left around the belly and navel to serve as a reminder of the ancient accident. (r9oe-191a)

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The navel is left wrinkled, knotted, interrupting the smooth surface of the body, which, as Freud knew, serves the ego as its model. 3 The closure of the body, paradigm of the ego's organization, is both accomplished and interrupted by Apollo, the "sun," the intervention of an exteriority, and serves as reminder "of the ancient accident." No matter how economical the ego may be, its "purse" can never be hermetically sealed, for just in the place where everything comes together, we find the scar and stigma of an ancient wound, an ancient striving. And it is precisely this striving that emerges from the operation of Zeus and Apollo: "Once the figure had thus been cur in two, each part yearned for its other half, and so they came together, held each other in their arms and pressed together, intertwined" (191a). This marks the spot where Freud seems to have found what he was looking for: the derivation oflife as a process of repetition from the tendency to restore a previous unity. It is here, then, that he believes that he has found Eros. Bur in Aristophanes' story, Eros is not yet mentioned, and with good reason. For the striving that Freud takes to be Eros is, in the version of the comic-dramatist, nothing other than Thanatos, in the purest and most irresistible of forms. The sundered bodies, he relates, intertwined, and out of the desire to grow together they died from hunger and other neglect, for they would not do anything apart. If, now, the one half was dead and the other remained, the survivor sought out another and embraced it ... and thus they perished. (191b)

Had Aristophanes' tale ended here, as Freud's version does, there would have never been Eros at all, bur only death. The story would have merely repeated, or rather anticipated, the Freudian black hole, fortress of the impervious da! and, in the end, nothing would have been left, not even death itself But Aristophanes continues his story, just as Freud must continue his search. And it is just possible that it is precisely this continuation that provides what Freud so deeply desires. For Aristophanes tells of a second, repeated intervention, designed to save the moribund bodies from themselves, from their deadly desire to be reunified and whole-to be, in short, a self: Thereupon Zeus took pity and placed another means at their disposal, by shifting their private parts to the front, instead of on the side where they were before,

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since previously they had reproduced not in one another but in the earth, like crickets. Now, however, he shifted them to the front and thus allowed them to reproduce in one another. (191b-c) This second intervention does not merely repeat the first; it adds a new direction: instead of dividing, cutting, and separating, it shifts, dislocates, and rearranges the reproductive organs, bringing repetition, as it were, to the fore. It is only with this dislocation, with the advent of a certain Entstellung, that the fort(ress) da! is finally and irrevocably breached. And only here, in the story of Aristophanes, is Eros finally named: "Ever since this distant time, therefore, love is inborn in man, attempts to make one of two and to heal human nature" (r9IC-d). Therefore, henceforth, the da! is fort!: not simply as a unity that has been lost, or a wholeness that has been separated from itself, but as an Entstellung that reinscribes the stories of loss and of separation in another text, one in which displacement becomes the "origin" of eros. For it is only when the organs have been displaced that they become capable of generating eros, and not merely thanatos; only then do they become erogenous: Each of us is therefore a fragment of a man [anthropou symbolon], since we are cut like flatfish, and have become two from one. Therefore everyone is always seeking his other part. (191d) For Aristophanes, it would seem, this erogenous, symbolic striving can never be separated from the narcissistic desire to become one; for him, the Symbolic therefore is indissociable from narcissism, from a certain mirror-image of the other. And yet, his story also marks indelibly the site, and the sight, of that image as the nave~ reminder of the ancient accident or incident by which the sun left its imprint for us to decipher. But what of that cipher left in just the place where we straddle, or fall for, the unknown? What of the "capital X" in which so much energy is bound up, the variable that both permits the "equations" of metapsychology and also casts them in doubt? In short, can we be sure, as Freud seems to be (but only by not reading the story he recites), that we know just where the story stops, or where it is going? Where the myth ends, and where theory begins? The lovers, at any rate, are least able to say what it is they really desire:

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When, then, one meets its true, proper half, be he a pediast or anyone else, the two are overcome by amorous union and love and do not wish to part for even the shortest time; and those who spend their entire lives together would not even be able to say what they want from one another. For this can hardly be the community of amorous delight ... but rather it is dear that the soul of each desires something else, which however it cannot explicitly utter but only hint at. (192b-c) The lovers cannot explicitly utter what it is that they desire from each other, because what they desire is so utterly different that it can only be uttered by someone else. This, at least, would seem to be the reason why, at the very end of his tale, Aristophanes recounts the intervention of yet another figure-or is it rather a hypothesis, a supposition that suddenly makes its appearance here, to guide the story toward its happy end? And if, while they lay together, Hephaistos was to step before them, tools in hand, and was to ask them: What is it then really, people, that you want from each other? And if they then had no answer, and he asked further: Is what you desire something like this, that you may be together as much as possible, and never part, either day or night? For if this is your desire, then I will melt and weld you so that you are one instead of two, and may live together as one, and so that when you have died, even in the underworld you will be dead not as two but as one. (192d-e) Hephaistos, the god of binding and unbinding, 4 often pictured with his tools slung over his shoulder like a capital X, appears here on the scene to assure the binding that the lovers, it would seem, so desire, and also to guarantee the moral of the story, that both Aristophanes and Freud cannot do without. But ifHephaistos thus ties up the loose ends of the story into a seemingly neat knot, the lovers, it should be observed, remain silent. And since they cannot say what it is that they want, Hephaistos must do it for them. For he does not merely pose his question, he imposes the response, putting his answer into the mouths of the lovers just as Plato, according to Freud at least, put his story into the mouth of Aristophanes. Is this, then, the mouth that gives us the true sense of the story? Hearing this, we know for certain, not even one (of the lovers) would refuse or indicate that he wanted something different, but rather each would be sure to have heard just what he had wanted to hear, what he had always yearned for, that is, by being close to, and melting into the beloved, to make two into one. (192e)

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Does Aristophanes speak for Plato here, for himself, or for Hephaistos, who speaks for, and in the name of, the lovers? Will we ever know for certain? "Each would be sure to have heard just what he had wanted to hear, what he had always yearned for." This, Aristophanes concludes, "we know for certain." But does that not mean that all we know for certain is what we desire to hear? The lovers, in any case, remain silent. They must be spoken for; but their silence speaks to us, through the voice of a narrator, about whose status we grow increasingly uncertain: It must therefore be feared that if we do not behave properly towards the gods, that we will once again be rendered asunder, and have to go about like the figures carved out of tombstones, which are divided at the nose, and that we will then become just like split dice, each of which possesses its other half. (193e)

The fate of the lovers, Aristophanes makes clear here, at the end, is ours as well: the mark they leave us, imprint of the sun and its relation to the earth, of a violent intervention of powerful forces, is a signal that suspends us somewhere between symbols and "split dice," in the silence of a figure engraved on a tombstone. The danger with which the signal confronts us is that, like Nietzsche's "female," we shall be neither deep, nor even flat, but rather twisted, distorted, entstellt. And that we shall move about like Hephaistos himself, who, it should be recalled, is the only Greek god known to limp. And perhaps it is this, more than anything else, that binds the Greek god of binding and unbinding, bearer of the great X, to Freud, who concludes in his speculative way Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the following remark: This is tied up with countless other questions which are impossible to answer now. We must be patient and await further means and occasions for research. Also ready to forsake a way that we have followed for a while if it seems to be leading to no good end .... Moreover, for the slow advances of our scientific knowledge we may take comfort in the words of a poet: "What we cannot reach flying, we must reach limping. Scripture tells us it is no sin to limp."

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Again, it is the words of a poet (Ruckert), philosophizing, that provides Freud with comfort. Or is it really a poet that Freud cites, here at the end of his speculative way? For, many years before, he had cited the same poet, and the same passage, but at a time when he was less concerned with death and with repetition than with the machine he was in the process of constructing, a machine that seemed almost ready to "fly" by itself. This machine, or more properly, this automat (Hephaistos, we recall, is said to have been the founder of automats) was none other than Freud's first attempt to elaborate a psychological system. As the "Project" drew ever nearer to completion, Freud wrote of his feelings in a letter to his friend, Fliess: Now listen to this. One strenuous night last week, when I was in the stage of painful discomfort in which my brain works best, the barriers suddenly lifted, the veils dropped, and it was possible to see from the details of neurosis all the way to the very conditioning of consciousness. Everything fell into place, the cogs meshed, one had the impression that the thing was now really a machine which in a moment would begin to go by itsel£ The three systems of neurones, the "free" and "bound" state of quantity, the primary and secondary processes, the main and compromise tendencies of the nervous system, the two biological rules of attention and of defence, the indications of quality, reality and thought, the state of the psycho-sexual group, the sexual condition of repression, finally the conditions of consciousness as a perceptual function-that all fit together and still does. I can, of course, hardly contain myself for delight. (Origins, p. 129)

Freud, who can hardly contain himself, nevertheless wishes he had waited before sending his friend and first reader an early draft of his "machine," one that was still incomplete: Had I only waited a fortnight with the communication to you, everything would have turned out so much clearer. But it was only in attempting to communicate it to you that the thing became clear to me in the first place. So it could not have been otherwise. Now I shall hardly find the time to give you a proper account. If only I had forty-eight hours to talk with you about this and nothing else [und nichts anderes], the thing could probably be finished up. But that is impossible. "What we cannot reach flying .... "(Origins, p. 129)

In the absence of the cherished friend, "first reader" and "representative of the others," Freud turned to the poet for comfort. And if the latter, re-

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peating Scripture-Die Schrift-could tell him that it is not a sin to limp, Freud was far from limping in 1895. Rather, he was flying high: "Other neurotic confirmations deluge me. The thing is really true and genuine" (ibid.). In 1920, however, in the absence of the Friend, Freud still sought solace from the poets, and confirmation from the neurotics. And in the "transference" of the latter-precisely, that is, in their refusal to confirm-Freud seemed to distinguish the true and genuine machine behind it all: the driving force of the repetition-compulsion, working automatically, flying, as it were, in the face of the pleasure principle. If the psychoanalytical machine might falter as therapy, it would fly as theory, as speculation, if need be. But the latter, like the automat, still needed a start from somewhere else-a start, which would also be a finish-and so Freud found himself on the way to an utterly different place, where he thought he discerned the authoritative voice of the poet-philosopher. But if the figure he found there was indeed a "poet," it was no philosopher but rather their antagonist, a man of the theater, a storyteller with a sense for the absurd. And the legend he told only repeated what Freud himself had thought and written elsewhere, long ago; repeated, that is, but also and inevitably transformed. And after the playwright had finished his story and after the actor had had his say, it finally came time for the philosopher to speak. And he promised to speak the truth about Eros, rather than simply to sing his pratses: For I shall hold no panegyrics, and could not do so if I wanted to. Rather, the truth is what I will tell you, if you are willing, not in the style of your speeches bur in my own way, so that I don't make myself ridiculous. (199a)

Like the comic writer, the philosopher also announces that his talk will be different from the others; and like the former, he also fears laughter. But this time, ~here will be none. For what the philosopher has to say concerns the most serious thing of all, truth. And truth must be said in its own way: "See too, Phaidros, if you can use such a talk, if you can listen to the truth about Eros, but told in phrases and words that just happen to come to mind" (199b). Having thus announced his "basic rule," which repeats, or anticipates, that which Freud will make the basis of psychoanalytic "free association," Socrates proceeds to tell, or rather to retell,

