Unconscious minions

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Notes

1. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Robert Hurley et al (trans), New York: Viking Press, 1977.

2. The extraordinary polemics around this issue remain volatile today. See, for evidence of the extreme affects the dispute raises, Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Against Literary Darwinism’, Critical Inquiry 37(2), 2011, pp 315–347, and the dossier of responses from Paul Bloom, Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Vanessa L Ryan, G Gabrielle Starr, Blakey Vermeule, and Kramnick himself, again, in Critical Inquiry 38(2), 2012, pp 388–460.

3. See, for example, Heather A Berlin, and Christof Koch, ‘Neuroscience Meets Psychoanalysis’, Scientific American Mind, April/May 2009, pp 16–19.

4. Slavoj Žižek is of course the critic who has most enthusiastically engaged with Donald Rumsfeld's notorious speculations from March 2003, about the relationship between the ‘known’ and ‘unknown’. See, inter alia, Žižek's various essays collected at the online site of Lacanian Ink, including ‘What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows about Abu Ghraib’, 21 May 2004, http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm (accessed 10 April 2012).

5. This feature has of course a peculiar biological precondition: the extraordinarily extended period of neotenia in human beings, which Lacan himself continually stressed under the rubric of ‘a veritable specific prematurity of birth’, Écrits, Bruce Fink (trans), New York: Norton, 2006, p 78. This is confirmed, again, by recent neuroscientific studies: ‘Brain regions that grow the most outside the womb are the same areas that expanded the most during evolution from monkeys to humans, a new study says. As the human brain matures, it expands in a “strikingly nonuniform” fashion, according to researchers who compared MRI scans of 12 infant brains with scans of 12 young adult brains. The research revealed that brain regions involved in higher cognitive and executive processes—such as language and reasoning—grow about twice as much as regions associated with basic senses such as vision and hearing, said study leader Jason Hill, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “The parts of the [brain] that have grown the most to make us uniquely humans are the same regions that tend to grow the most postnatally”, Hill said’ (John Roach, ‘Human Brains “Evolve”, Become Less Monkey-Like with Age’, National Geographic Daily News, 12 July 2010). What is coded here as ‘strikingly nonuniform’ is nothing other than the consequences of growing up in human environments, that is, culture.

6. For a bracing recent interpretation of just how violently this otherness is still maintained, see Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminals de l'Europe démocratique, Paris: Verdier, 2003.

7. Jacqueline Rose, The Jacqueline Rose Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p 86. See also Dennis B Klein, Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

8. See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII (1937–1939), James Strachey (trans), London: Hogarth Press, 1964.

9. Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed), Bruce Fink (trans with notes), New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, p 109.

10. If the research on this text is now enormous, there are a number of pertinent works in this context: see Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European, London: Verso, 2004, as well as the important tract by Yosef Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.

11. On precisely this point, see Rex Butler's stunning review essay on the indigenous Australian artist Richard Bell, ‘Hanging on the Telephone’, http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/positivity15.php (accessed 8 January 2012). One might in fact be surprised by the extent and intensity of responses to Freud in an Australian art context: take also the painting Interpretation of Dreams (2009) by Rod Moss, which depicts Freud lying on a couch while an Arrernte elder sits behind him, listening. I would like to thank Astarte Rowe for bringing this image to my attention.

12. I was slightly surprised, then, and especially given the medical historian background of many of the contributors, to find that there was no account of the role that cocaine plays in the development of early psychoanalysis, also at the origins of modern industrial pharmacology, and dependent upon colonial exploitation of regional botany. I have attempted to deal with this phenomenon myself in ‘The Jew's Two Noses: Freud, Cocaine, Addiction’, The UTS Review 7(2), 2001, pp 144–162. I read such absences here as a symptom that it is not, strictly speaking, psychoanalysis that this book is really interested in.

13. In fact, the operation of synecdochal misprision is at work throughout the essays here, that is, the taking of a part for the whole, and a concomitant erasure of the opacities, failures, stupidities, backsliding, revisionism, etc., of Freud himself. For example, although it is indeed a received notion that with psychoanalysis there is ‘the essential psychoanalytic location of the psychic within the individual rather than the collectivity’ (p 194), such statements are immediately falsified by such key Freudian propositions as ‘the antithesis between individual or mass psychology, which at first glance may seem to us very important, loses a great deal of its sharpness’ (Mass Psychology and Other Writings, Jim Underwood (trans), London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2004, p 17).

14. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, Steve Corcoran and Amy Patton (trans), Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009, p 83.

15. Matthieu Renault, ‘“Corps à corps”: Frantz Fanon's Erotics of National Liberation’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19(1), 2011, p 52.

16. Edward Said, Beginnings, London: Granta, 1997 [1975], p 65.

17. See Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Peggy Kamuf et al (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

18. Vincent Leitch, Theory Matters, London: Routledge, 2003, p 169.

19. Niklas Luhmann, ‘Beyond Barbarism’, Soziale Systeme 14(1), 2008, p 44.

20. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Russell Grigg (trans), New York: Norton, 2007. For further commentary and explication, see also Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (eds), Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.