Bersani on Baudelaire

Two days ago, I said I would be talking about the thinking subject in Proust as well as Nietzsche when writing about what thought is. What was going through my head at the time, were passages in the Bersani book on Proust and Klossowski on Proust that seemed to jump out and touch each other, where certain details could have been in either book, though a somewhat different end was in sight in each case. I mentioned - and Bersani mentioned - that Sartre hated Proust, and yet, Proust like Sartre doesn't allow any direct access to a thinking subject. In order to describe oneself, have any idea at all about oneself, one has to make use of the external world. A self is projected onto a face in the mirror, you deduce things about the self from the objects it is attracted to or repulsed by and the way it reacts to the outside world. When you try to find something prior to or independent of the outside world, you come up blank. Of course you are familiar with the famous statement in Nietzsche that the doer is just a fiction added on to the deed. Proust doesn't go so far... both Nietzsche and Proust talk about a lack of stability in the self. Proust, in talking about love notes that in the future we will be indifferent to the woman who means everything to us now, that rather than caring only about what she is doing and who she is with, even the most insignificant fact will seem more interesting than who she's with, and this is because we will be a different person. We are countless people throughout our lives... but he contradicts himself on this point more than Nietzsche does (though, Nietzsche also talks about his past self in a way that suggests continuity as well as insisting on a complete lack of continuity). While Sartre and Nietzsche are both extremely anti-Socratc and suspicious of any sort of essence or essentializing of the self, I've explained to you countless times that Proust IS socratic, and moments of pure time allow a certain access to the pure self, as does the creative activity of art. When I spoke of the Compagnon book on Proust the conflict between dissolution and unity came up a few times... oddly, that's also coming up in the Bersani books and in Klossowski on Nietzsche. I suspect that a large theme for me in coming entries (though not this one) will be the role of style in the determination and formation of self.

I should state that it disturbs me how often I can't make sense of something I'm reading or I suspect that I'm missing something important. This periodically makes me question whether I ought to throw in the towel and find another line of work (last night I was also in cold sweats about being in my mid-thirties and still basically a teenager with no solid accomplishments behind me. (It should give me a little boost that I've been getting s bit of fan mail for the article I just published, but it's just a short article and I didn't put much into it. It doesn't make me feel better.) All this is neither here nor there - it's brought up by the fact that reading Bersani's book "Baudelaire and Freud", I'm painfully aware that I should have clearer knowledge of all the psychoanalytic backdrop. I'm not bothered so much by not being up on figures like Pontalis (though he's the one who published Wolfson), Laplanche and Melanie Klein, but with certain basic things - I have to admit that I couldn't explain Lacan's shift from the imaginary to the symbolic, which is important for Bersani's analysis, and, equally important, I have a pretty weak grasp of the death drive in Freud.

Anyway, before attempting to make sense of what Bersani does with Baudelaire and general reflections on using psychoanalysis to approach literature (which I think people thankfully don't do so much any more), a word or two on Baudelaire himself (who Sartre also hated, though he wrote a book on him - Sartre generally had no use for poetry). Baudelaire was a kind of sick bastard. The poem 'A celle qui est trop gai' ends with the poet envisioning opening a new hole in the overly light-hearted woman's thigh, fucking that hole and releasing his 'venom' into it, at which point he can address her as 'sister'. In all fairness, this probably does cry out for a psychoanalysts attention. The prose poem 'assomons les pauvres' (let's beat up the poor), is kind of great - the narrator has been cloistered in his room reading books of basically political science and sociological commentary, explaining how to fix the world. He goes out and a beggar asks him for money - he turns and starts beating the beggar, and won't stop until the beggar is forced to fight back. At the end, he tells the beggar "you have shown you are my equal", splits his money with him 50-50 and asks the beggar to go out and spread his lesson - imagining that once all the beggars are driven to fight back and no longer accept their position society will be transformed. What Bersani does with this last piece, and with Baudelaire's later writings in general doesn't seem that interesting to me. He interprets the prose poem as an expression of narcissism... the beggar is meant to mimic the narrator, and drive others to mimc him in turn - ideally ad infinitum. This is in a sense the ultimate projection of the self onto the world, an attempt at infinite expansion and conquest, where "you are my equal" hides a second, "you are my reflection". The one topic that is more interesting in Baudelaire's later works is the attempt at impersonality - the loss of affect on the part of the speaker, the projection of the self onto the world outside, so that desire is always ascribes to others... it's just unfortunate that this is discussed in relation to developmental phases and psychosis/schizophrenia, etc. It's odd, because in other books, and even at the beginning of this one, Bersani doesn't fall into that sort of silliness - rather than trying to use literature as demonstration of psychoanalytic theories, he tries to understand what is unique and interesting in a work, and uses psychoanalysis, sparingly, as a prop to help elucidate a very particular structure. The beginning of his Baudelaire book focuses on the mobility of desire - desire as something that resists stasis. The influence of Deleuze keeps coming up in his discussion of the nature of desire. Desire is not initially a desire for something - it is free floating and given content. The self is inherently unstable, free-floating desire, and when the poet writes about sexual impulses, he doesn't fixate on one thing, one detail - the object of his interest keeps getting fragmented and transformed - the desire follows metaphor. It floats between the poet and the woman, is shared by them both and carries them both in all directions (Again, the constant mobility of desire and the inability of the will to ever attain stasis comes up a lot in Klossowski's discussion of Nietzsche - which I'll write about tomorrow). Bersani writes that ironically, when Baudelaire is writing about seual desire, there is no straightforward sexual representation - straightforward sexual representations come in poems like 'A celle qui est trop gai', which are about violence and death - or rather stasis as the end of desire. A search for unity is equivalent to a search for immobility, and is always included in desire, which is the opposite, driving toward dissipation. Death/ stasis/ unity, is given as an orgasmic finish inseparable from all desire, and the death drive can not be separated from the pleasure principle.
I can't be blamed for all of this psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. Surprisingly I recognize lots of parallels and dynamics that tie it to texts I can take more seriously... but you remember the statement in Proust about theory in literature cheapening it - well most of this does seem like an excessive application of theory to literature where both theory and literature seem to me a bit degraded - even if Bersani is bright and can be convincing in passages (again, his other two books, which didn't have Freud in the title, were less heavy-handed, and to me more enlightening).