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the story told to him by a woman met long before when he was still a very young man. And after he has finished retelling this story of love, a strange thing comes to pass: Now after Socrates had spoken thus, the others showered him with praise; Aristophanes, however, was about to say something, because Socrates had mentioned his own speech in the course of his talk. But suddenly there was a knocking on the outer door, and it became very noisy, as though there were voices of people wandering about, and the tones of a flutist were heard. (212c)

The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straightjacket. -Edgar Allan Poe, The System ofDr. Tarr and Professor Feather "Yc'll be come in the cannie moment I'm thinking." -Sir Walter Scott

Freud's essay on das Unheimliche-the uncanny1-begins by noting the peripheral position of the field he has chosen to investigate, with regard to the major concerns of aesthetics and literary criticism. Since r9r9, the year Freud's paper first appeared, the uncanny has not ceased to pervade the popular imagination, nor has there been any letup in the literary production of uncanny tales. The Anglo-American trio of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft has long since acquired international renown and has spurred on a vogue which even today shows no signs of abating. And yet this continued vitality of the uncanny in literature also serves to underscore the tenacity with which it has remained, today hardly less than in I9I9, off the beaten track of academic literary criticism and theory, even in countries such as France, where the litterature fontastique has long been a subject of intense investigation. One need only consult one of the more interesting recent critical studies in this field, Todorov's Introduction aLa Litterature fontastique, in order to see just how far "out"-"abseits" is Freud's word: off-beat, off-sides2-the uncanny has remained, even within the realm of the fantastic. For Todorov,

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"1' etrange realise ... une seule des conditions du fantastique: la description de certaines reactions, en particulier de la peur; il est lie uniquement aux sentiments des personnages et non a un evenement materiel defiant Ia raison. . . . "3 That Todorov should thus distinguish the uncanny from the fantastic, which, he asserts, necessarily involves an intellectual uncertainty concerning the reality or non-reality of phenomena, is certainly legitimate and indeed only repeats Freud's critique of the psychologist Jentsch, one of his rare predecessors in the investigation of the uncanny. 4 It is quite another matter, however, to assume that the uncanny is essentially or exclusively an emotive phenomenon, no less present in the mediocre tales of an Ambrose Bierce than in the texts of Poe. Such a position misconstrues the peculiar structure of the uncanny, or, more precisely, ignores the fact that the uncanny has a particular structure, which, however intimately bound up with subjective feelings-above all with anxiety-is nonetheless determined by a series of "objective" factors that in turn stand in a certain relation to literary discourse. This I submit as something of a working hypothesis which the present paper endeavors not so much to prove as to elaborate. Its aim is the definition of a "problematic," as Althusser might say, not the presentation of a solution which at this stage could only be premature. The first text I propose to investigate is Freud's essay on the uncanny. A relatively exhaustive and satisfactory reading of this seminal (or perhaps "disseminal") paper cannot be attempted here. Such a reading would have to explore a wide range of problems, beginning with that of situating the essay, both within the development of Freud's thought in general, and in particular with regard to the particular perspectives opened by Freud's move "Beyond the Pleasure-Principle," a text written at the same time as "The Uncanny" and related to it in various fundamental respects. Jacques Derrida has already indicated certain of the main lines which such an investigation would have to take, placing particular emphasis upon the significance of the Todestrieb (Death-drive) and the Wt'ederholungszwang(Repetition-Compulsion) for Freud's approach to art and literature. 5 This line of inquiry has been pursued by Helene Cixous in a recent article, "La fiction et ses fantomes," 6 which represents one of

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the first attempts to read Freud's text not simply in terms of its conceptual content but also with regard to its rhetorical and stylistic movement. Whether or not one accepts the major premise of Helene Cixous' reading-that Freud's text is to be regarded as itself an example of the uncanny: "moins comme un discours que comme un etrange roman theorique"7-the alert reader will hardly remain insensitive to the peculiar merging of subject matter and discourse in Freud's essay. Yet this merging does not simply fulfill the exigencies of theoretical discourse, the adaequatio intellectus et rei, since here the "adequacy" of discourse and object tends as much to dislocate the discourse as to locate the object. But unfortunately such decisive questions can only be touched upon here: instead of pursuing them in a direct and systematic manner, I shall proceed in a more naive but perhaps more accessible fashion, treating the uncanny as one theme or subject among others, forgetting-at least for the moment-its peculiar locality, abseits. Instead I shall begin by repeating Freud, in a certain manner, by treating his own text as it itself treats the uncanny, attempting to penetrate to its conceptual nucleus by mustering up its manifold manifestations. Freud divides his paper into three sections: the first is devoted to a lexical and etymological investigation of the words "heimlich" and "unheimlich'' and arrives in short time at what is to be Freud's major hypothesis: "Das Unheimliche sei jene Art des Schreckhaften, welche auf das Altbekannte, Uingstvertraute zuri.ickgeht." 8 (The uncanny is that class of the terrifYing which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.) Freud's point of departure-or is it arrival?-is thus that the words "heimlich" and "unheimlich" are not simply opposites, but that heimlich itself is the repository of ambivalent meanings, signifYing on the one hand, the familiar and domestic, on the other and simultaneously the concealed and the hidden. In this connection Freud quotes Schelling's description of the uncanny as anything which "im Geheimnis, im Verborgenen ... bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist" (which ought to have remained secret and concealed, but which has come to light). 9 This lexical investigation thus leads Freud to a conclusion which is no less important for being negative: the uncanny is not, as might be supposed, something entirely unknown or unfamiliar but rather "irgendwie eine Art von heimlich" (in some way or other a sub-species of the canny, of heimlich). 10

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The second and major part of the essay consists of a Musterung: a mustering of those "Personen und Dinge, Eindri.icke, Vorgange und Situationen" which embody, with particular clarity and force, the uncanny; yet the German word, Musterung-like its English counterpart-sugges ts not simply the peaceful assemblage, display and review of exemplary phenomena, but equally the marshaling of forces, conscription, constraint and conflict. We shall see that this connotation is not entirely arbitrary. The Musterung begins-necessarily -with the choice of a good example (Muster): Hoffmann's story, "The Sandman," leads Freud to the conclusion that the uncanny effect of the tale resides in the dread of losing one's eyes, which in turn is for Freud nothing but a substitute manifestation of castration-anxiety. But castration reveals itself here to be only one theme among the many which Freud musters up and which include, as second major thematic complex, that of the Doppelganger, the Double, be it as duplication, ego-splitting, revenant, or the recurrence of traits, characters, destinies. Behind the motif of the Double, Freud sees the solid ground of what he calls primary narcissism: "Diese Vorstellungen sind auf dem Boden der uneingeschrankten Selbsdiebe entstanden, des primaren Narzissmus, welcher das Seelenleben des Kindes wie des Primitiven beherrscht." (Such notions developed out of a basis of unlimited self-love, from primary narcissism, which dominated the psychic life of the child no less than that of primitive peoples.) The Musterung continues. Upon the heels of the Doppelganger follows a motif which is in a sense itself a double, since it doubles the Doppelganger: the motif of repetition (Wiederholung des Gleichartigen), which Freud links to the repetition-compulsion (Wiederholungszwang), "der wahrscheinlich von der innersten Natur der Triebe selbst abhangt" 11 (which probably derives from the innermost nature of the drives themselves). At this point the uncanny converges with the death-drive (Todestrieb), but instead of dwelling on this relation Freud hurries on, intent upon bringing about a "final decision concerning the validity of our supposition." Yet before reaching that "endgi.iltige Entscheidung," he introduces a fourth major thematic complex, which he terms "the omnipotence of thought" (Allmacht der Gedanken) and which, as with the Double, he traces back to archaic narcissism, this time however not of the individual but of primitive cultures and their animistic world-view.

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Here once again Freud suddenly stops short, this time, however, to reveal the "wesentlichen Inhalt dieser kleinen Untersuchung" 12 (the essential substance of this small study), couched-curiously enough-in two remarks (Bemerkungen): first, since the uncanny is a form of anxiety, and since anxiety in general is produced by the mechanism of repression, the uncanny must involve some form of the return of the repressed. Second, this explains why the word heimlich includes its opposite, unheimlich, since the latter is nothing new but only something originally familiar, which has been repressed. The remainder of this section of the essay, writes Freud, can now consist merely in the testing (erproben) of this basic insight (Einsicht). What follows, however, is a most remarkable proliferation of examples; the mustering grows to monstrous proportions as Freud amasses motif upon motif, many of which seem to repeat previous thematic complexes, such as the "relation to death," and the return of the dead, whereas others are of a very heterogeneous character and much more difficult to situate, such as the confusion of fantasy and reality or of symbol and symbolized. An even remotely adequate reading of Freud's essay would have to dwell here not merely on the conceptual conclusion of this remarkable proliferation of Muster, but on the parade itself, on the rhetorical structure and strategy of this curious Musterung and the constraints and desires to which it responds. Here I can only touch one of these: it is the struggle against doubt, a struggle that Freud conducts in various ways and at various levels, all of which are highly significant. Doubt-Zweijel-is the malin genie of the Unheimliche, and its shadow looms ever larger as the Musterung proceeds: for each doubt banned, two return in its place. Yet the doubts which remain, after Freud has marshaled all the forces at his command, are so fundamental that they require a third and final section of the essay in order to be discussed. These doubts call into question not only the theoretical thesis, involving the role of repression in producing the uncanny, but the status of the thematic examples as well. To begin with the latter: a severed hand, or any of the other motifs cited by Freud as uncanny, can produce such an effect but need not do so. Similarly for the mechanism of repression: the return of the repressed can be uncanny but is not necessarily so. That "conceptual nucleus," which Freud sought to disengage, has eluded his grasp, at least so far. The "material condi-

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tions" (stojftiche Bedingungen) 13 isolated by Freud reveal themselves to be inadequate in determining the specific difference of the uncanny. Here, Freud observes, we seem to reach the limits of a purely psychological investigation and enter the realm of aesthetics. Yet to halt here would be to open the way to doubt-"dem Zweifel das Tor offnen" 14 and this might well call into question Freud's entire analysis of the question. Freud is therefore constrained to muster up once more: this time, however, not examples (Muster), whose exemplary status might again be subject to doubt, but rather other divisions, namely two, a double division: first, between the uncanny of immediate experience (des Erlebens) and that of fiction; and second, das Unheimliche deriving from repression ( Verdriingung) or from surmounting or over-coming ( Uberwundensein). The uncanny of experience presupposes in general the only partial surmounting of archaic modes of thought-above all, animism; to a lesser extent it derives from the repression of infantile complexes. Yet the double division complicates the initial distinction, inasmuch as overcoming relates ultimately to "material reality," to "reality-testing," whereas the formal condition of fiction is precisely the exclusion of such testing. This perhaps explains why Freud argues that the resources of fiction in regard to the uncanny include all those of reality and many more-although, on the other hand, much of that which would seem uncanny in reality does not produce this effect in fiction. Moreover Freud himself limits the distinction between repression and surmounting, inasmuch as "die primitiven Uberzeugungen auf das innigste mit den infantilen Komplexen zusammenhangen und eigentlich in ihnen wurzeln" (primitive convictions are not simply profoundly connected with infantile complexes but indeed derive from them), and, he concludes, we need not be surprised if these distinctions are somewhat blurred ( wird man sich iiber diese Verwischung der Abgrenzungen nicht vie! verwundern). 15 After a brief discussion of some non-thematic elements involved in the uncanny quality of literary texts-the relation of the reader to the characters, the kind of "reality" selected by the "author," the certainty or uncertainty surrounding this reality, etc.-Freud abruptly breaks off this line of thought with a gesture that strangely supplements the broad sweep of the MusterungofPart Two, where the parade of examples seemed endless, as though-in accordance with a tendency of dream-articulation 16-

