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Preface
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
PREFACE The present study proposes to explore the enigma of experience and the significanceof the recurring questions of empiricism in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), William Wordsworth's Prelude (1805), Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), and Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). These works, in their variety, might nonetheless essentially all be defined as studies in selfknowledge , or attempts by thought to turn upon itself. The form that self-reflection takes differs in each case, whether it be the philosophical reflection on knowledge (Locke and Kant), the narrative of the poetic spirit (Wordsworth), or the analysis of the psyche (Freud). But in the movement of their different arguments, each of these texts reproduces a surprisinglysimilar scene: the scene of the encounter between a parent and a child, an encounter that uncannily takes place not as an exchange among the living, but as a relation to the dead, as a scene of mourning or of murder, and of the confrontation between a parent and a dead child, or between a child and a dead parent. The face-to-face meeting of parent and child might easily be read, in Enlightenment as well as in Romantic texts, as a representation of the origins, or the conditions, of self-knowledge , of the mind facing itself. But what are these texts trying to tell us if, at the very origin, one of these figures is already dead, already a part of the past? How can there be, at the ori- PREFACE / viii gin, already a memory? What kind of a remembering can be thus dramatized as being, in itself, an original beginning? And what, then, is a self-knowledge that begins as, or reflects, this "memory," something that is not fully and completely knowledge ? It is only by addressing these recurring questions, I would suggest, that we can begin to review and to rethink both the significance of the notion of experience and the complexity of the insistence of empiricism in these traditions. Taking as a starting point Locke's empirical philosophy as one influential source of the vocabulary of experience, this book sketches out the steps and the consequences of a reading that no longer takes this vocabulary at face value—a reading that begins, indeed, by treating Locke himself not simply as a philosophical doctrine but also as a narrativein which "experience " plays an unexpected and uncanny role. The transformations of this narrative in later texts will then confirm the suggestion that experience is, in effect, less a concept (over which the later doctrines struggle) than a singular encounter— a point of convergence or divergence—between literature and philosophy. In reflecting thus implicitly on the connections between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalyticinquiry, and in moving , in each chapter, from a conceptual and general opening and from the theoretical framework of some central questions to the singularity of a specific text and to the particularresistance of specific stories to abstraction, the present study also asks persistently what is the place, the function, the uniqueness of position of the literary text and of literary criticism. In each of the chapters that follow, literary theory puts into question traditional notions of period and genre. It does not, however, simply mourn the loss of these notions, nor reassert the individuality of the texts differentiated by them, but rather, like the mad, melancholic mother evoked by Locke, endlessly repeats the question of their difference. ...