Analogy, Terminable and Interminable

Few twentieth-century discourses have shaped the humanities and social sciences like psychoanalysis. The work of Sigmund Freud and his inheritors has been a driving force behind countless efforts to rethink the most fundamental questions of subjectivity, history, and politics. This enduring influence is readily evident in contemporary gender studies, film theory, and media studies–to list only the most obvious examples. Perhaps even more uniquely, the authority of psychoanalysis has crossed all methodological and ideological lines, impacting Anglo-American analytic as much as Continental philosophy, empirical anthropological research as well as semiotics and formalist hermeneutics. Freud himself sets the stage for these developments. Throughout his oeuvre, he routinely moves between observations about the dynamics organizing a singular psyche and broader reflections on cultural experience, considering art, literature, and religion as well as the nature of charismatic leaders, mass movements, and the possibilities for world peace. At the same time, it is in the midst of his strongest assertions of parallels between individual and sociopolitical systems that Freud betrays the most profound doubts about the explanatory reach of his work. Paradoxically, the status of psychoanalysis as a “master discourse,” its seeming ability to model everything under the sun, may be the product of the profound skepticism it directs toward its own mastery.
 
Near the close of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud asks whether his account of “the integration of a separate individual into a human group” provides a basis for understanding the “creation of a unified group out of many individuals” (21: 140).[1] Given the “similarity between the means employed and the resultant phenomena,” he writes, one can in this instance speak of “the same process applied to different kinds of objects” (140). In explaining the analogous development of the singular human psyche and civilization in general, Freud describes a cultural superego that resembles the individual superego in origin and function. Both formations establish ideal demands that lead to the creation of a conscience, and at times, they appear almost completely interdependent, as if one could not exist without the other. If the two differ, Freud suggests, it is only in that the injunctions of the cultural superego tend to be more legible than those of individual ones, whose commands largely remain unconscious and can thus be difficult to discern. In other words, even if one’s primary goal is to study the singular psyche rather than its social counterpart, focusing on the latter may still be the best means of understanding the former.
 
On the basis of these remarks, it would be a gross understatement to say that the development of the singular psyche is “mirrored by” or “reflected in” a larger communal field. Taking their cue from Freud’s characterization of these substantive parallels between individual psychological processes and social ones, several generations of cultural critics have felt licensed, if not required, to pass judgment on the mental welfare of entire societies. As Freud canonically formulates it:
 

If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization–possibly the whole of mankind–have become “neurotic”?
 

(21: 144)

The elaboration of “a pathology of cultural communities,” as Freud also terms it, has become a sine qua non of much contemporary research, even in disciplines in which the word “psychoanalysis” is rarely uttered. From anthropologists to art historians, from poetry critics to urban economists, scholars routinely pursue a host of different diagnoses of the psycho-logics of mass formations, implicitly and explicitly analogizing individual dynamics with groups ranging from reading or consuming publics to the populations of nations or continents.

 
Given the authority that Freud’s views on this topic have acquired, it is important to consider whether his claim that “the development of civilization” is “comparable to the normal maturation of the individual” is entirely compatible with his other views about social experience (21: 97-98). As is well known, a central concept in his later work–and a topic of considerable controversy for many of his inheritors–is the death drive. Freud maintains that both the singular psyche and civilization are structured by the same irresolvable clash between Eros and a Todestrieb, between a Lebenstrieb and a Destruktionstrieb. In fact, near the end of Civilization and its Discontents it is Freud’s confrontation with the all-permeating influence of this collision of forces that first prompts him to detail the analogy between the development of the individual and the development of culture.[2] Yet these reflections on the parallels between individual and cultural superegos take place in a book whose overarching theme–a theme that predominates in Freud’s later thought–is that “aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man” and “constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization” (122). In The Future of an Illusion, written two years before Civilization and its Discontents, Freud declares that “every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest,” adding that “civilization has to be defended against the individual” and that “in consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (21: 6/112). In other words, the development of the individual and the development of culture, two dynamics that proceed according to the same methods and produce remarkably similar results, are nonetheless essentially at odds with one another. Crucially, the divisive tension common to both processes, the clash of Eros and the death drive, does not explain this mutual antagonism; i.e., it is not a question of a discord internal to the individual reproducing itself as a conflict between self and other(s):
 

But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction–probably an irreconcilable one–between the primal instincts of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects.
 

