Céline Surprenant

On a Large Scale

The following chapter proposes to examine the conception of the mass that runs through Freud’s work with particular reference to the analysis of religion that is developed in the essays on application. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), this reflection leads to the hope that, one day, science will take over from religious ideas. This prediction rests on a traditional apportioning whereby ignorance and superstition are the lot of the many while enlightenment through science the prerogative of the few. The psychoanalytic examination of religion does not entirely modify this view, it could even be said to reinforce it. Our purpose, however, is less to insist on the pejorative view on ‘the great number’ that psychoanalysis undeniably holds than to explore the way in which the scientific activity that psychoanalysis aims to constitute cannot easily make room for ‘the many’. It is mostly as far as the future science at issue in The Future is above all the psychoanalytic science of the mind, whose object of study is a psychical apparatus that the incompatibility between science and ‘the many’ takes its full importance. An overview of the apparently only ‘social’ concept of the mass that runs through Freud thus leads us to the core of the psychoanalytic project, by confronting us with the ‘delicate apparatus of the mind’, whose operations are not easily conceivable on a large scale.

Proust et le paysage: des écrits de jeunesse à la ‘Recherche du temps perdu’

Proust’s 1908 musing as to whether his work in progress was to be a novel or a philosophical essay is well known. Perhaps less so is the writer’s 1913 description of the novel to Robert de Flers as ‘un roman à la fois plein de passion et de méditation et de paysages’ (p. 241). Just as the former statement continues to inspire studies on the unique form of the novel, so the latter invites us to ask what a novel ‘plein [. . .] de paysages’ may imply. This is the question that Keiichi Tsumori raises in a three-part book written originally as a doctoral thesis. Tsumori follows in the footsteps of André Ferré, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Pierre Richard, who dealt respectively with geography (Géographie de Marcel Proust (Paris: Sagittaire, 1939)), space (L’Espace proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)), and the fragmentation and unification of the sensible world (Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974)), among other renowned commentators. More than one notion of landscape operates in Tsumori’s book depending on whether the author draws from literary theory, aesthetics, phenomenology, or other literary works. To the rather flat question as to whether Proust ‘expresses landscape in his writing’ (p. 19), Tsumori provides rich analyses and a creative typology of landscapes that include ‘sonorous landscapes’ for example, by attending ‘chronologically’ to Proust’s tâtonnements around them, from the early fictional and critical writings to À la recherche, against the backdrop of diverse aesthetic stances (from romanticism to modernism). The land, the countryside, and nature are prevalent in Proust, and not only as a result of the writer’s interest in John Ruskin’s work on Venice and French gothic architecture. Remembering, itself, coincides with the transformation of things into landscape (p. 374). Among many significant critical topoi raised by landscape is the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism. A landscape, so one of its definitions goes, emerges with the subject’s perception of the external world more or less independently from its physical and geographical characters. Proust has inventively integrated the subjectivist conception into the story of a literary vocation, through a division of labour between the hero and the narrator with respect to perception. While landscapes emerge in the hero’s consciousness through misperception and memory, the narrator develops a transcendent point of view on the hero’s remembered landscapes that will form the basis of poetic creation. Landscapes, notably those of Paris during the Great War, concretize the hero’s changing perceptions and aesthetic consciousness. These arguments are developed in the third and strongest part of the book, through the opposition between static and dynamic landscapes, where Proust has recourse to panoramic visions and elevated locations in order to create temporal continuity out of spatial discontinuity, and to integrate the subjective and objective outlooks. If Proust’s travels helped form his depiction of places in his early writings, it is the motorcar and speed which have played that role in his late work. The book enlarges our knowledge of Proust, in addition to making us experience À la recherche as a novel almost exclusively made out of compelling landscapes.

Figurative Language According to Freud

It is with respect to the difficulty of defining what should yet be basic elements of psychoanalytic theory that Freud frequently refers to ‘figurative language’ [Bildersprache]. This heading encompasses as much the use of a model [Vorbild], an ‘intellectual scaffolding’ [Hilfskonstruktion], a ‘fiction’ [Fiktion], an analogy [Analogie], a comparison [Vergleich], a simile [Gleichnis], as that of an example [Beispiel]. If the presence of such figures is particularly noticeable throughout the Freudian corpus, however, it is partly in so far as Freud draws our attention to it, by inserting in many theoretical developments, amidst figures themselves, pronouncements concerning the impossibility of not using them. In these statements, Freud turns to science in order to justify what could easily be considered as a defect of psychoanalytic theory, and underlines the no less figurative aspect of scientific language.

Sciences of the Crowd

Having discussed briefly the problem of the metaphorical and thematic status of the mass in Freud, it might seem necessary, before considering Freud’s work further, to turn to ‘a precise and comprehensive history of the concept of “mass” — starting with the Greek …’, during the course of which we are bound to come across examinations of Freud’s singular treatment of the problem of the mass. The present study, however, does not take this path for reasons that the following chapter aims to explain.

Quantity, Mass and Metaphor

All commentaries of Freud’s work, whether they should be carried out by analysts or non-analysts, raise the question of Freud’s use of metaphors and models, but, as the article on the psychical apparatus from the Vocabulaire shows, what corresponds to this description poses problems of delimitation. One of Derrida’s merits is to have expressly focused on this ambiguous situation, not exactly, however, in order to present the ‘solution to all … difficulties’, as the Wunderblock is purported to do. Far from settling rhetorical matters, ‘Freud and the scene of writing’ shows the extent to which the problem of metaphoricity runs right through Freud’s theoretical edifice. If the essay however does not conclude on this aspect of Freud’s work, it is partly because it, too, involves significant ‘representational relations’.1 When Derrida emphasizes that the origin of memory lies in the ‘contact between two forces’, that ‘at least two hands are needed to make the apparatus function’, or that writing points to the relation ‘between the two apparatuses’, one is not in fact dealing with dual relations.2 Rather, the redoubling implied in ‘two forces’, ‘two hands’, ‘two apparatuses’ and which has been at issue throughout Derrida’s essay, signals that the psyche is constituted by a multiplicity, of ‘layers’ or of ‘traces’. The ‘two’ points to the several: to affirm that ‘at least two hands are needed to write’ amounts to saying that ‘we must be several to write’ (p. 226).3

Conclusion: ‘On Transience’

According to the Standard Edition’s introduction to the essay, ‘On Transience’ [Verganglichkeit] (1916 [1915]) gives ‘a picture of Freud’s feeling about the war’.1 It is however difficult to assess whether or not the theme of the essay — transience — only pertains to the particular kind of destruction associated with the war. By the end of the essay the brief reflection upon ‘the transience of all things’ indeed appears to serve the purpose of saving ‘our high opinion of the riches of civilization’ (p. 307) from the harm war may have done to it. War acts as a disclosing agent of the transience of all things, but it is only one instance of destruction among many others invoked by Freud, despite its incomparable brutality. It is the transience of all things that may have motivated Freud to speak about the war, rather than the reverse. Freud’s statement on the destructive character of the war seems, at first sight, the furthest removed from the idea of transience that he discusses throughout the essay. He writes in conclusion: When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility [Gebrechlichkeit]. We shall build up [aufbauen] again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground [auf festerem Grund] and more lastingly [dauerhafter] than before. (Ibid.)