Unconscious Minions: Review essay of Unconscious Dominions

1 Unconscious Minions Review essay of W. Anderson, D. Jenson, and R.C. Keller (eds.), Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 314. Published in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4 (2012), pp. 485-497. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2012.753664 Justin Clemens Would postcolonialism as an academic discipline have been possible without psychoanalysis? Merely thinking off the top of one’s head about some of the widely- accepted crucial interventions in postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis’s import can’t be ignored — to the point that one might even make the claim that the theoretical and critical resources of psychoanalysis have enabled not only the establishment, but some of the most productive ruptures and reorganisations of the field. From Frantz Fanon through Edward Said and Homi Bhabha to Ashis Nandy and beyond, psychoanalysis has proved a powerful, even indispensable formation for analysing the complicit routines of self and other, the racist violence of allegedly liberating European discourses, the ongoing psychic and public consequences of the colonial enterprise. Yet psychoanalysis has been of use in an integrally divided way. On the one hand, psychoanalysis provides unique resources for attentiveness, conceptual reorganisation, and praxis that cannot be found elsewhere. Concepts such as the unconscious, repression, overdetermination, identification, projection, splitting and repetition-compulsion have proven indispensable in this program. On the other hand, psychoanalysis is itself caught up in moments and movements that are essentially colonial, and which therefore themselves require strenuous critique. The general sorts of problems that arise in such a context are, after decades of dedicated postcolonial research, the obvious ones. So the questions, and they are pressing ones, remain: does it follow that, because a certain intellectual project, 2 psychoanalysis, emerges in a particular time and place, that it is therefore necessarily limited in its truth-claims, application and import, that it therefore takes on, as if beyond any demurral, all of the colonial elements of its chronotope? If that is true, how does one evaluate the role of psychoanalysis in a postcolonial frame? Is it possible to go beyond psychoanalysis in postcolonial studies? If so, what sort of new theories or new practices would that entail? Is psychoanalysis irreducibly compromised by colonial inheritances? Yes, absolutely, is one clear answer to this last question. No science — not even the purportedly ‘natural sciences’ of the ‘natural body’ — can lay claim to transcendent status. To this extent, psychoanalysis is, just like any other formation, tied to particular cultural situations, finite and, to the extent that it pretends to go beyond them, falls inexorably into a repetition of familiar colonising practices. To the extent it acts ‘internationally,’ then, it is as a false universal, exposing itself in and by imposing itself. Yes, with reservations, is another. This would be a position held by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, following to some degree some of Jacques Lacan’s opinions: on the one hand, psychoanalysis is a native Western phenomenon, whose emergence and operations are tied to very particular social, historical and intellectual milieux; on the other, not simply, precisely because the West has globalised itself through colonialism, rendering subjects psychoanalytical as it went, and in ways that far exceed any simple enumeration or delimitation of impact. 1 The psychoanalytical subject wasn’t, but became universal, in an analogous fashion to that of Simone de Beauvoir’s notorious claim that one is not born, but becomes, a woman. To the extent that psychoanalysis still makes sense, then, that is, as having explanatory purchase on the fractured behaviours of persons worldwide, it is as an ambiguous index of a continuing form of techno-cultural domination in a global capitalist economy. 1 See G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley et al. (New York: Viking Press, 1977). 3 No, is another clear answer: what else is a science except a practice that is founded on sub- and trans-cultural features, that is, on ‘natural’ features? Of course, this would require psychoanalysis to be a science — a status that is, to be honest, entirely unlikely. Much contemporary neuroscience, cognitive psychology and psychopharmacology give a resounding lack of assent to this possibility. Moreover, this is a kind of answer that is, rightly, anathema to both psychoanalysis and postcolonial theories generally. Why? Precisely because the political and sexual themes that are essential to both psychoanalysis and postcolonialism require a nonreducibility to ‘the natural’: indeed, the idea of ‘nature’ qua totality is itself a fantasy that psychoanalysis and postcolonialism must target, and precisely because they consider that what passes in any situation as and for ‘the natural’ is in fact seething with localised power relations seeking to impose their fictions globally. Against, for instance, the now-familiar polemics for ‘sociobiology’ and ‘consilience,’ in which there is an enthusiastic reduction of the social to biology, the latter thereby allegedly functioning as at once the new pilot science for the humanities, and the ultimate reference of all human activities, the former insist upon the contingency of human action — not simply the contingency of evolutionary processes as grounding all action, but a contingency of action itself.2 In other words, there is a quality of human symbolic invention that has its own processes irreducible to the nature studied by the sciences. Yet perhaps this possibility isn’t altogether nugatory, as — unlike behaviourism, cognitive science and neo-Darwinian formations, whose compromises and complicities with colonial and capitalist regimes are unquestionable — recent 2 The extraordinary polemics around this issue remain volatile today. See, for evidence of the extreme affects the dispute raises, J. Kramnick, ‘Against Literary Darwinism,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter 2011), pp. 315-47, and the dossier of responses from Paul Bloom, Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Vanessa L. Ryan, G. Gabrielle Starr, Blakey Vermeule, and Kramnick himself, again, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 388-460. 4 developments in neuroscience are returning a limited pertinence to fundamental Freudian and psychodynamic operations.3 Hence no, with reservations, is yet another answer. Notably, this split was constitutive to psychoanalysis from the start: on the one hand, Freud himself never gave way on the possibility that the advance of science might one day be able to explain psychological obscurities by means of biochemical processes; on the other hand, he simultaneously never abandoned the conviction that such a reduction of levels of explanation would be tantamount to a falsification of the evidence. If it is not a science stricto sensu, psychoanalysis nonetheless opens up a new field for research: that of ‘the unknown knowns’ that regulate behaviour without ever making themselves apparent. Indeed, psychoanalysis is a ‘science’ that separates ‘truth’ from ‘knowledge,’ and, in doing so, confirms that what is unique about human beings is that it is their ‘nature’ to be ‘social,’ i.e., singularized by life experiences in such a way that their environmental plasticity overrides or at the very least severely modifies any preprogramming, genetic or otherwise, that they might have. Above all, the role of culture in human life experience is determining (and now neuroscientifically verified, for whatever that’s worth).4 See, for example, H.A. Berlin and C. Koch, ‘Neuroscience meets Psychoanalysis,’ Scientific American Mind, April/May 2009, pp. 16-19. 4 This feature has of course a peculiar biological precondition: the extraordinarily extended period of neotenia in human beings, which Lacan himself continually stressed under the rubric of ‘a veritable specific prematurity of birth,’ Ecrits, trans. B. Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 78. This is confirmed, again, by recent neuroscientific studies: ‘Brain regions that grow the most outside the womb are the same areas that expanded the most during evolution from monkeys to humans, a new study says. As the human brain matures, it expands in a “strikingly nonuniform” fashion, according to researchers who compared MRI scans of 12 infant brains with scans of 12 young adult brains. The research revealed that brain regions involved in higher cognitive and executive processes—such as language and reasoning—grow about twice as much as regions associated with basic senses such vision and hearing, said study leader Jason Hill, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “The parts of the [brain] that have grown the most to make us uniquely humans are the same regions that tend to grow the most postnatally,” Hill said,’ John Roach, ‘Human Brains ‘Evolve,’ Become Less MonkeyLike with Age,’ National Geographic Daily News, 12 July 2010. What is coded here as 3 5 What may compromise all of these responses, however, is that they are themselves already too facile, too general. They are general positions that can be raised a priori about any formation whatsoever. Marxism, psychoanalysis, CBT, the Church of Mormon, Neo-Gnosticism, soccer, Michael Jackson — off you go! To that extent, then, these positions would utterly fail to account for the specificity of psychoanalysis, a failing all the more deleterious for the fact that the question of specificity is raised to its most intense pitch by psychoanalysis, not least because the latter insists on the absolute singularity of utterances. Indeed, psychoanalysis raises, in the most strenuous possible way, the problematic of position and voice, not only of who speaks and who listens, from where and with what safeguards, but also of unknown, unheard and inconsistent voices. To describe it as ‘Western,’ let alone ‘constitutively colonial,’ would then already be to misunderstand the stakes of psychoanalysis. First of all, one might claim that psychoanalysis in its classical Freudian moment acts as a countervailing practice to the contemporaneous sciences of the West. As a Jew, Freud occupied the place of the constitutive Other-of-the-West,5 and, as Jacqueline Rose reminds us, ‘In 1897, two years after the first German publication of Studies on Hysteria, the Emperor of Austria, Franz Josef, reluctantly confirmed the anti-Semite Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna.’6 Freud himself — despite the often ludicrous fervour of critics (one thinks here of personages such as Frederick Crews) who project onto his writings their own violent and dogmatic rage — clearly remained utterly self-critical throughout his working life, to the point that his last great published text is a deconstitution of the phantasms of Jewish origin themselves. One doesn’t have to be as critical as ‘strikingly non-uniform’ is nothing other than the consequences of growing up in human environments, that is, culture. 5 For a bracing recent interpretation of just how violently this otherness is still maintained, see J.-C. Milner, Les penchants criminals de l’Europe démocratique. (Paris: Verdier, 2003). 6 J. Rose, The Jacqueline Rose Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 86. See also Dennis B. Klein, Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 6 Lacan when he said that Freud was ‘playing his little part as a good Jew who was not entirely up-to-date.’7 Moses the Man, it turns out, was not Jewish at all: he was an Egyptian.8 At the monotheistic beginnings of the internal-other whose impossible in-assimilation founds the West….was a monomaniacal North African renegade heretic. Whether or not this is true — and I think we’d have to agree it’s an unlikely story — such a rewriting of the foundations of European monotheism can only be considered ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘colonial’ in the weakest and most misleading senses of the terms.9 So it is not just a finer optic on the empirical or theo-political circumstances that would make it difficult to sustain the proposition that ‘the psychoanalytic subject, that figment of European high modernism, is constitutively a colonial creature,’ as the introduction to Unconscious Dominions untenably maintains (1). Adding to my comments above, it would in fact be more accurate to maintain the opposite: psychoanalysis emerged against empire, not least the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed strictly coterminously with the rise of psychoanalysis. But whatever quibbling may be possible over the limits and meanings of the empirical situation, in its drive to create concepts worthy of unprecedented specificity, psychoanalysis transformed the field of conceptuality itself. No twentieth-century theory, at least in the academic humanities, has remained untouched by psychoanalytic discourse. Whether as a direct affirmative development of psychoanalysis or as a reaction to it, the very concepts that the essays in Unconscious Dominions employ would have been unthinkable without the concepts and practices of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic groups. Yet, because this feature 7 J. Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973. ed. J-A. Miller, trans. with notes B. Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 109. 8 If the research on this text is now enormous, in the current context, see Edward Said, Freud and the non-European (London: Verso, 2004). 9 On precisely this point, see Rex Butler’s stunning review essay of the indigenous Australian artist Richard Bell, ‘Hanging on the Telephone,’ < http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/positivity15.php>, downloaded 8 January 2012. 7 is at best assumed throughout this volume — rather than consistently thematized or itself interrogated — it tends to be occluded in a fashion that is often decidedly suspicious. If one follows the references through the sequence of essays, one might be surprised by the relative paucity of citations from ‘primary’ psychoanalytic texts: there is only one direct reference to any uncontrovertibly psychoanalytic text (to Totem and Taboo) in the Introduction, out of 34 entries, many containing multiple references. Paradoxically, if the bad faith of moralising academic scholarship is surely inexpungible from the postcolonial field, such a constitution is, paradoxically, partially due to the impact of psychoanalysis itself which — unlike almost all other ‘modern’ ‘European’ ‘sciences’ — effects a fundamental triple manoeuvre. First of all, it insists on a ‘personalisation’ of address: every proposition is emitted by a particular person in a particular circumstance and is, no matter its pretensions, necessarily particularized as a result. Second, it insists on a concomitant ‘depersonalisation’ of address: the particularities expressed are overdetermined, constitutively self-dissimulating, and irreducibly ambivalent. Third, it