I heart Wittgenstein

So I've been teaching the Philosophical Investigations this term, which gives me an excuse to re-read the book from cover to cover for the first time in a few years, as well as a chance to read for the first time the new translation that came out last year (which is really just an update and improvement on the original Anscombe translation). It's been great fun, and naturally I keep discovering new things, either things I hadn't noticed before, or connections I notice for the first time in passages that were already familiar.

One of the things I’ve found striking--and the thing I wanted to comment on--is how much I can see Wittgenstein's influence on the plays and other forms of make-believe that I create. There's a wonderful sense of absurdity in Wittgenstein that I think you'd love (have you ever read him?). Not so much outright jokes (though there are a few, depending on your sense of humour) as a pervasive sense of the world looked at askew, so that everything seems bizarre, out of place, ridiculous. And that's married with a very patient attitude toward the absurdities: Wittgenstein wants to nurse them gently rather than push any of them too hard.

There's a fair amount of debate about how to read Wittgenstein, ranging from people who think the best we can do with him is treat him like he was an analytic philosopher with a penchant for obscurity and try to tease tidy philosophical theses out of him to people who think his unique literary form serves a unique philosophical method that we ignore at our peril. As you can imagine, I fall more toward the latter end of that spectrum. My reading tries to take seriously his claim that if we were to advance theses in philosophy it would be impossible to debate them because everyone would agree to them, and so tries to find ways of reading Wittgenstein as not advancing theses.

To a large extent, I think the way to read Wittgenstein is as offering what he calls "objects of comparison." At §144 of the Philosophical Investigations he writes: "I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this sequence of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things." For instance, Wittgenstein encourages us to imagine a pupil who constantly gets things wrong in following out mathematical rules and can't be induced to do it "right." Wittgenstein doesn't tell us "the rules we normally take to be grounded in necessity are grounded in nothing stronger than our tendency to teach and learn in similar ways, so that, for the most part, we can teach people by getting them to see what we mean, but there's no way we can compel understanding." Rather, he finds the right absurdities to help us toward this view. (This claim obviously needs to be complicated: if all he's trying to do is get us to see the thing I wrote explicitly above, why didn't he just say so?). He sets the world we know against a world that's thrown weirdly askew, and the comparison leads us to see the world we know in a different light, in a way that dispels our philosophical confusions (or tries to do so).

It struck me that, though I don't do philosophy this way, it does reflect the way I approach my plays to a large extent. The well-chosen scenario is one that presents a fictional world that casts a jarring light on the real world. I'm not looking for the scenario that tells us what the real world is like so much as the one that gives us a point of comparison, or a perspective, on the real world such that we see it differently. And, in fact, this seems a not-bad sketch of what literature aims to do generally. Or one thing that literature does.

In this respect, it occurs to me that Wittgenstein interestingly blurs the old distinction between philosophy and literature. If philosophy is supposed to state claims directly and literature is supposed to cast light on matters obliquely by way of comparison, what Wittgenstein writes is more like literature than philosophy. This might explain why he's often greeted with such confusion and irritation within the halls of professional philosophy. What would Plato think?