cavell_stanley_freud and philosophy_ a fragment

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Freud and Philosophy: A FragmentAuthor(s): Stanley CavellSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 2, The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis (Winter, 1987), pp. 386-393Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343500

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Freud and Philosophy: A Fragment

Stanley Cavell

Introductory note.-The piece of which thefollowing pages are afragment isentitled Psychoanalysisnd Cinema and was deliveredon 18 October1985 totheForumon Psychiatryand the Humanitiesat Washington,D.C. as thatyear'sEdith WeigertLecture. Thefull essayconcernsthe idea thatpsychoanalysis ndcinema share an origin as responses o the sufferingand knowledgeof women,in particular responses n which that sufferingand knowledge s recognizedasthe latest,or last, stage in the historicalunfoldingofphilosophical kepticism, helastproofof theexistenceof the human mind. Theessayworks his out along withworkingout theexistenceofa genre offilmI call The Melodramaof the UnknownWoman. Thefilmfrom which the genre's title is adapted,Max Ophuls'Letterfrom an Unknown Woman (1948, withJoan Fontaine and LouisJourdan),is readso as tofollow out its declarationof itself-hence perhapsthedeclarationoffilm itself-to be understandableonly in taking thepositionof a woman,saya position n whichone alliesoneselfwiththefemininein one'scharacter,whicheverone'sgender;whosedirectordeclareshimself obea woman,henceperhapsdeclaresdirectingas such, of a certainrange offilm, toproceedfroman alliance with thefeminine;and whosenarrativeand themesmaybeseento declare hattheknowledgeof the existenceof others,hence of oneself, requires,as from a perhaps datableeventin humanhistory, hecapacity or theexperience fhorrorand ofmourning.

* * *

This excerpt is printed with permission of the series Psychiatry and the Humanities.The full text will appear in TheImages in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, nd Cinema,vol.10 of that series, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.CriticalInquiry 13 (Winter 1987)? 1987 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/87/1302-0004$01.00. All rights reserved.

386


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Winter 1987 387Other of my intellectual debts remain fully outstanding, that to Freud'swork before all. A beholdenness to Sigmund Freud's intervention inWestern culture is hardly something for concealment, but I have untilnow left my commitment to it fairly implicit. This has been not merelyout of intellectual terror at Freud's achievement but in service of an ideaand in compensation for a dissatisfaction I might formulate as follows:psychoanalytic interpretations of the arts in American culture have, untilquite recently, on the whole been content to permit the texts underanalysis not to challenge the concepts of analysis being applied to them,and this seemed to me to do injustice both to psychoanalysis and toliterature (the art that has attracted most psychoanalytic criticism). Myresponse was to make a virtue of this defect by trying, in my readingsof film as well as of literature and of philosophy, to recapitulate what Iunderstood by Freud's saying that he had been preceded in his insightsby the creative writers of his tradition; that is, I tried to arrive at a sensefor each text I encountered (it was my private touchstone for when aninterpretation had gone far enough to leave for the moment) that psy-choanalysis had become called for, as if called for in the history of knowl-edge, as if each psychoanalytic reading were charged with rediscoveringthe reality of psychoanalysis. This still does not seem to me an irrelevantambition, but it is also no longer a sufficient response in our alteredenvironment. Some of the most interesting and useful criticismand literarytheory currently being produced is decisively psychoanalytic in inspiration,an alteration initiated for us most prominently by the past two or sodecades of work in Paris and represented in this country by-to pickexamples from which I have profited in recent months-Neil Hertz onthe Dora case, Shoshana Felman on Henry James' The Turn of theScrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on homophobia in Our Mutual Friend.1And now my problem has become that I am unsure whether I understandthe constitution of the discourses in which this material is presented in

1. See Neil Hertz, Dora's Secrets, Freud's Techniques, in In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York, 1985), pp.221-42; Shoshana Felman, Turning the Screw of Interpretation, Yale French Studies55/56 (1977): 94-207; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital:The Example of Our Mutual Friend, Raritan 2 (Winter 1983): 126-51.

Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, isthe author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, TheSensesof Walden, The Claimof Reason, and, most recently, ThemesOut ofSchool.He spent last spring at Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a fellowof the Institute for Advanced Studies. His most recent contributions toCriticalInquiryare Politics as Opposed to What? (September 1982) andThe Division of Talent (June 1985).

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388 StanleyCavell Freud and Philosophyrelation to what I take philosophy to be, a constitution to which, such asit is, I am also committed. So some siting of this relation is no longermine to postpone.I content myself here with saying that Freud's lifelong series ofdissociations of his work from the work of philosophy seems to me toprotest too much and to have done harm whose extent is only nowbeginning to reveal itself. I call attention to one of those dissociations inwhich Freud's ambivalence on the matter bleeds through. It comes inchapter 4 of TheInterpretation fDreams, ust as he has distinguished theoperations of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currentsor systems). Freud goes on to say: These considerations may lead usto feel that the interpretation of dreams may enable us to draw conclusionsas to the structure of our mental apparatus which we have hoped for invain from philosophy. 2 Given that this feeling is followed up by Freudin the extraordinary chapter 7, which ends the book, a piece of theoreticalspeculation continuous with the early, posthumously published Projectfor a Scientific Psychology, the ambiguity of the remark seems plain: itcan be taken, and always is, so far as I know, to mean that our vainwaiting for philosophys now to be replaced by the positive work of some-thing else, call it psychoanalysis (which may or may not be a scientificpsychology); but the remark can equally be taken to mean that our waitingfor philosophy is at last no longer vain, that philosophy has been fulfilledin the form of psychoanalysis. That this form may destroy earlier formsof philosophizing is no bar to conceiving of psychoanalysis as a philosophy.On the contrary, the two thinkers more indisputably recognized as phi-losophers who have opened for me what philosophy in our age may looklike, such as could interest me-Wittgenstein in his Philosophicalnvestigationsand Martin Heidegger in such a work as WhatIs CalledThinking? haveboth written in declared opposition to philosophy as they received it.Heidegger has called philosophy the deepest enemy of thinking, andWittgenstein has said that what he does replaces philosophy.The idea of replacing here has its own ambiguity. It could meanwhat the logical positivists roughly meant, that philosophy, so far as itremains intelligible, is to become logic or science. Or it could mean whatI take Wittgenstein to mean, that the impulse to philosophy and theconsequences of it are to be achieved by replacing, or reconceiving, theground or the place of the thus preserved activity of philosophizing. Andsomething like this could be said to be what every original philosophersince at least Descartes and Bacon and Locke has illustrated. It is as ifin Wittgenstein and in Heidegger the fate to philosophize and the fate

2. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretationof Dreams, The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Worksof Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London,1953-74), 4:144, 145. All further references to this work, with volume and page numbers,will be included in the text.


