Abjection, or why freud introduces the phallus: Identification, castration theory, and the logic of fetishism

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 42, Issue SUPPL, 2004, Pages 48-66

  Chanter, Tina ^a  

^a DEPAUL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949529593     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2004.tb01014.x     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. Referring to the unresolved relationship between Freud's "hysterical identification" and "narcissistic identification," Elizabeth Cowie, for example, says that this "dualism has been translated into film theory in the work of Christian Metz in his investigation of cinema as the imaginary signifier, where the spectator's identifications with characters in a film are called secondary, while the cinema's primary identification is found by Metz in what he describes as the spectator's identification with the camera . . . It is the issue of sexual difference for the cinema spectator which Metz's account fails to address" (Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 75). However, in her own Lacanian reading of Freud, rich though it is, Cowie does not pursue the ambiguity that sustains Freud's slippage from hysterical to narcissistic identification, a slippage that I shall argue depends on the occlusion of maternal identification.
2. See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 43-5.
3. I take up some of these questions in Abjection: Film and the Constitutive Nature of Difference (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
4. Robert Gooding-Williams provides a good example of the productive, but, I argue, ultimately problematic use of fetishism to shed light on Casablanca, "Black Cupids, White Desires: Reading the Representation of Racial Difference in Casablanca and Ghost," in Philosophy and Film, ed. with an introduction, Cynthia A. Freeland and Thomas E. Wartenberg (London: Routledge, 1995), 143-60.
5. Freud, Sigmund, "The Ego and the Id," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 32 volumes, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), vol. 19, pp. 12-66, see esp. p. 31. Hereafter cited in the text as SE, followed by volume number and pagination.
6. Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 26.
7. Rather than follow through the tension this "strange father" produces for Freud's alignment of the mother with object choice and the father with identification, Kristeva sidesteps this issue when she says, "The problem is not to find an answer to the enigma: who might be the object of primary identification, daddy or mummy?" (28),
8. Later Kristeva proceeds to identify the "'father of the individual's prehistory'" as "the keystone of our loves and imagination" (The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Jeanine Herman [New York: Columbia University Press, 2000], 53).
9. Notwithstanding the cautionary note she sounds in Tales of Love against being seduced by the "impossible quest for the absolute origin of the capacity for love as a psychic and symbolic capacity" (28), in Sense and Nonsense Kristeva reads this father not only as the origin of love and the symbolic but also as the corollary of the abject mother. Thus the "genesis of the symbolic function" begins with the "separation from the maternal object. Starting with this separation, Freud speaks of a primary identification with the 'father of the individual's own personal prehistory.' For the child to separate from the mother, a primary identification with this father is produced that is already the inscription of a third, with whom the child is not yet engaged in a struggle to the death. We might wonder to what extent religions celebrate this father with the miracle of the God of Love" (The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 83).
10. Even if "Infantile Genital Organization" was not written, or conceived, after "The Ego and the Id," both texts were written in 1923. Clearly Freud introduces the phallic phase around the same time that he wrote "The Ego and the Id."
11. Naomi Schor points in this direction when she asks, "What if the appropriation of fetishism - a sort of'perversion-theft,' if you will - were in fact only the latest and most subtle form of 'penis-envy?'" (Naomi Schor, "Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand," Poetics Today 6: 1-2 [1985]: 301-10, at 309).
12. Marjorie Garber also underlines the relationship between penis-envy and fetishism: "Penis-envy is phallus envy, phallus envy is fetish envy . . . the ideology of the fetish is the ideology of phallocentrism, the ideology of heterosexuality" (Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety [New York: Routledge, 1997], 119).
13. Freud says that "at the height of the course of development of infantile sexuality, interest in the genitals and in their activity acquires a dominating significance which falls little short of that reached in maturity" (SE 19, 142).
14. See also Freud's claim in a 1924 passage added to the "Three Essays on Sexuality" (SE 7, 233).
15. See SE 7, 199-200 n. 2, which Freud added in 1924.
16. See also see also SE 7, 222 n. 1.
17. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).