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the proliferation of Muster served to conceal (and to represent) something quite different and more elusive. Here, at the point in his investigation where he is led beyond a strictly thermatic-motivic treatment of the Unheimliche, where contextual factors begin to emerge, or at least their necessity, Freud draws back, invoking the academic division of labor which he elsewhere shows little scruple in violating when necessary: "Wir sind auf dieses Gebiet der Forschung ohne rechte Absicht gefiihrt worden, indem wir der Versuchung nachgaben, den Widerspruch gewisser Beispiele gegen unsere Ableitung des Unheimlichen aufzuklaren." 17 (We have been led into this field of research without really intending it, by succumbing to the temptation of explaining the contradiction of certain of our examples to our derivation of the uncanny.) At the conclusion of this essay, Freud has in a sense been led back to his starting point, by a strange temptation, without really intending it, except that this time it is not merely the uncanny which is off-beat, off-side and far-out, abseits; for Freud himself has been led astray. The reasons for this pertain surely no less to the nature of the uncanny, to its position abseits, than to any peculiarities of Freud, or weaknesses in his argument. These are, as I have indicated, and as Freud himself admits, undeniable: the central thesis, involving repression (and then surmounting) is too abstract and too formal, and the particular relation between repression, anxiety and the Unheimliche is left open: however interrelated these three are, they are not simply identical. Secondly, the status of Freud's "evidence" remains open to question: how exemplary are the examples, if the elements they comprise are not necessarily uncanny? Furthermore, the examples which he cites, or musters up, are often of a very heterogeneous nature: the confusion of fantasy and reality, or of symbol and symbolized, is obviously not necessarily a thematic question but can pertain to the form of a text (or of an experience). Summarizing these objections-which are by no means exhaustive-it can be said that the relation of formal, thematic and causal factors is not adequately worked out by Freud in his essay. And as is generally the case when Freud is confronted with the necessity of affirming the interdependency of these moments without having sufficiently developed their constitutive connections, he resorts to a genetic-empiricist derivation, which explains less than it obscures. The following "example" can be risked as being exemplary: the fact that castration-anxiety plays an "enor-

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mous role" (eine grossartige Rolle) 18 in the child's development, and that children often display the fear of losing their eyes, suffices-for Freudto establish a causal relation between the two: ocular anxiety becomes the effect of and substitute for castration anxiety. In place of this pseudo-explanation I shall naively endeavor to develop an alternative argument, which is no longer genetic or empiricist, but which, for want of a better term, I shall call "structural"; this argument adopts certain elements of Lacan's reading of Freud but it begins with Freud's theory of anxiety, which, as we have seen, remains one of the unsolved problems in his paper on the Unheimliche. However, there are two Freudian theories of anxiety, and as their difference is germane to the problem, I shall have to recapitulate, very briefly, both. The first theory, which Freud still held in 1919, while writing "Das Unheimliche," affirmed that anxiety is the result of repression, which separates the affective cathexis (Triebbesetzuing) from the representation (Vorstellungsinhalt) to which it was previously bound, and which alone forms the object of repression. This affective energy is thus cut off from the representation, becomes free-floating and is thus transformed into anxiety, which Freud regarded as unbound psychic energy. This entire process Freud regarded as functioning entirely independently of the particular representation involved and no less so of the nature of the affect originally connected to the representation. This "first" anxiety theory thus included the decisive and radical insight, that the particular ideational content (Vorstellungsinhalt), which alone was the object of repression, was not in itself-that is in its intrinsic, qualitative content-sufficient to explain the genesis of anxiety, implying that it was only as the element of a broader context that individual representations become psychically relevant. Yet the weakness of this early theory, which Freud later qualified as being "descriptive," is that it leaves both the basic cause of repression obscure, as well as the specific mechanism by which repression produces anxiety. From 1926 on-the year Freud wrote his paper on Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)-this first theory of anxiety was not only altered: it was reversed. Freud came to the conclusion that it was not "repression ... which produces anxiety," 19 but anxiety that produces repression. This position thus compelled Freud to examine more

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closely the nature of anxiety, which could no longer be explained simply as the result of repression. Without going here into the typology of anxieties that Freud developed, one point can and should be retained: the particular anxiety which now became paradigmatic for the structure of anxiety itself was castration anxiety. 20 The implications of this second theory of anxiety for the problem of the uncanny are nothing less than decisive: it implies that it is not the return of the repressed as such which produces das Unheimliche, thus relegating castration to the level of one thematic-material element among others; on the contrary, the castration-complex now appears as the nucleus of the Freudian theory of the uncanny, permitting this theory to bring its otherwise disparate elements into a coherent connection. On one condition, however: that the complexity of the castration-complex not be overlooked, either by reducing castration to a "real" event or by equating it with an imaginary or arbitrary fantasy. Yet if it is neither simply real nor simply imaginary, what is castration? The only adequate response to this question, however disappointing it may seem, is that castration is almost nothing, but not quite. The Freudian theory of castration, as developed by Jacques Lacan, marks the moment-in a genetic, but also in a structural sense-of discovery when the subject is confronted with the object of its desire as being almost nothing, but not quite. The discovery of the penislessness of the mother by the child demolishes-or at least severely disrupts-the "infantile sexual theory" which postulates that all living human beings, regardless of sex, are equipped with the male organ. Yet the effects of the castration complex extend far beyond the blow that it thus metes out to the narcissism of the child; its implications and consequences can neither be interpreted in a strictly genetic nor in a simply psychological sense. For castration involves a structuring of experience that far transcends the realm of the individual psyche; and what it dislocates by its violent movement is the primacy of what Freud termed the "System Perception-Consciousness," which dominates both everyday experience and the tradition of western thought as a whole. For what the child "discovers"-that is, interprets-as "castration" is neither nothing nor simply something, at least in the sense in which the child expects and desires it to be: what is 'discovered' is the absence of the maternal phallus, a kind of negative perception, whose object or refer-

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ent-perceptum-is ultimately nothing but a difference, although no simple one, since it does not refer to anything, least of all to itself, but instead refers itself indefinitely. To use a language made popular by Lacan: castration inscribes the phallus in a chain of signifiers, signifying the sexual difference, but also as the difference (and prohibition) which necessarily separates desire-in the Freudian theory at least-from its "object."21 Castration thus structures the future identity and experience of the subject, by confronting it with its unconscious desire as a violent and yet constitutive difference, preventing the subject from ever being fully present to itself, or fully self-conscious. This summary allusion to the enormously complex FreudianLacanian theory of castration will probably confuse as much as it helps. An adequate exposition of the theory would obviously require a protracted discussion that cannot be attempted here. Instead what I shall try to do is to describe some of the consequences of this theory for the problem of the uncanny, in order then to propose this interpretation of castration as a working hypothesis in the reading of certain texts. Whatever the purely theoretical merits or difficulties of the theory of castration, I hope thus to be able to demonstrate its hermeneutical relevance. The determination of castration not as an event or mere fantasy but as a structure bears implications both for the articulation of the subject and for its access to reality. These implications can perhaps best be demonstrated in regard to the relation of castration and ocular anxiety. Whereas Freud, as we have indicated, could only equate concomitance with causality, it is now possible to discern a more stringent necessity linking castration to the eyes, inasmuch as they play a decisive role in the peculiar non-discovery of castration. Not merely do the eyes present the subject with the shocking "evidence" of a negative perception-the absence of the maternal phallus-but they also have to bear the brunt of the new state of affairs, which confronts the subject with the fact that it will never again be able to believe its eyes, since what they have seen is neither simply visible nor wholly invisible. The particular relation of castration to the eyes is thus not primarily based on agenetic fact or experience, the actual moment of non-perception, however important this may be; instead what is involved here is a restructuring of experience, including the relation of perception, desire and consciousness, in which the narcissistic categories of identity and presence are riven by a

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difference they can no longer subdue or command. The peculiar evidence of castration is peculiar because it is both too evident and never evident enough. It robs the eyes of the desired phenomena and thus alters the structure of perception; yet even more important, it carries a threat of enormous violence directed at the body and its self-image, narcissistic basis of the subject, since the perception of the "incompleteness" of the maternal body includes and implies a threat to the child's notion of the totality of its own body. This explains why Freud, in his Introduction to Narcissism, could describe castration as "the most important ( ... ) disturbance of the original narcissism of the child," 22 since narcissism is both the precondition of and in part the reaction to the castration-complex. These remarks enable us to situate more precisely the relation between castration and narcissism in regard to the uncanny, a relation which Freud describes but does not analyze. In his essay, Freud noted the importance of recurrent, repressed or (half-) overcome narcissism in explaining the uncanny nature of the motifs of the double and of the omnipotence of thought; The Doppelganger for instance, Freud argued-following Rank's interpretation-has an ambivalent, narcissistic significance. On the one hand, it originally represented the attempt to protect the self against death by duplication (involving probably, although Freud does not discuss this, identification with the other). On the other hand, the double has come to be a portent of death once the second self is no longer protected by primary narcissism: duplication, the multiplication of selves, becomes the splitting of the self, no longer overcoming but rather confirming its nonidentity and mortality. Freud himself indicated, but did not develop, the relation between this kind of narcissistic redoubling and castration by comparing the double to the representation of castration in dreams through the multiplication of genital symbols. 23 Repetition, duplication, recurrence are inherently ambiguous, even ambivalent processes: they seem to confirm, even to increase the "original" identity, and yet even more they crease it as its problematical and paradoxical precondition. 24 Castration marks this crease as repetition, or more precisely, as the shift from a form of repetition based on identity-the repetition of narcissism, the "infantile sexual theory" that repeats the penis by universalizing it-to another repetition, the articulation of difference, which is equally a disarticulation, dis-locating and even dis-membering the subject-rather as