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Winter1987 389to undo philosophizing are located as radical, twin features of the humanas such. I am not choosing one sense of replacement over the other forFreud's relation to philosophy. On the contrary, my sense remains thatthe relation so far is ambiguous or ambivalent. Such matters are apt tobe discussed nowadays in terms of Freud's preoccupation with what iscalled priority or originality-issues differently associated with the namesof Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida. So it may be worth my sayingthat Bloom strikes me as unduly leveling matters when he speaks ofFreud's crisis in Beyondthe Pleasure Principle as obeying the structure ofa poet's demand, against his precursors, for equal immortality.3 Freud'sproblem there was less to establishhis originality or uniqueness than todetermine whether the cost or curse of that obvious uniqueness mightnot itself be the loss of immortality. I find that I agree here with what Iunderstand to be Derrida's view (of chapter 2 anyway) of Beyond thePleasurePrinciple-that in it, and in anticipation of his own death, Freudis asking himself whether his achievement, uniquely among the sciences(or, for that matter, the arts) in being bound to the uniqueness of oneman's name, is inheritable.4 This is the question enacted by the scenesof Freud the father and grandfather circling the Fort/Da game of repetitionand domination, looking so much like the inheritance of language itself,of selfhood itself. What is at stake is whether psychoanalysis is inher-itable-you may say repeatable-as science is inheritable, our modernparadigm for the teachable. If psychoanalysis is not thus inheritable, itfollows that it is not exactly a science. But the matter goes beyond thisquestion. If psychoanalysis is not exactly (what we mean by) a science,then its intellectual achievement may be lost to humankind. But now ifthis expresses Freud's preoccupation in Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple andelsewhere, then this preoccupation links his work with philosophy, forit is in philosophy that the question of the loss of itself is internal to itsfaithfulness to itself.This claim reveals me as one of those for whom the question whetherphilosophy exists sometimes seems the only question philosophy is boundto, that to cease caring what philosophy is and whether it exists-amidwhatever tasks and in whatever forms philosophy may appear in a givenhistorical moment-is to abandon philosophy, to cede it to logic or toscience or to poetry or to politics or to religion. That the question ofphilosophy is the only business of philosophy is the teaching I take fromthe works of Wittgenstein and of Heidegger whose inheritance I have

3. See Harold Bloom, Freud's Concepts of Defense and the Poetic Will [lecture toForum on Psychiatry and the Humanities, 1980], in TheLiteraryFreud: Mechanismsof Defenseand the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven, 1980), pp. 1-28.4. See Jacques Derrida, Coming into One's Own, in Psychoanalysisand the Questionof the Text, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore, 1978). The translator, James Hulbert,warns that he has abridged a section from a much longer work in progress.

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390 StanleyCavellclaimed. The question of inheritance, of continued existence, appears intheir work as the question whether philosophy can be taught or, say, thequestion how thinking is learned, the form the question takes in Beyondthe Pleasure Principle. It is perhaps primarily for this reason that myphilosophical colleagues in the Anglo-American profession of philosophystill generally (of course there are exceptions) hold Wittgenstein or Hei-degger at a distance, at varying distances from their conceptions of them-selves.

What would be lost if philosophy, or psychoanalysis, were lost to us?One can take the question of philosophy as the question whether thelife of reason is (any longer) attractive and recognizable, or as the questionwhether by my life I can and do affirm my existence in a world amongothers, or whether I deny this, of myself, of others, and of the world. Itis some such question that Nietzsche took as the issue of what he callednihilism, a matter in which he had taken decisive instruction from RalphWaldo Emerson. I persist, as indicated, in calling the issue by its, or itsancestor's, older name of skepticism; as I persist in thinking that to loseknowledge of the human possibilityof skepticism means to lose knowledgeof the human, something whose possibility I envision in The Claim ofReason, extending a problematic of Wittgenstein's under the title of soul-blindness.It is from a perspective of our culture as having entered on a pathof radical skepticism (hence on a path to deny this path) from the timeof, say, Descartes and Shakespeare-or say from the time of the fall ofkings and the rise of the new science and the death of God-that I see,late in this history, the advent of psychoanalysis as the place, perhapsthe last, in which the human psyche as such, the idea that there is a lifeof the mind, hence a death, receives its proof. It receives its proof of itsexistence in the only form in which that psyche can (any longer) believeit, namely as essentially unknown to itself, say unconscious. As Freudputs it in the closing pages of TheInterpretationfDreams: The unconsciousis the true psychical reality (5:613). This can seem a mere piece ofrhetoric on Freud's part, arbitrarilyunderrating the realityof consciousnessand promoting the unconscious out of something like a prejudice thatpromotes the reality of atomic particles over the reality of flesh and bloodand its opposable things-and certainly on less, or no, compelling in-tellectual grounds. But when seen in its relation to, or as a displacementof, philosophy, Freud's assertion declares that for the mind to lose thepsychoanalytic intuition of itself as unconscious would be for it to losethe last proof of its own existence. (One may feel here the need for adialectical qualification or limitation: this loss of proof, hence of humanexistence, is specific to the historical-political development in which theindividual requires such a proof before, as it were, his or her own eyes,a private proof. The question may then be open whether, in a furtherdevelopment, the proof might be otherwise possible, say performed before

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Winter1987 391the answering heart of a community. But in that case, would such a proofbe necessary? Would philosophy?)

