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  • The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects
  • Brad Evans
The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. Peter Schwenger . Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Pp. 200 $25.00 (paper).

Peter Schwenger's latest book is a meditation on why, explicitly and implicitly, the relationship between object and subject appears so often to be one of melancholy. Or, more exactly, it is a meditation on how art, philosophy, and psychology have, for the last eighty years or so, explored the elusiveness of objects—the loss we feel when sensing that objects are always just beyond our possession, even as they possess us. [End Page 384]

The version of melancholy that The Tears of Things uses to describe this elusiveness is not so much Freud's as Lacan's. In Freud, it is assumed that the ego exists apart from the lost object; however, for Schwenger's melancholiac, the sense of loss resides in the perception that there is no self apart from objects. We perceive our selves because of our difference from objects, but we also perceive that objects can never reciprocate the feeling. The "thing" of Schwenger's title belongs neither to the object out there in the world, nor to the subject that perceives it. Rather, it is like "the Thing" in Lacan: "the Thing is a psychic state, and is in us, not in the world—though it is the discovery of the world, the world as other than us, that gives rise to that state" (10). According to Schwenger, this thing is like what Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger mean when writing about "being"; it is what Susan Stewart alluded to with "longing" in her pathbreaking work on things; and, as we see throughout this difficult but ultimately rewarding volume, it is what so many twentieth-century artists have explored—among them Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keefe, René Magritte, Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, Richard Wentworth, Luigi Serafini, Haim Steinback, Joel-Peter Witkin, Ben Marcus, Joseph Cornell, Donald Barthelme, and Zbigniew Herbert.

Schwenger demonstrated a similar interest in this psychic threshold in his previous book, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning. In that volume, the concern was how readers become "possessed by" books to such an extent that they fill in details that authors fail to provide—the fleck of snow on a carriage window, the silk lining of a bonnet. The concern this time around is similar, the books of the previous volume being more broadly construed as objects, and the fantasm of reading appearing rather like the melancholy of things. So just as to be possessed by literature is "in some degree to enter it, readers becoming ever more false to their selves, whatever they imagine those selves to be,"1 to be possessed by objects is to be claimed by a "liminal realm . . . beyond the world as the subject habitually conceives of it, a realm in which the subject is dissolved and to which he has been introduced by the uncanny agency of solid objects" (84).

What Schwenger thus offers is a major contribution to the burgeoning field of "object studies" that considers not just the sadness with which objects have been perceived since Marx suggested that tables were standing on their heads, but the manner in which this sadness is implicity attached to the very act of perception. Melancholy, that is to say, is not just part of the cultural history of things in the twentieth century; it is the liminal state in which we are merely by being in a world of objects.

The contrast between Schwenger's approach and many others that have recently been made in this line is striking, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell's What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, a part of which made an early appearance alongside a piece from The Tears of Things in the much-lauded Critical Inquiry volume on "Things." Mitchell is pleasantly candid in explaining why he resists psychoanalytic theory, suggesting that "the model of desire is already constructed around a set of assumptions about the nature of images, their role in psychic and social life, their relation to the Real, to...

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