insists on a non-judgemental praxis of negotiation, in which there is a ‘positive non-acting’ on the part of the analyst, as the analysand listens to him- or herself trying to speak absolutely freely. Psychoanalysis is an extra-academic and extra-medical practice that tries to eschew the sorts of intrusions endemic to such institutions: there (ideally of course) shouldn’t be a rectification of behaviour according to pre- established norms, nor technologies (such as pharmacological ones) used on the patients…although this is a literally impossible position to maintain. Indeed, this is precisely what the best essays in this collection bear out, mostly against the editors’ own propositions. The essays range widely, from the work of well-known colonial psychoanalysts, such as Girindrasekhar Bose to ambivalent, half-forgotten figures such as Henri Aubin, Géza Róheim and Pieter Mattheus van Wulfften Palthe. Others examine the work of the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine or disturbing events in contemporary French ethnopsychiatry. 8 What is perhaps most salutary in these articles, aside from the painstaking archival recovery of persons, acts, and documents, is the conviction that, in Alice Bullard’s words, the ‘forgetting of contributions from the colonies leads to a misshapen history of psychiatry; it leads to a history that mirrors the troubled relations between the colonizer and the colonized rather than reflecting on, or resolving, this relationship’ (45). Moreover, the double movement of colonial knowledge-power routines is clearly in operation when, as Bullard and others in this collection show, colonial psychiatry is at once used to displace the authority of local healers (‘sorcerers’), as it takes up the theories and practices of those healers in expanding its own armature and legitimacy. 10 Yet the question remains: is there anything specific to psychoanalysis in all this? One can only agree with Mariano Ben Plotkin when he writes in the preamble to a superb essay on the highly differentiated uptake of psychoanalysis in Brazil by the medical institutions, by the social sciences, and the modernist avant-garde: Why certain systems of thought [Plotkin invokes psychoanalysis and Marxism] that were not particularly easy to understand and were emerging at the fringes of the intellectual life of their time became powerful transnational ideological systems that, to some extent, determined the Weltanschauung of a whole century — even in cultural spaces that are very different and located very far away from those where they originated — while other systems of thought fell into oblivion is a question that cannot be easily answered (113). 10 I was slightly surprised, then, and especially given the medical historian background of many of the contributors, to find that there was no account of the role that cocaine plays in the development of early psychoanalysis, also at the origins of modern industrial pharmacology, and dependent upon colonial exploitation of regional botany. I have attempted to deal with this phenomenon myself in ‘The Jew’s Two Noses: Freud, Cocaine, Addiction’ in The UTS Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2001), pp. 144-162. I read such absences here as a symptom that it is not, strictly speaking, psychoanalysis that this book is really interested in. 9 Certainly, one can also agree when Plotkin adds: ‘The reception of psychoanalysis (or of any other system of thought) in a given cultural space is shaped by the particular vision that each society develops of itself’ (114). Yet this is again to beg the question, as the parenthetical remark shows. Did not the reasons that psychoanalysis travelled so rapidly and into so many different contexts include: its new concepts of difference were themselves essentially geared to further differentiation; its new concept-practices of the translatability of process projected a new kind of a-colonial internationalism; and its new concepts regarding unceasing psychomachia rescripted any tendency to unification, whether at an ‘individual’ or ‘national’ or indeed ‘civilizational’ level? As Ranjana Khanna says in the essay that concludes this volume and which, moreover, has the merit of attending to melancholia, one of the psychoanalytical concepts that continues to have widespread currency in the humanities today: ‘one of the reasons psychoanalytically conceived melancholia is a compelling rubric for an analysis of postcoloniality is that it is anti-identitarian while compelled by a situation and is affective without sentimentality. It is also highly self-critical’ (257). Actually, one could probably say the same thing about many other psychoanalytic concepts, but this is clearly true enough. However, if we take Khanna’s statement seriously, it also implies that psychoanalysis cannot become the object of a history unless one ignores the fact that it can only become the object of a history — of history itself — as something other than itself. Psychoanalysis immediately puts all historical narrative into question, insofar as, on the