Coming Too Late

Andrew Barnaby

Description

Aiming to reconceptualize some of Freud's earliest psychoanalytic thinking, Andrew Barnaby's Coming Too Late argues that what Freud understood as the fundamental psychoanalytic relationship—a son's ambivalent relationship to his father—is governed not by the sexual rivalry of the Oedipus complex but by the existential predicament of belatedness. Analyzing the rhetorical tensions of Freud's writing, Barnaby shows that filial ambivalence derives particularly from the son's vexed relation to a paternal origin he can never claim as his own. Barnaby also demonstrates how Freud at once grasped and failed to grasp the formative nature of the son's crisis of coming after, a duality marked especially in Freud's readings and misreadings of a series of precursor texts—the biblical stories of Moses, Shakespeare's Hamlet, E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman"—that often anticipate the very insights that the Oedipal model at once reveals and conceals. Reinterpreting Freudian psychoanalysis through the lens of Freud's own acts of interpretation, Coming Too Late further aims to consider just what is at stake in the foundational relationship between psychoanalysis and literature.
Note on Citations for Major Primary Works
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. The Refusal of Being Born: Psychoanalysis, Belatedness, and Existential Trauma

Introduction to Part I. Why Are We Born? Inversion in Freud’s “Theme of the Three Caskets”

1. “Awakening is itself the site of a trauma”: Rethinking Caruth on Freud

2. Owing Life: The Birth Trauma and its Discontents (Rank and Freud)

Part II. Tardy Sons: Shakespeare, Freud, and Filial Ambivalence

3. “More than his father’s death”: Mourning at Elsinore and Vienna

4. The Afterwards of the Uncanny

Part III. “Is not He your Father who created you?”: Belatedness and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

Introduction to Part III. Gazing on God

5. Satan’s Gnostic Fantasy

6. Choosing the Father in Moses and Monotheism

Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Permissions
Index

Sujets

• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 29 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438469799
• Langue: English

