Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture by Shoshana Feiman (review)

Book Reviews Shoshana Feiman. J a c q u e s L a c a n a n d t h e A d v e n t u r e o f I n s ig h t : P s y c h o a n a l y s is in C o n t e m p o r a r y C u l t u r e . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. 169. Shoshana Felman’s new book, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure o f Insight, pursues the interrogation undertaken in her previous books, Writing and Madness and The Literary Speech Act, of the implication of psychoanalysis and literature for and in each other. More specifically, in this recent work she examines psychoanalysis and literature as praxes shar­ ing a common didactic and interpretive enterprise. Her principal strategy in elucidating the communality of literature and psychoanalysis is a repetition of Lacan’s gesture of laying bare “ the cognitive revolution brought about by psychoanalysis” (p. 9) which implies at the same time a revolution in the theory of reading. Versions of the five essays which comprise the book—“ Renewing the Practice of Read­ ing,” “ The Case of Poe,” “ What Difference Does Psychoanalysis M ake?,” “ Psycho­ analysis and Education,” and “ Beyond Oedipus” —have all, with the exception of the first, been published elsewhere, but their combination here constitutes a new narrative, confirm­ ing Felman’s own assertion that “ repetition is not of sameness but of difference” (p. 43). W hat is different here, besides Felman’s inclusion of her own story as an analysand and a formal student of psychoanalysis, is the knitting together of these essays as an attempt to understand what Lacan’s life story means, to articulate his destiny as “ one of the most influential and controversial French thinkers of this century” (p. 4). Just as Lacan made a “ return to Freud” not to recuperate but to renew the radicality of Freud’s teaching, so Feiman, in a similar movement, returns to Lacan whose corpus, now that he is dead, has too often been treated—even, or perhaps mostly, by his followers in the Cause Freudienne—as dogma, as a collection of concepts to be transmitted as a totalized knowledge. Felman’s return to Lacan is based on a reversal of the received image of Lacan as pure theoretician; she insists, rather, that he was “ first and foremost a clinician” (p. 6) and that his work demonstrates in a fundamental way the primacy of practice over theory. With his seminars as the proving ground of her hypothesis, Feiman recreates Lacan’s “ poetic pedagogy” (p. 96) in her own rereadings of his readings of Poe’s Purloined Letter, a Melanie Klein case history, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. By means of these multi­ ple readings that finally produce a heterogeneous and unlocatable origin of understanding, Feiman persuasively demonstrates her (Lacan’s) notion of teaching and learning as dialogic, that is, as emanating not from the confrontation of two self-knowing subjects, but rather from an exchange, through a third instance, of what the teacher and pupil or analyst and analysand don’t know. Her most original and provocative demonstration of this practice is in her rereading of Oedipus at Colonus in which she sets up Lacan’s reading of the play as a resurrection of the death instinct, repressed by the contemporary psychoanalytic establishment, in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As Lacan had, in a sense, to repeat Freud by again going beyond his establishment of Oedipus the King as the key myth of psychoanalysis, so Feiman goes beyond Lacan by repeating his gesture of proposing the dead but unburied Oedipus as the myth that mediates practice and theory. This repeating to go beyond is the central gesture not only of Jacques Lacan and the Adventure o f Insight but, as Feiman insists, of all true teaching and learning, psycho­ analytic or literary. If one were to repeat her own rich rereading—in which Freud then Lacan take the place of Oedipus at Colonus—that would put Feiman in the place of VOL. XXIX, NO. 1 97 L ’E s pr it C...