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the Sandman treats and mistreats poor Nathanael in E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale, which Freud invokes as that "happy first example" and to which I shall now turn, or return. The difficulties encountered by Freud in his efforts to look das Unheimliche straight in the eyes, as it were, to muster it, peeling and paring away its external layers to get at the "conceptual kernel" within and yet unable ever to eliminate the (growing) shadow of doubt-all this indicates that even if the uncanny is not conceived as an irreducibly subjective sentiment its objective structure cannot be determined solely in thematic terms, independent of their complexly structured context. If, as Freud's conclusion suggests, das Unheimliche has a privileged relation to literary "fiction," it is surely not to the mere contents represented "in" or "by" texts, but to their "formal," textual structure itself. The reading that I now propose to undertake, however naive and preliminary in character, seeks nevertheless to avoid the impasse of interpretations which-like Freud's Musterung-conceive and organize their own activity, consciously or unconsciously, in terms derived from a notion of perception ("vision") which in turn is based upon ontological presuppositions that the problematic of castration precisely and decisively dislocates: namely, upon the presence and identity of the "object" in question. If the reading that follows appears to do little more than simply recount Hoffmann's text and repeat Freud's analysis of it, it is in the hope of reaching a point where repetition allows not identity but significant differences to emerge, with important consequences for the problem of the uncanny, a problem which, we begin to suspect, involves repetition not merely as a thematic phenomenon but as a factor of interpretation itself. If, therefore, this first, relatively naive reading, remains largely at the level of thematic-semantic content, it, I hope, can be pursued to the point where the necessity of another reading becomes compelling. The student, Nathanael, writes in a letter of his meeting with the optician, Coppola (also known as Coppelius), who reminds him of a terrifYing figure of his childhood. Nathanael's father was visited regularly by a mysterious "Sandman." Little Nathanael's curiosity about the visitor grew-following a necessity which, although essential, cannot be interpreted here-into a compulsion "to explore the secret, to see the fabulous Sandman" (das Geheimnis zu erforschen, den fobelhaften Sandmann zu

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sehen). One evening as he hears the Sandman approaching, he hides himself in his father's study. The two men enter the room, the Sandman reveals himself to be the lawyer, Coppelius, an occasional guest at the family's dinner table, hated and feared by Nathanael and his sister, both of whom are often teased by the lawyer. Coppelius, with Nathanael's father as assistant, proceeds to carry out alchemical experiments upon the stove which stands in the room: the lawyer plucks what appear to Nathanael to be "brightly blinking masses out of the thick smoke" (hellblinkende Massen aus dem dicken Qualm), 25 and suddenly Nathanael is overcome by the sensation that "all about human faces were becoming visible, but without eyes-horrible deep black holes instead" (als wurden Menschen-

gesichter ringsumher sichtbar, aber ohne Augen-scheussliche, tiefe schwarze Hohlen statt ihrer). 26 Nathanael cries out in terror, is discovered by the Sandman, who immediately makes a grab for his eyes, and only the pleading of the father saves the sight of the son. Then Nathanael falls into a semi-trance during which it seems to him as if the Sandman were to dismantle his body and then reassemble it, before the boy loses consciousness completely. Thereafter Coppelius drops out of sight for a year until one evening, when his heavy step is heard on the threshold of Nathanael's house. The boy's father promises his terrified wife that this will be the last time that he will see the baleful visitor and then disappears with Coppelius into the study. A short time later "a tremendous explosion" is heard (ein emsetzlicher Schlag ... wie wenn ein Geschi.itz losgefeuert wi.irde) and Nathanael, having rushed into the study, finds his father lying dead in front of the steaming stove, his face scorched and horribly contorted ... mother next to him, unconscious" ( vor dem dampfenden Herde auf dem

Boden lag mein \tater tot mit schwarz verbranntem griisslich verzerrtem Gesicht ... die Mutter ohnmlichtig dane ben). 27 This letter, with which the story begins, is addressed by Nathanael to Lothar, the brother of his fiancee, Clara. Through a curious lapsus Nathanael addresses the letter to Clara, and is then angry that she answers him with rational arguments: "That uncanny night," she writes, is only "the fantom of our own ego" and "our own mirror-image" (jene "unheim-

liche Nacht" sei nur "das Phantom umeres eigenen Ichs" und ''unser eigenes Spiegelbild"). 28 She promises Nathanael to be his guardian angel and to

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stay with him in spirit. But instead of Clara, Nathanael is visited by Spalanzani, professor of physics and the father of Olympia, a girl with an "angelically beautiful face" (engelschonen Gesicht), yet with eyes that appear somewhat rigid (starr), as though lacking the power of sight. At the first glimpse of these remarkable eyes Nathanael is overcome by an "uncanny'' feeling. After the house in which he has resided burns down, Nathanael moves into a room directly opposite the house of Professor Spalanzani. Here he is visited one day by the uncanny Coppola, the optician, who seeks to sell the student his wares. Coppola spreads a vast number of spectacles and lenses upon the table and Nathanael is horrified, for it appears to him as if "a thousand eyes were staring and squinting spasmodically up at him" (tausendAugen blickten und zuckten krampjhaft und starrten auf). 29 He is about to throw Coppola out when the optician suddenly reaches into "the side-pocket of his jacket" (aus der Seitentasche des Rocks) and takes out a larger number of "large and smaller telescopes and magnifiers" (eine Menge grosser und kleiner Perspektive). 30 Nathanael peers through one of the telescopes and is astounded, for "never before had he looked through a lens which presented objects as purely, clearly and distinctly right before his eyes" (noch im Leben war ihm kein Glas vorgekommen, das die Gegenstdnde so rein, scharf und deutlich dicht vor die Augen ritckte). 31 An instant later he sees Olympia and it seems as if "the damp rays of the moon were rising in her eyes ... as though at long last the power of sight had been ignited in them" (als gingen in Olimpias Augen ftuchte Mondesstrahlen auf Es schien, als wenn nun erst die Sehkraft entziindet wurde)Y Nathanael is enraptured, captivated (wie ftstgezaubert); in a trance he pays Coppola three ducats for the lens, and as he hears the optician laugh as he departs, Nathanael wonders absently whether "I did not pay him too much for the little telescope, much too much" (wei£ ich ihm das kleine Perspektive gewiss viel zu teuer bezahlt habe-zu teuer bezahlt). 33 From this moment on, Nathanael's love for Olympia knows no bounds. One evening he is on his way to present her with a ring that he had been given by his mother, when he hears a strange commotion and the sound of raised voices corning from Olympia's room. He bursts in and sees Coppola and Spalanzani, "struggling in rage for the possession" of a feminine figure (streitend in vollem Wut um den Besitz), 34 a figure which turns out to be Olympia, bur also something less than feminine, since it reveals itself

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to be a life-size robot. Nathanael sees Coppola disappear with Olympia in his arms, while Spalanzani hurls her eyes at the horrified student, with the cry, "the eyes stolen from you ... there are the eyes!" (die Augen dir gestohlen ... da hast du die Augen/) 35 Nathanael goes mad, tries to strangle the professor, is overpowered and taken off to the madhouse; he awakes, much later, back home with Clara at his bedside. Coppola has disappeared. Nathanael and Clara seem now to have finally found happiness together, and prepare for their marriage. One day they take a walk through the town, and Clara proposes that they climb the tall tower of the town hall for a look at the distant mountains. Instead, however, she observes a "strange small grey bush, which seems to be coming directly towards us" (a sonderbaren kleinen grauen Busch, der ordentlich auf uns los zu schreiten scheint). 36 Nathanael reaches mechanically into his side-pocket, takes out "Coppola's glass," looks sideways and sees "Clara ... in front of the lens!" He is immediately overwhelmed by a fit of madness, tries to throw Clara off the tower, and she is saved only at the last moment by her brother, who has rushed to her aid. Then Nathanael sees Coppelius down below, the lawyer towering above the others, "like a giant" (unter ihnen ragte riesengross der Advokat Coppelius hervor). 37 Nathanael springs to his death. With a laconic description of the happiness that Clara finally found with another, and which she could never have had with Nathanael, the story ends. After this summary we can see that Freud's emphasis on the decisive importance of the eyes and of castration in producing the uncanniness of the story is wholly justified. The compulsion to see the feared secret, Nathanael's dread lest he himself be seen, with the consequence of losing his eyes, the dismantling of his body by the Sandman, the substitution or supplementation of the eyes by optical instruments, Olympia's eyes; finally the role of the parents, the spectacle of the father, lying dead with contorted features, the mother unconscious next to him, following the "entzetzliche(m) Schlag"-all this points towards castration or sets the stage on which its scenario is played out: that of the Urszene, the "primal scene." But, as we have remarked, in his essay on the Unheimliche Freud treats castration ultimately as though it were simply a thematic-material event, as if it were essentially a perceived reality, the content of a representation, a Vorstellungsinhalt, which were to succumb to repression and then

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return in identical form. I have attempted to indicate how a more structural theory of castration would be distinguished from this thematic notion: how castration can and ought to be treated not as one phenomenon among others, but rather as the crisis ofphenomenality, as such, since it marks a new differential and symbolic contextuality which can no longer be simply perceived, but rather read and interpreted To identify castration with any substantial, determinate representation, scene or situation is to ignore or reduce its dynamic, which inscribes all phenomena in a symbolic context. Yet this reduction is what Freud tends towards when he treats castration as possessing a fixed identity, as a substantial, visible theme. I will now try to demonstrate how this reduction determines his reading of "The Sandman" in particular and his theory of the uncanny in general. In a footnote to his article on das Unheimliche, Freud writes of "the original arrangement" (die ursprilngliche Anordnung) of Hoffmann's text, which, however distorted it has been by the author's imagination (Phantasie), can nonetheless be essentially "reconstructed" (wiederhergestelit). 38 Freud's entire interpretative approach to the text is determined by the possibility of such a reconstruction; that is, by the postulated existence of an original Urtext which itself is fully free of all distortion and repetition, and which antedates the fantasy-work of the writer. I shall only dwell on a single aspect of Freud's attempt at reconstructing this Urtext, but it seems to me to have exemplary status (for, in a certain sense, it involves the status of the example, of the Muster itself). Behind the double-figure of the Sandman as Coppelius and Coppola, Freud sees a single, although certainly ambivalent figure: the loved, hated and feared father of the Oedipus complex. By means of this figure, castration can be fixed and made visible, representable: as long, that is, as the uncanny effect is (in Freud's words), "bound directly to the figure of the Sandman" (direkt an der Gestalt des Sandmannes . .. haftet). 39 All other repetitions, doublings, splittings etc. can accordingly be reduced ultimately to the identical meaning of this single figure. "The conclusion of the story," writes Freud, "makes it quite clear that Coppola the optician really is the lawyer, Coppelius, and thus also the Sandman (Der Schluss der Erziihlung macht esja klar, dass der Optiker Coppola wirklich der Advokat Coppelius und also auch der Sandmann ist). 40 But is the conclusion of the story really all that clear? to

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And what is the status of reality ("really is") in a text of fiction, where reality-testing and "material" reality are not directly applicable, as Freud himself admits? In any case, let us read Freud's account of the conclusion, and then Hoffmann's text itself. First Freud: On the girl's suggestion they mount the tower, while her brother, who was accompanying them, remained below. Up above, Clara's attention is drawn to a curious object coming along the street. Nathanael looks at the same thing through Coppola's spyglass, which he finds in his pocket, is seized by a new fit of madness ... below, among the crowd which has begun to gather, the figure of Coppelius, who has just arrived, towers above the others. W't- may suppose that it was his approach, seen through the telescope, that threw Nathanael into madness.

