ON ANCIENT TERRORS AND TRAGIC HEROES: A RESPONSE TO RUBENS”

BARNABY B. BARRATT

Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, 7480 Greenwich East, Bloomfield, MI 48301-3920, U.S.A.

Sentimentally, I would have liked to respond to Rubens’ efforts in a sympathetic and collegial manner-as a fellow journeyman, a patient, and a psychoanalyst who knows, from my own consulting room, whereof this essay speaks. But I cannot do so. There is no doubt his ideas are beguiling: who does not have intimations of the profound terrors residing within us all, and which of us, struggling with these matters, would decline to consider ourselves heroic? Yet the guile of these declarations begets mere gullibility. Little in Rubens’ portrait of psychoanalysis and the “tragic sense of life” addresses what I consider the essential pulse of the discipline, its method and its ethic. Rather, his mode of depiction presents psychoanalysis in a manner that necessarily misses its critical imperative-and for this, Rubens’ eff-orts are themselves to be criticized.

Why tragedy? Why not-as Lacan has led us to suppose--irony? For there is indubitably something ironic about the Psychoanalytic subject that interrogates itself perpetually to displace that which it previously held to be most certain-a subject bent on counter-reading its own last counter-reading. Why not comedy?

There is surely something grotesquely and painfully comic about the earnest pursuits of the consulting room-the search for “ultimate conclusions” that we know can never arrive, or the aspiration toward a figura of “health” within the grounds of madness. And (to fill our Frye’s “anatomy” in four modes) what about the romantic? These pursuits of the consulting room are no less earnest than fabulous and quixotic, enthralled by a passion and an imagination that subordinate what is routinely ordinary and common-sensibly practical. Or what, finally, of epicality? For whatever the triviality of our individual lives, few of us who go through psychoanalysis feel the odyssey to be of anything less than epic proportions.

Rubens’ predilection for tragedy issues, of course, from Freud himself who modeled his articulations on his admiration for classical tragedy. Thus, the thesis that life could or should be approached via a “sense” of its tragedy is scarcely a “new idea in psychology.” What Rubens tells us is as old as the Greeks, and better reiterated by Freud himself, despite the polishes of Sewall, Muller, or Unamuno-and the gloss of a “phenomenological approach” that amounts to no more than an assertion of faith, a scarcity of critical thinking, and a deficiency of method or praxis.

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However, the issue here is not to dispute Rubens’ choice of the tragic. How, in any event, can one argue with the presumptions of an author who announces that anyone who imagines escaping this “tragic vision” must either “lack the courage to pursue truth” or have succumbed to a myopic and megalomanic pretense that “rationality” as we know it could eventually totalize itself and emerge triumphant? Rubens places his “argument” beyond disputation-and, in a certain important sense, it is this very emplacement that is the issue. The ingenuous claim here seems to be that we can or do have a “sense of life” as an

absolute that underlies, and is in some sense prior to, the distinction between the rational and the irrational. My dissension is that psychoanalysis works (and plays) at the very margins of “rationality,” deconstructing (as a negatively dialectical engagement with) the borders of the rational and its “other,” whereas Rubens’ insistence on the “tragic sense of life” promotes mere acquiescence to this boundedness of our thinking, speaking and acting (despite whatever intention he has to avoid this implication). This is, under another description, an acquiescence to the world “as is.” In this regard, there are nevertheless several aspects of Rubens ’ “mode of viewing life” that warrant our interrogation. These concern his assumptions about truth, the time of truth, the subject and its praxis.

Since he espouses a “prephilosophy” that is claimed to antecede the rationality- irrationality distinction-a “sense” that is “more or less formulated, more or less conscious,” that is a “mode of experience, a subjective shaping and way of organizing the data of existence,” and that somehow determines ideas rather than being determined by them-it is easy to find fault with Rubens’ notions of knowledge and truth. How can he “know” that the “tragic mode” is a preferable means by which to approach the problems of knowledge? How does he reckon to know what might be “the most fundamental questions of existence”-those that he claims are “repeatedly raised” by tragedy? He writes that the “most basic of existential questions form the foundation on which tragedy is constructed,” but never tells us by what (rational or irrational) process we are to discriminate such “basic questions” or their foundationality. In any case, does the “tragic sense of life” raise the questions or get raised by them? Insisting that we accept “personal responsibility” for the “taking of meaningful action,” Rubens seems to have nothing to say about the standards by which an action becomes meaningful or whether in any sense such standards can actually be personally generated. While he offers us an abundance of inflated phrases such as “the deepest level of what underlies and shapes” experience, the “deepest possible value and meaning” and “the core of who one is,” Rubens does not (and, I suspect, cannot) define such discriminations, nor does he seem to have anything new to say about how to arrive at them. Advocating the “tragic vision” that, for example, “demands” of us a “confrontation with truth,” what Rubens writes about this “truth” eventuall) seems platitudinous. It is confusing as well, since “truth” is held to have a “provisional nature” whereas several other matters, such as a “knowledge” that is “total and all-encompassing,” seem to be held to be absolute and universal.

