the minnesota review n.s. 55-57 (2002)Marc RedfieldPassionate Textuality(On Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject" [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001])Ever since its emergence as a minor media phenomenon some thirty years ago, "theory" has inspired strong feelings—strangely strong feelings, given the academic and esoteric character theory has generally borne in North American contexts. Why should responses to some complex readings of Rousseau, Husserl, or Hölderlin in the 1970s have been so impassioned? And—the more rarely asked question that Rei Terada sets herself in this remarkable study—that does theory itself tell us about feeling and emotion? Does theory address the question of (its own) passion in nonincidental ways? Conventional wisdom tells us that theory (a term that, stripped to its bones, always turns out to mean "deconstruction," and above all the writings of Derrida and de Man) inhabits a cold climate. At best, emotion will be an epiphenomenal distraction in these polar regions; at worst, a hindrance of potentially fatal proportion. For, because it puts pressure on the notion of a coherent subject, theory is supposed incapable of attending to or accounting for the surge and ebb of feeling, and Derrida's displays of passion in his writing are thus routinely taken as signs of theory's incoherence. "I refute it thus," cries the latter-day Johnsonian, kicking the theorist and observing with satisfaction that she at least sometimes responds emotionally. How dare she? Hasn't she claimed—absurdly, of course—that the subject is dead? For Terada, however, that is precisely the point: the subject, if not perhaps quite dead (or alive), is in fact incompatible with emotion. Standing doxa on its head, Terada proposes that we have feelings precisely to the extent that we lack centers of identity: "we would have no emotions if we were subjects" (4). She makes two general claims relative to this proposition: first, that poststructuralist criticism, as exemplified by the work of Derrida and de Man, presents itself as an implicit or explicit theory of nonsubjective emotion; second, that poststructuralist dissatisfaction with the subject "appears in classical thought about emotion," with the result that "theories of emotion are always poststructuralist theories" (3). The complication attending that second claim is that, according to Terada, an "ideology of emotion" shadows and conceals emotion's truth: "the discourse of emotion from Descartes to the present day describes emotion as nonsubjective experience in the form of self-difference within cognition. The ideology of emotion tells a supplementary story in which emotion fills in the difference it registers" (3). Since these two stories repeatedly entwine in Terada's text and in those she studies, emotion turns out to be structured like an ungrounded figure, in Nietzsche's or de Man's sense: a self-disfiguring figure that produces both the illusion of a stable meaning and an ongoing narrative of this meaning's deconstruction. Because Terada offers her theory of emotion in the context of an account of the vicissitudes of emotion in and in relation to "theory," her book focuses for the most part on well-known texts by the two great icons of American theory-discourse, de Man and Derrida. At the same time, however, she demonstrates an impressive command of traditional and Anglo-American philosophical writing on emotion, and though her loyalties clearly lie with the poststructuralists, she writes generously and shrewdly about a wide range of authors and texts. There are four chapters, in addition to a general introduction and a short conclusion. Chapter 1 reviews a history of classical philosophical thinking about emotion and lays the groundwork for the book's thesis about poststructuralist theories of affect by examining Derrida's early writings on Descartes ("Cogito and the History of Madness" in Writing and Difference), Rousseau (Of Grammatology), and Husserl (Speech and Phenomena). Chapter 2 focuses on de Man's Allegories of Reading, a text that Terada, bucking conventional wisdom, understands as "a book about emotion" (52). Chapter 3 studies four different kinds of recent writing about emotion, stacked in a sequence leading toward the nonsubjective: a) Anglo-American philosophical writing on music (Levinson, Kivy, Wollheim, among others); b) the remarkable work of Ronald de Sousa, which "affirms the heterarchy of living systems and stops just short of discarding the human subject" (91); c) the "heterophenomenology" of Daniel Dennet; and, d) the antisubjective and anti-interpretational work of Gilles Deleuze. Finally, in Chapter 4, Terada returns to Derrida and examines the elegiac texts about de Man that Derrida published in the second half of the 1980s: his remarks at the Yale memorial service held for de Man (1984); a subsequent book, Memoires for Paul de Man (1986), and essay, "Psyche: Invention of the Other" (1987); finally, and above all, his famous essay on wartime journalism, "Like the Sound of a Shell" (1988), and "Biodegradables" (1989), his passionate response to the passionate responses of various academic opponents to this last. Terada's thesis is persuasively argued and, in my opinion, fundamentally correct. Perhaps the best way to review her claims is to summarize her reading of the primal scene of emotion in deconstruction: the paradigmatic encounter of Rousseau's "primitive man" with another man. "A primitive man, on meeting other men, will first have experienced fright," Rousseau fantasizes in the Essay on the Origin of Human Languages. "His fear will make him see these men as larger and stronger than himself; he will give them the name