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Redemptive Criticism: Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, and Democratic Culture

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Redemptive Criticism: Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, and Democratic Culture REDEMPTIVE CRITICISM: SIGMUND FREUD, WALTER BENJAMIN, STANLEY CAVELL, AND DEMOCRATIC CULTURE By Lara K. Giordano Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy May, 2015 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Gregg M. Horowitz, Ph.D. José Medina, Ph.D. Lisa Guenther, Ph.D. Rebecca Comay, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without the financial and academic support of the Vanderbilt Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities nor without the intellectual and moral support of Michael Alijewicz, Elizabeth Barnett, Cory Duclos, Cari Hovanec, Paddy McQueen, Rosie Seagraves, and Jen Vogt, the wonderful Fellows with whom I spent the 2012-2013 academic year. Many thanks to Dr. Lisa Guenther and Dr. José Medina, who served on my dissertation committee and from whose experience and research I have benefitted so much, as well as to my outside reader, Dr. Rebecca Comay. I’m also grateful to my friends and colleagues for the patience and enthusiasm that they brought to the many hours of conversation through which I found my way through this project. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the depth of my gratitude to Dr. Gregg Horowitz, my dissertation chair. A more supportive, generous, and inspiring mentor is, to me, unimaginable. ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Works by Benjamin AP Arcades Project OGT Origin of German Tragic Drama SW1 Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926 SW2 Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1930 SW3 Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1931-1937 SW4 Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 Works by Cavell CR Claim of Reason CT Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman MWMW Must We Mean What We Say? PH Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage PP Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises QO In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism WV The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film Works by Freud CD Civilization and its Discontents FI Future of an Illusion GP Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego TT Totem and Taboo Other Works SC Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………...ii ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………………………iii Chapters I. Introduction: Toward the Concept of a Redemptive Form of Critique……….1 II. The Myth of the Primal Horde and the Fate of Post-Revolutionary Politics: Freud’s Critical Redemption of Anthropology……………………………....23 Negotiating Patriarchy and the Authority of Patriarchal Myth: Pateman on the Primal Scene……………………………………………33 The Conservative-Revolutionary Powers of Myth-Making: Hunt’s Family Romance…………………………………………………54 The Myth of the Primal Horde: Freud’s Natural History of Secularism………………………………......72 At the Limits of Psychoanalysis as Social-Political Theory: The Paradox of Cultural Psychoanalysis…………………………..……...84 III. Seeing Past the Freudian Prohibition on Cultural Psychoanalysis: Benjamin’s “Weak Messianism” & the Critical Redemption of History........96 The State of Emergency……………………………...............................116 Naturgeschichte and the Allegorical Intention………………………....131 Part I: Naturgeschichte in Marx, Lukács, and Benjamin…………...134 Part II: Benjamin’s critical method of allegoresis………………….146 The Limits of “Weak Messianism” for the Purposes of Democratic Theory……………………………………………………………..……160 IV. The Dialectic of Privacy and Publicity in the Writing of Stanley Cavell & the Critical Redemption of the Movies…………………………………………172 Skepticism, Anti-Skepticism, & the Dialectic of Privacy and Publicity Skepticism as fantastic discourse………………………...……………..175 iv Criteria and Convention –or Cavell’s Natural History……………………..193 Secularity & Its Discontents………………………………………………..205 The Power and Limits of Acknowledgment in Cavell’s Anarchic Cinema...........................................................................................................215 Cavell and Benjamin on audience-formation……………………….….. 226 Photogenesis as allegoresis: the cinematic redemption of skepticism.