Neohelicon XXIX (2002) 1, 179–185
EVA KUSHNER
DEATHS AND RESURRECTIONS OF THE SUBJECT1
Deaths and resurrections of the subject. Comparative Literature studies have for some time now been engaged in a new phase in which the internationality of the subject matter is no longer at stake. In the global village literatures develop both transnationally and intranationally as parts of wider cultural patterns. Thus to reflect upon literature is increasingly a philosophical matter involving battles of Weltanschauungen. The problematic of the subject is a case in point. Subjectivity as embodiment of the individual human existent has come to be viewed negatively, particularly in the light of feminist and postcolonial theories, which question the universality of a subject built on objectifying the Other; thus the erstwhile object becomes in turn subject, and the equation is once again incomplete. We wish to examine a sampler of diverse, indeed scattered instances of a renewed interest in the problematic of the subject. For example, far from being dead, the Author reappears massively in biographical and autobiographical writings, and is tracked through genetic studies. The subject writes itself in interstices and margins, in discontinuity, elusiveness and uncertainty, as process rather than essence; but we hypothesize that this is in many literary and cultural contexts the very mode of its rehistoricization.
There is perhaps at the present time, among the entire spectrum of fields of knowledge, no discipline as anxiously and persistently reexamining its field as is Comparative Literature. These wonderings and wanderings are illustrated by the fact that far fewer textbooks specifically bearing the name of Comparative Literature have been published in recent decades than previously. What we are seeking in these transnational times is what – if anything – remains more alive than ever in Comparative Literature studies, when the imperative of internationality has been fulfilled and taken out of our hands – at least seemingly so, since nationalities have far outgrown national borders, and since, on the other hand, there are pluralities of nations within national states. But the perspective of studying newer formations linking – or opposing – peoples and their literatures and not in any way determined by national borders is a 1 Paper given at the colloquium on “Comparative Literature in Transnational Times”, Princeton University, March 2000, the proceedings of which were not published.
Eva Kushner, N.F.H. 201, Victoria Collage, University of Toronto, 73 Queen’s Park Crescent, Toronto, Ont. M5S 1K7, Canada 0324–4652/2002/$5.00 © Akadémiai Kiadó
Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
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creative one. It allows us to freely probe the applicability of wide cultural concepts to particular cultures in time and space. Comparative Literature at the millenium seems to suffer from two complementary handicaps: one is the global nature of its task, in that all literatures belong and the entire network of problematics examining literature also belongs; the other is the dizzying speed with which theories and approaches have been adopted, discarded, replaced. Despite the growing diffidence vis-à-vis the imposition of universals, we continue consciously or not to impose or at least propose universals, be it about the unreliability of universals. One such concept, which in appearance was the most unifying and turned out to be divisive, haunts us from the margins and demands, again and again, to be recognized in its very multiplicity and dispersion. It is that of the subject, unavoidable in the Humanities because regardless of definitions and denials human beings exist in multiple relationships to the fields of inquiry constituting the Humanities. In particular, one could argue that the so-called death of the subject, if that subject was, for example, the “metaphysical hypostasis of the logical identity”2 of the Cogito imposed on all humanity from North to South and from West to East, is in fact only transformation caused by the rethinking its rejection has produced. If that were so, it is not unthinkable that the problematic of the human subject could visibly become an effective link in the international study of literatures, but for reasons obverse to those which occasioned the erstwhile “death of the subject”. That would of course require an unprecedented degree of what Todorov has called heterology. My purpose is not to advocate a pluralistic construct or a new curriculum in which all literatures within the world’s literary system would contribute their poetic visions of the human existent. It is, far more modestly, to give a few examples of the manner in which the problematic of the subject has returned in multiple ways into our classrooms and publications, without spelling out its name; what we have before us is a problematic, a chance to problematize, to question, rather than preconceived answers, since it is precisely the preconceived answers which had provoked the reaction against the subject in the first place. To even appear to hold on to a certain humanism in our attitudes and studies brings with itself the risk of being thought