qui
parle

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The collection, Poèmes de Samuel Wood, begins with a call to read what cannot easily be read. A nameless speaker addresses a nameless audience in order to make a request: "Écoutez-le qui grignote à petit bruit, admirez sa patience / Il cherche, cherche à tâtons, mais cherche" (28) [Listen to him making little gnawing noises, admire his patience / He is searching, searching blindly, but searching]. The request that the speaker makes appears to give the poem an external point of reference. The reader is asked to listen, to pay heed to some scene that exists, presumably, outside of or apart from the lines in which it is first mentioned. That scene, however, never achieves full legibility. Too much is missing to lift it from its place beneath the ink. Someone, we might say, nibbles at something as part of a search for something else. Even this restatement of the lines, though, adds too much to them. It gives the verbs "grignoter" and "chercher" an object they do not have and places them in a relation which is, by no means, apparent. The lack of an object, the obliqueness of the relation between the two verbs, the absence even of an identifiable agent: all this renders the scene illegible, opaque. 

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I have a problem with jargon, or rather with its absence. Like some stern deity, a comrade-in-arms of Duty and Conscience, the figure of Lucidity hovers threateningly above my computer screen, issuing imperatives, interfering with my progress, driving me back over my prose to revise and elucidate. "Is it clear?" "Will they see what you mean?" "Do you know what you mean?" are questions that haunt my every keystroke. And perhaps it's out of envy that I'm drawn to writers who seem less bound to this tyrant's remorseless wheel––modernists in literature, Continentals in philosophy, deconstructors in criticism.

As a slave, I inevitably harbor suspicions about my master, and frequently murmur rebelliously as I rewrite a sentence for the tenth time. What's the source of this power, exercised over me as a force in need of no justification? Psychologically, in terms of my personal history, I can make some guesses; but the question is more interesting as a philosophico-politico-cultural one. This demand for clarity, perspicuity, accessibility, this attack on jargon, hermeticism, technical language: what's at stake here, for assailants and victims?

It goes without saying that I shall try to deal with this question as lucidly as I can.

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This paper will consider, in terms more Sedgwickian than Lacanian, what to do with a girl like Eve Harrington. The eponymous heroine of the 1950 movie classic, "All About Eve," represents a set a problems for lesbian epistemology: rather than posing the question of how, given the blinding pressure of homophobia, we know she "is one," the film asks us to enter a slippery realm of signification where the hints, codes and clues given with one hand are immediately erased by the other. One famous feminist primer, whose title and author escapes me, written in the 70's and distributed during lesbian week in my first women's studies class initiated me into the logic of this blindness when it stated that what lesbians do together is "comb each other's hair" or some such metonym for fuck. Lesbianism is assimilated, in this sort of account (which I shall hereafter refer to as the "lesbian continuum" view) to a kind of overarching identity that encompasses all affective bonds between women. But what, then, is occluded if not the specificity of knowing how lesbians differ from other women around them?

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I. Why is Sade the truth of Kant?

It is of course commonplace to assert that psychoanalysis arose as the final outcome of a long "incubation period." However, answers differ as to where and when, in the "history of ideas," the process was set in motion which finally gave birth to psychoanalysis. In his "Kant avec Sade," Lacan provides an unequivocal, although unexpected answer to this question: Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. The gist of Lacan's argument is that Kant was the first to outline the dimension of what Freud later designated as "beyond the pleasure principle."

Kant's starting point is the question: what is the impetus of will, of our practical activity? His answer is: a representation [Vorstellung] which determines will by means of the sentiment of pleasure or displeasure it brings about in the subject. We represent for ourselves an object, and the pleasure or displeasure attached to its representation sets off our activity. Such a determination of our will is, however, always empirical, linked to contingent circumstances, that is to say "pathological" in the Kantian sense of the term. Man qua finite being is limited by his phenomenal, temporal-spatial experience, i.e. he has no access to the "thing-in-itself" which transcends the horizon of his possible experience. Which means that the Supreme Good––the a priori object which sustains itself on its inherent necessity and, consequently, does not depend on any external conditions––is unrepresentable, out of reach to our consciousness: if Kant did not formulate the notion of A barré (the barred big Other), he at least conceived of the barred G (Good).

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What does it mean to be a genius? Why should genius, or rather the perception of his own lack of genius, weigh so heavily on Rameau's Nephew? These questions shall guide my inquiry here, although I should say that I can offer no hard and fast solutions to the problems they unleash. For many thinkers of the late Enlightenment, first among whom would be Kant, the problem of the genius is, in a sense, the problem of the unanswerable question: genius is seen by such thinkers as the enigmatic phenomenon whose only rule is to be an exception to the rule. In an age in which scientific categorization of empirical phenomena was becoming the dominant mode of knowledge in the West, the problem of genius threatened to overwhelm the claims of science, just as it enabled human beings to allay their suspicions that they too might be nothing more than empirical phenomena.

Genius is terribly mysterious, a seemingly superhuman power which inexplicably inhabits specific individuals; yet at the same time it is gratifyingly reassuring, for it proves over and over again that human beings are more than mere animals, that men too can be god-like.

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A review of Boone, Joseph A. and Michael Cadden, eds. Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

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A review of Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Political Crumbs. Translated by Martin Chalmers. (London and New York: Verso, 1990).

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A review of Straus, Joseph N. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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