Abstract

Other of my intellectual debts remain fully outstanding, that to Freud ’s work before all. A beholdenness to Sigmund Freud ’s intervention in Western culture is hardly something for concealment, but I have until now left my commitment to it fairly implicit. This has been not merely out of intellectual terror at Freud ’s achievement but in service of an idea and in compensation for a dissatisfaction I might formulate as follows: psychoanalytic interpretations of the arts in American culture have, until quite recently, on the whole been content to permit the texts under analysis not to challenge the concepts of analysis being applied to them, and this seemed to me to do injustice both to psychoanalysis and to literature. My response was to make a virtue of this defect by trying, in my readings of film as well as of literature and of philosophy, to recapitulate what I understood by Freud ’s saying that he had been preceded in his insights by the creative writes of his tradition; that is, I tried to arrive at a sense for each text I encountered that psychoanalysis had become called for, as if called for in the history of knowledge, as if each psychoanalytic reading were charged with rediscovering the reality of psychoanalysis. This still does not seem to me an irrelevant ambition, but it is also no longer a sufficient response in our altered environment. Some of the most interesting and useful criticism and literary theory currently being produced is decisively psychoanalytic in inspiration, an alteration initiated for us most prominently by the past two or so decades of work in Paris and represented in this country by—to pick examples from which I have profited in recent months—Neil Hertz on the Dora case, Shoshana Felman on Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on homophobia in Our Mutual Friend.1 And now my problem has become that I am unsure whether I understand the constitution of the discourses in which this material is presented in relation to what I take philosophy to be, a constitution to which, such as it is, I am also committed. So some siting of this relation is no longer mine to postpone. 1. See Neil Hertz, “Dora’s Secrets, Freud ’s Techniques,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud — Hysteria —Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, pp. 221-42; Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Yale French Studies 55/56 : 94-207; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend,” Raritan 2 : 126-51. Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of “Walden,” The Claim of Reason, and, most recently, Themes Out of School. He spent last spring at Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies. His most recent contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Politics as Opposed to What?” and “The Division of Talent”