one hand, it insists that historical documents are themselves self-dissimulating and self-absenting, and that the crucial secondary materials may be absolutely irrecoverable; on the other hand, the presuppositions of the putative historian will remain irrecoverable to themselves, as they dispose their traces in the historian’s reorganization of the material itself. This rigorous and irreducible duplicity, in fact, is clearly at stake in the essay that opens the collection, in which John Cash argues that Freud’s case of obsessional neurosis, a.k.a. ‘The Rat 10 Man,’ can be read in such a way as to illuminate problems in contemporary political theory regarding the relationship between ‘the beast and the sovereign’ à la Jacques Derrida, and the ‘friend-enemy distinction’ à la Carl Schmitt. As he says, ‘With its focus on processes of identification, repression, and splitting and projection, psychoanalysis presents a rich account of the formations and deformations of subjectivity under conditions of intimacy, authority, and the play of power and violence’ (22). As such — and this is one of the virtues of Cash’s method — one uses psychoanalysis to reopen the case of psychoanalysis, indeed the cases of psychoanalysis. Focussing here on the ‘case of the Rat Man,’ Cash shows how orientalist fantasies come to be inscribed and deployed within European individuals, here exemplified by the horrific rat torture ‘from the East,’ relayed to the patient Ernst Lanzer by the ‘Cruel Captain,’ who functions within Freud’s fable as a kind of index of sadistic militarism, triggering off a set of revelatory symptoms and actings-out. As Cash underlines, the psychical and political import of these acts cannot simply be ‘read off’ from the ‘objective,’ ‘empirical’ details, which require reconstruction, not falsification, and whose reconstruction entails a conception of uncircumventable ambivalences in the psycho-political records. Indeed, some of the best moments in this volume arrive when the authors not only recognise that psychoanalysis is hardly one thing, but that its own history is a history of misunderstandings, opportunisms, and eclecticisms. As Joy Damousi notes of the enthusiastic but eclectic uptake of psychoanalytic ideas by a staggering range of extra-psychoanalytic researchers and disciplines: ‘While this trend was obviously a problem worldwide, nowhere was it as marked as in Australia, where the lack of a psychoanalytic training institute and low numbers of trained analysts meant that there was no real yardstick of orthodoxy. The ideas behind psychoanalysis, unattached as they were to any real practical application, remained just that — ideas: theories that could be appropriated at will by Australian intellectuals and incorporated into their own philosophies and practices’ (84). This clearly pinpoints one of the crucial issues: that psychoanalysis is only psychoanalysis because it is also not psychoanalysis. Or, in other words, that the history of psychoanalysis is in 11 large part the very separation of ideas from their practices that the practice of psychoanalysis was invented and intended to undermine. How can anybody consider writing any kind of postcolonial account of psychoanalysis with even minimal plausibility without taking these paradoxes into account? If, as Deborah Jenson correctly puts it in her contribution on Haiti, the ‘applicability of trauma theory to historical inquiry is especially complicated, according to [Ruth] Leys, by a fundamental tension in the history of its definition that is inseparable from hypnosis: the question of whether trauma has an imitative or mimetic character’ (186), it is just as true that the very possibility of such applicability puts any genetic historical narrative into question. Moral blackmail is quite often the solution to these tormenting intellectual and pragmatic difficulties, and one can discern such disturbing moralising tendentiousness at work throughout Unconscious Dominions. In such a context, even to speak of ‘the universalized, psychoanalyzable subject’ is already the outcome of a decision, not a demonstration.11 There is certainly no question that, as the essays in this collection demonstrate, psychoanalysis has been pressed into service both by colonial administrations as well as by anti-imperialist struggles. But that is not quite the same thing as being able to maintain that such deployments are integral to something in psychoanalysis itself — as opposed, for example, to psychoanalysis being forcibly reinscribed within colonial frames as if it were just another form of psychiatric or mental health 11 In fact, the operation of synecdochal misprision is at work throughout the essays here, that is, the taking of a part for the whole, and a concomitant erasure of the opacities, failures, stupidities, backsliding, revisionism, etc., of Freud himself. For example, although it is indeed a received notion that with psychoanalysis there is ‘the essential psychoanalytic location of the psychic within the individual rather than the collectivity’ (194), such statements are immediately falsified by such key Freudian propositions as ‘the antithesis between individual or mass psychology, which at first glance may seem to us very important, loses a great deal of its sharpness,’ Mass Psychology and Other Writings, trans. Jim Underwood (London: Penguin Modern Classics 2004), p. 17. 