Introduction 1 Freud's Melancholic Subject
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Notes Introduction 1. Juliana Schiesari quotes first from a then unpublished lecture by Derrida, ‘The Politics of Friendship’ (in October 1988 at Cornell University) and then from Julia Kristeva, 1989, pp. 5–6. 2. Alessia Ricciardi describes the transition from loss to lack in Freudian theory, but also at the threshold to Lacan’s reading of Freud (2003, pp. 17–21). 3. Cf. ‘Signature Event Context’: ‘All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically deter- mined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modifica- tion of presence; it is a break in presence, “death”, or the possibility of the “death” of the addressee, inscribed in the structure of the mark … What holds for the addressee holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or the pro- ducer’ (1982d, pp. 315–16). Derrida attempted here to show that the absence typical of writing is actually constitutive of language as such. 4. Cf. Butler: ‘[G]ender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition’ (1999, p. 80). 5. Cf. Kristeva: ‘The child king becomes irredeemably sad before uttering his first words; this is because he has been irrevocably, desperately separated from the mother, a loss that causes him to try to find her again, along with other objects of love, first in the imagination then in words’ (1989, p. 6). 6. Similarly, sexual repression appeared at first as a condition peculiar to hys- teria and only later as the condition of mature humanity in general. In ‘On Narcissism’ (first published in 1914), Freud explained that dementia praecox and paranoia could throw light on the psychology of the ego: ‘Once more, in order to arrive at an understanding of what seems so simple in normal phe- nomena, we shall have to turn to the field of pathology with its distortions and exaggerations’ (1914b, vol. 14, p. 82). 1 Freud’s Melancholic Subject 1. In ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), Freud emphasised that the ideal outcome of the Oedipal complex is its complete destruction, but he still postulated a latency period which follows that destruction and which interrupts the child’s sexual development (vol. 19, p. 177). In ‘Two Encyclopaedia Articles: “Psycho-Analysis”’ (1923c), too, Freud described the latency period which separates the sexual desires of the child (aged two to five years) from those of the adolescent. The Oedipal phase is said to deter- mine the direction of the later sexual period in puberty (vol. 18, p. 246). 2. According to Grahame Clarke the systematic investigation of Dordogne caves began in 1863 (1980, p. 16). The latter half of the nineteenth century 197 198 Notes witnessed many archaeological discoveries. Schliemann’s digging took place in eight different phases between 1870 and 1890 (Easton, 1992, p. 51 and Cobet, 1992, p. 122). Between 1875 and 1880 the excavation of Olympia occurred (Kenyon, 1969, p. 540). 3. In the record of Freud’s library (Davies and Fichtner, 2006), 47 books are listed under the keyword ‘archaeology’ alone. Many more are listed under ‘ancient world’ and related entries. 4. In the Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII, Freud maps out the first topol- ogy. He presents a diagram that has the system of perception at one end and the motor system at the other end. In between, mnemic traces, the unconscious and the pre-conscious have their places. Freud himself identi- fies his model as primarily temporal: ‘Strictly speaking, there is no need for the hypothesis that the psychical systems are actually arranged in a spatial order. It would be sufficient if a fixed order were established by the fact that in a given psychical process the excitation passes through the systems in a particular temporal sequence’ (1900b, 5: 537). 5. This position of complete preservation was not always maintained by Freud. Bowlby points out that the Oedipus complex is one instance in which Freud postulated in 1924 not repression and preservation but a complete ‘destruc- tion’. A year later, in 1925, Freud claimed that the complex was ‘smashed to pieces … by the shock of threatened castration’ so that it ‘exists no longer, even in the unconscious’ (qtd. in Bowlby, 2007, p. 155). 6. Freud’s early text ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, which dates from 1895 and remained unpublished until 1950, testifies to Freud’s physiological interest. The emphasis on repetition, which this essay reflects, and which is surely a legacy of scientists like Forel, Hering and Semon, resurfaces in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920). Freud also reviewed Auguste Forel’s book Der Hypnotismus, seine Bedeutung und seine Handhabung (1889). 