giants." Repeated contact with these giants will reveal to the primitive man that "the supposed giants are neither larger nor stronger than himself," and he will invent a noun common to self and other, "such as, for example, the word man," retaining "the word giant for the false object that impressed him while he was being deluded." Rousseau advances this parable as an illustration of his thesis "that the first word had to be figurative," and, as every theory aficionado knows, readings of this scene play an important role in Of Grammatology and a frankly central role in Allegories of Reading. This story of man-meeting-man is, furthermore, that of de Man's encounter with and reading of Derrida. De Man analyzed the "giant" passage twice: first at the culminating moment of his famous chapter on Derrida in Blindness and Insight, "The Rhetoric of Blindness" (1971), and then again in "Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau's Second Discourse" (1973), an essay that subsequently became the first of the sequence of chapters on Rousseau that forms the spine of Allegories of Reading (1979). For Derrida, as Terada summarizes, "Husserl and Rousseau affirm subjectivity on the basis of the representational translucence they figure as auto-affection." The Derridean reading discovers difference within the transparent self-reflexivity of auto-affection, such that "experience is experience at all only because of the self-difference of self-representation." ("Thus," Terada concludes—this is her book's most persistent claim?experience and subjectivity are incompatible" [17-18].) Yet Derrida also stresses the power and persistence of the logocentric dream of presence-to-self, and in Of Grammatology he suggests that the sign "giant," though referentially erroneous, recovers its propriety as a representation of the idea that fear has generated in the head of the primitive man. Rousseau thus, as Derrida puts it, "restores to the expression of emotion a literalness whose loss he accepts, from the very origin, in the designation of objects" (Of Grammatology 275). Terada pushes Derrida here, emphasizing that the idea of a giant does not genuinely "express" fear, except via a catachresis ("fear is not like a giant," as she snappily puts it [42]). Her reading of Derrida's reading locates the representation of the passion in and as "the difference between the sign's falseness with respect to its object and its accuracy with respect to its idea" (43); fear is "the difference between subjective ideality and the external world, appearing within experience" (44). Emotion thus becomes non-subjective and non-expressive: "Unrepresentable by any individual sign, emotion is represented by traces in a differential network" (45). Already, in my brief summary of Terada's account of this complex scene of reading, de Man's reading of Derrida has been at work in the background, for Terada could fairly be said to be nudging Of Grammatology into the orbit of Allegories of Reading. De Man's discussion of the "giant" scene in Blindness and Insight undergirds his claim that "Rousseau's text has no blind spots" (Blindness 139), and, by extension, that texts deconstruct themselves. That argument left its mark—the history of deconstruction in America would have been very different without de Man's essay—let the reading of the "giant" scene in Blindness and Insight is also strangely crabbed and edgy: on the one hand de Man claims that "Rousseau said what he meant to say"; on the other hand he chastises and corrects Rousseau, telling us that "the example [of fear] is badly chosen" (Blindness 135, 134); Rousseau should have written about pity or love, because these Rousseauist passions are grounded in illusion, and thus draw attention to the figurativeness of language. "The choice of the wrong example to illustrate metaphor (fear instead of pity) is a mistake, not a blind spot" (Blindness 139n51). By his own admission, de Man was soon dissatisfied with these formulations. Some ten years later, in a letter responding to a general critique of his work by Stanley Corngold, he asserted the fundamental instability of the difference between (random and contingent) "mistake" and (systemic and compulsive) "error," and then offered in passing one of the few public retractions of his career: "I can remember, with some embarrassment, at least one passage in Blindness and Insight in which mistake is peremptorily distinguished from error (or 'blind spot'); all I can say for myself is that it took me a large number of pages to try to disentangle the snarl that resulted from this rash assertion" ("A Letter" 510). Those pages are the Rousseau chapters of Allegories of Reading. "Fear," no longer a mistake, becomes here the exemplary emotion, precisely because it originates as a "figural state of suspended meaning" (Allegories 151). On the one hand, Derrida is right to claim that the metaphor "giant" recovers a literal meaning insofar as it expresses fear; on the other hand, fear is not a literal meaning: "Fear is the result of a possible discrepancy between the outer and the inner properties of entities" (Allegories 150). (The other primitive man, though not a lion or a bear, might act like one.) As Terada comments: "Fear not only expresses the inner state of the frightened person, but forms a hypothesis about something in the outside world as well" (57). Fear involves an epistemological and referential moment, yet that moment is also a rupture and a deviation: fear is an unresolvable state of suspense ("The fear of another man is hypothetical; no one can trust a precipice, but it remains an open question, for one who is neither a paranoiac nor a fool, whether one can trust one's fellow man") and