regressive, because it evokes an inevitably Western, male and Cartesian concept of human nature. In introducing the set of essays entitled Who comes after the subject?, Jean-Luc Nancy explains that a certain kind of humanist was not even invited to take part in the discussion – the kind of humanist who would “find no validity in it” and also who would, after denouncing its presuppositions return, “as though nothing had happened, to a style of thinking that we might simply call humanist, even where it tries to complicate the traditional way of thinking about the human subject”.3 No literary scholars were actually invited because historically the meeting of which these essays are the proceedings was a meeting of specialists in philosophy; but what we want to know is whether Comparative Granel in Who Comes after the Subject? edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 149. 3 Ibid., p. 3. 2
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Literature as it now stands is invited to this virtual discussion; and in my view there are at least two reasons for such an eventuality: the long-standing rapprochement between literary studies and philosophy (and here we should perhaps specify philosophy apart from the unconditional analytical school); and the numerous indices of an awareness of subjectivity which signals, in literary studies across the board at the present time, an engagement to bear witness to the relationship between art and the life of the human person. Is there any reason why Comparative Literature should be – or is – turning to mildly integrative philosophical topics precisely when all the signs seem to be pointing to cultural decentralization? This is not a new question; all along there has been philosophical reflection about literary studies, and it is when it was lacking or not thorough-going enough that shortcomings occurred. Some of the major selfquestionings Comparative Literature underwent in the past were of a philosophical nature though the word philosophy was seldom pronounced. When in his 1970 paper René Wellek denounced traditional literary history, it was for its practice of the “genetic fallacy” – a misapplication of the concept of causation presupposing that literatures would evolve like animal species or be determined by constraints comparable to physical laws. Anteriority would provide heuristic evidence for the behaviour of literary phenomena, as if it were itself a force. Similarly, insufficiently analyzed notions of time would result in warped periodizations. The greatest victim of these conceptual insufficiencies was historicity itself; many literary histories carried sub-products of pseudo-Hegelian philosophies of history. All this has been amply discussed and the only reason to recall it is that our disciplines fell short of philosophical reflection in these matters and became an easy and willing target for theoretical criticisms, which were themselves of a philosophical nature but which often just substituted one dogma for another. They had, however, by and large, the immense advantage of setting the study of literary phenomena in the framework of thorough-going philosophies of culture beginning with those of Freud and Marx and some of the 1968ish combinations of Freud and Marx; of Lacan and Derrida and ever so many others. Far from appearing as extrapolations stemming from non-literary disciplines these Weltanschauungen have become part and parcel of our examination of the literary system. The (fortunate) complication is that they too are being and have to be searched for fixations that would tend to generate universals and hierarchies over again, particularly as regards the treatement of the human person. Every Weltanschauung that came or comes to dominate the scene dissolves and decenters the subject further; but why? It seems to me that it is for the sake of the human identity of that person, its now biologically proven uniqueness, that which makes all the difference. But we have been too busy downplaying the rational commonalities to acknowledge that there remains an existent, stronger for having been stripped of its most abstract characteristics, and thirstier than ever for recognition. It does not even matter that the “subject” designation is so worn out that it may no longer fairly represent that existent. The downtrodden other of the condemnable subject may be, in postcolonial terms for example, designated as object. Thus, in her
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analysis of Gayatri Spivak’s and Edward Said’s postcolonial vision, Asha Varadharajan shows how postcolonialism defeats the “patriarchal and imperialist subject by demonstrating that the unity and self-sufficiency of this subject is possible only at the expense of the object” 4 ; that “the object [...] continues to function as a dark continent of sorts, a species of otherness whose point of reference remains the Eurocentric and masculine self”. In this case the object is not yet emancipated or self-accepting, and the author looks for a further development in which the relationship between self and other would be rethought to articulate “the resistance of the object, not as the elided difference within the imperialist self, but as the