(Das Madchen schliigt ihrem Brautigam vor, auf dem Turm zu steigen, warhend der das Paar begleitende Bruder der Braut unten verbleibt. Oben zieht eine merkwiirdige Erscheinung von etwas, was sich aufder Strasse heranbewegt, die Aufmerksamkeit Claras aufsich. Nathanael betrachtetdasselbe Ding durch Coppolas Perspektiv, das er in seiner Tasche jindet, wird neuerlich vom Wahnsinn ergrijfen . .. Unter den Menschen, die sich unten ansammeln, ragt der Advokat Coppelius hervor, der plotzlich wieder erschienen ist. Wir di.irfen annehmen, dass es der Anblick seiner Annaherung war, der den Wahnsinn bei Nathanael zum Ausbruch brachte.) 41

Before we discuss the pros and cons of this supposition (Annahme), let us first reread Hoffmann's text: Look at that strange small grey bush which seems to be coming right at us, said Clara. Nathanael reached mechanically in his side-pocket; he found Coppola's spyglass, he peered sideways-Clara stood in front of the lens-Suddenly his pulse began to beat spasmodically-white as death he stared at Clara, but soon his eyes began to roll in their orbits and sparks showered from them ....

(Sieh doch den sonderbaren kleinen grauen Busch, der ordentlich aufuns los zu schreiten scheint, "[rug Clara. Nathanael fasste mechanisch nach der Seitentasche; er fond Coppolas Perspektiv, er schaute seitwarts-Clara stand vor dem Glase !-Da zuckte es krampjhaft in seinen Pulsen und Adern-totenbleich starrte er Clara an, aber bald gliihten und spriihten Feuerstrome durch die rollenden Augen. ... )42

Freud, it seems, has eyes only for the Sandman: fascinated, he stares at him and simply refuses to see Clara. Not so poor Nathanael: he knows

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where danger lurks and there is no mistaking what he is compelled to see: poison and antidote at once, Clara stood in front of the lens, white as death he stared at Clara ... and it is Clara whom he then seeks to hurl from the tower, before he himself leaps. In such details, which Freud either ignores or repeats as mechanically as Nathanael reaches-not into his pocket (Freud), but into his side-pocket (Hoffmann), the text of the Sand Man displays more of the nature of castration than Freud himself is prepared to acknowledge, at least in his essay on das Unheimliche. For it is not the visible figure of the castrating father that comprises the remarkable essence or non-essence of castration, but rather the glimpse of that almost-but-not-quite-nothing, a glance which is therefore itself almost blind, but not quite, for it "sees" the difference that reveals and conceals itself in the same movement. It is therefore of particular significance that the decisive movement goes in an oblique direction, sideways, mechanically reaching into a side-pocket. For what is designated by the term "castration" is precisely the impossibility of seeing directly, right on or straight ahead. Castration can never be looked at, en face, for it is always off to the side, off-side, like the uncanny itself. This is why Coppola, and Nathanael, who repeats him mechanically, automatically, both reach into their side-pockets to grasp the spyglass, and it is also why Nathanael must look sideways to see what he can see. And what he sees is not, as Freud supposes, "the same thing" (dasselbe Ding) that Clara has seen, for everything we have learned about castration makes this supposition untenable: according to the law of castration no thing is ever the same but only the repetition of another, itself a repetition. That is one reason why Nathanael's movement is described as "mechanical," since it repeats unconsciously Coppola's gesture, but not only that. This is also the reason why the spyglass, which he mechanically takes from his side-pocket, is described as Coppola's glass, a fact which Freud repeats with that now familiar mechanical gesture, finding apparently nothing remarkable about the possessor of a glass which Nathanael, according to his own testimonyitself repeated ("zu teuer ... ")-bought too dearly from the optician. Yet the glass remains Coppola's property, in the sense in which the castration complex always designates all property as belonging to another, despite or because of the paradox that one never entirely repays one's debt. But even had Nathanael looked at the strange thing in the manner in

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which Freud describes, he would not have seen the Sandman, at least not as that "same thing" or identical figure, which Freud is so intent upon (us) seeing. For here again Freud omits a small but significant difference: what appears in Hoffmann's text is a "strange small grey bush" (incidentally, not "like," but metaphorically identical). Yet this small grey bush is itself the repetition and displacement of the horrible face, indeed the eyes, of Coppelius, who, at the beginning of the story, is described as having "grey bushy eyebrows, under which a pair of green eat's eyes sparkled" (bushigten grauen Augenbrauen, unter denen ein Paar grunliche Katzenaugen stechend hervorfonkeln). 43 But does this repetition prove that Coppola is "really" Coppelius, that the two figures are ultimately identical? Or does it not indicate that the decisive "reality'' here resides in the intratextual, metonymic displacement, that movement of difference and desire which can never be entirely grasped or simply seen. Perhaps what is most significant in the double-name, Coppelius/Coppola is not the double-meaning that Freud, and others before him remarked: not simply the meanings of coppo: eye-socket, and coppella: melting-pot, but a third meaning, which does not designate an entity so much as a (linguistic) function: the copula (German: Kopula), which, like the twin-figure of the Sandman, reveals a third dimension, a remainder which is inextricably tied up with language, just as Nathanael's curiosity originally aims at discovering whether the "Sandman" is simply a turn of phrase or something more real than a dormant, transparent figure of speech. 44 The copula is perhaps this remaining third, which, like the Sandman, binds without resolving into identity, since its combination separates and splits rather than unifying. Much more could and should be said about Hoffmann's text and its relation to Freud's. Yet I think we have reached a point where at least the lines of further inquiry can be delineated: above all, the role of the narrator and the narrative structure, totally neglected by Freud, must be interrogated, since this provides the context for that movement of repetition and splitting which is constitutive for the uncanny and for the crisis of perception and of corporal unity that are inseparable from it. This crisis involves the crisis of the traditional, representational narrative and this marks perhaps the specific frontier of the Unheimliche. Yet instead of pursuing this problem further in Hoffmann's story, I shall try to develop it by

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reading another text in which the narrator functions as participant and where his status is to an extent thematic: the text is by Villiers de !'IsleAdam and is entitled-not without reference to Hoffmann's Sandmann-

Claire Lenoir. The relations between Hoffmann and Villiers are important and various: the decisive points of contact, however, result from certain common concerns and problems that underlay their respective works. An indication that these problems may not be very distant from those we have been examining is the fact-itself surely no mere coincidence-that upon one of the rare occasions where Villiers cites Hoffmann explicitly, in L'Eve foture (as motto for chapter 2, "Phonograph's Papa"), it is the scene in which Nathanael sees the Sandman for the first time: "C'est lui! ... Ah! dis-je en ouvrant de grands yeux dans l' obscurite: c' est !'Homme au sable! . .. "45 Nevertheless, the recurrence of common motifs does not signifY a simple repetition or "influence," and although Claire Lenoir almost certainly alludes to Clara, and despite the fact that the narrator and hero of the novella is also a student of the great professor Spallanzani, it is nonetheless the differences between the two texts which strike the reader, at least at first. Above all and of more than just formal significance, is the reunion of narrator and narrated which Villiers achieves in the figure of Tribulat Bonhomet, professor of physiology and honorary member of various academies, "arriere-pensee de son temps" as he is described, synthesis of M. Prudhomme and Haubert's Homais, and-fictive author, or more exactly, stenographer of the minutes of the case of the most mysterious Mme. Claire Lenoir, a case which imperceptibly but irresistibly becomes his own. Let us begin again by recounting the story, which itself commences with a description of Tribulat, of his physiognomy which, he avers, is no less "la physionomie de mon siecle, dont j' ai lieu de me croire 1'ARCHETYPE,"46 and which is dominated by an over-dimensional nose, "a Ia fois envahisseur et vaporisateur." This feature is of great importance, since a nose is not just a nose, no mere physical organ: "le Nez, c' est I' expression des facultes du raisonnement chez l'homme; c'est l'organe qui precede, qui eclaire, qui annonce, qui sent et indique. Le nez visible correspond au nez impalpable, que tout homme porte en soi en venant au monde." 47

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This correspondence between visible and invisible, palpable and impalpable will play no small role in the story to come. Tribulat's life is dominated by two great passions: the first consists in the observation of "les infiniments petits, les Infusoires, comme les a nommes Spallanzani, mon maitre bien-aime." 48 This passion has devoured his entire inheritance, which was of no inconsiderable size, in the acquisition of the most advanced lenses and magnifiers existing, "qui mettent a nu les arcanes d'un monde momentanement invisible." If Nathanael's voyeurism was still private, individual and familial in nature, with Tribulat Bonhomet this passion has been socialized, the allegory of the ambitious petit bourgeois and of his ideology, scientific positivism. But this allegory is no simple illustration of an idea and Tribulat is not to be confounded with a simple-minded philistine or vulgar positivist, for he is, as he insists, ultimately a visionary: Ce qu'il est important de constater, c' est que I' esprit d' analyse, de grossissement, d' examen minutieux est tellement 1' essence de rna nature, que toute Ia joie de vivre est confinee pour moi dans Ia classification precise des plus chetifs tenebrions, dans Ia vue des enchevetrements bizarres, pareils a une ecriture tres ancienne, que presentent les nerfs de l'insecte, dans le phenomene du raccourci des horizons, qui demeurent immenses selon les proportions de Ia retine ou ils sereflerent! ... La realite devient alors visionnaire-er je sens que, le microscope a Ia main, j' entre de plain-pied dans le do maine des Reves! 49

But Tribulat does not only scrutinize, enlarge, observe, and above all: dream; he possesses, or more exactly, is possessed by a second passion, one under which he truly suffers and which is difficult to describe. It appears to be an inherited phobia, "une AFFRE" as he writes, which abruptly and without warning overwhelms him, apparently without reason. During the course of his adventure this anxiety occurs in connection with wind, which he cannot tolerate, and with the sight of empty, open and deserted spaces. Concerning the relation of these two great passions, Tribulat is not very communicative, and yet we can perhaps see a hint in his horror of being caught observing the protozoa, which he guards like a jealous lover: "Mais je suis jaloux de mes decouvertes et je me cache profondement de tout cela ... Lorsqu'on me questionne ace sujet, JE FAIS LA BETE." 50 In order to effectively conceal his true interests from the prying world at large, and to divert the potentially curious, Tribulat has devised

