The Sel! and Its Pleasures Carolyn J. Dean THE SELF AND ITS PLEASURES Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Sub;ect Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Copyright © 1992 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1992 by Cornell University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dean, Carolyn J. (Carolyn Janice), 1960– The self and its pleasures / Carolyn J. Dean. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-2660-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8014-9954-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Self—History—20th century. 2. Self (Philosophy)—History— 20th century. 3. Masochism—History. 4. Criminal psychology—History. 5. Lacan, Jacques, 1901– . 6. Bataille, Georges, 1897–1962. 7. France— Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title. BF697.D363 1992 155.2'0944'0904—dc20 92-52748 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 3050-2213d-1pass-r01.indd 1 22-03-2016 10:36:37 To my parents Harriet Katzman Dean Albert Robert Dean Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction I PART ONE Psychoanalysis and the Self II lo The Legal Status of the Irrational 17 2. Gender Complexes 5 8 3. Sight Unseen IReading the Unconsciousl 98 PART TWO Sade's Selflessness 123 4. The Virtue of Crime 127 5. The Pleasure of Pain 170 PART THREE Headlessness 201 6. Writing and Crime 205 7. Returning to the Scene of the Crime 221 Conclusion 246 Selected Bibliography 253 Index 265 [vii] Acknowledgments 1 thank the University of California at Berkeley and the An­ drew W. Mellon Foundation for providing the funds and leave time necessary to undertake the writing and research of this book. 1 am especially grateful to Mary Gluck, David Joravsky, and Sarah Maza, who graciously read various portions of the manu­ script. 1 am also indebted to Mark Poster's criticism and to Michael Roth, whose close reading of the final draft helped me clarify and sharpen my argumento 1 owe my most profound intellectual debts to Denis Hollier, Lynn Hunt, and Martin Jay, without whose encouragement, crit­ icism, and commitment this book might never have taken the direction it did. Martin Jay guided and commented on this work at every stage of its unfolding, and it is to him that 1 owe the deepest gratitude. John Ackerman, Judith Bailey, and the editorial staff at Cornell University Press helped prepare the final manuscript and offered invaluable assistance. Gretchen Schultz and Brigitte Mahuzier ad­ vised me on translations and helped me relax. For everything else, 1 thank my colleagues and friends Elizabeth Barnes, Laird Boswell, Julie Greenberg, Laura Hein, Walter Hixson, James Beale, Michael Sherry, Jennifer Terry, and Sharon Ullman. And a special thank you to Michael Polignano, Laurie Bernstein, Robert We inberg, and Nicole Albert. One portion of this book has appeared in differentform in Repre­ sentations 13 (Winter 1986). c. J. D. [ixl The Sel! and Its Pleasures Introduction In 1966 the historian Michel Foucault declared that the con­ cept of man I/would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."l Foucault's dramatic declaration represented the culmination of nearly a century of philosophical and aesthetic commentary that questioned whether "man" was in fact a unitary, transcendental, rational, knowing subject. Indeed, French modem­ ists, existentialists, phenomenologists, structuralists, and now poststructuralists have I/decentered" the seli in radically different ways since the late nineteenth century. They have developed the idea that the seli no longer masters the world through its reason but is mired in and constituted by culture. This book is about the development of one contemporary forro of seli-I/dissolution," whose different and most recent manifestations have often been terroed structuralist or poststructuralist. But it is aboye all an at­ tempt to account for the idea of a decentered seli as it has been articulated primarily in the works of two French thinkers who were friends as well as contemporaries: Georges Bataille (1897- 1962) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). 1 use their work to frame three interrelated questions: Why, quite simply, has France been the home of the most influential theories of seli-dissolution? How, then, is the decentered seli historically and culturally specific? And how do we account for rather than just describe what Judith Butler has called the I/regulatory fictions" that constitute it?2 Why, first of all, Bataille and Lacan? Intellectual historians and 1 Michel Foucault, Th e Order af Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 387. 2Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion af Identity (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), p. 33. [rl [2] The Self and Its Pleasures others usually place them in differentcategor ies. Scholars consider Lacan a structuralist (or a poststructuralist in disguise). No one calls Bataille a structuralist, sine e he never implicitly or explicitly used Saussurian linguistics to ground his thought. Instead, Jürgen Habermas places him first in a line that leads from "Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Oerrida/'3 implying that Bataille is closest to poststructuralist thinkers. There have in fact been sever­ al recent attempts to see Bataille as a forerunner of poststruc­ turalism, and one critic claims that Bataille's work constitutes an "urtext of deconstruction."4 This effort to understand their work by reference to theories of the decentered subject helps us place Bataille and Lacan in the history of ideas. It tells us to whom they demonstrated intellectual affinities or allegiances, and it accounts for the significance of their contributions to the development of structuralist psychoanalysis or poststructuralist literary theory. But while it may be true, for example, that Lacan was Foucault's structuralist contemporary (in­ sofar as the early Foucault was seen as a structuralist), and Bataille his proto-poststructuralist predecessor, this kind of assertion still begs the question of the historical meaning and relevance of struc­ turalism and poststructuralism (not to mention the difficulty of pinning down Foucault). 1 have chosen Bataille and Lacan because they are each slippery enough to defy easy categorization and yet important enough in the history of French (and We stern) theories of the self to be considered predecessors, founders, or exemplars of particular schools of thought. So, what if we were to conceive their formulations of the self as local, historical practices rather than in terms of broad, shifting paradigms of subjectivity? 3 Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity-An Incomplete Project," in Hal Foster, ed., Th e Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture ¡Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 14. 4 Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge ¡Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. xiii. Other attempts are Michele Richman, "Introduction to the College de So­ ciologie: Post-structuralism before Its Time?" Stanford French Review 12 ¡Spring 1988), 79-95; Jean-Michel Heimonet, Politiques de l'écriture: Bataille/Derrida: Le Sens du sacré dans la pensée fram;aise du surréalisme a nos jours ¡Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard ¡Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 3, 9-58. Pefanis warns us to resist calling Bataille a poststructuralist or postmodernist "in order to avoid the easy retrospective projection of Bataille into a seminal prehistory of these two categories" ¡p. 40). Nevertheless, he proceeds to analyze Bataille more or les s in those terms. Introduction [31 In this book I seek to account for Bataille's and Lacan's formula­ tion of decentered subjectivity as part of a cultural crisis in inter­ war France in which aH the criteria defining what makes a self and what gives it legitimacy were perceived as having dissolved. In the chapters that foHow, I look at the relationship between this self and changing constructions of the other in order to account for what makes the French interwar critiques of the subject-in particular the works of Bataille and Lacan-culturally specific. More pre­ cisely, I try to document the process through which, in France, all psychoanalytic and literary attempts to rescue the self after the Great War led instead to its dissolution, and all attempts to sta­ bilize the self in new theoretical terms reiterated its instability. This approach requires treating ideas as historical practices. Ye t what it means to do so is far from clear. Other scholars have writ­ ten the history of how the decentered self emerged prior to struc­ turalism and poststructuralism in terms of a complex meshing of intellectual influences facilitated by cultural, spiritual crises. Most trace decentering to a general philosophical recognition of the other.5 Beginning in the nineteenth century, philosophers and members of literary movements in particular effected a shift away from a rational or empirical to what might be called an intuitive model of the sources of subjectivity: from seeing as a primary mode of cognition to an emphasis on being which rejects the sup­ posed neutrality or passivity of the observer. Abandoning the pose of the neutral recorder of experience, phi­ losophers, including Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson, engaged in a common effort to save the self from a world they perceived as 5Jürgen Habermas, Th e Philosophical DiscoUlse ofModemity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987)¡ Michael Theunissen, Th e Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber (Cambridge: MlT Press, 1984), p.