How easy this intuition is to lose (the mind's [psychoanalytic]intuitionof its existence as unconscious), how hard the place of this intuition isto find-the place of the proof of existence constituted in the origin ofpsychoanalysis as a fulfillment of philosophy-is emblematized by howobscure this or any relation of philosophy and psychoanalysis is to us,an obscurity our institutions of learning serve to enforce. (I do not justmean that psychoanalysis is not usually a university subject and onlyquestionably should become one, I mean as well that philosophy is, orshould become, only questionably such a subject.) The tale to be toldhere is as yet perhaps untellable, by us and for us in America-the taleof Freud's inheritance (inescapable for an ambitious student of Germanculture of Freud's time) of the outburst of thinking initiated by Kantand then developed continuously by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopen-hauer, and Nietzsche. One possible opening passage of this story is fromthe same closing pages Ijust cited from TheInterpretation fDreams: WhatI ... describe is not the same as the unconscious of philosophers.... Inits innermost nature it [that is, psychical reality, the unconscious] is asmuch unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is asincompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the externalworld by the communication of our sense organs (5:614, 613). Freudallows himself to dismiss what he calls the unconscious of philosophers(no doubt referring to what some philosophers have referred to with theword unconscious ) without allowing himself to recognize that his con-necting in the same sentence the innermost nature of psychic reality andthe innermost nature of external reality as equally, and hence apparentlyfor the same reasons, unknown, is pure Kant, as Freud links the unknownground of both inner and outer to a realm of an unconditioned thing-in-itself, which Kant virtually calls the It (he spells it X ).5Kant's linkingof the inner and the outer sounds like this: The conditions of the possibilityof experience n general are at the same time the possibilityof the objectsofexperience. 6Heidegger, in What Is Called Thinking?, quotes this passagefrom Kant and from it in effect rapidly derives the tradition of Germanso-called Idealism. He adduces some words of Schelling, in which thepivot of inner and outer sounds this way: In the final and highestinstance, there is no being other than willing. Willing is primal beingand to [willing] alone belong all [primal being's] predicates: being un-conditioned, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. All phi-losophy strives only to find this highest expression. 7 The predicates of

5. Immanuel Kant, Critiqueof Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York,1950), A109.6. Ibid., A158, B197.7. See Martin Heidegger, WhatIs Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York,1964). The quotation from Kant is on p. 243; that from Schelling on pp. 90-91.