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a brilliant manoeuvre: he fabricates marriages. While in reality only concerned with his one-celled infusoires, he creates single-cells where there were previously rwo: he plays marriage-broker. And thus we come to the story of the married couple, the Lenoirs, whom Tribulat brought together in matrimony, and solely by virtue of a name. For the young woman, Claire, was born a Lenoir, and thus it occurred to Tribulat that it would be only logical to bring her together with his good friend, Dr. Cesaire Lenoir. The doctor is delighted with this proposal, since Claire, in addition to being beautiful is also intelligent, and indeed, has only one defect: a weakness of the eyes, with the possibility of early blindness. Claire accepts, the bond is sealed and for Tribulat apparently the case is closed. Returning from a world voyage, Tribulat meets a young English seacaptain, Sir Henry Clifton, a melancholy man, who tells him the sad tale of his unhappy love for a married woman, who, although unnamed, reminds Tribulat strangely of Claire Lenoir. By coincidence Tribulat is about to visit the Lenoirs; shortly after disembarking, he reads a newspaper article, which reports of a remarkable discovery of the Academy of Sciences in Paris: it appears that all animals destined for human consumption display the curious characteristic of preserving the last image seen by them before being slaughtered, like a photograph within their eyes, until decomposition sets in. Tribulat is charmed by this discovery and by the scientific progress to which it testifies. Shortly thereafter he sees Claire Lenoir for the first time after many years and is deeply disturbed by her appearance, more exactly, by the gigantic spectacles which she now wears in order to protect her eyes, but also the eyes of those who behold her; for as Tribulat himself experiences, as he peeks behind her glasses at her eyes, "ils faisaient mal." 51 Small wonder, for Claire's eyes are not only dull and glassy, her glance is not only hard and incisive as stone, but the very color of her eyes, aquamarine, reminds Tribulat of those abhorrent winds of the Midi, enough to send a shudder through him. The following dinner is filled with protracted discussions, which are too long and too tedious to summarize here, and yet they are not wholly lacking in interest. Dr. Cesaire Lenoir reveals himself to be a "hegelien enrage," yet his idealism is of a very materialist sort, for the omnipotence of the Idea manifests itself no less in magnetism, telepathy and life-after-

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death than in reason and scientific progress. Yet perhaps the most symptomatic expression of his belief in "Ia realite presque ponderable de l'Idee" is the following story that Dr. Lenoire cites from the medical annals: Une femme, dont le mari fut tue a coups de couteau, mit au monde cinq mois apres, une fille qui, asept am, tom bait dans des acces d'hallucination. Et I' enfant s'ecriait alors:-"Sauvez-moi! voici des hommes armes de couteaux qui vont me tuer!"-Cette petite fille mourut pendant l'un de ces acces, et !'on trouva sur son corps des marques noiratres, pareilles a du sang meurtri, et qui correspondaient, sur le coeur, malgre les dissemblances sexuelles, aux blessures que son pere avait rec;:ues sept ans auparavant, pendant qu'elle etait encore en dec;:a des mortels.5 2 That this bloodthirsty case involves more than just the realite presque ponderable de l'Idee requires little emphasis: what I would like to remark, in passing, are just those "marques noiratres" which correspond to the fatal wounds of the father, "malgre les dissemblances sexuelles." Dr. Lenoir's Idea becomes ponderous and palpable by effacing certain differences between father and daughter, male and female, but this incarnation of the spirit produces not transparency, but "marques noiratres." We will return to this point. This somber tale is in no way untypical of the hegelien enrage, and Tribulat even sees in him something of a "vampire velu." 53 But Dr. Lenoir seems no less burdened by such thoughts, which, as he incisively puts it, suggest the disturbing possibility that the fragility of the body or of matter in general may not necessarily work out to the advantage or greater glory of the spirit, the idea or reason itself. At dessert the truth finally emerges: "Ce n' est pas un homme qui habite dans la forme humaine," confesses Dr. Lenoir, but rather "des betes invisible, transfigurees par leur travestissement, si vous voulez ... mais ... des BETES REELLEs!" 54 Now as little original as this insight may be, in such general form, it begins to become both more specific and more concrete, as Dr. Lenoir passes to his own particular case. For the animal that resides within his body is not simply carnivorous, but "un cannibale." 55 Whether or not this invisible animal reminds Tribulat of his own barely visible infosoires is not recorded. What is, is that from this moment on the situation in the Lenoir house becomes increasingly intolerable to him and that he therefore decides to take radical measures in order to bring about a decisive change, for better or worse. Dr. Lenoir is a pas-

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sionate and excessive devotee of snuff and his health suffers from this obsession; it is evident that for Tribulat, both as a doctor and chemist, and as a man fully conscious of the importance of the nose, this situation is an ineluctable challenge. He intervenes by adding a mixture of the most deadly pulverized plants to the snuffbox of Dr. Cesaire Lenoir, whose usual mixture is now enriched by everything from powdered shoe-soles to silver nitrate. Finally, Dr. Lenoir succumbs to an attack of apoplexy: his last words show him preoccupied with the problem of adultery. A few days thereafter, following various remarkable experiences which I am forced to omit-in order not to inflate this resume excessively-Tribulat departs, leaving behind the widowed Claire Lenoir. A year later as he is travelling through the French Alps, Tribulat receives a letter which reports the sad end of Sir Henry Clifton. Sir Henry was charged with leading a voyage of scientific exploration in a region of Oceania otherwise shunned by all, because of its perilous storms and dangerous islands, covered with quicksand. As Sir Henry had just disembarked upon one of these islands and was moving slowly inland in order to explore the immediate vicinity, a gigantic black figure suddenly emerged from behind a rock and beheaded Sir Henry before he could defend himself. Pursued by the horrified party, the savage fled along the beach, and then slowly sank into the quicksand. Yet before he finally disappeared entirely, he held up the head of Sir Henry Clifton as though in triumph. It is to be assumed-concludes Tribulat's correspondent-that the savage was a member of the tribe of Ottysors, the only humans who dare to inhabit this area and who live there as pirates. They are known as "guetteurs de naufrages," which suggests that here the exploring captain was met by another sort of searcher. In any event, Hoffmann's Sandman has here become distinctly less human: a black savage, whose exact status-living or dead-cannot be determined; and even less human, quick-sand This development from Sandman to quick-sand reveals its significance only now, at the denouement of the novella; this final scene, therefore, we will not simply recount but try to read. The reader will hardly be surprised that Tribulat now hears a voice calling him by name from the adjoining room, and that he then discovers that the voice belongs to Claire Lenoir. In the one year since they last

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met, Claire has aged cruelly and grown mortally ill. She is wearing mourning clothes, sitting upright in her bed, a black figure in the middle of the freshly painted silver-white room, the walls of which serve as reflectors. On rhe one hand these walls seem to intensifY the brightness, thus aiding Claire's failing sight; on the other hand, she must protect her eyes from the light by means of giant blue spectacles. Claire tells Tribulat that her husband lived on after his death and confirmed his suspicions of her adultery with Sir Henry Clifton, and that Dr. Lenoir will soon return to take his wife with him, "par les yeux." Claire recounts further a strange dream she has had repeatedly, in which her deceased husband appears, but in the form of a dark creature like those which inhabit Oceania; in this dream she sees this figure hiding behind a large rock, or pacing up and down the beach, as though waiting for something or someone. From this point on, the reader is no longer in doubt as to what must come, no more than is Tribulat, who, however, refuses to acknowledge the obvious. And yet, despite the fact that the suspense of the story ends at this moment, the uncanny begins here: for the Unheimliche, like castration itself, is less involved with a what than a how, with the mechanisms of repetition, recurrence and return, and here: with reflection. Suddenly Claire tears off her glasses and crushes them, crying that she no longer has need of them. Then, with growing horror, she stares fixedly at the silver-white walls. Her aqua-marine eyes merge with another ocean and her stonelike glance is mirrored in the rock behind which the Ottysor hides, holding a stone knife, a black figure on an island beach and a black figure upright in bed. At precisely this instant the national holiday celebration outside begins, and as the rockets rise into the sky, Claire sees and dies. At this moment Tribulat, mute witness, feels himself overcome by an irresistible and strange impulse: he feels his head forced downwards violently and hears a voice commanding him: "regarde." He is compelled to stare directly into the eyes of the woman, who herself has just stared herself to death. At first he sees only the familiar glassiness and minute points in the pupils. Then he remembers that he has brought his ophthalmoscope with him, takes it out of his bag and is about to examine the dead woman's eyes with it, when he remembers that this is impractical if not impossible. For if he looks directly into those eyes, the image will be inverted. What is to be done? His first inspiration is rejected as violating

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all decency: he abandons the possibility of turning the corpse upside down and hanging it up by its feet on a hook in the wall. His second idea is more feasible and will no longer be entirely foreign to us, if we have not entirely frgotten Hoffmann's text: he decides to lay the body sideways on the bed, "en travers," so that the head will hang down over the bedside, "suspendue au-dessus du plancher." 56 Now he can look in comfort at the upside-down head, hanging just above the floor, and get a rightside-up image. And "decency" is preserved: Tribulat is not endangered by seeing too much. With the jet of light of his opthalmoscope-its pinceau du lumiere-he begins to penetrate into the dead eyes of Claire Lenoir, searching and scanning: "Nul douce, a present, que-s'il y avait quelque chose en leurs prunellescela m' appanlt dans le sens normal. " 57 Yet what he sees is not quite dans le sens normal and also more than he reckons for, although we have already "seen" this scene at least two times: bur the hero of this story is not called Tri-bulat for nothing (any more than any of the other names are simply "proper"), for his trial and tribulation consists also in the fact that he can only recognize his destiny the third time he meets it, in the photographic mirror-image conserved in the dead eyes of Claire Lenoir. Tribulat's hereditary horror vacui, his voyeurism and compulsion to know all come into their own, mirrored in the gaping mouth of Dr. Lenoir and in the severed-cleft?-head of Sir Henry Clifton, himself the victim of a "caesarian" section. But Tribulat has already been informed about this, once by Claire, and before by the letter: what is uncanny is rather the mortal repetition and reflection in the hermetically sealed silver-white hotel room, a movement which fuses and confuses the difference between eyes and image, image and object, life and death, man and woman, black and white, black and black, name and name. Within the glaring chamber a fatal reflection which seems unending drives Tribulat mad, while outside the city celebrates: at the very moment that Tribular makes his final discovery, "regarder dans l'Infini par le trou de la serrure," the fete reaches its culmination: "Et, me faisant tressaillir, voici qu' empourprant les vitres, le bouquet du feu d' artifice de la Fete nationale eclata, dans l eloignement, sur Ia ville exultante, aux acclamations d'une multitude bisexuelle" (my emphasis). 58 The sexual dissemblances of father and daughter is repeated here, not exactly bur rather a travers, with a small sidestep, the ambivalent echo of the discovery within.

