… the application of scientific ideas to poetry is interesting because it reduces [the scientific] idea of truth (much more intimately than elsewhere) to a self-contradiction (Empson [1930] 1949, p. 249).
To the well-known maxim, according to which language was given to man in order to conceal his thoughts, one should add that it is in concealing them that he reveals them. Falsum index sui, et veri.
(Genette [1966] 1982b, p. 265)
Abstract
This paper examines some of the figures through which ambivalence is transposed into ambiguity. It raises the following questions: How has work on ambivalence shifted from the philosophy and anthropology of religion to individual psychology to group psychology, and then, across some ruptures, to poetics—and how has it been able to slide between them? How is it possible that it is devalued as primitive, pre-rational thinking on the one hand, and valued as evincing the highest cognitive, imaginative, and aesthetic faculties on the other? I will approach these questions from primarily two sites: firstly, from psychoanalysis encompassing both the ontogenetic history individual psychic formation, and the phylogenetic history of cultural-societal formations, and, secondly, from aesthetic theory. The complex transcriptions mediating between these distinct sites belie a the simple charge of the “psychologisation of religious experience” in late modernity (Agamben).
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Notes
References here are William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889), Marcel Mauss and H. Hubert’s ‘Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice’ (1889), Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1922), Wilhelm Max Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (1906), Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), Bataille’s The Accursed Share, and Roger Callois’ Man and the Sacred (1939).
In his seminar on Language and Death. The Place of Negativity, Agamben asserts that “the sacred is necessarily an ambiguous and circular concept” ([1982] 1991, p. 8; see also Fitzpatrick 2005, p. 53), which would seem to be corroborated by his claim, stated below in the further course of the quote from Homo Sacer, that it is “in a particularly sensitive region” that the social sciences have been led astray ([1995] 1998, p. 75).
Agamben adds: “That the religious belongs entirely to the sphere of psychological emotion, that it essentially has to do with shivers and goose bumps—this is the triviality that the neologism ‘numinous’ had to dress up as science” ([1995] 1998, p. 78).
Freud concedes that much in postulating a close relationship—albeit one that internalises the external—between obsessional neurosis to the socio-cultural institutions of art, religion, and philosophy (Freud [1913] 1985, p. 124).
However, the relationship between magic and art is not a matter of the latter’s manifest contents or forms (Adorno [1974] 1981, p. 651). Any attempts to add or enhance the spiritual meaning of art by injecting elements of magic or religion into it are bound to be futile (Adorno [1974] 1981, p. 651). The relationship between magic/religion and art, insights into which are afforded by the practice of translation and transcription, is akin to that between two different languages.
See Marx’s insights that were immensely fruitful to a philosophy of history: “The Christian religion was only able to help in the objective understanding of earlier mythologies once it had … developed its own self-criticism to a certain level. And bourgeois economics first arrived at an understanding of the feudal, ancient and oriental economies insofar as bourgeois society had begun its self-criticism” (1857 Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. In: Marx [1953] 1977, p. 106).
In William Empson’s inimitable words, “though such words [asserting the identity of opposites] appeal to the fundamental habits of the human mind, and are fruitful of irrationality, they are to be expected from a rather sophisticated state of language and of feeling” ([1930] 1949, p. 195).
Taboo, Freud explains by reference to Northcote W. Thomas’s article on ‘Taboo’ in the 1910–1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is aimed at the protection of important persons from harm, provision against dangers of contact with corpses and certain types of foods and substances, guarding of the acts of life (birth, death, marriage, sex) from interference, securing humans against the power of gods or spirits, and securing of children from being affected by certain actions and foods ([1913] 1985, p. 72). It pertains, by extension, to “… all special individuals, such as kings, priests, or new-born babies, to all exceptional states [and persons in exceptional states], such as the physical states of menstruation, puberty or birth, and to all uncanny things, such as sickness and death and what is associated with them through their power of infection or contagion. The word ‘taboo’ denotes everything … which is the vehicle or source of this mysterious attribute” (Freud [1913] 1985, p. 75).
Closely related to the sacred site of the ambivalence of taboo is ambivalence toward the object at work in the taboo placed upon death and dying, owing to the acknowledgement and simultaneous denial of the supremacy of death and to the simultaneously held emotions of hate and love toward the deceased. “This”, Freud says, “is the classical example, the prototype, of the ambivalence of human emotions” ([1913] 1985, p. 116).
“Not until the genital organization is established does love become the opposite of hate” (Freud [1913] 1985, p. 137).
The conflict of the two gives rise to conscience (conscientiousness, dread of conscience, anxiety, and a sense of guilt), occurring in heightened form in obsessional neurosis (Freud [1913] 1985, p. 125).
This is evident most of all in the word ‘taboo’ itself: “As the importance of the ambivalence denoted by [the word ‘taboo’] diminished, the word itself … fell out of use.” Freud elaborates: “… a definite historical chain of events is concealed behind the fate of this concept: that the word was at first attached to certain quite specific human relations which were characterized by great emotional ambivalence, and that its use than [sic] spread on to other analogous relations” ([1913] 1985, p. 124).
Freud sees the modern subject as drawing a sharp distinction between thinking and doing, to the point at which thought becomes a substitute for the deed, inhibiting action ([1913] 1985, p. 224).
This combination of fields of inquiry is mirrored in Lacan’s casting of Freud as one who was an encyclopedia of the arts and muses, as well as an assiduous reader of the Fliegende Blätter (a German comic newspaper at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century) (Lacan [1957] 1992, p. 169).