Extrait

Coming Too Late
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor
Coming Too Late
REFLECTIONS ON FREUD AND BELATEDNESS
ANDREW BARNABY
René Magritte, “La Reproduction interdite (Reproduction Forbidden)”
Cover art: © 2017 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Barnaby, Andrew Thomas, author.
Title: Coming too late : reflections on Freud and belatedness / Andrew Barnaby.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016034117 | ISBN 9781438465777 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Parent and child. | Childbirth—Psychological aspects. | Pre-existence. | Oedipus complex. | Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939.
Classification: LCC BF723.P25 B295 2017 | DDC 150.19/52—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034117
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Emma and Ian, and in loving memory of Claire (1996–1998)
Contents
Note on Citations for Major Primary Works
Acknowledgments
Introduction
P ART I T HE R EFUSAL OF B EING B ORN : P SYCHOANALYSIS , B ELATEDNESS, AND E XISTENTIAL T RAUMA
Introduction to Part I Why Are We Born? Inversion in Freud’s “Theme of the Three Caskets”
Chapter 1 “Awakening is itself the site of a trauma”: Rethinking Caruth on Freud
Chapter 2 Owing Life: The Birth Trauma and its Discontents (Rank and Freud)
P ART II T ARDY S ONS : S HAKESPEARE , F REUD, AND F ILIAL A MBIVALENCE
Chapter 3 “More than his father’s death”: Mourning at Elsinore and Vienna
Chapter 4 The Afterwards of the Uncanny
P ART III “I S NOT H E YOUR F ATHER WHO C REATED YOU? ”: B ELATEDNESS AND THE J UDEO -C HRISTIAN T RADITION
Introduction to Part III Gazing on God
Chapter 5 Satan’s Gnostic Fantasy
Chapter 6 Choosing the Father in Moses and Monotheism
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Permissions
Index
Note on Citations for Major Primary Works
*For full bibliographical entries, see Works Cited .
1. Freud
a) Most of the citations of Freud’s writings will be from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. London, 1953–74. Citations will be given by volume and page number(s) with work identified as necessary.
b) Citations of some of Freud’s earliest writings, including letters, will be from The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887–1902 , ed. Marie Bonaparte, et al.; trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey, New York, 1954. Citations will be given by page number(s) following Origins .
c) Citations of Freud’s “Theme of the Three Caskets” will be from C. J. M. Hubback’s translation in The Collected Papers , ed. Joan Riviere, 5 vols. New York, 1959, IV, 244–56. Citations will be given by page number(s).
d) Citations of select letters will be from Letters of Sigmund Freud , ed. Ernst L. Freud; trans. Tania and James Stern, New York, 1960. Citations will be given by page number(s) following Letters .
e) Citations of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism will be from Katherine Jones’s translation, New York, 1954. Citations will be given by page number(s).
f) Citations from the original German texts, identified as necessary, will be from Gesammelte Werke , 18 vol., ed. Marie Bonaparte, et al., Frankfurt am Main, 1968–78. Citations will be given by volume and page number(s).
2. Bible
a) Unless otherwise noted, citations of the Hebrew Bible, by chapter and verse number(s), will be from Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text , New York, 1985.
b) Unless otherwise noted, citations of the New Testament, by chapter and verse number(s), will follow the NRSV.
3. Shakespeare
Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Shakespeare’s plays, by act, scene, and line number(s), will be from The Riverside Shakespeare , 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al., Boston, 1996.
4. Milton
a) Citations of Milton’s Paradise Lost will be from The Riverside Milton , ed. Roy Flannagan, Boston, 1998. Citations will be given by book and line number(s).
b) Citations of Milton’s prose writings will be from The Complete Prose Works , ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. New Haven, 1953–82. Citations will be given by volume and page number(s).
5. Hoffmann
a) Citations of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” will be from The Golden Pot and Other Tales , trans. Ritchie Robertson, Oxford, 1992. Citations will be given by page number(s).
b) Citations of Hoffmann’s original German text of “Der Sandmann” will be from Poetische Werke , 12 vols., ed. Walter Wallerstein, Berlin, 1957, III, 3–44. Citations will be given by page number(s).
Acknowledgments
Part of the argument of this book is that Freud understood the process of looking back as the recognition of a debt incurred. But while Freud saw such a debt as a burden and its recognition as potentially traumatic, the recognition of a debt can also be the cause for the expression of gratitude. And so, as I look back to the various debts I have incurred over the many years in which this book has taken shape, I would like now to express my gratitude to those who have offered special guidance: Lisa Schnell, Todd McGowan, Steve Schillinger, Molly Rothenberg, Loka Losambe, Tony Bradley, and Gabriel Moyal. I would also like to thank the University of Vermont’s College of Arts and Sciences and its Department of English for other forms of support. And I would like finally to thank Andrew Kenyon and Charles Shepherdson at SUNY Press for their efficiency and helpfulness in guiding the manuscript through the various stages of the publication process. I dedicate the book to my children who are now and have always been the source of joy and wonder.
Introduction
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”
What stakes are raised by these questions? One doesn’t need to be an expert to foresee that they involve thinking about what is meant by living, speaking, dying, being and world as in being-in-the-world or being towards the world, or being-with, being-before, being-behind, being-after, being and following, being followed or being following, there where I am … It is too late to deny it. … I must once more return to the malaise of this scene. … I will do all I can do to prevent its being presented as a primal scene. … [W]e shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens … when a son is after his father.
—Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am”
I
For a study so foundationally concerned with the problem of origins, it would seem appropriate to offer an initial reflection on its own literal starting point. And so I begin with the book’s cover art: Magritte’s “La Reproduction interdite” (1937). 1
A male figure stands looking into what appears to be a mirror. We assume it is a mirror because we see the cover of a book (Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ) and a partially revealed mirror image of that cover in the lower-right corner of the painting. Given the position of the foregrounded figure relative both to the mirror and to our own point of view, we would expect to see a frontal image (face and torso) looking back at us from the mirror. But what we see instead is the figure’s backside: back of the torso, neck, back of the head. In other words, what we see reflected in the mirror is precisely the same back view we have of the figure itself. In short, an impossible image.
The painting obviously aims to compel us to ask questions to which we have no immediate answers: Is this actually a mirror? Is what we see in the mirror what the front of the figure looks like or is this an illusion, an artist’s trick? More to the point, the painting thematizes (and enacts) its own unreadability in a specific context: what we think a mirror should unequivocally make available to us, our very capacity to know ourselves through an experience of reflection.
Looking at the foregrounded figure, we expect to see his (hers? its?) identity clearly revealed. We also expect that the figure’s point of view—and in having a point of view, however obscured, the figure is, in a sense, the viewer’s double—will not only establish the correct object of perception (his own reflected face staring back at him) but also, and perhaps more importantly, permit us to trust the very act of seeing and the site from which it originates. In most situations involving the seeing-knowing subject, such self-si(gh)ting would typically, and quite literally, be out-of-sight. It is only in the particular case of an original looking at its mirror image that the origin of seeing and knowing