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Instead of pursuing my reading of a text whose main lines have hopefully begun to emerge, I shall instead try to draw some preliminary conclusions to these introductory remarks. What should have remained concealed and what has nonetheless, in a certain manner, emerged, engenders the uncanny because its very appearance eludes perception, its being is not to be had, because it side-steps and side-tracks-and not just Freud-by repeating, doubling, splitting and reflecting. The uncanny is thus bound up with a crisis of perception and of phenomenality, but concomitantly with a mortal danger to the subject, to the "integrity'' of its body and thus to its very identity, which-if we accept the psychoanalytic theory of narcissism-is based upon this body-image as its model. The uncanny is thus bound up with subjective emotions, and upon an affective scale it can even be situated with some precision: it is not simply a form of anxiety, but is located between dread, terror and panic on the one side, and uneasiness and anticipation on the other. Yet the distinctive character of the uncanny requires a structural determination that exceeds the realms of purely subjective affect. This structure involves the recurrence and repetition of castration, which however is itself, as I have tried to indicate, a form of repetition and not to be confused with a unique, visible event. On the other hand, castration is not a pure form either, and indeed bound to certain determinate events, situations, constellations: the primal scene, the symbolism of the female body, but also to laws of articulation in which repetition consists not in the re-presentation of the identical but rather in the indefinite, incessant and often violent displacement of marks and traces never entirely reducible to a signified significance: a process of reference without ultimate or fundamental referent. Hence, castration "itself"-a necessary fiction-can only be glimpsed obliquely, sideways, seitwarts, en travers: never en face. It cannot be mustered. This indicates why the question of the "reality" or irreality (= phantasy) of the Unheimliche is irrelevant, in opposition to the fantastic, which, as Todorov has recently argued, following a venerable tradition, reposes precisely upon this distinction and the intellectual uncertainty which chis ambiguity engenders. Constitutive for the uncanny is not the alternative: reality-imaginary, for this alternative presupposes the identity and the meaning of whatever it thus questions, and seeks only to fix its ontological status. Uncanny is a certain indecidability which affects

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and infects representations, motifs, themes and situations, which, like the allegories described by Walter Benjamin, always mean something other than what they are and in a manner which draws their own being and substance into the vortex of signification. 59 But the uncanny is not merely identical with this indecidability: it involves and implies a second moment or movement, namely the defence against this crisis of perception and phenomenality, a defence which is ambivalent and which expresses itself in the compulsive curiosity, the Wissgier, the craving to penetrate the flimsy appearances to the essence beneath-and below!-the desire to uncover the facade and to discover what lurks behind, "The Thing on the Doorstep" or "The Haunter of the Dark" (to cite the titles of two of Lovecraft's stories): or, apparently far less menacing, a simple woman, Clara. This desire to penetrate, discover and ultimately to conserve the integrity of perception: perceiver and perceived, the wholeness of the body, the power of vision-all this implies a denial (Verneinung is the Freudian term) of that almost-nothing which can hardly be seen, a denial that in turn involves a certain structure of narration, in which this denial repeats and articulates itself The problem of the narrative context of the uncanny thus emerges as crucial for further investigation. A second problematic, which was at least latently at work in the juxtaposition of Hoffmann and Villiers, is the question of the historical status of the Unheimliche, its relation to socially determined objective structures which themselves involve something like that crisis of perception and representation active in the uncanny. Without being able to do more than indicate a possible line of research here, I would like to call attention to Marx's description of the circulation and production of commodities, which themselves appear as "sensuous-supersensuous entities," as "phantasmagorias," which represent both the objectified labor power of society and an ambivalent, antagonistic social relationship. This antagonism can be articulated in various ways: the commodity is both necessary to thereproduction of the producers (under a particular social system: capitalism), and at the same time absorbs and consumes their physical energies, and thus embodies a permanent threat to their physical existence. And capital is also described by Marx in terms of the return of "dead labor" of the past, which "lives like a vampire sucking up living labor, and which

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thrives all the more, the more it devours" (verstorbene Arbeit, die sich nur vampyrmiissig belebt durch Einsaugung lebendiger Arbeit, und umsomehr lebt, je mehr sie davon einsaugt). 60 Whatever the methodological difficulties posed by such questions, it would be precipitate to ontologize "castration'' before having clarified its relation to such historical factors. Their influence on the uncanny is scarcely to be ignored and they doubtless have contributed to the fact that this "off-side" region has lost little of its actuality since the days of Hoffmann, Villiers, and Freud. But that is a long story which we have only begun to recount.

REFERENCE MATTER

Notes

PREFACE 1. M. Foucault, "What is an Author?" reprinted in: Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY, 1980, pp. 133-35.

2. These remarks are intended less as a critique of the Standard Edition, whose merits in introducing Freud to the English-speaking world can hardly be questioned, than as an indication of the price paid in rendering Freud clear and intelligible. As Franc;:ois Roustang observes, "Freud's writing loses all of its vigor and even its meaning in the majority of French translations, and even in the English translation of-the Standard Edition, because the translators are interested only in rendering the overall meaning of a phrase defined by its syntax, and not at all concerned with the placement of words and with their repetitions. If parataxis must be respected in Freud's text it is because his writing is the very machine it constructs, because this machine ... is his discourse and because therefore its parts cannot be displaced without rendering its functioning impossible." ("Du style de Freud," in: F. Roustang, ... Ellene le lliche plus, Paris, 1980, p. 35). To which I would add only that since the "machine" functions precisely by displacing its parts, its operation cannot simply be respected either, except perhaps by continuing, and reflecting on, the process of displacement itself. For a critical discussion of the Standard Edition's translations, see Bruno Bettelheim's 1982 article in The New Yorker, "Freud and the Soul," I March 1982, pp. 52-93. UNCANNY THINKING 1. I. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, translated by F. Max Muller (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), p. xxxviii n. 2. S. Freud and J. Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (New York: Basic Books), p. n7n.; translation modified. 3· Ibid., p. 125. See my discussion of this text in Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 73-84. 4· Freud will later describe rhis type of action as "isolation," in which the ob-

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Notes to Pages 5-9

jeer is not so much repressed as "isolated" from its consequences, and thus rendered harmless. See infra, p. 95f. 5· See infra, p. 184ff. 6. The superego addresses the ego through the call of conscience, placing the latter in the position of a receiver of messages rather than an emitter. For Heidegger as well, it is through the silent "call" of conscience that being-there is recalled to its uncanny origins. See Being and Time, §57. 7· "Dreams are completely egotistical. Whenever my own ego does not appear in the content of the dream, but only some extraneous person, I may safely assume that my own ego lies concealed, by identification, behind this other person. [ ... ] Thus my ego may be represented in a dream several times over. [ ... ] The fact that the dreamer's own ego appears several times, or in several forms, in a dream is at bottom no more remarkable than that the ego should be contained in a conscious thought several times or in different places or connections~e.g. in the sentence, 'when I think what a healthy child I was."' Freud, The Interpretation ofDreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 358. Although Freud appears to be trying to emphasize the normal, everyday nature of the dream's "egotism," the implication of what he is describing works the other way: to render the everyday sense of the ego's unity problematic. For it is precisely the sentence he cites to confirm the familiarity of the representation of the I in dreams that becomes highly problematic when it is asserted by the dreamer. As Lacan would say, the "I" that asserts and is asserted, the subject of the enonce, is not equivalent to the speaking subject of the enonciation. 8. E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Der Sandmann," Fantasie und Nachtstiicke (Munich: Winkler-Verlag, 1960), p. 331 (my translation). 9· This is of course one of the topoi of the horror story or (more recently) film: the locus amoenus of the private, domestic household reveals itself to be the site of all dangers. In Rosemary's Baby, for instance, Rosemary seeks to escape from the power of the devil while carrying his child about in her womb; this is a model of the genre in which the very gesture of escape reproduces the menace from which it seeks to flee. All of the Freudian defense mechanisms of the egorepression, disavowal, denial, isolation, etc.-reproduce this pattern. The fear that that which should be most "proper" and appropriate, the individual body, is in fact the site of all possible betrayals, is already evident in Descartes First Meditation: "Suppose that we are sleeping and that all these details, i.e. that we open our eyes, that we move our head, that we extend our hand and similar things are only false illusions; and think that perhaps neither our hands, nor our entire body are such as we see them." First Meditation, Descartes: Oeuvres et Lettres, texts presented by Andre Bridoux (Paris: Editions de Ia Pleiade, 1958), p. 269 (my translation).

Notes to Pages n-22

241

10. "The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has beenotherwise it could not be repeated-but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new." S. Kierkegaard, "Constantine Constantius," in Repetition (Gjentagelse), translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna N. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 149. II. I have discussed some of the implications of this use of the German adverb "da," which is "normally" considered to refer to a place, but which in narrative contexts is often used to mark a temporal turning point. See Samuel Weber, "Einmal ist Keinmal: Das Wiederholbare und das Singulare," in Gerhard Neumann, ed., Poststrukturalismus. DFG-Symposion I995 (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1997), pp. 434-48. In this text, I comment on Nietzsche's use of the "da" in a well-known passage from Zarathustra relating to the Eternal Return. 12. I thank Jennifer Stone for pointing out what should have been obvious, but wasn't (to me): the wall closet, that Nathanael expects to be the "same" as the one in which he is hiding-to wit, a closet hung with his father's clothes-turm out to be a closet of a very different genre, and gender: that "dark hole" in which an "oven" is hidden, an oven that will ultimately bring death and destruction to both Nathanael's father and to himself. That "hearth" (Herd signifies both hearth and oven), out of which sparks fly and then eyes detached from their sockets, is, qua "socket" and crevice, a figuration of femininity from the perspective of the narcissistic male ego, the model spectator-observer. What is even "worse" than this monstrous "hole" (and the "hearth" it contains and conceals) is that enigmatic clarity and transparence that display nothing, in the sense of revealing no figure, no Gestalt, but manifest rather the strange and uncanny state in which a certain diaphanousness converges with a certain opacity: "Clara stood before the glass!" We will return to this in a moment. When Nathanael thus takes the plunge, it is also, and perhaps above all, the "birth" not of "tragedy," but of something more akin to that "farce" discussed in part one of Kierkegaard's Repetition. 13. See "The Sideshow," infra. 14. I have discussed some of these in my essay "Television: Set and Screen," in Mass Mediauras (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 108-28. 15. See V. Volosinov, Marxismus und Sprachphilosophie, translated into German by Renate Horlemann (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1975), p. 186ff. 16. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 145· 17· All English quotations from this text are my translations. The page references in parentheses in the body of the text refer to the page numbers of the German and English editions respectively, so that readers can compare my translations to the published ones. 18. "Wortlichkeit der Syntax"-"verbatim syntax"-was Walter Benjamin's

242

Notes to Pages 24-38

supreme criterion for translation. See my discussion of this as translatability in Benjamin's -abilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). A German version of this text has been published as: "Un-Obersetzbarkeit," in: Die Sprache der Anderen, edited by Anselm Haverkamp (FrankfUrt am Main: ZeitSchriften: Fischer, 1997), pp. 121-46. 19. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 69-70. 20. Walter Benjamin, "Der Autor als Produzent" (The author as producer), GS Il.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, Werkausgabe, 1980), p. 698. 21. Freud, "Das Unheimliche," GW XII, p. 267. GOING MY WAY I.