7. Freud’s edition of Forel’s lecture Das Gedächtniss und seine Abnormitäten (1885) is marked with a green pencil. The archivist of the Freud Museum, J. Keith Davies, assured me that Freud frequently used coloured pencils. The Hering lecture remained unmarked, but Freud took the trouble to have it bound together with other offprints of short lectures in a volume with the spine title ‘Vortraege I’. He owned Semon’s book in the revised edition of 1911. This book contains no markings but Freud might have taken other kinds of notes that were subsequently discarded. 8. The ‘imagination’ or ‘phantasy’ is one of three inner senses Burton distin- guishes in the tradition of Aristotle: ‘common sense, phantasy, memory’ (1948, vol. 1, p. 159). 9. Ficino and Burton are two prominent examples of a historical connec- tion between desire and melancholia. Hersant also notes the link between seduction and melancholia in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s famous picture Melancholie (1528), which takes up Dürer’s celebrated image of the con- templating melancholic angel surrounded by astrological and geometrical symbols (Melencolia I). Cranach’s lady is clothed in red and is, in contrast to Dürer’s asexual allegory of melancholia, rather coquettish. In contrast to Dürer, Hersant explains, ‘Cranach has allegorized carnal desire’ (2005/2006b, p. 111). Hersant advances a compelling reading of this picture: the frivolous lady in the red dress is not turned into a passive object by our attention Notes 199 and desire; rather, she appropriates those that are careless enough to look at her for too long by means of her glance. After all, and here Hersant evi- dently refers to Ficino, the enchantment of the spectator is caused through a vapour – part of the spirit, which connects mind and body – which is sent out through the opened eyes of the observed and enters the heart of the unguarded onlooker (2005/2006b, p. 114). 10. According to Derrida, ‘the sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, “thing” here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence … The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence’ (1982a, p. 9). In his work, Derrida attempted to deconstruct this idea of representation by suggesting that language func- tions on the basis of ‘an irreparable loss of presence’ (1982a, p. 19). It is then impossible to reach beyond the sign to a pure referent. 2 Primitivism and Meaning in Heart of Darkness 1. The evolution of culture was also questioned from a non-polygenist angle as early as the 1890s. Torgovnick points out that Franz Boas and others argued from a cultural relativistic and anti-evolutionist stance ‘for the diversity and complexity of primitive social and mental formations’ (1990, p. 19). Then again, there were Darwinists like Huxley who believed that humanity constituted a single species but who were not interested in social evolution: ‘For Huxley, eth- nology is not primarily about customs and culture but about the physical and mental characteristics of the human races’ (Brantlinger, 2003, p. 171). 2. ‘Aryan’ is a notoriously difficult term. Despite its later use by the Nazis it was not always used for the construction of a race. It was first introduced by philologists to denote those who partake in the body of Indo-European languages. 3. I borrow this very suitable expression from Griffith (1995, pp. 109–10), who in his turn took it from Brook Thomas. The German expression Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen is often ascribed to Ernst Bloch. 4. Cf. the entry on Wallace in the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad (2000, p. 442). Wallace developed and published the theory of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. 5. Arthur O. Lovejoy warned readers of Rousseau as early as 1923 against read- ing Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality as ‘a glorification of the state of nature’ (p. 165). He described the assumption ‘that its influence tended wholly or chiefly to promote “primitivism”’ as ‘one of the most persistent of histori- cal errors’ (1923, p. 165). Nonetheless, Lovejoy identifies the origins of this historical error in Rousseau’s description of physical man: ‘It is when rhap- sodizing over the physical superiority of early man that Rousseau falls into the often-quoted language which probably has done most to give hasty read- ers the impression that he identifies the state of nature with the ideal state’ (1923, p. 170). 6. According to Karl, Conrad had assimilated ‘eighteenth- and nineteenth- century philosophy, Rousseau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche’ (1979, p. 116). Karl also claimed that Conrad was a Hegelian in as much as he was ‘a dialectician, never an absolutist’ (1979, note on p. 568). 200 Notes 7. Torgovnick also stresses the role of ‘physicality’ in constructions of the primitive (cf. 1990, pp. 227–43). 8. Cf. Bowlby’s detailed discussion of ‘domestication’ in Feminism Beside Itself, ed.