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392 StanleyCavell Freud and Philosophybeing unconditioned and of independence of time will remind us ofFreud's predicates of the unconscious. Schelling's lectures in Berlin in1841 were, as noted in Karl Lowith's FromHegel toNietzsche,attended byEngels, Bakunin, Kierkegaard, and Burckhardt. And 1841 is also theyear of Emerson's first volume of essays. His volume sounds, for example,this way: Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Itis the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritionsalso ... for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence,which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind iscommensurate with the work to be done, without time.... I unsettle allthings ... I simply experiment. 8Compared with the philosophical cultureof Schelling's audience, Emerson's mostly had none; yet his philosophizingwas more advanced than Schelling's, if Nietzsche's is (since Emerson'stranscendental realm is not fixed; the direction or height of the will isin principle open). Heidegger claims for his quotation from Schellingthat it is the classic formulation of the appearance of metaphysics in themodern era, an appearance that is essential to understand[ing] that-and how-Nietzsche from the very start thinks of revenge [the basis ofnihilism] and the deliverance from revenge in metaphysical terms, thatis, in the light of Being which determines all beings. 9 However remotethe fate of such a claim may seem to us here now, it will, if nothing else,at any time stand between us and our desire, however intermittent, yetpersistent, for an exchange with contemporary French thought; sinceHeidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche is one determinant of the Parisof, say, Derrida's Plato and Rousseau and of Lacan's Freud. (It may bepertinent to cite the effort in recent decades to bring Freud within theorbit of German philosophizing, in particular within that of Heidegger'sthought, made by the existential-analytic movement [Daseins-analyse].This is no time to try to assess that effort, but I may just note that myemphasis on Freud as, so to speak, an immediate heir of German classicalphilosophy implies that establishing this relation to philosophy does notrequire mediation [or absorption] by Heidegger. The point of my emphasisis that Freud's is to be understood as an alternative inheritance, a competinginheritance, to that of Heidegger. Otherwise Freud's own break withphilosophy, his [continued] subjection to it and its subjection to him, willnot get clear. Then Wittgenstein's is a third inheritance, or path, fromKant.)'1

8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles, The Library of America (New York, 1983), pp.404, 411, 412.9. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, p. 90.10. After a conversation with Kurt Fischer, I realize that I should, even in this openingsketch of the problem of inheriting philosophy, be more cautious, or specific, in speakingof Freud's inheritance of classical German philosophy. I do not mean that an Austrianstudent in the later nineteenth century would have hadjust the same philosophical educationas a German student of the period; nor does my claim require that Freud read so much


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CriticalInquiry Winter 1987 393In these paths of inheritance, Freud's distinction is to have brokenthrough to a practice in which the Idealist philosophy, the reigning phi-

losophy of German culture, becomes concrete (which is roughly whatMarx said socialism was to accomplish). In Freud's practice, one humanbeing represents to another all that that other has conceived of humanityin his or her life, and moves with that other toward an expression of theconditions which condition that utterly specific life. It is a vision and anachievement quite worthy of the most heroic attributes Freud assignedhimself. But psychoanalysis has not surmounted the obscurities of thephilosophical problematic of representation and reality it inherits. Untilit stops shrinking from philosophy (from its own past), it will continueto shrink before the derivative question, for example, whether the storiesof its patients are fantasy merely or (also?) of reality; it will continue towaver between regarding the question as irrelevant to its work and asthe essence of it.It is hardly enough to appeal here to conviction in reality, becausethe most untutored enemy of the psychological, as eagerly as the mostsophisticated enemy, will inform you that conviction is one thing, realityanother. The matter is to express the intuition that fantasy shadowsanything we can understand reality to be. As Wittgenstein more or lessputs an analogous matter: the issue is not to explain how grammar andcriteria allow us to relate language to the world but to determine whatlanguage relates the world to be. This is not well expressed as the priorityof mind over reality or of self over world (as, among others, Bloomexpresses it1). It is better put as the priority of grammar-the thingKant calls conditions of possibility (of experience and of objects), thething Wittgenstein calls possibilities of phenomena-over both what wecall mind and what we call the world. If we call grammar the Logos, wewill more readily sense the shadow of fantasy in this picture.

as a page in one of Kant's works. It would have been enough for my (or Freud's) purposesfor him to have received his Kant from the quotations of Kant he would have encounteredin his reading of Schopenhauer. My focus, that is to say, in speaking here of Freud'sinheritance of the German outburst, is rather on who Freud is, on what becomes of ideasin that mind, than on what, apart from a mind of that resourcefulness, German philosophyis thought to be. I assume that more or less the same ought to be said of the inheritanceof German thought by that other Austrian student, Wittgenstein.11. See Bloom, Freud's Concepts of Defense, p. 7. Bloom means here to be speakingfor Freud; as do I.

cavell_stanley_freud and philosophy_ a fragment

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