Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer by L. O. Aranye Fradenburg (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER if indeed Troy marks England’s move toward nation as ambivalent, more might be made of the fractious fantasies of dissolution, dismay, and disunity embedded in the Trojan inheritance. Patricia Clare Ingham Indiana University L. O. Aranye Fradenburg. Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism , Chaucer. Medieval Cultures 31. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 327. $19.95 paper, $59.95 cloth. While psychoanalysis has a long and distinguished history in medieval studies, no medievalist has advocated as passionately for its indispensability to historicist literary study as L. O. Aranye (formerly Louise) Fradenburg. Sacrifice Your Love takes as its premise Lacan’s ethical dictum from the seventh seminar (itself preoccupied with the medieval): ‘‘The only thing of which one can be truly guilty is of giving ground relative to one’s desire.’’ Humanity’s moral sense, Lacan avows, derives from the dialectic of sacrifice and enjoyment at the center of Western ethical thought, from Aristotle to Kant, from Abelard to Nietzsche: ‘‘restraint, sacrifice, duty, ‘containment,’ are forms taken by desire’’ (p. 7), as are compensation, self-denying charity toward others, the act of giving in, or indeed the art of almost getting what one (thinks one) wants. Jouissance in this worldview is less pleasure or fulfillment and more a kind of ‘‘dirty immanence,’’ in Georges Bataille’s phrase, that never resolves the ethical confusion of desire and abnegation. Sacrifice Your Love is a deductive book, and those predisposed against psychoanalytic approaches to literary study may resist Fradenburg’s forthright enlistment of their psychologies and desires. The book’s guiding thesis—‘‘what we think we ought to do—even the very idea that we ought to do certain things—is always intimately related to our desire ’’ (p. 2)—suggests that Fradenburg’s central object of scrutiny will be not simply the desire of medieval subjects; rather, we are the subject of this book: our obligations, our modes of sacrifice and enjoyment. This we, though, does not exclude Chaucer and his contemporaries, and despite the strategically essentializing risk it takes, the untroubled use of the first-person plural throughout the book should not be read as ahistorical . To the contrary: Sacrifice Your Love is intended as a contribution PAGE 306 306 ................. 11491$ CH13 11-01-10 14:02:27 PS REVIEWS to the writing of ‘‘the history of our sensibilities’’ (p. 2), a history that demands a disinvestment in what Fradenburg calls ‘‘alteritism.’’ The notion that the Middle Ages is inexorably ‘‘other’’ to modernity has led to a fair measure of intellectual dishonesty: ‘‘What respect do we show the Middle Ages when we say that responsibility involves understanding the Middle Ages exclusively on its own terms, and then insist . . . that only postmedieval alteritist views of time and methods of knowledge production are capable of the attempt?’’ (p. 65). In order to appreciate what this book is trying to do, we must first understand its rhetorical and critical style. Fradenburg’s many paraphrases of psychoanalytic thought are most often presented as gnomic proclamations of psychic quiddity; the book’s most riveting pages are also those in which psychoanalysis is made to speak with an analytic veracity few others would allow it. Indeed, Fradenburg inhabits her psychoanalytic idiom so forthrightly, so unapologetically, that the book has the effect of subsuming even a resistant reader into its Lacanian habitus. It is in this sense that we must comprehend the caliginous pleasures of Fradenburg’s prose as integrally related to the relationship she outlines between desire and sacrifice: as she points out more than once, enjoyment is emphatically not synonymous with ‘‘ease,’’ a sentiment illustrated through an abundance of neologism and syntactical ingenuity that, in her unrelentingly Lacanian argot, comes to feel almost intrinsic to the subjects at hand. For these and other reasons, Fradenburg emerges in this book as in many ways a more profound Lacanian than Lacan himself. She is certainly a more profound and subtle Lacanian reader, and as a psychoanalytic explicator of Chaucer she is without peer. While Sacrifice Your Love presents itself as simultaneously a psychoanalytic intervention into medieval historicism and a study of Chaucer, Fradenburg could have done more to clarify the relationship between...