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In recent years, Harold Bloom has become one of the best known literary critics writing in English, on the selling strength of a string of books on Western literature and religion. At the same time, his most crucial theoretical insights about revisionism, poetic influence and the formation of literary canons have largely been set aside or forgotten by those writers within the academy most likely to appreciate them. The thoroughness of this dismissal may be gauged by the fact that John Guillory's Cultural Capital, perhaps the most important and theoretically astute recent work on the formation of the English literary canon, declines even to mention Bloom, who is still among that canon's most historically crucial theorists.

But Bloom's backslide within academic theory is in large part his own doing. Even more than most writers, he has been of little help in determining what of his own theory remains worth reading. In recent years, despite his stated preferences, he has become a pundit for a traditionalist and preservative view of the inherent, ahistorical "qualities" of certain Western texts, asserting that canonical literature is something you "recognize when you read it," and, more generally, that works are canonized because they, or their authors, appear to possess certain attributes. 

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To say that Pierre Fédida is a member of the Association psychanalytique de France (APF), which includes Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Jean Laplanche, and Didier Anzieu, and that his work is closely related to that of André Green (Société psychanalytique de Paris), is scarcely to begin to situate him. Fédida‘s distinctiveness in part resides in the fact that he is the heir to a tradition of philosophical and psychopathological thought that is strictly phenomenological and psychoanalytic, yet which has long recognized the critique of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis. His work also demonstrates an extraordinary openness to and fertile dialogue with English language clinical psychoanalysis (for example, the work of Harold Searles, D.W. Winnicot and Frances Tustin). In other words, his is a psychoanalysis perpetually interrogating experience in which the usual oppositions between the psychoanalytic and the phenomenological do not make sense. His project is as much concerned with the mutual critique of phenomenology and psychoanalysis as it is with the furtherance of critical experience. It would be useful, though, to identify briefly certain key themes which dominate a large oeuvre.

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“A dictionary would begin from the moment where it no longer gave the meaning but the job of words. Thus informe is not only an adjective having such and such a meaning, but a term which works to disorder, generally requiring that each thing take its form. What it designates doesn't have rights in any way, and is crushed everywhere like a spider or a worm. It must be that the universe takes form in order to make academic men happy. All of philosophy has no other goal: it consists of giving a redingote to that which is a mathematical redingote. Affirming oppositionally that the universe does not resemble anything and is but informe comes down to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spittle.”
––Georges Batailles, Documents

Georges Bataille's denunciation on several occasions of the threat of psychoanalysis' circumscription by the auto-dogmatization of its vocabulary would not be worth recalling again today if it did not take on a kind of decisive significance here. A dictionary is in the service of the use and functional usages of the defined words, and it confirms the knowledge of a language in its principal, instrumental value of communication. Whatever the rupture that it introduces - through the place it allots to sexuality –– to the principle of an intersubjective communication, psychoanalysis perhaps does not escape the destiny of the spirit of the dictionary: the stake is no less than that of repression undergone by the words of a language from the moment that their objective meaning is privileged over their "business"  –– most certainly their work, but also their auto-eroticism and in this way the pleasure [jouissance] of playing with them. 

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An analysis of the structure of the Hebrew family in the Old Testament may help set in play a deconstruction of Hegel's views with regard to the contributions given, respectively, by the Roman and the Christian family to the formulation of a private code of law and particularly of the law of legitimate family succession. According to Hegel, family succession earns its legitimacy through the determinant role played by the paterfamilias, the head of the family, in the transmission of the family's name and estate. As Jacques Derrida has shown in Glas, the principle that a historical and logical progression necessarily leads from the Greek to the Roman and from the Roman to the Christian notion of paterfamilias is fundamental to the Hegelian jurisprudence of civil right. Yet, the necessity of this progression is contradicted by the structure achieved by the Hebrew family through the Mosaic law. A gulf separates the Christian family, whose essential manifestations are characterized by the love of one's kin, and ultimately by the love of the Holy Trinity, from the Hebrew family, whose essential manifestations are characterized by tribal norms, and ultimately by the dictates of the Torah.

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Were it possible simply to add an ellipsis onto all that has recently been written about the work of Maurice Blanchot, I would be very tempted to do so. I would be tempted to translate everything that I would have written, along with everything that I could never write, into a simple ellipsis, which I would then offer up as my best line of thought, as a perfect circle of writing, as an ellipsis that would thus already be beyond me, excluding me from it from the very beginning.

Such is, I think Blanchot has suggested, the temptation of writing, the temptation to go beyond writing in writing, to say it all without infidelity or remainder, to write so simply, so simply, so simply ––but without and beyond repetition. To write with a single ellipsis without remark, with a simple ellipsis that would overcome its own spacing, its own temporalization: with an ellipsis, so to speak, of the unspeakable.

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A review of Spotts, Frederic. Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).

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A review of Jardine, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare Historically. (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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