defaced inhabitant of cultures, histories and materialities, subject to and other than this self”.5 This terminology, and the use Asha Varadharajan makes of it, points to the fact that these postcolonial views have indeed defended the human existent by indicting the subject, and by instead endowing the object with the most urgent human aspirations; but that this a posteriori analysis does not yet describe the potentially liberated self or at least the self capable of freedom. This observation, of course, in no way invalidates the critical contribution postcolonial studies have made by way of clearing the deck of the abusive characteristics of the dominant subject. They can, however, serve to make us conscious of subjectivity in all its variables as a field of interaction, of elaboration of the as yet unrecognized in our present. On this point, Marc Angenot in his reflections on social discourse6 shows that the radically new, the novum, does not always manifest itself obviously as the antithesis of hegemony; it can appear in the margins, humble, fragmentary, ridiculous even and unrecognized. As the medium in which all communication necessarily occurs, this hegemonic discourse appears to define all possible elements of discourse to come. It breeds contradictions of itself, the most extreme of which become the unthinkable, the absurd, infamous, monstrous. But how, then, Angenot asks, will the radically new, the novum, the noch nicht gesagtes make its way? There will be stirrings in the network, heteronomy, which is not the exact sum total of contraries of the hegemonic, for the hegemonic allows for any number of dissensions and originalities. In fact, hegemony excells at producing predictable, ostentatious innovation. In establishing criteria for the truly not yet said that will make a radical difference one must therefore be wary of this ability of hegemony to inscribe everything within itself so that the most outrageous questioning will do little more but confirm it. Therefore, Angenot demands of the researcher an unprecedented endeavour based on “a global perception of the socio-historical discursive system”, so that the unconscious revivals, survivals, and returns of the forgotten and repressed, in short, the illusory new, will be avoided; and promises of what is really new will be heeded. The first stirrings of the new are unspectacular, discontinuous, sporadic and unimpressive because still in search of means of expression. Hence the need to avoid resurrecting or reactivating 4 The Exotic Parodies. Subjectivity in Said, Adorno and Spivak (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. XI. 5 Ibid. 6 In Robert F. Barsky, ed., Discours social I, no. 3 (1988).
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the obsolete – in our case, crypto-humanisms extolling the humanistic subject of yesteryear. Genuine dissidence is to be sought in the peripheral, the marginal, where it abounds. The real challenge must come from the marginal as it gains acceptability, at the crucial moment when the unthinkable and unsayable become possible and touch a chosen audience. If then in this sense the postcolonial treatment of the subject has tended to call forth its alienated other without as yet propounding an alternative theory of subjectivity it may be, in the first place, that it had not meant to do so. It may also be that, exactly as envisioned in Marc Angenot’s model, repressed, marginalized manifestations of the subject or rather of the surviving splinters of subjectivity vying for attention are widely scattered, heterogeneous and in need of reassembling. I wish I knew of a clever-ism that would suddenly gather within itself these disparate signs of our guilt towards the non-subject. As it is, I can only offer a sampler of the many-sided manifestations of the human existent’s need for recognition in the configuration of our studies. In the first place, perhaps, comes or came the necessity to reexamine the claim of objectivity, scientificity even, of many literary theories and philosophies of culture. A recent acquisition for my sampler came from hearing a lecture by Michael Holquist based upon Auerbach as a person, the quasi-legendary aspects of his life, the fact that his personal crises and his exile symbolically marked the end of the European Enlightenment; and the fact that even those who are suspicious of drawing relationships of signification between individual and collective histories are fascinated by Auerbach’s biography. Topoi may be spots on an intellectual map, but they are also nodes of osmosis between past and present with roots in subjective experience and therefore repositories of intersubjectivity. The “inter” does not abolish the personal elements, but on the contrary underscores the communicative potential of literature, bringing closer to our attention its communicative function. Most particularly, Michael Holquist brought into mutual relationship exile as a figure and the figure (that of the author, or that of the structure?) as a product of exile. The lecture cannot be summarized; I simply wanted to use these few indications as part of the evidence of a renewed and sustained interest in the subjective underpinnings of philosophies of culture. A