Colin Davis

Haunted subjects : deconstruction, psychoanalysis and the return of the dead

Acknowledgements Introduction: The Return of the Dead Vampires, Death Drives, and Silent Film Sartres Living Dead Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis The Ghosts of Auschwitz: Charlotte Delbo Speaking with the Dead: De Man, Levinas, Agamben Derridas Haunted Subjects Burying the Dead Bibliography Index

Can the Dead Speak to Us? De Man, Levinas and Agamben

The worlds of the living and the dead might seem irrevocably cut off from one another. Nevertheless, an important strand of modern thought attempts to find some form of intelligibility emanating from the dead. Paul de Mans discussion of prosopopoeia suggests the possibility of giving voice to the dead, though this turns out to be a form of delusion inherent in language. Emmanuel Levinas, arguing against Heidegger, seeks to maintain a relationship with the other beyond death, and Giorgio Agamben tries to find meaning in the silent testimony of victims of the Holocaust. This article examines these various attempts to mediate with the dead and suggests that it may be impossible to eliminate the risk of imposing our own words on those who cannot speak. However, a readiness to be surprised by unanticipated meanings may be the necessary condition to finding signifying sources outside ourselves.

Fathers, others: The sacrificial victim in Freud, Girard, and Levinas

Abstract This paper derives from an interest in murder. This interest began through reading fictional narratives which ceaselessly stage and restage scenes of murder; but it has also become clear that a range of theoretical texts are no less preoccupied with the basic question, ‘Why kill?’ (see Davis, 2000). In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Freud, Girard and Levinas, directly address the question of murder, its causes and consequences. In each case, the theoretical question turns out to depend upon a minimal core narrative in which the stakes of murder are crystallized; rival theoretical accounts are thus also bound up in a competition of stories. As this paper traces a common concern from Freuds Totem and Taboo, through Girards La Violence et le sacré, to Levinass Totalité et infini, the question ‘Why kill?’ gets entangled with the dynamics of storytelling and the issue of what it means to do theory.

Antelme, Renoir, Levinas and the Shock of the Other

In recent years there has been renewed interest in Robert Antelme and in his one book, L’Espèce humaine, a powerful account of his time as a prisoner of the German concentration camp system written in the immediate aftermath of the war. Important articles by Blanchot and Perec, first published in the 1960s, were followed by a period of relative neglect. Interest was revived when Marguerite Duras, Antelme’s wife at the time of his deportation, published a fictionalized version of his return from Germany in La Douleur (1985), which prompted a number of comparative studies of Duras and Antelme. At the same time, Antelme was again becoming a focus of study in his own right, most significantly in Sarah Kofman’s Paroles suffoquées French Cultural Studies, 14/1, 041–051 Copyright

Psychoanalysis, Detection, and Fiction: Julia Kristeva's Detective Novels

A crime has been committed, we don’t know by whom. It could have been any one of us, or even, as in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, it could have been all of us. But in all likelihood the truth will out; by the final page the detective will have solved the enigma of guilt and apprehended the true culprit. Like the detective novel, psychoanalysis is an invention of the late nineteenth century, and it is now almost commonplace to compare the detective and the psychoanalyst. Both search out the relevant clues that point to a hidden truth. However, while noting the similarities between the Sherlock Holmes-type detective and the analyst, Slavoj Žižek insists on their essential difference. A crime has been committed, and we may all be murderers in the unconscious of our desire; but, by reconstructing the true story of the crime, the detective guarantees ‘‘that we will we discharged of any guilt [. . .] and that, consequently, we will be able to desire without paying the price for it’’ (Looking Awry 59). The detective is a guardian of the law who proves our innocence by isolating the guilt of others. As such, he is a servant of the superego, adjudicating between right and wrong, guilt and innocence; but the psychoanalyst knows that the superego is a fool among others, perpetrating its own obscene crimes. Thus, there is no neat complementarity between the detective and the analyst, no parallel between the external truths traced by one and the forked paths of the psyche traced by the other. Whereas psychoanalysis confronts us with the price that has to