12 or just another set of available intellectual techniques. This is not only annoying and misleading, but itself morally and politically suspect. One might even make a case that it is the indiscriminate transformation of apprehensions of difference into knowledge-technologies that is an essential hallmark of colonial power. Moreover, even more disturbingly, such technologies can work, as Didier Fassin points out, not through violent unification, reduction or conflation, but through ‘the radicalization of their difference’ (227). For Fassin, who is interested in, as his essay’s subtitle declares, ‘A French Psychopolitics of Otherness,’ the institutionalisation of ideologies of cultural difference entails a reimposition of vicious colonial practices under the license of sensitivity. Regarding a case of a Muslim African mother and child in the Paris banlieues, Fassin says ‘instead of being offered support or medication for her child, the woman was confronted with the alternative of choosing between the institutional sanction (having her little boy taken away from her) and the exotic ascription (being qualified and treated as different)’ (226). Crucially, such practices are not psychoanalytical ones, and, far from receiving any psychoanalytical imprimatur, are founded precisely on an ignorance or explicit rejection of psychoanalysis. Yet it is such an illicit totalisation of the alleged ‘psychoanalytic subject’ that is used by the editors of this volume to provide leverage for their own policy declarations. It is hard not to feel that these are not also marketing decisions. Hence we read: Like psychoanalysis and the discourses of scientific rationalism, biomedicine, and Enlightenment republicanism [could there be a more parodic conflation of differences than is given by this list?] in which it finds its roots, cultural globalization assumes a universal and cosmopolitan subject as prerequisite for its possibility…. Although these discourses allow room for particularism, they do so only to the extent that such differences are assimilable into a single model of the subject 13 that contains real difference in favor of a uniform possibility of transformation and fluid exchange (2). I find these claims at once bizarre and only-too-familiar. Psychoanalysis, which began as a science of specificity, is here stripped of its own specificities in the alleged ideal of attending to real specificities. To do this, one has to have already left psychoanalysis, to be outside and beyond it, to occupy a position from which the limits of psychoanalysis can be clearly and definitively drawn, and its failures condemned. Yet it is precisely such a genre of claims that psychoanalysis takes as eminently suspicious, indeed themselves most likely compromised by what we might call — drawing on a quite low level of Kleinian discourse — a paranoid- schizoid splitting, or paranoiac-segregative, as Deleuze and Guattari might say. Good postcolonial breast, bad psychoanalytic breast! Undaunted and unashamed, the editors continue in this vein: the notions of the unconscious as a forbidden zone of irrational desire and passionate violence relied upon imperial imaginings that continued to structure colonial space in starkly opposing terms. The dichotomy between the cool exterior of the autonomous bourgeois ego and the inflamed turmoil of the colonized unconscious reflected the tensions of a ‘self-conscious’ European modernity that defined itself against the unchanging ‘primitivism’ of non-Western civilisations (3). Before all else, look at the illicit work being done by the insinuating adjectives: ‘forbidden,’ ‘irrational,’ ‘passionate,’ ‘starkly,’ ‘cool,’ ‘inflamed,’ etc. These adjectives are insinuating in a number of senses; above all, because they at once take on the burden of an exegesis that is nowhere provided and in doing so misrepresent everything specific to psychoanalysis. Strictly speaking, that is, according to minimal canons of scholarly accuracy, the unconscious is not a ‘forbidden’ zone; it is constituted by ‘repression,’ which is not simply that of an authoritative external 14 prohibition, but of an internal operation that enjoins the reappearance of avatars of the repressed. The putative ‘irrationality’ of the unconscious is what psychoanalysis precisely contravenes: the unconscious has a rationality, only not one you and your ego can accept, and it is the theory of psychoanalysis that attempts to reconstruct this rationality. The bourgeois ego is, psychoanalysis insists, neither cool nor autonomous. On the contrary, to have an ego is to suffer, at the very least, irresolvable anxiety. Moreover, the unconscious really cannot be said to be ‘colonized’ in the same sense as one speaks of European colonisation unless one