….231 V. Conclusion: Redemptive Criticism and Democratic Institutions……….......243 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………..254 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: TOWARD THE CONCEPT OF A REDEMPTIVE FORM OF CRITIQUE To my knowledge, there is but a single text that brings together the names of Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Stanley Cavell. This essay, entitled “Remains to be Seen,” is written by Cavell himself and he undertakes, in its four pages, a curiously intense yet elliptical engagement with the Walter Benjamin of the Arcades Project on the occasion of that text’s English translation and publication. In this piece, Cavell manages to surpass the indirection that characterizes even his most comprehensive pieces. His citational tendencies—his predilection for the epigrammatic—emerge in full-force, perhaps in homage, perhaps simply aroused by this assignation with the Arcades, the ambition of which was “to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks…its theory intimately related to that of montage.”1 And it is in this mode of abridgement and referentiality that Cavell links his own particular activity of philosophizing to that of Freud and Benjamin. He writes: I should not forbear seeking, or questioning, another of my nows in the antitheological Freud…when early in the Introductory Lectures, Freud confesses: ‘The material for [the] observations [of psychoanalysis] is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant—the dregs of the world of phenomena.’ This picks up Benjamin. ‘Method of this project:…I shall purloin no valuables…But the rags, the refuse— these I will…allow in the only way possible to come into their own: by making use of them.’ Freud’s dregs and Benjamin’s refuse are each interpretable with Wittgenstein’s ordinary; the differences are where I come in.2 1 AP, 458; N1, 10 2 “Remains to be Seen,” 261-2 1 Where Freud, concerned with the suffering of private persons, made the abortive attempts of individual expression (obsessive behaviors, parapraxes, dreams, etc.) the fundamental stuff of psychoanalysis and Benjamin, for his part, found, in the detritus of capitalism, the essential material for his critique of culture, Cavell’s efforts have been largely devoted to the rescue of pieces of intellectual inheritance dismissed by American academe as being below the level of philosophic regard. As he comments of his work in Pitch of Philosophy, “[The essay Must we Mean What We Say?] is explicitly a defense of the work of my teacher Austin against an attack that in effect dismissed that work as unscientific, denied it as a contender in the ranks of philosophy at all. (Since a response to some denial was part of my cue in taking up Thoreau and Emerson, even in thinking about Shakespeare and then about film, there is the sense of a pattern here, perhaps of further interest).”3 Such is the interest of the following pages, which seeks to bring into focus the pattern writ large in the work of Freud, Benjamin, and Cavell. While it was already some months into this project when I encountered Cavell’s telegraphic piece in which he forms, in and under the sign of redemption, an indefinite constellation between his work and that of Benjamin and Freud, the central preoccupation of my research was already, unbeknownst to me, dedicated to the decoding and concretization of this claim that remains, in Cavell’s essay, a mere suggestion, constrained to these eight lines of text. This dissertation offers a sustained investigation of the insight glimpsed in and by Cavell that, between his critical hermeneutics and that of Freud and Benjamin, there is an essential isomorphism and that, further, in his uptake of ordinary language philosophy, 3 Ibid, 9 2 Cavell renders thematic the differences between his two predecessors, Freud the critic of private life and Benjamin the critic of the public. Freud, Benjamin, and Cavell are all, one could say, episodic or occasional thinkers in the sense that their work is always devoted to some particular object or text. This characteristic preoccupation with the particular—with that which defies easy subsumption under and by a ready concept and thus has the potential to contest our concepts as they stand—has left Freud, Benjamin, and Cavell largely unclassifiable in terms of extant philosophical categories.4 While Freud is one of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century and the writings of Benjamin have, in recent years, earned him a small but fervent following, and Cavell, for his part, has had what is undeniably a successful career within academic philosophy, these three remain nonetheless without a proper philosophic home, unassimilated to any particular school of academic thought. The predominant view, within philosophical circles at least, is that there is something deeply unsystematic—philosophically irredeemable—about the work of all three of these thinkers. This dissertation, however, examines this resistance to easy incorporation in and by the discipline as part of the philosophic work that they seek to accomplish to argue that their texts, rather than being failed instances of intelligibility, systematically chart the limits of reason and, in so doing, expose a limit internal to philosophy itself. In other words: Freud, Benjamin, and Cavell undertake philosophy for the
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