the erasure of its own predicament ("By calling him a 'giant', one freezes hypothesis, or fiction, into fact and makes fear, itself a figural state of suspended meaning, into a definite, proper meaning devoid of alternatives" [Allegories 151]). Fear is metaphor as error: as the monstrous coming-to-be of figure (which is also to say: ratio, measure, comparison) through dis-figuration. The entire theoretical narrative of Allegories of Reading unfolds out of this story about fear. Like all strong acts of reading, Terada's commentary on her chosen theorists is at once modest and far-reaching, scrupulously faithful and sharply original. In eliciting a theory of emotion from these texts, she both teaches us how to view them anew and, in doing so, offers us a powerful reimagining of "feeling" as reading. The final sentences of her chapter on de Man deserve quoting, since they nicely summarize and give a little extra spin to her thesis: If we have emotions because we can't know what to believe (what texts and people are up to), as de Man suggests, then we have emotions even though we can't know which emotions we ought to have. If we truly knew which emotions we should have, we would no longer feel like having any. We are in no danger of being emotionless, though—nor is de Man's theory—since this 'if' condition is never fulfilled. (89) In her book's conclusion, she recapitulates her argument by way of a suitably lurid figure, the zombie: "A living system is self-differential; only self-differential entities?texts'feel. . . . [Z]ombies have no feelings because they are subjects" (156). The book closes with a cunning reiteration of its, and deconstruction-in-America's, archetypal scene: "Perhaps Rousseau's primitive man is panicked most of all by the idea that the stranger coming over the horizon may be, finally, a human subject—as he knows himself, frightened, not to be. A real subject would be really frightening; if I thought I saw one coming, I too would run away" (157). In a fashion typical of Terada's lucid, understated style, these final sentences suggest the weird complexity of emotion in the field of conceptual rhetoric. To be frightened is to be consoled (I am not a zombie-subject; I am internally divided, alive), and to be consoled is to forget one's internal difference—to imagine oneself, as it were, the zombie one is not. Thus we endlessly (fail to) hypostatize into identity the self-difference that keeps us living on, passionately. Terada's book not only offers us canny reflections on the role of emotion in theoretical (and, by extension, Western philosophical) writing, but also helps us understand the emotional intensity that has so often colored talk about theory. If passion is the "nonsubjectivity within the very concept of the subject" (5), and if theory is, at least for our era, the preeminent discourse in which passion reveals itself as such, it becomes understandable that spirals of fear, fascination, and flight should characterize theory's reception. Numerous philosophico-critical, political, and historical issues lurk prominently in the background of this seemingly minor academic scenario, and it must be said that Feeling in Theory accomplishes its task so efficiently and effectively partly because it sets itself rather strict heuristic limits. "The subject," here, is avowedly Cartesian (rather than, say, psychoanalytic, or, as in certain post-Kantian traditions, non-reflective, and so on); "experience," meanwhile, functions as an unproblematic honorific, opposed to the subject rather than aiding and abetting it as (for instance) a species of Erfahrung. Perhaps because her fine-grained analyses far outstrip the limits of such a binary opposition, Terada seems throughout this book to vacillate between a deconstructive sense of the subject as a necessary error, and a pragmatic sense of its disposability as a concept (e.g., "I have argued that while emotions are real experiences, the expression that supposedly conveys them and the subject that supposedly expresses them are unnecessary angels parasitical on the phenomenon of emotion" [118]). The main proof that Terada's elegantly modest way of framing her topic has in fact served her purpose, however, is that in learning from her one learns to want more. By what preferred route, for instance, would the author wish us to get from her discussion of the ideological twist that "casts emotion as proof of the human subject" (4) to the related (and equally popular) sleight-of-hand that produces "the body" as a locus of "reality" and a ground for language? How might we begin to reconceive such classic aesthetic topics as katharsis, or, more generally, fictional identification and affect (Hamlet's great question, posed of the actor: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba / That he should weep for her?"), in the wake of Terada's reflection on passion's essential fictionality? And if emotion is generated out of self-loss, as she argues—if emotion is in this sense irreducible, unkillable, returning all the more powerfully when, like the "theorist," we rebuke the solicitations of pathos—how might we position discourses and ideologies of feeling in relation to the ongoing destabilization of the "human" under the impact of modern technics? In asking and thinking about such questions one finds oneself returning, for help and sustenance, to Terada's rich study, which perhaps, in the end, has all the more to contribute to these large matters because it so punctiliously eschews grand overviews and syntheses. Works Cited
Marc Redfield teaches literature at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (1996), and The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (2003). |