Elizabeth Rottenberg. Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. xxi + 177 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8047-5114-8; $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-5113-1.
Reviewed by Nicholas D. Liberto (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania)
Published on H-German (August, 2006)
The Absence of Context and Arbitrariness of Obligation in Elizbeth Rottenberg's Reading of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert
Elizabeth Rottenberg's new work adds to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to uncover the unthematized, or "unthought" content of key texts of the philosophical and literary tradition by means of poststructuralist approaches to reading. Specifically, the author examines "the implicit but unarticulated relation between legacy and morality," first, in the later practical, ethical philosophy of Kant and then in the late works of Kant's "heirs," Flaubert and Freud (p. xx). In each case, Rottenberg draws attention to the appearance of notions of "possession," "obligation" and "inheritance" in relation to the Enlightenment legacy of moral autonomy.
Rottenberg is thoroughly practiced in the close reading of texts. She has adeptly edited and/or translated several key texts of French poststructuralist philosophy and literary criticism, including Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001 by Jacques Derrida (2001), Maurice Blanchot and Derrida's The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (2000), and Blanchot's Friendship (1997). Inheriting the Future showcases Rottenberg's skills as a translator of difficult literary and philosophical texts. The novelty of her interpretation of these "canonical" works depends in large part careful attention to rhetorical style and meticulous tracking of syntactical shifts. Although I found the constant comparisons of English translations to the French and German originals to be at times excessive (particularly when the words and phrases under comparison are cognates!), Rottenberg's focus on syntax and textual performance does throw into relief aspects of the texts that would otherwise (and often do) go unnoticed.
Rottenberg's approach will likely make this work less relevant and accessible to scholars in philosophy and intellectual history, who are not well versed in the practice and specialized terminology of the "deconstructive" approach, particularly that inspired by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. This difficulty is compounded by the author's unwillingness to engage the work of other scholars in philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature who do not share her approach, as well as her disregard for the historical or discursive-philosophical contexts of the three authors she explores.
In her prefatory note, Rottenberg alerts the reader to the conceptual and etymological association of inheritance with the obligation and the necessity of choice. In French law, the dead are said to invest or, literally to "seize" (saisir) the living with the right to choose. The important point, for Rottenberg, is that the legacy confers upon the inheritor an obligation to choose, regardless of one's desire to be possessed of such a choice. Rottenberg's reading of Kant, Freud and Flaubert applies this discovery to the realm of intellectual and moral legacy. In Kant's deontological ethics (ethics of duty) and the needs of reason before "absolute heteronomy"; in Freud's advocacy of the right and obligation of reason before "the trauma of reality"; and in Flaubert's unsettling portrayal of "undifferentiation" through the grammar of the atemporal, "posthumous present," Rottenberg argues that "we" are bound to take up and respond to the paradoxical place of "otherness" as the constructive element of modern subjectivity and, thus also bound to bequeath this problematic to the future.
The provocative relation of morality to legacy, as the author understands it, is laid out in the introduction, "Of Human Bondage." Rottenberg questions the content of what is referred to as the modern, or Enlightenment, legacy. By initially juxtaposing Kant's formulation of the critique of reason in "Was heißt sich im Denken orientieren?" (1786) with Freud's later, speculative work The Future of an Illusion (1927), Rottenberg identifies the Enlightenment legacy not only with the primacy of cognition and the intellect, but also the necessity and even "common compulsion" of reason for its own right and future. Rottenberg "returns" to the legacy of Kant's critique of reason by way of Freud's diagnosis of the "dangerous illusion" behind religious consolations before the real. In this way, Freud is proffered as an heir to the Kantian, Enlightenment legacy (p. 1). The psychoanalyst's indictment of religion as false consolation and an impediment to the legitimate claim of reason on the future of civilization enacts the right of reason to pass judgment, which, according to Kant, is reason's right and need even in the absence of objective grounds. The true interest, for Kant and his heirs, then, is not the objective grounding of cognition a priori, but the right and implicit need of practical reason to legislate the moral law even when its maxims have only a subjective grounding.