The notion of truth depends upon the metaphysics of time (Wood, 1989). Reason finds itself coordinated between the notions of an absolute origin and an absolute end, at which is achieved the unity of opposites in “the word” of truth,

On ancient terrors and tragic heroes 377

an identity of subject and object, or the totality of all things reflected unto themselves-for example, the “ideal” of the Hegelian absolute W~~s~nschuf in which are reconciled the manifold differentiations occurring within it, the progressive maneuvers of thinking are all vindicated, and history comes to its fullstop. In our Western tradition, reason has sustained itself as reason by this notion of its totalization, an eschatological identitarianism unfolding within the metaphysical unicity of time as representationality. Yet, at the closing of the modern episteme, with the desperate intimations of postmodern thinking, philosophy breaks with Hegel. No longer holding to the attainability of this absolute “making sense” of things, thinking must proceed without this coordination (cf., Reiss, 1982, 1988; Taylor, 1987, 1990). But this is not to uplift tragedy, to return to a quasi-religious faith, or to indulge nostalgically in claims to a “prephilosophy” that somehow antecedes (yet also insidiously reaffirms) the foundations of “reason” itself. Rather, it calls for an interrogation of the metaphysics of time itself, a Destruktion or deconstruction of its notion, an attempt to write of the conditions (not of the possibility but rather) of the impossibility of things (cf., Derrida, 197811967, 1982/1972; Heidegger, 1962/ 1927, 1972/1962, 1985/1925). This attempt is a working-playing along the very bounds of the rational-irrational, which is neither a manic assertion of the rational as totalizable, nor an acquiescence to this boundedness as it presents itself to us (an acquiescence which is also thereby its reaffirmation).

I believe that Freud should be read as instigator of and participant in this “postmodern” movement (Barratt, in press). His hotchpotch of assertions concerning the temporal regimentation of conscious or representational life vis- a-vi, its “other’‘-the “timelessness” of an “unconscious” that is nonsensical-can only be grasped as the perpetual intimation of a recondite past-future alienated within every instantiation of the present (cf., Levinas, 198711947). The unicity of time, the present as an identity unto itself, the “now” as a linearly reiterated point-the modern notion of its equable, continuous and irreversible flow-all begin thereby to be subverted.

Yet Rubens writes as if he has neither read Freud, nor read through the twentieth century. Today it is as unacceptably glib to write about the “irreversibly forward flow of time” as it is to pass of-f the idea that two persons can have some sort of “first hand experience of each other.” Has not psychoanalysis taught us the inescapable deferral and interminable displacement of every meaning? Rubens acknowledges that the arrival at an absolute origin or an absolute end is unattainable-this is the “provisionality” of the “tragic” way-but this is altogether different from the postmodern demonstration of their impossibility, and hence of

the operation of’ such “absolutes” m the repression, foreclosure or exclusion of all that the metaphysics of a unified time renders “other.” The result is that absolute origin and absolute end always reappear in writings such as Rubens’. We might notice here his plethora of expressions such as “ultimate conclusions,” the “full reality of the present situation,” and in “full awareness.” We should also notice how the thesis seems to be all about history (this “irreversible flow”), yet actually is grandly ahistorical (the “tragic vision” was once, is now, always will be). The major issue here is that Rubens is implicitly and explicitly committing

378 H. H. Barratt

himself to a notion of life as m~lotmmt, an emplotment that is inevitably coordinated between absolutes that at-e operatively there, guiding the conduct of life, even if they are held to be unattainable. Such tragically unattainable “ideals” as the absoluteness of an origin and an end thus continue to serve to orient the possibilities of thinking, speaking and acting. It is because of this that Rubens has nothing to say about rationality itself, not- about irrationality, nor about the boundary between them. He merely resigns himself (and us) to “rationality” as it presents itself to us. Yet is it not psychoanalysis itself that suggests the falsifying conditions of the rational, and the aporetics of ati “irrationality” that has been rendered “otherwise”? Rubens advocates that we engage with reason, but not to criticize or deconstruct its determinations, rather to move forward with it and to accept its limitations. While he is right to eschew the now outmoded imperialism of the Enlightenment-the belief that ;I phalloilogocentl-ic rationality will conquer all-he turns against the postmodern imperative, with the serious consequence that his “vision” can only promote slave-thinking.