Ernest Jones, The Life and Work ofSigmund Freud, Vol. III, London, 1957,

p. 30. 2. Citations of Freud refer wherever possible to the Norton Library editions. Otherwise, the Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud in 24 Volumes (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-66), with volume and page number, is given in parentheses in the body of the text. In almost all cases, however, I have retranslated the passages cited, and the reference to the Standard Edition is given as a contextual and comparative aide to the reader. 3· The IPA, in short, was to be organized much like a collective Ego, of which Freud observes: "The Ego is an organization. It is based on the maintenance of free intercourse and of the possibility of reciprocal influence between all its parts." Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety, New York: W W Norton, 1959, p. 24. 4· Jones, II, p. 143. 5· Ibid., p. 145. 6. The problem of institutionalization has attracted increasing attention in the psychoanalytic literature of recent years. Within the context of the French experience, the study of Fran 245-46; and combination (Verbindung) Deleuze and death drive, 160-61, 164-66; in primary repression, 75, 79· See also Fixation Castration: and Adler's theory of "masculine protest," 41; and anxiety, 93, 215-16, 251; link with the eyes and seeing, 216, 224, 243; as crisis of narcissism, 144, 162, 217; as narrative, 221, 235; and observation, perception, 5-6, 18, 56-58, 210, 215-17; in the shaggy dog story, 155; and shifi: in dream/storytelling perspective, 65 Cathexis (Besetzung), in primary and secondary process, 70-74, 77, 8o-8s passim, 91-92, u8, 164, r66, 214. See also Anticathexis; Binding; Hypercathexis Cixous, Helene, 208-9 Clara. See "The Sandman''

256

Index

Combination (Verbindung), and primal repression, 79-80. See also Binding Consciousness, in Freudian context, 64, 79, 83, 180-84, 204 Danger, and theory of anxiety, 87-89, 184, 247. See also Signal Darstellung (presentation, exposition), 53-54, 65-66, ro2-3, r87. See also

Enstellung Death drive (Todestrieb): 6o, 159-63 passim, r68, 184-85, 187, 208; convergence with the uncanny, 2IO; as repetition, r88, 208; "silence" of, 177 Delcourt, Marie, 250; on Hephaistos as god of binding/unbinding, 202 Deleuze, Gilles: death drive and binding, r6o-66 passim, 249; "transcendental" character of Freudian speculation, 161-64, 168-69. See also Death drive Derrida, Jacques, xiv, 208, 249, 250, 25!, 252 Descartes, Rene, 20 Description, as category of Freudian epistemology, 55· See also Observation; Interpretation Disfiguration: as aspect of Enste!!ung, 53; and anxiety, 91. See also Dislocation; Enstellung Dislocation: aspect of Enste!!ung, xiv-xv, 62; and anxiety, 91, 246; dream as, 64; as essence of dream, II5. See also Disfiguration; Enstellung Distortion. See Disfiguration; Dislocation; Enstellung Double (Doppelganger): as Freudian theme, 2ro, 217, 225, 244 Dreams, 53, 63-64, ro2-15, u9-20, 187, 240; latent meaning in, roz; a "model dream" (vorbildlichen), IO). See also Interpretation Ego: animism and the narcisstic ego,

45-46; and anxiety, 93, 95-96, 246; as a "compromise formation," 52; in jokes and play, 132, 147; and repetition-compulsion, 171; standpoint of and narcissistic thought, 46, 54, 56, 145-46, 166-68, 243, 245, 250. See also Narcissism Enstel!ung. as disfigurement, dislocation, distortion, xiv-xv, 201, 203; constitutive gesture of ego in anxiety, 91-92, 96; dream as, r02-4, u2, uS, 122-23; dream-narrative as, 53-54; and psychoanalytic topology, 62, 64-65, r6r, r86; and Witz (joke), 139· 147 Ferenczi, Sandor, 38 Fixation, 79-So. See also Binding; Combination (Verbindung); Repression Fleiss, Wilhelm: So, 99. 123, 204; as Freud's "first reader and critic," 121 Fort!/Da!: as game described by Freud, 134-37; as speculative game played by Freud, r68, 174, 177-79, 188, 192, 198, 201 Foucault, Michel, xiii-xiv, 239 Gaps (Lucken): filling of gaps in the psyche, 55; and hysteria, 6o. See also Lacan, Jacques Gross, Wenzel, 130, 132-33 Heiddeger, Martin, 241, 242; reading of Antigone, 21-31 passim Heine, Heinrich: "filling the gaps," 56; philosophical tie with secondary revision, 44 Hoffmann, E. T. A. See "The Sandman" Hephaistos (god of binding/unbinding in Symposium), 202. See also Binding; De!court Hypercathexis ( Uberbesetzung), 77,

Index So -Sr. See also Amicathexis; Cathexis; Signal Inhibition: and joke, 139, 152; in primary process, 74-78 passim, 92 Institutionalization (of psychoanalysis), 37· See also International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) Interdiction (M-rsagm), 85. See also Repression International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), 35-36 Interpretation: in dreams, 82, 104, w8-u, 245; role in psychoanalysis, 55· See also Description; Observation IPA. See International Psychoanalytic Association Isolation (mechanism of isolating): described, 95-96; practiced by Freud, IIO

Jentsch, E., 15, 208 Joke (Witz): and analogy, 125; basic qualities, 43, 248, 249; discontinuous temporality of, 126; as jest (Scherz), 131; relation to psychoanalytic theory, 124-156 passim, 187; third person in, 139-42, 147-50 passim, 152-53; Zote (smut), 140-43, 147, 155. See also Shaggy dog story Jones, Ernest: as chronicler of psychoanalytic movement, 36; on death drive, 159, 163-64, 178, 242, 243· 249 Jung, Carl Gustav: Freud's polemics against, 40, 4r48, 54, 88, 242, 243; split with Freud, 37-38 Kant, Immanuel, 239; distinction between "thinking" and "knowing" (story of Lucy R.), 2-4; theory of wit as analogizing, 125-26 Klein, Melanie: incorporating female aspects in Freud's model, 57, 243-44

257

Krauss, Karl, 121 Lacan, Jacques, xiv, 242, 243, 247, 249; concept of the beance (gap), n6-2o, 162; on death drive, 159, 162-163; on Freudian "dream-navel" concept, us17, n9-20, 214-16; theory of mirrorstage, 134-36, 248. See also Gaps Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 244 Laplanche, Jean, 163, 246, 249 Laughter, 138-40, 248; and the dynamics of the joke, 147-50 Lucy R (Kantian analysis of). See Kant, Immanuel Nancy, Jean-Luc, 244 Narcissism: in animism, secondary revision, 45-46; castration as crisis of, 57-58, 144, 215, 217, 244; ego and play, 56, 134-35, 243, 244; in jokes, 144-45; and repetition-compulsion, 172-178 passim; in speculative assumption of death drive, 162-64 Narration, as integral part of dream, 53, 64. See also Entstellung; Stories Nathanael. See "The Sandman" Navel of dream (Traumnabel), as figure of Freudian hermeneutics, u3-17 Observation: as aspect of psychoanalytic theory, 55, 59; in the speculative assumption of a repetition-compulsion, 175. See also Bildersprache; Description; Interpretation Partridge, Eric, 249 Perceptual identity (Wahrnehmungidentitiit): and binding, r66; in primary process, 71-72, 92 Plato. See Symposium Play: Fort!/Da! as game, 134-37; and narcissistic ego, 134; pleasure of, 144; and verbalization, 167; in Witz, 131-34· See also Fort!!Da!; Narcissism

258

Index

Pleasure: as function of narcissistic ego, 167; joke-pleasure, 144; and repetition, 188 Primal repression, 79· See also Repression Primal scene (Urszene), ro, 13, 16, 53, 58, 221; as Auseinandersetzung, 58, 244 Primary/secondary process: binding mental energy to representation, 73, 91-92, 164-65, 167; inhibition of unpleasure principle in, 91; set apart, 70-74, 79, n8, 245; as "theoretical fiction," 74· See also Binding Rank, Otto: theory of birth trauma, 88-90,97 Reizschutz (protective shield), 183-84. See also Trauma Repetition, 28, 217, 241, 247; and binding in death-drive, r6o-65 passim, 173-78 passim, r86, r88; and consciousness, 181; as recognition, 162; of the same/of difference, 180, 193; in Symposium, 191-93, 197; in theoretical discourse of metapsychology, 97-98, 160-62, r69, 173; transcendental structure, 169-70. See also Repetitioncompulsion Repetition-compulsion, 6o, 169-76; relation to death drive, 163, 187, 208; in transference, 170, 172, 205 Repression, 16, 204, 246; in anxiety, 86-87; base of "indispensible foundation of psychoanalysis," 40; in primary/secondary process, 75-84 passim. See also Anticathexis; Cathexis; Hypercathexis; Primal repression; Translation Rosen, Stanley, 250 Roustang, Fran~ois, 239, 242, 242-43 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, r6o Schreber, Daniel Paul, 146

"The Sandman" (Hoffman), 7-21 passim, 26, 210, 217-32, 240-41, 252 Secondary process. See Primary/secondary process Secondary revision (secondary elaboration), 40-47 passim, 103. See also Systematization Setting apart: in psychoanalytic topology, s8-59: of writing, 68. See also Auseinandersetzung Shaggy dog story (Aufiitzer), 153-54. See also Joke Signal: in anxiety, 247; as product of ego, 92-93; in repression as hypercathexis, 7r78, 85; as temporizing-temporalization narration, 184; as "x" in Freudian metapsychology, 97. See also Narration; Stories; Trauma; "x" Socrates, 2o5- 6 Sophocles: Antigone, 21-31 passim Speech-associations (word-associations); in repression, 82 Standard Edition, xv; specific translation instances discussed, 98, II3-14, 129, 1)2, 154· 239· 242, 246, 247· 249 Stories (and story-telling): as articulation of Freudian speculation, 65, 177-78; and castration anxiety, 93-94, 172; and consciousness, r8o-84; and Freud's perception of life, r8o; infantile sexual theories as, 57-59; in repetition-compulsion and death-drive, 187. See also Narration Strachey, James, IIJ, 127. See also Standard Edition Stekel, Wilhelm, 37 Superego, 240, 245; as the "third person" of joke, 146-48. See also Joke Symposium (Plato), 105, r88-zo3 passim, 250 Systematization: of psychoanalytic

Index thinking, 40. See also Narcissism, Secondary revision Thallus, n9-20, 156 Theatricality: narrative in theatrical space, 6-7, 13, 16, 19, 29; as "scenic staging," 42, 247 Todorov, Tzvetan: Introduction a Ia literature fantastique, 207-8, 250 Topology: death drive and binding, 162, 163, 166; by the displacement of place, 186-87; psychoanalytic topology marked by overlapping, 59 Transference, 205; in assumption of death drive, qo, 172; in joke narration, 153; in psychoanalytical discourse, 61 Tran~lation (Ubersetzung): as hypercathexis (Uberbesetzung) in repression, 81-85; observation into theory, 6o-62 Trauma, in anxiety, 88, 90-92, 96, 184, 247

259

Ulysses (Joyce), 107 Uncanny (Unheimlich), 15-31 passim, 157, 209, 2II-15, 218, 221, 250, 252; convergence with death-drive, 210; in literary texts, 212-19 passim, 225, 231-35 passim Unheimlich[en]. See Uncanny Urszene. See Primal scene Villiers de !'Isle d'Adam, Auguste: L'Eve future, 226-35 passim, 252-53

Wisstrieb (urge to know), 56, 150 Wt'tz. See Joke. Writing, as Auseinandersetzung, 67-70

"x": as "reality" of"danger" and signal of psychoanalytic thought, 97; as the "unknown" of meta psychology, 180, 183, 187, 201

Zote (smut), 140-43; derivation from Zotte, 155. See also Joke

Cultural Memory

in the Present

Samuel Weber, The Legend ofFreud, expanded edition David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity Rodolphe Gasche, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion ofRelation Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution ofPsychoanalytic Knowledge Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings ofFriedrich Holder/in J. Hillis Miller I Manuel Asensi, Black Holes I]. Hillis Miller; or,

Boustrophedonic Reading Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and japanese Surrealism Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism ofthe Other; or, The Prosthesis

of Origin Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation:

Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification ofIntimacy Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing

Interdisciplinary Interpretation Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion