To read what is not written: from psychoanalysis to rhetoric and back

ABSTRACT

One of the grand narratives of modernity, psychoanalysis can be read as a genre of speculative discourse that, recognizing the force of living speech, places itself in competition with philosophy and rhetoric. Performative through and through, it uncovers the ambiguity of meaning as it flows from speakers to addressees who stand to the former as more than themselves. Given its emphasis on language and the pragmatic contexts in which analytic discourse acts to establish and recreate reality, psychoanalysis bears undeniable affinity to rhetoric and, by extension, communication studies and media studies. This themed issue assembles four essays that explore the productive potentials of psychoanalysis to rhetoric and communication studies, and vice versa. Taken together, they demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic perspectives to rhetorical inquiries, especially when they respond to rhetoric's original vocation as technê and epistêmê.

KEYWORDS:

• Anachronism
• Cartesianism
• psychoanalysis
• repetition
• speech act

He who refused the simulacrum had his love of truth immortalized in a simulacrum.

Pierre Klossowski, Le Bain de Diane ¹

One of the grand narratives of modernity, psychoanalysis can be read as a genre of speculative discourse that fully recognizes the force of speech—prior to and beneath its performative efficacy—in shaping the process and structure of our psyche. Continuing the tradition established by many a doctor of the soul reaching back to medieval times and accented later by Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and others, psychoanalysis was given a distinctly modern formulation by Sigmund Freud in a city whose structure had already begun to invoke melancholy more than glory and splendor. At its basic level, this formulation suggests that, contra Cartesianism or any mirror theory of nature, what we say or think we are saying is not only never really what we take it to mean, but also not fully transparent to the speaker themself, however introspective they try to be. Behind and underneath our thinking and action lies the celebrated Unconscious, an Other within oneself that is more than or other than oneself. It is this it, argues Freud, that persists and insists on speaking, determining sub rosa one's fate, precisely because one does not hear or listen to it, precisely because one speaks it without knowing so, that is, precisely because it lives on as the very survival of what we do or desire. It is with this Other's speech that psychoanalysis works and it works not only for its assertive living on, but also for analysis's very own survival. After all, psychoanalysis begins and ends as a “talking cure,” its being therapeutic not so much because it liberates our ego from incidental misadventures, bad luck, or any volitional weakness, but because it “attends to (therapeuein)” the needs of our full speech, a truthful soliloquy addressed to the Other in me as much as to myself as an Other.

There is no psychoanalysis without psychoanalysts, of whom the Thebans Sophocles and Oedipus rank as high and originary as the Viennese Freud. According to Freud, analysis is essentially interminable, evidenced by his obsession with self-psychoanalysis throughout his lifetime and surely by the recognition he shares with writers that current tragedies may have begun 2,000 years ago by the Aegean Sea. If analysis is indeed interminable, then the Oedipal scenario that determines one's conscious life ought to be considered as one of repetition. Put differently, if the unconscious is to be considered as the analyst's proper working site, then it is because the unconscious returns. And it returns in that it repeats itself, in that it returns as its own commencement. Bringing this idea back into proper analytic contexts, we could say pace Jacques Lacan that the analysand's speech unfailingly circles around certain signifiers they are barred from ever uttering and, consequently, ends up receiving their own messages in inverted form. Herein lies the law of psychoanalytic procedure and the dialogue it incurs: the unconscious obeys (by repeating) the law that it is, provided one recognizes that in this case “the law of repetition is law only as another repetition.”² Psychoanalytically speaking, truth repeats; more than that, what repeats is the truth, which, surviving repetition, necessarily takes the form of error or fiction.

It is this repetition, cutting across repressions and resistances, that makes analytic work truly archaeological and makes psychoanalysis a gay science of memory, archive, and trauma, as well as the buried cracks therein that make our lives both livable and, for not a few, not worth living. And it is also from this repetition that one can glimpse into the promise of psychoanalysis, the possibility of an open future, a time to come (à-venir), whose determination, as Jacques Derrida reminds us,

should no longer come under the order of knowledge or of a horizon of preknowledge but rather a coming or an event which one allows or incites to come (without seeing anything to come) in an experience which is heterogeneous to all taking note . . . to all stabilizable theorems as such.³

This performative to come “whose archive no longer has any relation to what is, to the record of the presence of what is or will have been actually present” constitutes the richness of psychoanalytic work and the value to be gained from it.⁴

To repeat is to continue; it is to live on, to survive one's own ongoing past. This is the imperative of psychic life and is also the principle that keeps one's ontological consistency. Continue, as Lacan admonishes. Is this not also what Freud would advise, despite what Anna Freud and American ego psychologists advocated? With this in mind, we should recall that Freud often characterizes the unconscious by the term “timeless” (zeitlos). The “atemporal” character of the unconscious does not mean that psychoanalysis is removed from the domain of history. For Freud, temporality (zeitlosikeit) indicates a dimension of complication within the temporal flow itself. Beneath the river of becoming, as it were, lies the riverbed, “the other time of the flow” (l’autre temps de l’ecoulement). Underneath the chronology of the running water, there exits the chronic condition, an anachronism of the currents, invisible at the surface, that bifurcates suddenly or turns abruptly to give rise to the danger of the patient's drowning, their debilitating obsessions and endless sufferings. This (a)chronic current, this flow of the unconscious, as repetitive as it is constant, is what analyst and patient speak to and about when they talk. And this, too, is where a psychoanalytic critic finds their point of entry when they approach a text. Indeed, inasmuch as an analyst searches behind a patient's symptoms for the Oedipalized cause of their suffering, a critic, no less hermeneutically suspicious than an analyst, must read what is not written when they turn the pages.

As all analysts know, every patient is unique, but the cause of each one's misery may not be so different. Similarly, every story told and read may be different, but the underlying plot of each one may remain the same, diegetic variations notwithstanding. Perhaps, we can say, each world is a world, but there is only one world, from which we as speaking beings can never escape. Analysts are close readers, as are critics unavoidably analytic when they read. Seen in this light, psychoanalytic criticism and rhetorical or media criticism, all dialogic in nature and symbolic-centered in equal measure, may not be so dissimilar after all.⁵

This themed issue gathers four essays that engage psychoanalysis from four distinct perspectives. As intimated, they all fall within psychoanalytic criticism in that they not only address psychoanalytic concepts directly, but also put them to test with regard to issues that we face as socio-politically interested scholars. Moreover, if they belong together here, it is because they also focus on issues central to communication as a critical discipline. Taken together, they demonstrate psychoanalysis's usefulness for and continual relevance to communication studies and media studies as they grow and pluralize themselves. This themed issue features contributions from a cross section of scholars in rhetoric and media and communication studies: a media theorist and critic of international repute (Knut Ebeling), graduate students beginning their academic careers (Alvin J. Primack and Rishi Chebrolu), and an emerging scholar known for innovative rhetorical scholarship (Atilla Hallsby). It is my hope that readers will find thinking and further discussions about this themed issue truly productive and meaningful. Instead of summarizing the essays, I invite readers to read them and judge for themselves.

Selected further reading

Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Easthope, Anthony. The Unconscious. London: Routledge, 2000.

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice. New York: Norton, 2017.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Forrester, John. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989.

Freud, Sigmund. On Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. Edited by Angela Richards. Eastbourne, UK: Gardners Books, 1991.

Henry, Michel. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1998.

Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press, 1973.

Leader, Darian. Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing. London: Counterpoint, 2004.

Lear, Jonathan. Freud. London: Routledge, 2015.

Leclaire, Serge. Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Dream-Work Does Not Think.” In The Lyotard Reader. Edited by Andrew E. Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1974.

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

Nasio, Juan-David. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan. Translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Safouan, Moustafa. Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Anna Shane. New York: Other Press, 2004.

Weber, Samuel M. Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Michael Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 2009.

Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso, 2008.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Ramsey Eric Ramsey for giving me the opportunity to guest edit this themed issue and for his forbearance with any lack of proficiency on my part. Sincere thanks must also go to Sohinee Roy, without whose expert assistance this issue was likely to remain unendingly conceptual. Finally, I thank all the contributors for sharing their work in this venue, which readers, I hope, will help to expand.

Notes

1 Pierre Klossowski, Le Bain de Diane (Paris: Pauvert, 1956), qtd. in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford university Press, 1991) 105.

2 Werner Hamacher, Pleroma: Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 204.

3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 72 original emphases.

4 Ibid., original emphasis.

5 It might be useful to point out here the relation between rhetoric and philosophy, whose claims over truth and knowledge psychoanalysis seeks to decenter. As Barbara Cassin rightly suggests in Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014):

Counting two is what philosophy has habituated us to. When one speaks, one either “speaks of” or “speaks to,” according to an “or” that is evidently not exclusive. “To speak of,” to unveil, to describe, to demonstrate, is of the major register of philosophy, considered as ontology and phenomenology. “To speak to,” to persuade, to have an effect on the other, is of the register of rhetoric. From the point of view of philosophia perennis, there is no third dimension of language (194 original emphasis)

(194 original emphasis) for the simple reason that, as Cassin continues, “regardless of what happens in the bosom of the one, they always come back under the regulation of the truth that governs speaking of” (195–96). Hermeneutically suspicious, psychoanalysis puts philosophy back in its place as a speech act, in a dit-dimension of language, as Lacan calls it, in which the subject speaks of and to themself endlessly, that is, in a rhetorical mode.