So what then of the subject and its praxis--a subject whose tragic circunl- stances Rubens wishes to “ennoble” but to whose conduct he contributes less than nothing? Rubens tells us there c:m be no “faith that everything will \vork out a11 right,” yet also endorses an “insistence on the possibility and significance of meaningful individual action.” Here, his idea of tragedy seems to be offset by the sanguinity of “hope”-even if it is a hope that, in a certain sense, has alread) been condemned as fruitless. Although it goes unmentioned, Rul)ens’ essay is imbued with U~i;i~ii~~~io’s injunction: f5pfww! It is m anguish of etenlal \ciiiting inmixed with the joyotlsness of hope itself. When Rubens comrs to discuss “action,” he seems to urge us to have “courage and stature,” yet tt4ingl?, wc filltl that he is unable to think of this except through the motif‘ of’ r/cn.\tc~ry. Having nothing new to say about rationality, about irrationality, or about the boundiq between them. Rubens GIII only fall back on the motif of domination, conquest, and possession, as the ideals of knowledge and action. ‘I‘hese are thr ver) “ideals” that peixiieate t tic oppressi\,eness and repressiveness of modern thinking--a motif with which, it sCems to me. psychoanalvsis and the postrrlode~nl beak. It is baffling to me how blithely Kuhens can announce that the patient is “o~vncr of‘ the territory,” needing, by implication, only the psychoanalyst’s guidance in order to coqucr Iri.5 OiO?/ “clepths.” Srirely,

psychoaialysis is /MT fwfdlfwcf, ;i cleliionstI‘~ition 01‘ the impossibility 01‘ o\vriing oneself (l>errid+ 1 !EW1!18’i), just as it is a tletnonstI-~ition of the impossibility of‘ thitlkinglspeakirlg/~~~ting what one me;~ns. It seems to mc that this is the mainspring of what psychoan;ilysis teaches. That against the entire (Lirtesia- Bat-oniari motif of domination. f,sycho~tnalysis exliihits the iriteniiiIial)le falsily of

the subject’s belief in the master? of its own life. ‘l‘his is not to say that psych&alysis has to be comprehended in a Lacanian f’ashion, as purelv ;I recognition of one’s deterniinatioIis from the elsewhere ot the c-apit&ed “Other” (Barrett, 19X4), but it does imply that meaning is a matter of endless deferral, displacement and dispossession of the apparent subject-a matter thl

subverts the apparent iinicity of its own time as I-epI.esentationalitv. Endorsing the modem illusion of‘ the subject as ~oIlq~~istatfo1~. it is 11;) surprise

On ancient terrors and tragic heroes 379

that Rubens’ essay is so relentlessly patriarchal, its idiom so blatantly phallocen- tric. Everywhere we read of man, him, his, and he. What are we to make of these “heights to which man is capable of rising” and of Rubens’ exhortation for the patient and the psychoanalyst to go “deeper and deeper”? Is this not the outmoded imagery of “knowledge” as erection, penetration, and subjugation of the “other”? The postmodern suggests that everything is at the surface, even “depth,” and that at every surface is the repressed, the otherwise “other” alienated within every meaning the subject utters. Feminism suggests that knowing is not the subordination of the “other,” nor “science” its territorializa- tion (Mills, 1987; Spivak, 1987). It would be to the inseparability of these movements-psychoanalysis, feminism, and the postmodern-that I would recommend Rubens to direct his reading.

Terror, tragedy, and the heroism of the subject (a heroism that could only be comic, ironic, tragic, romantic, and epic) all fall within what is the metaphysical notion, the unicity of time itself. Within this notion, there is no doubt some sense in which our “most fundamental” fears are “universal” and inescapable-despite Rubens’ assertion that so much depends on the “vision” with which we approach life. Our lives are indeed coordinated around insurpassable terrors-of sexual ecstasy, madness, and death-of separation, castration, annihilation. As the discipline that works-plays with life itself, psychoanalysis is entirely concerned with these. But its discipline is not the adoption of a posturing toward them. Psychoanalysis is not the acceptance of uncertainties in a manner that promotes acquiescence toward the boundaries by which (un)certainties appear to us as such, nor is it an exercise in moralizing about the patient’s “refusal” to “recognize the reality of growth and change.” It is a method and an ethic concerning the struggles by which such terrors are to be lived, and here, it seems to me, the genuine radicalism of psychoanalysis diverges markedly from Rubens’ serlti- ments.

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H. H. Barratt