Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (review)

This is fascinating work. Esther Rashkin makes an impassioned case for an end to the marginalization of psychoanalysis within cultural studies, arguing that psychoanalytical theory is of incomparable value in highlighting ideological dimensions of discourses and exposing cultural connections that would otherwise remain unanalysed. In particular, she calls for cultural studies to overcome its aversion to close reading, which it tends to dismiss because of the predominantly conservative cultural agenda of the schools of criticism (notably New Criticism) with which it has historically been associated. Yet this need not be the case. Reminding us that Barthes, one of the founding fathers of cultural studies, was ‘indisputably’ a close reader (p. 11), Rashkin presents close reading as a practice which can form the basis of a ‘radical politics’ (p. 14) and, indeed, the studies comprising the bulk of the book all bring out unsuspected wider social or political implications of details of written or filmic texts. It might be objected that the author’s depiction of cultural studies overly homogenizes it; for example, no mention is made of Naomi Schor’s work which has much in common with her own approach yet unquestionably counts as a contribution to cultural studies. However, the main value of this book lies in the strength of the readings it proposes. These deal with a very diverse range of texts: Dineson’s ‘Babette’s Feast’, Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Puenzo’s The Official Story, Barthes’s ‘Sarrasine’, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The readings are generally intriguing, often polemical, occasionally outrageous (as the author herself recognizes) and, above all, unfailingly stimulating. The chapter on Last Tango in Paris is exemplary in this respect: although the idea that this film is underpinned by a commentary on France’s history of colonialism and collaboration may initially seem implausible enough to arouse considerable resistance in the reader, its intellectual audacity is matched by such perceptive attention to detail and such thoughtful analysis that this reader, at least, was persuaded. This is not to endorse all Rashkin’s positions as equally compelling. For example, the assumption that the discourse of a literary or cinematic character can be analysed in the same way as a clinical narrative seems debatable; the fact that a character’s fictional status necessarily precludes access to any aspect of his/her extratextual existence is surely of relevance to the attempt to articulate an unsaid trauma (the Jewishness of Sarrasine or of the Auërspergs in Axël, Irish colonial experience in Dorian Gray, etc.) on the basis of traces decipherable within the text. The extent to which any trauma can be articulated is itself a vexed question that would merit more consideration; more too would be welcome on the status of the conclusions reached, which on occasion appear to attain a degree of certainty at odds with the specification that the decrypted secrets do not represent the ‘“meaning” or “truth”’ of the text (p. 211). But these are not reservations; rather, they are requests for more which testify to the fertility of Rashkin’s thinking. Thought-provoking in both its content and its practice, this is truly a pleasure to read.