(21: 141)

Not only does Freud avoid claiming that it is the developmental similarities between the individual and its society that inexorably bring them into conflict with one another, but he also goes to some lengths to complement the parallels he has identified between these processes with a list of their differences, ultimately concluding that the overarching aim of culture is “one great unity, the unity of mankind,” a goal to which no individual psyche even vaguely aspires (122).[3] For its part, the individual tirelessly seeks its own happiness, as a consequence of which “the development process of the individual can thus be expected to have special features of its own which are not reproduced in the process of human civilization” (140).[4] The remarkable similarities between the methods and results of individual and social development notwithstanding, it is no longer clear that communal phenomena can be understood as “extensions” or “reflections” of the individual or that one can look to a cultural superego as a way of learning something about an individual one.[5] More bluntly, it may be that despite what Freud himself argues in earlier works such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the libidinal model of an individual psyche cannot account for social dynamics.[6] As useful as Freud’s discussions of conscience, the Oedipus complex, or the relationship between sadomasochism and narcissism may be for understanding political logics, Freud is far more skeptical about the reliability of such “applied” analyses than many of his followers.

 
In fact, it could be argued that from the moment he introduces the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud’s discussions of the relations between individual and cultural processes of development are characterized by this dual–at times almost graphically divergent–emphasis on their striking parallels and their profound mutual antagonisms. The resulting aporias are well known and account for the pessimistic reputation of Freud’s later writings: the regulation of aggression becomes virtually indistinguishable from the causes of aggression; the self-destructiveness of civilization stems from the way in which it gives either too much or too little expression to libidinal forces; and, most generally, the dynamics within culture that threaten to tear it apart are also the source of its most celebrated achievements. It therefore comes as no surprise that in Civilization and its Discontents Freud asks for forgiveness for wasting everyone’s time by writing down what is simply common knowledge and yet simultaneously declines to offer an opinion on the inherent worth of culture and denies having any real insight into the problems he is exploring, as if this “common knowledge” were uncommonly obscure, even to him.
 
The presence of these stark tensions in Freud’s later work does not necessarily mean that any “pathology of cultural communities” is destined to fail, but if the processes of civilization and the dynamics internal to individuals are both identical to and antithetical to one another, it is clear that psycho-cultural research cannot proceed along the straightforward lines that Freud himself seems both to propose and to undertake. In fact, it may be that psychoanalysis has been a tremendous resource for cultural criticism because in Freud the theory of an analogy between the individual and the social is always also a critique of the authority of analogy as such. In first introducing the parallels between the development of the singular psyche and the development of civilization, Freud explicitly acknowledges that it is difficult to know what inferences can and cannot be drawn from such an alignment of systems, stressing that one may easily take the comparison too far and find that the resulting conclusions are not coherent in the original terms of the demonstration. If, for example, treating the development of culture like the development of an individual allows us to attribute psychological maladies to an entire people or epoch, we immediately see that unlike with a neurotic patient, who can be contrasted with a “normal,” non-neurotic man or woman, there is no overarching baseline of comparison that would make it possible to deem one culture “sick” and one “healthy.” Of course, this objection is far from damning. Freud casually acknowledges a solution–making comparisons across multiple cultures–which he does himself when he notes that he is working hard to avoid “the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization” (21: 116). In addressing the formal structure of analogy in abstract terms, however, Freud underscores the inherent instability of the schema. The issue is not simply that any analogy posits an implicit difference between the terms it aligns, e.g., that an analogy between the individual and the cultural is tantamount to a statement about their differences. More importantly, by according authority to a tertium comparationis, one introduces new distinctions that may not be so easily controlled. It is this question of how best to manage the conceptual implications of his comparisons that Freud, having just articulated his crucial analogy, immediately tries to resolve:
 

The process of the civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction of a higher order than is the development of the individual and it is therefore harder to apprehend in concrete terms, nor should we pursue analogies to an obsessional extreme [die Aufspürung von Analogien soll nicht zwanghaft übertrieben werden].
 

