Identity Formation at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century: Intersubjectivity, Art, and Medicine in Siri Hustvedt’s Works Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades eines Dr. phil., vorgelegt dem Fachbereich FB 05 – Philosophie und Philologie, Department of English and Linguistics der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz von Christine Marks aus Essen Mainz 2006 Referent: Korreferentin: Tag der Prüfung: 9. 9. 2010 For my parents Contents 1 Introduction...................................................................................................1 2 Philosophies of Intersubjectivity ...............................................................21 2.1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Concept of Self-Consciousness: Between Domination and Mutuality.............24 2.2 Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue: I-It and I-You Relations .................................................................31 2.3 M. M. Bakhtin’s Dialogical Principle ............................................36 2.4 Intersubjective Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty................................................................................40 2.4.1 Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation: Monadic Selves and Intersubjective Community ............................................................41 2.4.2 Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Embodied Intersubjectivity..............47 3 Seeing on the Threshold: Self-Other Relations, Vision, and Visual Art in Siri Hustvedt’s Works............................................................................54 3.1 The Self as a Hole in Vision: Subjectivity and the Gaze of the Other.....................................................................................61 3.1.1 Jacques Lacan: The Specular Subject ............................................62 3.1.2 Jean-Paul Sartre’s Theory of Vision and Subjectivity ...................66 3.1.3 M. M. Bakhtin: Vision and Consummation ...................................72 3.1.4 Alienation and Photographic Misrepresentation in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold and Other Works ...................................75 3.2 Moving toward the Other: Intersubjective Modes of Vision .........91 3.2.1 Voyeuristic Tendencies in Siri Hustvedt’s Writing: The Pleasure of the Look ...............................................................98 3.2.2 Painting as a Medium of Dialogue in Siri Hustvedt’s Intersubjective Vision of Art........................................................102 4 Identity and the Boundaries of the Body: Hysteria and Anorexia Nervosa in Siri Hustvedt’s Writing.........................................................116 4.1 Boundaries of the Body................................................................122 4.2 The Self as a Reflection of the Other’s Desire: Hysteria .............126 4.3 Closing the Self Down: The Anorexic Struggle against the Open Body..............................................................................136 5 When the Other Goes Missing: Loss and Grief in Siri Hustvedt’s Writing....................................................................................154 5.1 Relational Psychoanalysis: Attachment and Loss........................156 5.1.1 Jessica Benjamin’s Theory of Intersubjective Psychoanalysis ....157 5.1.2 D. W. Winnicott: Holding, Mirroring, and the False Self .......... 160 5.1.3 John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory .............................................164 5.1.4 Siri Hustvedt’s Application of Relational Psychoanalysis...........167 5.2 Loss and Grief in What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American........................................................175 5.2.1 What I Loved: When Death Parts Self and Other.........................177 5.2.2 The Sorrows of an American: Talking to Ghosts ........................ 183 6 Intersubjective Identity, Mirror Neurons, and the Arts: Toward a Collaboration of Science and Literature...............................188 Works Cited .....................................................................................................196 1 Introduction In their introduction to The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty- First Century (2009), Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz observe that “Americans in the twenty-first century devote more technology to staying con- nected than any society in history, yet somehow the devices fail us: studies show that we feel increasingly alone. Our lives are spent in a tug-of-war between con- flicting desires—we want to stay connected, and we want to be free” (1). In an era of increased tension between ideals of connectedness and independence, the work of American author Siri Hustvedt exhibits the inevitable interrelatedness of the human experience while advocating self-other relations based on dialogical in- tersubjectivity. Hustvedt’s work stands as a defense of mutuality and personal in- terconnections in a culture that thrives on appearances, technological advance- ment, and consumer objects, a culture that fosters “the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren’t a part of us anymore but are turned into things” (Hustvedt, Loved 346). In her writing, Hustvedt illustrates the fatal implications of this tendency toward objectification as well as the redeeming moments of human connection and affirmation. The tensions between her charac- ters are indicative of the conflictive state of identity conceptions in contemporary Western culture. While the ideal of personal autonomy has lost its ground in a va- riety of discursive fields that have promoted a reorientation toward relational iden- tity concepts (psychoanalysis, feminist scholarship, autobiography studies, among others), the specter of the independent Cartesian self still haunts American society, which has always cherished the ideal of unbound individuality and independence. In the Cartesian tradition, human identity relies on the dichotomy of self and other, on the partition between inside and outside. The very definition of iden- tity, in the sense of a distinct, single self, is grounded in the exclusion of otherness and difference. Dichotomies, however, are subject to deconstruction, and partitions are rarely as impermeable as envisioned in their ideal form.!Although this defini- tion of identity presupposes distinct boundaries vital to the formation of an intact subjectivity, human experience is, as many critics have noted, full of moments of ! Marks!2! indecisiveness during which identity borders are disrupted. Most prominently, Freudian psychoanalysis has unveiled the split between the conscious and the un- conscious, leaving the self torn in a struggle between irrational drives and defen- sive mechanisms of repression. Moreover, contemporary theories have focused on the breaking down of rigid boundaries and the deconstruction of binary distinc- tions, such as inside-outside, self-other, presence-absence, prevalent in the dualis- tic logic of modern Western philosophy. Deconstructionists, psychoanalytic liter- ary critics, and feminist scholars have challenged, from their respective perspec- tives, traditional Western conceptions of an autonomous subject. Today, the Cartesian ideal of a self that is pure and autonomous, safely de- tached both from the body it inhabits and from other selves, has been shaken to the core. Through the cracks in the Cartesian shell, from the very core of the self, emerges the other. Rather than stressing individual power and independence, con- temporary approaches in various disciplines outline an image of identity as rela- tional, focusing on the interdependencies that shape identity and the physical con- nectedness between self and world. Models of relational identity envision self and other as interwoven in a web of mutually constructive relationships. The move away from autonomy towards relationality was initiated in the field of psychoanalysis. In the 1940s and 1950s, object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott shifted the focus in psy- choanalysis from the investigation of inner drives to the child’s relation to his or her1 environment, to the external and internal objects shaping her development. John Bowlby’s attachment theory further heightened the awareness of the infant’s primary need to relate to other people. The increased interest in the child’s rela- tions with others coincided with a centering on the mother-child relationship as the principal object of research. Postmodernist thought has contributed to redefinitions of selfhood as a fluid and flexible entity mediated through continuous interaction with the envi- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 For readability’s sake, I will hereafter switch between “his” and “her,” “he” and “she,” etc., kindly asking the reader to imagine that whenever I refer to the self or the other or the child or other non-gendered concepts, both genders are included in either the masculine or the feminine form. ! Marks!3! ronment, undermining established conceptions of atomistic autonomy and self- coincidence. As Susan Stanford Friedman underlines in her definition of relational identity, it “depends upon a point of reference; as that point moves nomadically, so do the contours of identity” (Mappings 22). According to Friedman, “structures of power” (Mappings 22), especially those delineating identity borders with regard to gender and race, determine the shifting nature of the self, and the contours of the self are shaped by interpersonal relations. The deconstruction of the