Articles
Sadism and Film: Freud and Resnais
Leo Bersani & Ulysse Dutoit
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Is there a non-sadistic type of movement? Would we go toward
the world if we were not motivated by destructive impulses? This
question––which we will first treat theoretically and which we will
consider in the context of two films of Alain Resnais––is at once
raised and elided in Freud's 1915 essay "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." Toward the end of that essay, in his discussion of the instinctual vicissitude consisting in a change of content (a vicissitude
"discerned in a single instance only––the transformation of love into
hate") Freud claims: "At the very beginning, it seems, the external
world, objects, and what is hated are identical." The infantile ego
must defend itself against the external stimuli by which it is bombarded; "hatred" is at first a self-preservative reflex. But this repudiation of the world––of all the difference that threatens the ego's stability (indeed, at the beginning, its very constitution as a distinct identity)––is by no means limited to infancy. The ego's protective measures against a painful influx of stimuli from the external world
will, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), be hypostatized in the
"instinctual" need of all living organisms to return to the state of
inanimate matter. "As an expression of the unpleasure evoked by objects," Freud writes in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," hate
"always remains in an intimate relation with the self-preservative instincts" (14:139; emphasis ours).
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Delicacy and Disgust, Mourning and Melancholia, Privilege and Perversity: Pride and Prejudice
Joseph Litvak
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
In a well-known passage from one of her letters to her sister Cassandra, Jane Austen records her own response to Pride and Prejudice
(1813):
“I had some fits of disgust. . . . The work is rather too
light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it
wants to be stretched out here and there with a long
chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn
specious nonsense, about something unconnected
with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on
Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté [sic], or
anything that would form a contrast, and bring the
reader with increased delight to the playfulness and
epigrammatism of the general style.”
That Austen can be driven to disgust not just by her own writing, but
by its very refinement, by what is most "light, and bright, and
sparkling" in it, comes as no surprise: the hyperfastidiousness she
evinces here confonms perfectly with the venerable stereotype of gentle Jane, where the gentleness or gentility in question easily assumes a
pathological or ideologically suspect character.
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Preside at their Pleasures: Rousseau, Diderot, Kafka and the Ambivalence of Representation
Lincoln Shlensky
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
In the preface to The Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives his readers an eloquent lesson in the
proper proportions of democratic discourse. Rousseau had written the
Letter as a response to d'Alembert's proposal, which appeared in the
article "Geneva" in a 1757 volume of the Encyclopédie, that a theatre
should be established in the city of Geneva. Before launching into a response to the article, Rousseau's preface gives reasons why his response
to d'Alembert's proposal should not be withheld. It is characteristic
of the Letter that these reasons seem at first glance to be mere stylistic
flourish; but, in keeping with Rousseau's narrating ethos, such acts of
stylistic bravado always double as rhetorical devices. The opening
paragraph announces Rousseau's decision to publicly break with
d'Alembert and, by association, with the whole project of the Encyclopédie, to which Rousseau had formerly contributed.
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Spectre Shapes: “The Body of Descartes?” with an intervention by Peggy Kamuf
Andrzej Warminski
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
This title––"The Body of Descartes?"––quite rightly dresses the body
of Descartes with a question mark. The question mark is most fitting, for,
indeed, what we might want to identify under its garments as the body of
Descartes could turn out to be a ghost or an automaton––like those hats and
cloaks at the end of the Second Meditation that we judge (by the "pure
inspection of the mind") to clothe men but which may turn out to cover only
"spectres or feigned men" (des spectres ou des hommes feints). But these
shapes become all the more questionable if we remember that in context
they are the figures for a still more famous body of Descartes: the body of
the "piece of wax." In the same way that ordinary language almost
deceives us into saying that we see the same wax after it has undergone all
kinds of changes to its corporeal nature––when, in reality, what we do is
to judge by the pure inspection of the mind that it is the self-same wax
so it would deceive us into saying that we see men when we look out the
window at hats and cloaks passing in the street––when, in reality, what we
do is to judge by the pure inspection of the mind that these hats and cloaks
cover the bodies of men and not ghosts or automatons.
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The Unease in Art History
James Elkins
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I. Art history on the sickbed
Part of the constitution of the discipline of art history in the past
three decades is an uncertainty or unease about itself. This feeling typically appears as a medical metaphor: a disease or a "crisis in the discipline" with "symptoms" such as parochialism, moribund methods, or
lack of intellectual force. Theorists rush at it like doctors, clamoring
to be the first to pronounce a working cure. Some are prescriptive, setting out conservative canons (one such is W. M. Johnson, Art History,
Its Use and Abuse) or agendas of expansion and reform (such as Donald
Preziosi' s Rethinking Art History). Others are more descriptive, and
imagine their purpose to be the representation of the current state of
affairs (for example, David Carrier's Principles of Art History Writing, and Mark Roskill's What is Art History?). To a third group, the
patient has already died, and the task is to think ahead, to plan art history's successor (here one might name Hans Belting's The End of Art
History? despite its author's protestations that he is not writing about
the end of art history).
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Book Review
On Valerie Traub‘s Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama
Eve Sanders
A review of Traub, Valerie. Desire and Anxiety:
Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. (New York: Routledge, 1992).
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Cover: Photograph reprinted with permission from Underwood Photo Archive, San Francisco, California.
Volume 6.1 is available at JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.