SCENES OF POST-WAR FRENCH THOUGHT

Abstract

This essay follows the movements of the word “scene” across post-war French thought. The word appears at pivotal moments in the period: it is at the centre of Laplanche and Pontalis’ development of a concept of fantasy; it allows Jacques Derrida, in his early work, to yolk together heterogeneous registers of his thought; it becomes the focal point of representation, political or otherwise, in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; and it structures Jacques Rancière’s polemics with Althusser and then Auerbach. In tracking the itinerary of the word, I restage some of the fundamental philosophical problems of the period around the structure and origins of representation.

Keywords:

• scene
• Derrida
• philology
• representation
• Rancière
• psychoanalysis

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This essay benefited immensely from the work of two anonymous readers. Many thanks are owed to them for their kind, thoughtful, and incisive feedback.

1 Aristotle 1449a18. For an account of the historical ambiguities of this shift and the way in which skenographia merged with scaena, see Small.

2 One can hear in the word, too, Hélène Cixous notes, “cène” – supper – so that a primal scene might also be heard as a primal devouring (which implicates questions of taste). Cixous, too, puts the word into philosophical play, in two ways which exceed the immediate concerns of this essay: one through the immediacy of theatrical practice; the other through the conceptual reconfiguration of originary scenes. See, in particular, Volleys of Humanity 86–87 and “From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History.” For an illuminating overview of the way in which these two strands fold into one another in the context of Cixous’s work at the Théâtre du Soleil, see Stevens.

3 “Stage,” like étage, just meant a raised area. Unlike étage, however, “stage” was eventually associated, as early as the thirteenth century, with the raised areas on which medieval plays were performed in England.

4 For an influential formulation of this problematic, see Jean Hyppolite, Figures II: 997–1037, 731–58. For comprehensive overviews, see Janicaud; Lawlor, Thinking; Kleinberg; Pettigrew.

5 Lacan, though, consistently avoided the metaphor of the “scene.” In Seminar V, for instance, he prefers to talk of the “scenario” of fantasy (214, 387–88), and in his two “Logics of Fantasy,” Seminars VI and XIV, he systematically avoids invoking the word “scene.” See, for instance, his discussion of fantasy in Seminar VI 151–58. He does not, to my knowledge, reflect on this silence, but one implication of my arguments here is that the word collapses all three registers he distinguishes and it obscures the fundamental distinctions he draws in what he calls, in Seminar XIV, the “grammatical structure” of fantasy (n. pag.; see 16.11.1966).

6 Laplanche and Pontalis 17/1868; translation modified: “[L]e fantasme n’est pas l’objet du désir, il est scène.” Throughout this essay, when I have cited a French text in addition to its translation, I have followed this convention: English/French.

7 For a more developed account of these arguments, see Lawlor, Derrida; Hägglund; Marrati.

8 See, in particular, the final pages of “Genesis and Structure” in Writing and Difference 165–68; the Introduction to the Origin of Geometry 141–55; and the formulation of this problem in Heidegger 108. For a sustained discussion of these problems, see Marrati 114–41.

9 “White Mythology” is the most well-known text, but that text crystallizes earlier reflections in, for example, the introduction to Voice and Phenomenon (37) and his 1964 course on Heidegger (Heidegger 55–56, 189–90).

10 Lacoue-Labarthe is responding, immediately, to Lyotard’s “Beyond Representation” (1974), a preface to the French translation, by Francine Lacoue-Labarthe and Claire Nancy, of Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art. See Lyotard, Textes. Cf. Lyotard’s essay “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène.”

11 Scène 13–14; my translation (throughout).

12 For a brief overview of the word’s itinerary in Rancière’s work, see Deranty; Blouin.

13 See, in particular, “La Scène du texte” (52, 65), revised and translated as “Althusser, Don Quixote, and the Stage of the Text” in The Flesh of Words (133, 142–43).

14 For a more general account of Rancière’s relation to Auerbach, see Parker.

15 This observation is in contrast to Rancière’s own statements about the scenic method. See the interview with Oliver Davis, “On Aisthesis” 203–04; La Méthode de la scène.

16 In The Ignorant Schoolmaster “translation” becomes the form of knowledge that defines “reason between equals” (Rancière, Ignorant Schoolmaster; see ch. 5); in The Emancipated Spectator, it is the paradigm for understanding any possible emancipatory labour of the image.

17 And it is worth recalling, given the context, that Derrida quotes Freud at the moment he affirms the utility of the metaphor of writing: if the metaphor of writing has not yet been followed up, it is because “psycho-analysts are entirely ignorant of the attitude and knowledge with which a philologist would approach such a problem as that presented by dreams” (Derrida, Writing 220).