(140)

Having established foundational connections between the development of the individual and the development of human culture as a whole–indeed, having gone so far as to say that the latter process clarifies dimensions of the former that may otherwise remain invisible–Freud notably does not try to explain why this argument might be at odds with the general theme of his book, the antagonism between the individual and society, and instead pauses to warn that such an “analogy” may get out of hand. Far from being led astray by what we are (or are not) learning about the relationship between the individual and its culture, it is the seductiveness of analogical demonstration itself that arouses our obsessive impulses. If we are not careful, the analogy will take on a life of its own, compromising its reliability by saying too much. To be clear, the seductiveness of analogy in general is not grounds for worrying that any particular analogy is fallacious. To the contrary, the analogy in question here gains its potentially misleading momentum from the fact that the parallels it highlights are “true.”

 
Naturally, we are not dealing with just any analogy. On the basis of it, one can draw (or reject) countless conclusions about the parallels between social reality and the workings of singular minds. For this very reason, however, this analogy indicates why such correspondences are simultaneously vital, dangerous, and, most crucially, unavoidable. At the beginning of this essay, we noted that over the last century psychoanalysis has shown itself to have seemingly boundless explanatory powers that cross virtually all methodological and ideological borders. The irony is that for Freud doubts about the argumentative scope of psychoanalysis arise not because its models are somehow limited, but rather because they are never limited enough. In this particular instance, it turns out that once the authority of analogy is given full reign, it acquires a paradigmatic status that may undermine the articulation of the very distinctions it is intended to clarify:
 

I would not say that an attempt . . . to carry psychoanalysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless. But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are dealing only with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with people but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been involved.
 

(21: 144)

Formulated in blunter terms than anything we have to this point considered, the suggestion that using psychoanalysis as a basis for broader cultural reflections rests on what is ultimately “only an analogy” threatens to undermine much of the scholarship that has been done in Freud’s name over the last century. At the same time, Freud’s concern about the standard of comparison on the basis of which one culture could be termed “neurotic” and one “healthy” applies equally well here: By what standard is an analogy “only” an analogy? Is not psychoanalysis, of all fields, a discourse in which the ideational or intelligible content of a comparison is no more or less “real” than some physical or material phenomenon or register? What external reference point or third term allows for a clear differentiation between an analogical and a non-analogical assertion of identity between two concepts, entities, or processes? In this regard, it is important to observe that precisely what Freud has not been doing with the individual and the collective in Civilization and its Discontents is “tearing them from the sphere in which they have originated.” Indeed, his entire discussion aims to explore the parameters of their respective emergences. Moreover, by implicitly analogizing people with concepts in the very gesture of trying to qualify the demonstrative authority of analogy (“it is dangerous, not only with people but also with concepts”) Freud reveals just how obsessive our reliance on analogy actually is. Not only is his rejection of analogy indirectly made through an analogy, but it is through an analogy that repeats the error he wants to avoid. By aligning human beings and concepts, Freud, far from grounding his discussion in concrete terms, moves it to “an abstraction of a higher order,” for if the development of the individual and the development of civilization can be likened to one another on the basis of a host of similarities in their methods and results, Freud has done nothing to show that there is any justification for paralleling people and concepts along similar lines. Having just given us good reason to be concerned about the complications introduced by the fact that any analogy in effect becomes an analogy of analogy, it is Freud who seems to be the one on the verge of tearing his arguments from the sphere in which they have originated.

 
All of this suggests that the questions of logic and rhetoric raised in Freud’s treatment of analogy play an essential role in his conceptualization of cultural systems. At the start of his discussion of the relationship between the development of the individual and the development of civilization, Freud acknowledges that since these dynamics and “organic life in general” all appear to be characterized by the struggle between Eros and the death drive, “we cannot . . . avoid going into the relations of these three processes to one another” (21: 139). If the set of comparisons and contrasts that ensues is “imperative and unavoidable” (“unabweisbar“), that is, if the resulting demonstration is reliably inevitable, it is nonetheless inevitably unreliable, as well. We cannot help but undertake the analysis, yet we do so with the knowledge that we will fall prey to the seductions of analogy. To put this more prosaically, if Freud challenges us to pursue the insights garnered by the unavoidable recognition of the similarities between the development of the individual and the development of culture, we must at the same time problematize the integrity of the analogies thereby produced. The argument succeeds by generating results that it has to question rather than embrace. If psychoanalysis is a powerful paradigm of interdisciplinary research or of social experience in general, this is because it articulates a forceful critique of the claims of its own models to be exhaustive. Psychoanalysis is one discourse that will never unambiguously present itself as a master discourse, even at the points at which its doctrines acquire their most universal pretensions. In what respects, then, does the illustrative power of Freud’s analogy between the individual and culture run its course? Is our obsession with it terminable or interminable? In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud offers no definitive way to decide whether it is possible to “work through” the obsessive impulses analogy excites. If anything, he suggests that the effort to fight against such impulses may actually intensify them.
 