Livy and Corneille: Conflict and Resolution in the Story of the Horatii

The great Roman historian Livy describes a radical attempt at conflict resolution in his version of the story of the Horatii. The warring cities of Rome and Alba agree to settle their differences by pitting two sets of triplets against each other in a battle to the death. Two of the Roman champions, the Horatii, are killed, but the remaining brother wins the day for his city. In a further twist, he then goes on to kill his sister when he finds her grieving for one of the dead Alban brothers, to whom she was betrothed. Although guilty of a dreadful crime, by the will of the people the murderer is spared because of his services to the state. In the version of the story dramatized by the seventeenth-century French playwright Pierre Corneille, it is rather the Roman king who saves the surviving Horatius by deeming that his heroism places him above the law. This article considers whether the interests of the state can offset private crimes, as appears to be the case in the versions of the story told by both Livy and Corneille; and it concludes by referring to Livy’s continuation of the story, which shows the resolution of the conflict to be short-lived.

The Sun Shone and the Rain Fell Down: Adaptation and Infidelity in ‘Une partie de campagne’, from Maupassant to Renoir

Abstract This article examines Jean Renoir’s 1936 film adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘Une partie de campagne’. The sun plays a key role in Maupassant’s story, but Renoir’s attempt to reproduce this was impeded by the heavy rain with which he had to contend during filming. Analysis of this enforced departure from the source text leads to a discussion of fidelity as sexual and aesthetic concerns in the two works. The story and the film are both centrally concerned with issues of fidelity and infidelity, as they reflect on their status as source text and adaptation. The article concludes with some comments on fidelity in adaptation studies, and how we might learn from what the works themselves have to say about the matter.

Now I Get It!: The Dogmatic Assurance of Lyric Philosophy

This contribution to a symposium on “lyric philosophy” argues that there is much in Jan Zwicky’s work that should make it attractive to literary critics, in particular her insistence that form and content are inextricably bound up with one another. Lyric compositions should not be assessed by reason and logic alone, she holds, and they should not be understood solely in terms of their propositional content. She acknowledges that full understanding employs the imagination and takes account of metaphor. However, some critics may be less willing to accept Zwicky’s suggestion that there is a world, and an experience of the world, that is available to us without linguistic mediation and structuring. This article questions whether there a kind of meaning (the “it” of “Now I get it!”) that can be understood preverbally and intuitively. The discussion concludes with a consideration of Zwicky’s comments on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Contrary to her own principles, she offers a prose summary of the poem that does not take account of its lyric form and thereby misses some of its most enigmatic features. Whereas Zwicky would have it that the reader of such a poem can achieve a preverbal intuition of its meaning, the article suggests that, when we attend carefully to the words of the poem, we will be intriguingly perplexed.

From psychopathology to diabolical evil: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde and Jean Renoir

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can be regarded as a reflection on the nature of evil seen through the lens of late-nineteenth-century medical discourse. When Jean Renoir made his film version of Stevenson’s story under the title Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (1959), the context had changed radically. After the traumas of European Fascism and the Second World War, Renoir’s film re-fashions the story of Jekyll and Hyde for a post-Holocaust audience. It eschews psychopathology and explains evil as the free choice of a rational subject who is disturbingly in tune with the contemporary world.

Camus, Encounters, Reading

The remaining chapters of this book are concerned with the ways in which a variety of literary texts describe and stage encounters — or failed encounters — with alterity. This may entail tacit aggressions and gestures of mastery directed at the elusive, fragile and invulnerable Other, and at the text’s implied reader, who actualizes the Other’s alienating gaze in the process of reading. This and the following chapters discuss how such tacit aggressions may betray a more hostile relation to alterity than attitudes foregrounded within the texts, or authors’ recorded views, would lead us to expect. Altericide frequently seems to be humanism’s reverse side, and perhaps its occluded foundation.