Cultures of the Death Drive

Sanchez-Pardo Esther Sanchez-Pardo

Description

Cultures of the Death Drive is a comprehensive guide to the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and to developments in Kleinian theory to date. It is also an analysis and a demonstration of the distinctive usefulness of Klein's thought for understanding modernist literature and visual art. Esther Sanchez-Pardo examines the issues that the seminal discourses of psychoanalysis and artistic modernism brought to the fore in the early twentieth century and points toward the uses of Kleinian thinking for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations today.Sanchez-Pardo argues that the troubled political atmosphere leading to both world wars created a melancholia fueled by "cultures of the death drive" and the related specters of object loss-loss of coherent and autonomous selves, of social orders where stability reigned, of metaphysical guarantees, and, in some cases, loss and fragmentation of empire. This melancholia permeated, and even propelled, modernist artistic discourses. Sanchez-Pardo shows how the work of Melanie Klein, the theorist of melancholia par excellence, uniquely illuminates modernist texts, particularly their representations of gender and sexualities. She offers a number of readings-of works by Virginia Woolf, Rene Magritte, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen-that reveal the problems melancholia posed for verbal and visual communication and the narrative and rhetorical strategies modernist artists derived to either express or overcome them. In her afterword, Sanchez-Pardo explicates the connections between modernist and contemporary melancholia.A valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the study of representation in literature and the visual arts, Cultures of the Death Drive is a necessary resource for those interested in the work of Melanie Klein.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384748
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

C U L T U R E S O F T H E D E A T H D R I V E

Post-contemporary

Interventions

Series Editors:

Stanley Fish and

Fredric Jameson

C U L T U R E S O F T H E D E A T H D R I V E

Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia

E S T H E R S Á N C H E Z - P A R D O

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London 2003

∫2003 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Juan

1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8 9

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations of the Works of Melanie Klein Introduction: Anxieties and Their Vicissitudes

P A R T O N E

Itineraries 23 Kleinian Metapsychology 55 Femininities: Melancholia, Masquerade, and the Paternal Superego 72

x 1

Masculinities: Anxiety, Sadism, and the Intricacies of Object-Love 94 Kleinian Melancholia 118 The Death Drive and Aggression 137 The Setting (Up) of Phantasy 162

P A R T T W O

Modernist Cultures of the Death Drive Framing the Fetish:To the Lighthouse: Ceci n’est pas un roman218

193

1

0

11 12

viii

Funereal Rites: Melancholia, Masquerade, and the Art of Biography in Lytton Strachey 273 Melancholia Reborn: Djuna Barnes’s Styles of Grief 306 Melancholia, the New Negro, and the Fear of Modernity: Forms Sublime and Denigrated in Countee Cullen’s Writings 343 Afterword: Modern(ist) Cultures of the Death Drive and the Melancholic Apparatus 386 Notes 395

Bibliography Index 475

Contents

451

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Cultures of the Death Drivewas written with the support of a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Del Amo-Universidad Com- plutense Foundation, which covered my stay at the Rhetoric Department, University of California-Berkeley, in 1995–96. A preliminary version of chapter 4 first appeared as ‘‘Melancholia as constitutive of male homosex- uality: A Kleinian approach’’ inGender and Psychoanalysis3 (1998). I am greatly indebted to the counsel of colleagues and teachers at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz and at Cornell Univer- sity at di√erent times in my nomadic roaming around the United States. Among these people, I must mention Fredric Jameson, Hayden White, and Judith Butler, the latter of whom was responsible for making my stay at Berkeley both possible and fruitful. Reynolds Smith, Executive Editor at Duke University Press, engaged this project with enormous interest and respect from the beginning. I am very grateful for his insightful and e≈- cient contribution to the final version of this volume. My friends Marcia Baker, Jacques Lezra, and Osvaldo Sabino should also be credited for supporting me through di≈cult times in this long war of attrition. I also extend my thanks to my graduate students in the English De- partment, Universidad Complutense, for their encouragement and interest in our common work. Finally, I would also like to mark the great debt I owe to my parents, Piedad and Jesús, for their encouragement, love, and blind faith in me. And above any other reader of my work I would like to thank Juan Imperial, to whom this book is dedicated, for his constant friendship and invaluable intellectual partnership.