These difficulties are by no means unique to Civilization and its Discontents. Whenever Freud wants to coordinate the singular psyche and communal dynamics, he introduces a representational schema as a supplemental element; but in each instance, the figure in question, far from remaining marginal or secondary, generalizes to become the central semantic paradigm. The question of how insights into individual psychological processes can or should guide the study of history, aesthetics, or politics is thereby subordinated to concerns about the relationship between thought and language; e.g., the task at hand is suddenly to articulate a concept of analogy that can be distinguished from an analogy of analogy.
 
The discussion of dream symbolism in The Interpretation of Dreams and the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis is a case in point. In the first version of the Traumdeutung, Freud argues that the individual dreamer’s own associations are the core of any systematic interpretation of a dream. Emphasizing the singularity of each oneiric expression, he writes that he is “prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts” (4: 105). However, with the new material added to the book between 1914 and 1923, the discussion of the dream-work is greatly expanded, and Freud appends example after example of codified dream symbols (kings are the dreamer’s father, rooms represent women, children stand in for the genitals, and so on).[7] As fixed relations between manifest and latent contents that have not been forged by a singular dreaming psyche, these symbols are entirely resistant to interrogation through the dreamer’s associations. Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok identify this tension as a fundamental impasse in Freud’s thought, something that calls for outright repair.[8] Yet it would be equally accurate to say that it is in dwelling on the forces that organize this “impasse” that psychoanalysis becomes a discourse about the individual and the collective. From his first remarks on the topic, Freud makes it clear that symbols are not products of dreams or in any way unique to them. To the contrary, symbols are part of a broader cultural milieu, a means of expression that can be found in idioms, myths, and folklore. When symbols appear in a dream, they are highly expressive, but they are not the individual‘s expressions–to use them is akin to speaking a language one does not actually know. Initially, Freud argues that the presence of symbols in dreams is a contingency, that is, symbols are indirect representations that just happen to be available for the dream-work to take advantage of as a tool for censorship. As a consequence, Freud is adamant that the interpretation of dream symbols is to be regarded as a supplement to the main analytic focus on the patient’s own associations with the manifest dream text: “Interpretation based on a knowledge of symbols is not a technique which can replace or compete with the associative one. It forms a supplement to the latter” (15: 151). As with the obsession-inducing analogy, however, this hierarchy proves to be anything but stable. Having made the point that symbolism is only one of the techniques of indirect representation relied on by the dream-work for censorship, Freud almost immediately grants it the more substantial status of “a second and independent factor in the distortion of dreams, alongside of the dream-censorship” (168). The difficulties involved in keeping the “supplement” in its place become even more obvious as Freud tries to clarify the boundaries between dream symbolism and the other three types of relations between manifest and latent dream content: part for whole, allusion (Anspielung), and plastic portrayal (Verbildlichung). “The essence of this symbolic relation,” Freud writes, “is that it is a comparison (Vergleich), but not a comparison of any sort. Special limitations seem to be attached to the comparison, but it is hard to say what they are” (152). If some symbolic comparisons are so obvious as scarcely to qualify as indirect representations (and hence as instances of censorship), others are so obscure that the tertium comparationis remains forever unknowable. In the latter case, the symbol links two contents, but there is no way to explain why, as if on a semantic level the alignment were completely unmotivated. To make matters even messier, Freud says that there is no guarantee that any given element in the manifest content of a specific dream is functioning in its symbolic capacity, i.e., sometimes a room or a child is just a room or a child. Given the vexing character of symbolic relations–at once obvious and obscure, restricted and unrestricted, direct and indirect–“we must admit . . . that the concept of a symbol cannot at present be sharply delimited: it shades off into such notions as those of a substitution (Ersetzung) or representation (Darstellung), and even approaches that of an allusion (Anspielung)” (152). Introduced as a particular type of indirect relationship between two contents, the symbol potentially comes to infect all representations, whether by reducing them to purely contingent codifications (linked mechanically, with no substantive connections between the elements), dissolving them into fields of imprecise allusions, or transforming them into indifferent sequences in which any term can be a substitute for any other. In submitting all semantic relations to the tyranny of its “special” comparison, the symbol negates the conceptual specificity of comparison itself and threatens to undermine the very idea of the dream-work as a forging of relations between manifest and latent contents.
 