is happy playing with false attributions and loose metaphors. What is here imputed to psychoanalysis would work far better as a description of the Romantic unconscious, that of the German and English writers of the late 18 th and early 19th centuries, whose ideas really are contemporaneous with an exacerbation of colonial routines, and who were often really — yes, really — connected with expansionist colonial enterprises (take the Humboldt brothers, for example). Indeed, as Peter Sloterdijk notes of the peculiarities of the Freudian unconscious: ‘no longer did it designate a reservoir of dark, integrating forces, a nature capable of healing and generating images, situated upstream of consciousness; nor did it designate an underground comprised of blindly selfaffirming currents of will existing beneath the “subject”: it designated a small, inner container that becomes filled through repressions and that is placed under neurogenic pressure by the impulse of the repressed.’12 The Freudian unconscious is actually not constituted on phantasms of an unchanging non-Western primitivism. Moreover, as I’ve been suggesting, there is a lot of work done here to blur psychoanalysis into a generalized slew of colonial psychiatric medicine, often in the same breath with which one is urging careful reclamation. Above all, the marginalisation in this volume of what is actually central to psychoanalysis — the theorisation of the centrality of sex and sexuality in human affairs — is indicative of 12 P. Sloterdijk, Terror from the air, trans. S. Corcoran and A. Patton (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 83. 15 an unremarked epistemic swerve. ‘Trauma’ gets a bigger index listing than ‘sexuality,’ and the latter appears mainly in the context of a discussion of ‘fetishism’ and a handful of proper names. There is no index listing for either ‘sex’ or ‘love’; three small entries for ‘repetition’; none for ‘death drive,’ and so on. There is little or no sense of just how crucial sexuality is for pretty much everybody, let alone for Freud or, for that matter, somebody like Fanon. This collection therefore utterly lacks the sort of analysis that Matthieu Renault has recently given, in which ‘Fanon’s theory of violence is at the same time an erotics of liberation. The Martinican psychiatrist adopts an economic point of view on violence, not in the sense of Marx and Engels, but rather in the sense of Freud.’13 But it also lacks any account of such recent strikes against colonial pieties as the brilliant work by the indigenous Australian artist Richard Bell, perhaps most famous for ‘Bell’s Theorem,’ i.e., ‘Aboriginal art — it’s a white thing.’ In the video piece ‘Scratch an Aussie’ (2008), Bell, dressed as Freud in a heavy grey suit, listens to young, bronzed, blonde white Australians in gold bikinis and speedos prattle on while they lie on a reconstruction of the famous couch. Desexualization comes at a cost. Without an adequate attention to sexuality, any talk about psychoanalysis threatens to wander off-topic. Hence the volume is strewn with confusing sentences of the type ‘Psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the earlier part of the last century worked within a model that assumed the ascendancy of white civilization, progress, and the Enlightenment’ (81) or ‘Freud’s conversations and letter exchanges with Bruno Goetz…, Romain Rolland, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Bengali linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji confirm his lack of interest in, if not outright denigration of, Indian culture’ (107). Really? Respectful, long-term exchanges in which people are trying each other’s otherness seriously? Of course, psychoanalysts would agree that a large dollop of unconscious sexual aggressivity inevitably accompanies such seriousness, but you’d probably already have to have absorbed psychoanalytic principles (‘outright’?) in order to say so. Yet when it M. Renault, ‘“Corps à corps”: Frantz Fanon’s Erotics of National Liberation,’ Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2011), p. 52. 13 16 comes to actually describing properly psychoanalytic practices, the very same writers often prove themselves sensitive and powerful exegetes of the (desexualized) ambiguities. So this volume — so interesting in so many ways, so full of vital research and reclaimed evidence — nonetheless is compromised by its resistance to the specificity of psychoanalysis, by its program of fudging psychoanalysis into psychiatry more generally, and to its grand, self-aggrandizing postcolonial claims. Against such a reduction, as critics such as Fanon, Bhabha, Said, Nandy, Rose, etc., have all emphasized in their own ambivalent ways, psychoanalysis examines the distortions of identification and projection, giving to this examination an unprecedented attentiveness and inventiveness (it is surely a mere oversight that the index for this book doesn’t have a listing for ‘Said’ or ‘Rose’?). In the process, the ideal of truth as adequation is exposed as a ruse of power. As Said writes in Beginnings, ‘the patient’s affirmation or denial of the analyst’s hypotheses is a sign only of unconscious pressure on the patient, not of the analyst’s perspicacity.’ 