D E S I R E O F T H E A N A L Y S T S P s y c h o a n a l y s i s a n d C u l t u r a l C r i t i c i s m GREG FORTER AND PAUL ALLEN MILLER, EDITORS Desire of the Analysts SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Henry Sussman, editor Desire of the Analysts Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism Edited by Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Judith Block and Eileen Meehan Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Desire of the analysts : psychoanalysis and cultural criticism / edited by Greg Forter, Paul Allen Miller. p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7299-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7914-7300-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Psychoanalysis and culture I. Forter, Greg. II. Miller, Paul Allen, 1959– BF175.4.C84D47 2007 150.19'5—dc22 2007016659 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller Part One Psychoanalysis and the Future of Cultural Criticism 1. Sartre, Politics, and Psychoanalysis: It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got das Ding 35 Paul Allen Miller 2. Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Cultural Criticism at the Millennium 57 Henry Sussman Part Two Psychoanalysis and Collectivity 3. Lacan’s F(cid:2)ou(cid:2)r Discourses: A Political Reading 81 Slavoj Zizek 4. Signs of Desire: Nationalism, War, and Rape in Titus Andronicus, Savior, and Calling the Ghosts 99 Deneen Senasi v vi CONTENTS Part Three Psychoanalysis and the Author 5. Moving beyond the Politics of Blame: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 123 Kaja Silverman 6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Psychobiography, and the Fin-de-Siècle Crisis in Masculinity 147 Greg Forter Part Four Psychoanalysis and Sexuality 7. Desiring Death: Masochism, Temporality, and the Intermittence of Forms 179 Domietta Torlasco 8. Sadistic and Masochistic Contracts in Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orléansand Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne; or, What Does the Hymen Want? 195 Sharon Diane Nell 9. Queer(ing) Pleasure: Having a Gay Old Time in the Culture of Early-Modern France 225 Pierre Zoberman Contributors 253 Index 255 Acknowledgments This volume grew out of a conference that took place at the University of South Carolina in February 2003: the fifth annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference, organized by the editors and entitled “The Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criti- cism in the New Millennium.” We wish to thank all the conference partic- ipants for making it an unusually stimulating event. The South Carolina Humanities Council and the following units at the University of South Carolina provided generous support: the College of Liberal Arts, South Carolina Honors College, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the English Department, the Women Studies Program, and the Philosophy Department. We also wish to thank Noreen Doughty and Paulette Jiménez for their adminstrative assistance, as well as the following graduate students in Comparative Literature: Mandy Bayer, Kay Clowney, Atussa Hatami, Georg Schwartzman. Portions of Paul Allen Miller’s chapter (chapter 1) will appear in altered form as “L’espace littéraire, la pensée du dehors, et l’objet sublime,” in La Lit- térature a-t-elle un espace?, edited by Pierre Zoberman (Paris: Presses Univer- sitaires de Vincennes, 2006). A shorter version of Greg Forter’s chapter on Fitzgerald (chapter 6) appeared in American Literature 78.2 (June 2006): 293–323. We are grateful to that journal’s editors for permission to reprint. vii Introduction GREGFORTERANDPAULALLENMILLER Why do we—or at least some of us—continue to desire psychoanalysis? How might that desire contribute to the project of interpreting, perhaps even changing, the world in which we find ourselves at the dawn of a new millennium? What, finally, is the relationship between the desire for psy- choanalysis and the domain of expressive culture, a relationship that the title of this collection assumes in its yoking of “psychoanalysis” with the enterprise of “cultural criticism”? These questions in part reflect longstanding concerns among cultural critics, but they have a special urgency in the current intellectual climate, for there has recently been much talk of the death or irrelevance of psy- choanalysis. The proclamation has come from many quarters. Psychiatrists have trumpeted new discoveries in biochemistry that they say render quaint such concepts as repression, displacement, transference, uncon- scious motivation, and even the mind itself (as opposed to the brain). They contend that we must confine our discussions of mental activity to empiri- cally verifiable facts, implying that the intangible quality of “the psyche” renders it no more than a metaphysical leftover of religious belief in the soul. Perhaps most damningly, these critics point to the development of powerful psychotropic drugs, especially for the treatment of depression, as proof of the obsolescence of Freud and his followers. For if depression is simply the effect of a genetically influenced chemical imbalance, and if this imbalance can be redressed through the diligent application of Zoloft, who needs talk therapy of any kind, let alone of the kind that can take years and perhaps cost thousands of dollars?1 A similar form of skepticism has come to prevail in the humanities and social sciences. In the latter field, the criticisms leveled are closely related to those in psychiatry. Freudian thought is disreputable, on this view, be- cause the existence of unconscious processes cannot be empirically verified. 1