In confronting this nexus of problems, Freud argues that anthropologists and linguists probably understand the topic better than he and that it is in trying to account for this special form of comparison that psychoanalysis discovers its essential connections with and dependence on discourses such as philology, sociology, and religious studies. Once again, the bond between the individual psyche and the cultural is articulated through an analysis that is as much poetics as it is psychology. When Freud writes that symbols are part of the unconscious “Vorstellen des Volkes” (“ideation/imagination of the people”), we see more clearly why his repeated additions to the symbolism section of The Interpretation of Dreams constitute an intervention into the debates about individual and social formations and a “collective unconscious” that raged in the teens between Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung (Schriften II/III: 356). By 1915, Freud was subjecting his concept of the unconscious to a series of tests that would ultimately produce the second topography and the figure of the cultural superego. To the extent that Freud accords the symbol an unusual status as unconscious knowledge (Kenntnisse) rather than unconscious impulses (Strebungen), we should regard his analysis of its complexities as a key moment in his efforts to recoordinate onto-and phylogenetic accounts of the human psyche. Whatever our conclusions about these more general points, Freud’s consideration of symbolism shows how each of his attempts to describe the relations between individual and cultural dynamics turns, or founders, on the way in which an ostensibly restricted figure–such as the symbol or analogy–comes to infect, if not to control, the representational schemas that ostensibly delimit it.[9]
 
Our discussion suggests that the abiding challenge for psychoanalytically guided criticism is to embrace both Freud’s optimism about the explanatory potential of his research for all areas of human experience and his tacit (pessimistic) acknowledgement that any theoretical articulation of the individual with the social seems fated to occur on the basis of a representational dynamic that is far from stable. This special issue of Postmodern Culture was originally conceived as an opportunity to reflect on these issues by looking at the changing aesthetic and political significance of psychoanalytic thought over the last several decades. On the one hand, the basic parameters of such a review seem clear. Any discussion of psychoanalysis and politics today almost necessarily takes as its central reference point French thought of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era in which the relations between Freudian and Marxist doctrines were explored with unprecedented vigor. Indeed, it is doubtful that the enthusiasm for Freudo-Marxism has ever subsequently waned. From Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida to Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, efforts to come to terms with the political implications of psychoanalytic arguments have repeatedly been linked to philosophical reconsiderations of Idealism and its most prominent nineteenth-century critic, Karl Marx. On the other hand, it is easy to muddy this picture. No thinker has had more influence on contemporary debates about gender and politics than Michel Foucault, and his singular impact has arguably had a great deal to do with the extent to which he cannot be situated in a psychoanalytic camp. More specifically, one could ask whether Foucault’s ideas about bio-power and their reinterpretation in the work of Giorgio Agamben or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri mark the petering out of the Freudo-Marxist rage of the 1960s and 1970s, rather than its continuation. When it comes to the Frankfurt School, it is similarly uncertain just how crucial some conjunction of Freud and Marx is for confronting basic questions about liberalism and capitalism. Although both Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin are known for their cryptic–in Adorno’s case highly ironic–engagements with Freudian doctrines, it is far from clear how much this facet of their work influences their readings of Marx, their understandings of culture, or their theories of fascism. Finally, much could be said about the way in which historicist paradigms have gradually displaced the influence of psychoanalytic models, particularly when it comes to studies of ethnicity and globalization.
 
The essays in this issue take as their starting point these and related uncertainties about the coherence of any Freudo-Marxist synthesis. In “In Theory, Politics Does Not Exist,” Brett Levinson begins by revisiting one of this field’s founding dilemmas: why should the masses desire fascism rather than socialism? Starting with George Bataille’s claim that without the help of psychoanalysis no Marxist project can explain why modern capitalist democracies should witness the emergence of right-wing populist movements rather than left-wing ones, Levinson focuses on Lacan’s Seventeenth Seminar and his notorious challenge to the Parisian students in the aftermath of May of 1968: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.” For Lacan, argues Levinson, freedom from mastery and master signifiers occurs not by rioting in the streets, but through the jouissance and knowledge made possible by the analysis of language and the reading and overwriting of the language of the other that occurs in the transference. What is ironic, concludes Levinson, is that Slavoj Zizek, the most prominent self-proclaimed Lacanian of our day, has missed this lesson entirely. Turning to Zizek’s recent debate with Ernesto Laclau about populism as a paradigm for the political as such, Levinson shows that both writers end up claiming that political praxis is based on the avoidance of the knowledge and joy central to Lacan’s thinking. In the end, neither one of these two theorists can understand his own work–theory–as political.
 