similar look could be taken, further in the past, at Gaston Bachelard and at his double-pronged world vision. On the one hand he was the grandfather of nouvelle critique with his poetics of the four traditional elements, and of space, and of daydreaming; on the other hand he was a philosopher of science critical of simplified rationality. At a very recent conference on Bachelard there occurred a reevaluation of his epistemology in the light of newer physical theories (indeterminacy, chaos etc...) About his poetics it was noticed that on the one hand he was a distant contributor to the death of the author, since the crops of images he culled in the poetry of the world were classified according to the common structures of imagination and divorced from the private worlds of the poets he quoted; on the other hand, however, in close readings of his discussions of these images, one could retrace psychic impulses that were indisputably his own and determined his choices. For instance, though he wrote reams
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about the poetics of the spaces of the house and their glowing warmth, his intuitions of them were typically male and charmingly uninformed. Whether his subjectivity also affected his epistemology raises a wider question since a similar questioning could be applied to a variety of philosophies; what can be safely said is that his early treatment of the history of reason may well have contributed to relativizing determinism and emphasizing the role of the researcher’s mind in shaping scientific hypotheses. Let us reminisce for a moment about the thematic phase of nouvelle critique, while it still searched in the text patterns revealing the poet’s psyche; we reach the historic point at which the latent structures in the text became entities no longer bearing the marks of a particular personality but products of the collective unconscious, or of the imagination as seen by the anthropologist, or of societal patterns. This might not have marked the death of the author, but it made the author instrumental to the collective. Lucien Goldmann said very clearly, did he not, that the author holds the pen but it is the community that writes. Here is a voice of the 1990s from afar, that of Betty Rojtman of Israel in a rather extraordinary book introduced by Paul Ricoeur: Une grave distraction.7 The author, starting from the sense of dispossession I have been discussing, uses narratology as her experimental ground, and Hebrew thought as her underlying motivation. The objective is a quest of meaning in full knowledge of its futility. Fiction in recent decades appears to shun anything resembling a “logique du récit”.8 “Dans l’ébranlement des repères idéologiques, l’histoire des modèles narratifs annonce un processus de subjectivation et d’intériorisation des schémas d’intrigue, moins soumis aux codes culturels et privés de leur garantie. [...] La logique des structures s’émousse, et le sens qu’elle emporte. Cette histoire [...] débouche sur le désordre apparent, l’impuissance à signifier de la modernité.” One consequence of this is the advent of intentional non-meaning by saturation of discourse, a situation Barthes had trouble accepting; he tried instead to redeem the insignificant. But Betty Rojtman collects instances of unfufilment and this is relevant to us because of the reader’s expectation of fulfilment. “Une conscience en quête qui ne trouve d’appui, dans l’espace-temps du monde raconté, composite et discontinu, que de son propre désarroi.”9 What is so important about this concentration on the deferral or even absence of meaning is the subjectivity of the reader, transposing its need of meaning into the text and attempting to construct meaning. But in some texts the reader will find only “l’essentielle défaillance: un cadre spatio-temporel qui s’effrite, et qui dise la signifiance de ce démembrement. Un sujet divisé entre lui-même et l’autre désemparé de son projet, qui cherche aveuglément la rive.”10 Potentially this means any reader and gives clear preponderance to that individual person as opposed to the interpretive community.
7 8 9 10
Paris: Balland, 1991. p. 55. p. 59. Ibid.
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The two of course are complementary; but what I stress here is that subjectivity is welcomed as part of literary communication. No less significant is B. Rojtman’s way of inserting traditional Hebrew thought into postmodernity. Though there is Light, the self is separated from it. What guarantees its being is, precisely, the rift. “L’arrachement et la perte sont le signe préalable d’une autonomie reconnue.” 9 The only thing of which this self can be sure is the very separation which gives it the right to err, but by the same token gives it reality. This minimalist concession to subjectivity can also invoke Lacan in that the “irreparable nostalgia” of desire which confirms us in our separateness also confirms the unattainability of Being. Among many other elements my sampler also contains the field of genetic textual studies which devote themselves to the text in the making, to the interaction between the writer’s moment to moment experience and the graphemic evolution of his or her text.
11
p. 216.