Scholars of Kantian philosophy will not find this suggestion particularly surprising. The claim that the "revolution" or "Copernican turning" in Kant was aimed at the grounding of moral, practical reason, rather than epistemology is not incredibly novel.[1] Kant references Copernicus only in the notes of the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), and it is here that he retrospectively describes the project of the Kritik to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. For Rottenberg, this represents a kind of originary moment, where the formalism of speculative reason is faced with what she designates "absolute heteronomy" of finite, human autonomy (p. 34). This is how I believe we are to understand the author's defense of the formalism of Kant's moral theory, his ethics of duty.
Drawing on Paul de Man[2] against "Kant's greatest apologists," whom the author never cites by name,[3] Rottenberg demonstrates how Kant's formalism offers a means to "the most radical form of resistance" to "any ideological closure of the 'human,' a resistance whose legacy can only be called the 'future'" (p. 27). The necessary recourse to formal elements in Kant's moral theory is thus a gesture and demonstration of the "futurity" of Kant's legacy. At the heart of Kant's philosophy is not only the grounding of epistemology within the realm of experience, but also the more enduring legacy of the space left empty by this restriction. This is to say that the Kantian "inheritance" is the burden of legislating the universal moral law with only a necessary, formal justification of our autonomy to do so. Kant's legacy, which is passed on to Freud and, presumably, to Flaubert, is one in which "absolute heteronomy" is unavoidable, and "possesses" the inheritor with the necessity of its textual reenactment.
This inheritance is traced to Freud's discovery of "splitting of the ego" (Ichspaltung). Specifically, Rottenberg focuses on Freud's later work, where he focuses on the problem of the displacement of desire before the demands of reality in fetishism and obsessional neuroses and on the speculative extension of human development to culture. Rottenberg explicates the intensification of the ego's defensive predicament as it moves from repression and forgetting to "disavowal" (Verleugnung) and ego-splitting. Ego-splitting is, for Rottenberg, identified with the point where "the ego maintains two contradictory attitudes in consciousness without the one influencing the other" (p. 63). This is the case, for example, in the castration complex, where the child refuses the reality of the female's apparent lack. Fetishism, rather than a repression of the trauma, is a defensive redirection of desire towards an alternative reality, the "artificial" reality of the fetish.
In obsessional neurosis, we move from disavowal as fantasy to disavowal as reality, as a genuine or literal act of disavowal. Obsessional compulsion represents, for Rottenberg, a greater ethical dilemma, for it results when the ego by means of the superego repeatedly attempts to disavow the conflict between desire (libido) and reality. Importantly, the ego (and the conscious patient) can recognize the neurotic symptoms; in other words, the ego is aware, and autonomous in the sense that it is doing this damage to itself; but the disavowal of the internal conflict of desire by the superego is the mechanism of this autonomy. The superego is and is not the ego at the same time. As in the legacy of Kantian autonomy, in exploring the ethical implications of obsessional neurosis, Rottenberg finds a "legacy of dispossession," where the neurotic patient is "possessed by a force that remains utterly unresponsive to the ego" (p. 87).
The final substantive chapter is devoted to the question of the legacy of "undifferentiation" and temporality in Flaubert's last, posthumous novel and "testament," Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881). Rottenberg takes up Marcel Proust's insight of 1920 that Flaubert's "revolution of style" can be compared with Kant's revolutionary philosophical discovery of the pure categories of the understanding. For Rottenberg, Proust rightly draws attention to Flaubert's use of grammar, particularly the shifts in tenses throughout the novel. It is not by the content or imagery of the novel, but by shifts in grammatical structure (moving from the simple past to the imperfect, and then to what Rottenberg designates the "intemporal present") that Flaubert achieves a temporal disruption that Rottenberg carefully traces as "the allegorical subject of the novel."
I am not qualified to assess the novelty of Rottenberg's grammatical approach as the most convincing means to "read" Flaubert's enigmatic last work. What I do find problematic is the conflation of the text's effect with that of the events of the author's life, particularly his death before finishing it. The fact of its posthumous publication grounds Rottenberg's claim that the legacy of Bouvard et Pécuchet is a "posthumous present," where we encounter the death of Flaubert, and the remaining plans, or "copy" for the novel's completion as an event of absolute otherness. However, that "we" inherit the novel in this way seems completely circumstantial. Why could there not be a means of interpreting "inheritance" in Flaubert's work?