This focus on Lacan and his reaction to the events of 1968 brings us face to face with one of the central concerns of late twentieth-century French thought: must social movements be understood in terms of dynamics of desire and energy that escape traditional categories of subjectivity and unsettle any clear opposition between the ideal and the material, or the body and language? In “The Desire Called Mao,” Eleanor Kaufman asks whether the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism celebrated in the “libidinal economy theory” of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard is resurrected in the work of a thinker who at first–and even second–glance could not appear to be more different: Alain Badiou. One of Kaufman’s key insights is that the interest of libidinal theorists in energistic flux is complemented by a concern with inertia, a vestige of Freud’s death drive encapsulated by notions such as the “zero point” of desire and the immobilization of the body. If Badiou shares neither the methods, assumptions, nor goals of these philosophers, he nonetheless addresses this question of stasis and its significance for his conceptualization of the event when he breaks with Marxist ideas of periodization and change and directs a great deal of skepticism toward the structuring authority of temporality itself. The consequence, Kaufman shows, is that these very different thinkers all confront an a-material materialism that contemporary discussions of trauma, memory, and the haunting of the past have failed to understand.
 
These two articles suggest that any consideration of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism must take as a central task a rethinking of the concepts of time and history. This is true both for Badiou’s concern with the waiting involved in the inevitably belated recognition of the event and for Lacan’s interest in the temporality of affect as a time “on the other side” that is forever on the brink of arriving.[10] It has been argued that Marx never subjects time to the critique he directs at the other bedrocks of bourgeois thought. But is psychoanalysis also guilty of under-theorizing time? In “The Mystery of Sex and the Mystery of Time,” Alan Bass explores this problem, starting with the deceptively simple question of why sexuality is a theoretical issue. Working from Laplanche’s effort to link the Freudian unconscious with Heidegger, Bass asks what it would mean to coordinate psychoanalytic models of sexuality with a theory of ekstasis. He focuses on the idea of “eruptive time,” the moment at which the tension defining sexual need opens up a relation to the other that cannot be grasped by a traditional subject-object opposition. The crucial thing to recognize, Bass suggests, is that this unsettling of self-enclosed identity by an unconscious memory of non-presence is a profound source of violence against the other. As an expression of anxiety about the other’s unconscious, eruptive time must therefore be central to any explanation of the relationship between the intrapsychic and the cultural. In “Endopsychic Allegories,” Laurence Rickels approaches the conceptualization of social relations in psychoanalysis from a somewhat different perspective, focusing on “endopsychic perception,” which Freud describes in a famous letter to Fliess: “The dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond. Immortality, retribution, the entire beyond are all reflections of our psychic inside” (Complete Letters 286). In an intertextual study of Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs, Freud’s case study of Schreber, and Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, Rickels considers this endopsychic perception as “the inside view (afforded through certain psychotic delusions) of the psyche at the intersection between technology and the unconscious.” Highlighting the parallels between the sadism of the allegorist and the paranoid, Rickels reads Philip K. Dick’s quasi-autobiographical final novels and his earlier Time Out of Joint as meditations on the Freudo-Benjaminian understandings of un-mourning and melancholy and the relationship between psychic reality and loss.
 
As a discourse at once enthralled by and profoundly at odds with its own explanatory powers, Freudian thought remains one of the best examples of what a genuinely critical project can be. Together, the essays in this volume offer a complex picture of what is involved in articulating a psychoanalytic theory of society or culture. In one respect, their lesson appears to be that some of the basic categories of political philosophy have to be rethought from the perspective of dynamics of repetition and mourning or stasis and ekstasis, that is, with schemas that bear little resemblance to the traditional paradigms of development, regression, or revolution. At the same time, there is a sense that the progressive potential of this kind of research is not predicated on a complete rejection of Enlightenment presuppositions about the value of knowledge and the hierarchies that inevitably obtain between intellectual and material labor. Whatever the ultimate point of emphasis, it is clear that psychoanalysis continues to be central to the way in which the historicity of theory is being explored.