14 And pace garden-variety Foucauldianism (not Foucault himself), psychoanalysis does not simply propose or conform to ‘the repressive hypothesis’ or to a generalised capture of sexuality by speech (Derrida has dedicated some very interesting texts to this issue).15 On the contrary, psychoanalysis is a practice dedicated to evading such powers, if in a complex and paradoxical way. It is a ‘science’ of listening, as much as an affirmation of speaking. That is, it tries to affirm the speech of the excluded, unacknowledged, and impotent in order to claim that one must listen closer to what is being said, without thinking one has the slightest idea of what one is listening to, or of thinking that one can act in any particular way on that basis. For the listener, the ‘analyst,’ the challenge is to shut up and stop working. For the speaker, the ‘analysand,’ the challenge is to say anything, anything whatsoever. In this, dichotomies are dissolved in favour of a radical materialist explanation of 14 E. Said, Beginnings (London: Granta, 1997 [1975]), p. 65. See J. Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. P. Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 15 17 ontogenesis. One can see this here: even if psychoanalysis is often reduced or misunderstood, it is quite clear to many of the volume’s contributors that, to the extent the figures they examine were truly touched by psychoanalytic thinking, their theories and practices became that much more attentive, as they became that much more dangerous, susceptible to colonialising reuptake. Postcolonialism is a ‘counterdiscipline’ in Vincent Leitch’s sense, one ‘constructed self-consciously against the oversights, blindspots, or ingrained prejudices of the modern disciplines.’16 This very constitution can induce, as in the collection at question here, a peculiar inversion: the constitutive criticality of the program renders it both blind and uncritical at the moment it thinks itself incisive and insightful, while simultaneously presenting extraordinary work whose own implications it cannot always read. One could even suggest that this is constitutive of postcolonial studies: it is a university discourse that purports to have a political motivation, import and aims. As such, it cannot help falsifying the very phenomena it simultaneously brings to light, and doing so according to state accountancy practices of knowledge-power that misrepresent their own operations. In Niklas Luhmann’s words: ‘We know: there is talk about exploitation, or about social suppression, or about, marginalidad, about an increase of the contradiction between center and periphery. But all these are theories that are still governed by the desire for all-inclusion and therefore are looking for addressees to blame.’17 Luhmann’s point is not simply an amoral one, however; what he is pointing out is that such sorts of theoretical operations, perhaps characteristic of a certain dominant stratum in postcolonial studies and in evidence here, can only make their judgements on the basis of disavowed colonial assumptions of their own. De te fabula narratur! as the words of the fable have it. Why not turn this around and ask not how psychoanalysis appears to contemporary postcolonial studies, but how postcolonial studies might look from the point of 16 17 V. Leitch, Theory Matters (London & New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 169. N. Luhmann, ‘Beyond Barbarism,’ Soziale Systeme, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2008), p. 44. 18 psychoanalysis? This volume at least conforms to what Lacan denominated ‘university discourse.’ For the Lacan of the late 1960s, there are four discourses — that is, elementary forms of social bond — whose structure was of key interest to psychoanalysis.18 These discourses are those of the master, the hysteric, the university and psychoanalysis. What defines university discourse is not just that it’s produced in the locale of the university, but that, from the ideological standpoint of ‘knowledge,’ it treats its topics as if they were inherently double, at once objects of desire and abhorrence, reclamation and critique. In doing so, university discourse transforms its subject-matter into knowledge-units, denying their division by denying that it’s denying the division. To this extent, it becomes the double and disavowed agent of the master’s discourse. So through the recurrent rhetoric of defying those, like ‘Freud himself,’ ‘who sought a sovereign referent of psychoanalysis’ (262) we hear here, among the important evidentiary work and the surprising insights, the sporadic barks of the master’s incomprehensible voice. 18 J. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. R. Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007). For further commentary and explication, see also J. Clemens & R. Grigg (eds.), Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).