One alternative may be Pierre Bourdieu's reading of a work that shares some similarities with Bouvard et Pécuchet in its depiction of Flaubert's contemporaries, Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). Bourdieu shows how Flaubert constructs his protagonist, Frédéric, as one who is unwilling or unable to possess, or to be possessed by his inheritance in the sense that he refuses the social existence that the "symbolic capital" of his patrimony confers.[4] Bouvard et Pécuchet likewise has moments of indifference to inheritance and failures to "be inherited" at critical moments in the plot. Rottenberg does not seem to take seriously the view that Flaubert may again be using the failed inheritance motif as a means to throw into relief those aspects of his contemporary social existence and cultural milieu that he finds repugnant.
The omission, or, at best, the blurring of historical context with internal, textual relations is the greatest weakness of Rottenberg's juxtaposition of these three authors. She points to a shared lineage in the moral problems bequeathed by the Enlightenment and specifically, its Kantian formulation, but she provides no historical account of such a lineage. Her internal approach to the texts of Kant, Freud and Flaubert is punctuated by presumptive gestures of conceptual or intellectual affinity in the three authors. However, Rottenberg is not interested in historical explanations of how a similar problem of "otherness" might arise in Kant and Freud, for instance. That she does not see fit to cite any secondary material on Kant's philosophical influence, or even the ample work that has been done on the role of Kant's philosophy and neo-Kantianism in Freud's development of psychoanalysis also adds to the narrowness of her approach.[5] Rottenberg only wants to follow a "textual enactment" and reenactment of a general (universal?) presence of the inhuman in moral language. Thus the grounds for linking the works of these three authors, operating in three different fields of discourse and across three centuries, could really be valid for any authors that Rottenberg chooses. The question we are left with is why Kant, Freud and Flaubert in particular are the representatives of "a heterodynamic or force of otherness that lies at the heart of the most foundational concepts of the human" (p. 124).
What we find then is that interest falls on the works of Kant, Freud and Flaubert purely as case studies for the application of a particular deconstructive reading of texts. Thus there seems to be no reason why what is isolated in this practice can be proffered as "our" legacy or inheritance. To claim to have discovered an "ongoing obligation to which we are bound to respond," it is necessary for the author to articulate historically the specific intellectual and conceptual development that has bequeathed this "structural predicament" as our shared legacy. Instead, we learn in her postscript, entitled "Last Words," that the relation between "dispossession" and language is only fathomed in the works of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, and that applying their methods to any modern texts will presumable yield the same discovery.
Notes
[1]. She might have registered, for example, the groundbreaking interpretations of the German philosophers, Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank, and, of course, Paul Guyer in English. However, these thinkers challenge the Heideggerian focus on what is "unthought" in great thinkers of the Western tradition that Rottenberg endorses (see p. xvii), a view that was criticized as early as Dieter Henrich, "Über die Einheit der Subjektivität," Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955): pp. 28-69.
[2]. At this point in the text, she cites Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," in his Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 3-19.
[3]. Rottenberg refers to academic philosophers who dismiss Kantian morality as "repugnant" à la Schiller or "unsatisfying" à la Hegel as "symptomatic of a generalized (but perhaps predominately Anglo-American) tendency in Kant criticism" (p. 139, n. 11). Cryptic references to this "irresponsible tendency" in "the literature" to demand that a moral theory "give us what we want" (see p. 26) are symptomatic of the author's general tendency to cite only those authors with whom she agrees.
[4]. Pierre Bourdieu, "Prologue: Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert: A Reading of Sentimental Education," in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 10-11.
[5]. This has been well documented and analyzed by intellectual historians, most convincingly in John Toews, "Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and for Our Time," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): pp. 504-545; see esp. pp. 541-545.
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Citation:
Nicholas D. Liberto. Review of Rottenberg, Elizabeth, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12100
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