The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James (review)

Reviews275 writing "ineluctably diverges from the prepositional content of its individual assertions" (p. 34). What the Entstellung reveals is Freud's struggle and his desire to apprehend the unconscious that constandy eludes capture. Thus, Freud's discovery diatjokes depend for their success — that is, their identity asjokes — on an explosion of laughter, where the person does not even know why he is laughing, threatens to turn the theory ofjokes into a joke on theory. Throughout the book, and especially in his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Weber stresses the importance of narrative in the ego's drive to organize. Just as the "castration story" masters sexual difference by interpreting it as a lost presence, Freud's speculations on the death drive reduce alterity to a repetition of the same, the modification of an origin. Thus, although Weber does not deal directly with Freud's impact on the study of literature, his book addresses die fundamental literary questions of interpretation, narrative , and implicitly, translation. One of the book's strengths is Weber's clear, concise writing which avoids die stylistic eccentricities of the French Freudians to whom Weber is indebted. Nevertheless, The Legend ofFreud is not simply a faulty translation, a secondary revision of the oneiric style of Lacan, Derrida, or Irigaray. Despite a surprisingly conventional view of translation — he considers the Standard Edition a secondary revision of Freud's "original" distortion and makes the German text die "privileged theater" of his inquiry (pp. xvi, xvii) — Weber is gifted at exploiting its possibilities. His English renderings are hardly more "faidiful" to the original dian Strachey's, but they are often ingenious . For instance, he translates "Aufsitzer" — Strachey's "take-in"— as "shaggy dog story" and then links "shag" — British slang for "unclean hair, pubic hair, unclean woman" (p. 1 16) — to the undecidable "thallus," Weber's response to Lacan's logocentric "phallus." In so doing, Weber does not so much return to the original German as locate himself at the intersection of three languages, producing a new constellation of meanings in Freud's texts. As a "translation," then, Weber's book is not only an accessible introduction to French Freud: it makes a genuine contribution of its own. Universityof OregonJane Marie Todd The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, andJames, by Henry Sussman; 260 pp. Badtimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, $22.50. This work takes its starting point from the question of the border between the "outside" and "inside" of speculative philosophical thought as put forth in Jacques Derrida's Qf Grammatology and the conception of tropological historiography advanced by Hayden White in Tropics ofDiscourse. Both Derrida and White (in his Metahistory) have given fresh ways to consider Hegel as an ironic and metaphorical thinker and Sussman in this work 276Philosophy and Literature has shown how great theoretical and fictive works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries follow Hegelian diemes diat have not previously been given a thoroughgoing analysis. The key to Sussman's analysis is to see Hegel in a new light. Literary critics who give attention to die connection of Hegel and an audior or movement generally work from platitudes about Hegel's philosophy, usually formed from his philosophy ofhistory. Little can be learned from such comparisons because they are not based on a mastery of Hegel's thought. On the other hand, professional philosophers who interpret Hegel, i.e., Hegelians, do so from what Sussman would see as the "inside" of Hegel's system; they offer evaluations of die interior conceptual acceptability of the system. Philosophers have very litde understanding of the nature or significance of the literary structure of Hegel's work. By working on the outer border of Hegel's diought, Sussman can identify the jokes, tropes, ironies, double meanings, violations of logic, and so forth that are the life of Hegel's speculative philosophy. Sussman's analysis is directed to the Phenomenology ofSpirit, specifically the first four chapters from die conception of sinnliche Gewissheit to die appearance of self-consciousness in the interaction of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft and the unglückliche Bewusstsein. In focusing on the early stages of the Phenomenology, Sussmain wishes to show how what he calls Hegel's...