Shoshana Felman

Literature and Psychoanalysis is a reprint of a 1977 issue of Yale French Studies - which explains why there are so many contributors from that particular university!

As with many collections about Lacan from this time period, there is plenty of dross here that is not very interesting to today's reader. However, there are a number of historical texts available in this edition that are useful for tracing the interpretation and understanding of Lacan in Anglophone circles.

The first of these is Shoshana Felman's introduction, which nicely summarizes the tension between the discourses of literature and psychoanalysis. Also of interest is her long chapter on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, although I would suggest that it is better to read it as it (re)appears in her book [b:Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis|187416|Writing and Madness Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis|Shoshana Felman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348203277s/187416.jpg|181169].

Another piece that I really liked was Peter Brooks's essay on narrative, which he theorizes using Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This essay is innovative and insightful, and one of the collection's highlights.

Two other pieces are important here, not because they are of lasting value, but because they have been influential touchstones in Lacanian criticism. First, there is Fredric Jameson's long essay that attempts to reconcile Lacan with Marxism, and which (to me, anyway) just comes across as nonsense. The real is the same thing as history? I don't think so! Second, there is Barbara Johnson's look at the contradictions of Derrida's reading of Lacan, which makes some good points but seems pretentious and outdated from today's perspective.

All in all, this is a book that, while it has lost a lot of resonance, remains historically interesting for readers of Lacanian criticism.… (altro)

I've never been a big fan of Felman's work, which too often gets bogged down in dull technical details and language that swamps her better ideas. In Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, this problem is not banished entirely - Felman's language is still unnecessarily florid - but that is compensated for by the fact that this particular bone contains a lot more meat than usual.

Felman begins the book charmingly by describing how she first stumbled to Lacan as a graduate student, and then how that understanding was supplemented by her own encounters with analysis. From there she states her ambition to "articulate and to reach into the significance of Lacan's insight, beyond the literal perception (the dogmatization) of his text, his acts, his practice, and his clinical techniques" (p.15). This is a relief, for the worst commentators on Lacan are usually those who try to formalize his ideas into a neat schematic package.

Chapter 2 considers the case of how to read Poe using psychoanalysis, with Felman contrasting Lacan's famous interpretation of "The Purloined Letter" with studies by Joseph Wood Krutch (1926) and Marie Bonaparte (1933). We are in familiar territory here, as Felman essentially replays the chapter from [b:Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis|187416|Writing and Madness Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis|Shoshana Felman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348203277s/187416.jpg|181169] about good and bad psychoanalytic readings of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The subtlety of the Lacanian reading is not to *apply* psychoanalysis to the text as a kind of critical template, but to show the "interimplication" of literature and psychoanalysis "in each other" (p.49).

Chapter 3 looks at Lacan's "return to Freud" by arguing that the principle of self-reflexivity and auto-critique are built into the Freudian framework. Freud himself, Felman shows, repeatedly turned away from the revolutionary implications of his work, and so had to perform his own "return to Freud." Felman claims that Lacan takes this core principle and runs with it, echoing as it the self-reflexivity built into other new discourse like modern physics.

Chapter 4 examines the implications of such self-reflexivity for psychoanalytic views on pedagogy. Felman looks at how Freud and Lacan break down the authority of the master/student relationship: instead, the master merely becomes the one who has learned how to learn, and it is this this open-ended process that is passed on to others.

Chapter 5 is titled "Beyond Oedipus," but it begins by considering a famous case by a rival therapist, Melanie Klein, and examines why, in Lacanian terms, her technique succeeds. Felman then looks at two versions of Oedipus: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. In the first play, Oedipus has misrecognized knowledge about himself, and must learn how to see correctly; in the second play, he now has that knowledge and must learn how to accept it. Felman compares these two stages to moments in Freud's work, from The Interpretation of Dreams (discovery) to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (acceptance). Coming after Freud, Lacan is naturally more interested in the latter two texts.

Felman's book succeeds beautifully in what it sets out to do, namely, to provide an overview of Lacan's thought that shows readers why he is a great thinker while remaining in the spirit of his work. She could, I suppose, be a little more realistic about the very real gap that existed between the ideal of Freudian and Lacanian principles and how they worked in real life - both had notoriously authoritarian habits, especially with regard to the psychoanalytic institutions that belie their deconstruction of authority. But then, that task lies beyond the purview of this book, which sets out to show us the real promise of what psychoanalytic theory can do, given a chance.… (altro)

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

Writing and Madness was a book that I wanted to like as a whole - its topic is certainly an interesting and timely one - but I found that I could only relate to it in bits and pieces. Felman starts out by articulating the difficulties of speaking madness, as outlined by Michel Foucault in [b:History of Madness|770903|History of Madness|Michel Foucault|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1486327755s/770903.jpg|756961]. She then plunges into the intricacies of the debate between Foucault and Derrida (Ch.2), paying careful attention to how both thinkers problematize questions of writing, philosophy, and literature in their attempts to write about madness. This section is easily one of the best in the book.

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

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

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

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

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