As e.g. in obsessional neurosis, which enacts taboos individual-psychologically.
The interpretation of dreams has to proceed by a theory of the dream and a theory of translation that can take account of the prior translation effected by the dream work, which “is not a word-for-word or a sign-for-sign translation; nor is it a selection made according to fixed rules …; nor is it what might be described as a representative selection—one element being invariably chosen to take the place of several; it is something different and far more complicated” (Freud [1916] 1991, p. 208).
Freud on the transposition required in the interpretation of dreams: The manifest content is presented as it were in pictographic script (pictorial value), the characters of which have to be individually transposed into the language of the dream-thoughts (their symbolic relation) ([1900] 1976, p. 381). “The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance” (Freud [1900] 1976, p. 382).
Condensation contracts several elements to a single element common to all of them, co-ordinating them through the relation of similarity. It is enhanced in its capacity to do this through ambiguity—an ambiguous word -, which can harbour numerous otherwise disparate elements or thoughts (Freud [1900] 1976, p. 454; see also Freud [1916] 1991, p. 205). A more detailed definition is provided in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: “By [condensation] we understand the fact that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an abbreviated translation of it. … we never find that the manifest dream is greater in extent or content than the latent one. Condensation is brought about (1) by the total omission of certain latent elements, (2) by only a fragment of some complexes in the latent dream passing over into the manifest one, and (3) by latent elements which have something in common being combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream” (Freud [1916] 1991, p. 205).
Condensation most pertinently designates the last one of these listed processes.
Displacement transvalues elements in such a way that they can find their way, in a distorted form, into the manifest dream-content. Displacement helps them to acquire a disguise through which they can escape the censorship imposed by the pre-conscious (Freud [1900] 1976, p. 417). This is effected by replacing one particular idea by another one in some way closely associated with it, or contrary to it (Freud [1900] 1976, pp. 454, 608).
De Saussure’s distinction between contiguity and similarity, combination and selection, gets correlated by Jakobson (1956) with metonymy and metaphor, respectively; and, in a supposed “return to Freud” the distinction between contiguity and similarity is transposed by Lacan, onto displacement and condensation, respectively.
See Genette’s Figures III (1970) and Metonymy in Proust (1972); Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor (1975); and de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979).
Quintilianus refutes the assumption that a trope involves a simple substitution of words: “Quare mihi videntur erase, qui non alios crediderunt tropos, quam in quibus verbum pro verbo poneretur. Neque illud ignoro, in isdem fere, qui significandi gratia adhibentur, esse et ornatum, sed non idem accident contra …” (1975, p. 218).
A narrowly circumscribed substitution model shows itself inadequate in accounting for the tropes. Catachresis, for example, involves a term for a state of affairs which is supplanted by another one, often signifying its contrary (see Quintilianus 1975, p. 232). Allegory, likewise, tends toward an alteration if not inversion of the sense (Quintilianus 1975, p. 236), especially in the case of irony (Quintilianus 1975, p. 240). In the case of metalepsis, similarly, it is not a matter of a simple substitution, but of a transference of one signifier to another across a non-signifying middle stage (Quintilianus 1975, p. 232). Involving non-homological transferences, the tropes do not revolve around word-based signification (“non significandi gratia”—Quintilianus 1975, p. 234).
See e.g. Lacan (1992, p. 59); see also 73 (reference to structural linguistics and ethnography’s mathematicisation of pairs of phonemic oppositions as pathbreaking for psychoanalysis).
It would be more correct to say, with Lacan (in ‘The agency of the letter’, 1957), that “the symptom is a metaphor …, as desire is a metonymy” (Lacan [1957] 1992, p. 175). An elaboration of this idea can be found in his earlier Rome Report (1953): “… metaphors, like the negation whose doubling undoes it, lose their metaphorical dimension, and … this is so because [one] is operating in the proper domain of metaphor, which is simply the synonym for the symbolic displacement brought into play in the symptom” (1992, p. 51).
This is not entirely correct, certainly not in Quintilianian terms, in which tropes are distinctly not figures, even though there may be occasional cases where tropes and figures occur together in the same thought (“frequenter in easdem sententias et τρόπον et figuram”—Quintilianus 1975, p. 254).
In his Rome Report (1953), Lacan had outlined the reach of metaphor, which comprises catachresis, autonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synekdoche (1992, p. 58).
Once again (see n. 25), Lacan’s terminology here is obfuscatory, conflating tropes with figures (of style), figures of sense (by reference to Quintilianus’ figurae sentiarum), and figures of speech. Quintilianus carefully distinguishes tropes, figures of sense, figures of thought, and word figures from each other. The mechanisms that Lacan designates, by reference to Quintilianus, as figurae sentiarum, and that are of paramount importance for the work of the dream and of dream interpretation, correspond rather to Quintilianus’ tropes. Nevertheless, for an analysis of the latter, elements of figurae sentiarum (particularly those of conversio, retrospection, circumscription, diminution), of figures of thought (particularly those of digression and dissimulation), of word figures (particularly those of anaklasis, traductio, ellipsis, paronomasia) would be relevant as well. The last of these categories of figures belongs to the domain of grammar rather than rhetoric.
It is the last verse of the last stanza to which de Man is referring. The last four verses read,
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
(Yeats [1920] 1997, p. 115).
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Kistner, U. Ambiguity: transfiguring the ambivalence of the sacred. Neohelicon 37, 421–431 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0068-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0068-3