Book Review: “Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early European Culture by Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (eds)”. Journal of Intercultural Studies, April 2001. more

Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture CARLA MAZZIO & DOUGLAS TREVOR (EDS), 2000 London/New York, Routledge x + 417 pp. pb. UK£13.99 History and Psychoanalysis have long been seen as incompatible modes of interpretation. This view prevails despite some of Freud's own writings either explicitly addressing historical questions (e.g., the origin of society in Civilization and Its Discontents) or which can be said to result from historical circumstances (e.g., the origin of war in Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Neither can we forget the Frankfurt School's readings of material history and of Freud which mutually reinforced each other in their critique of the specific historical organization of human existence. The editors of this new volume have done a notable job of proposing a means for bridging the gap between history and psychoanalysis. The contributors subject early modern culture to psychoanalytic scrutiny while simultaneously providing psychoanalysis with a history rooted in the early modern. Moreover, the essays use early modernity to critique our common beliefs about history and psychoanalysis. The book is remarkably coherent, which is something all too rare in edited volumes, and the reader is rewarded by the careful work of the editors. The work is divided into four sections. The first section, Fielding Questions, introduces the key concepts which will be deployed by the contributors: "Fetishes," "Dreams," "Space and Urbanism," "Violence," and "Sexuality," all of which take place within capital's transvaluation of "Material Culture." The second section, Graphic Imaginations, brings together several attempts to visualize the concepts organizing section one. The third section, Depth Perceptions, contains some interesting readings and counter readings of texts (Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Spenser's The Faire Queene) and discourses (on witchcraft and sorcery and on interiority). These essays are well argued, although the value of the essay on Shakespeare's Coriolanus is reduced by the deliberateness of its attempt to be controversial, and the unnecessary need to point out just how controversial in both a preliminary comment and in an extended footnote. The essay does, however, raise a number of important issues regarding the place of politics and sexuality in the previous readings of Coriolanus. The fourth and final section, Legacies, contains two essays that attempt to lay out the nature of the debt we owe to early modernity and, with volumes such as this one, we are now ready to repay. The first "Weeping for Hecaba" read Hamlet against the circumstances of the lives of Shakespeare and Freud. The result is a valuable discussion on the nature of Hamlet's grief and on the nature of debt and obligation. This leads nicely into the next essay which meditates on the meaning of the provision in Shakespeare's will leaving his wife his "second best bed." In general, the contributors take Shakespeare as the beginning of modernity. Freud and Lacan personify psychoanalysis, but there is no one school or primary proponent of historicism. One is left with the feeling that the historicism of Ranke and Hegel prowl the interiors of the different essays alongside the anti-historicism of Nietzsche, but this remains just an impression. If there is a problem, it rests in an assumption that may be well valid, but is not always fully explored here: the assumption of a continuity, assumed even in the phrase itself, between the Early Modern and the present. Surely if we are reading the works of the Early Modern period, then we are reading them in our own context and for our own reasons, which in this case is the commendable task of forging an alliance between historicism and psychoanalysis. One gets the feeling that a goal here is to historically situate the present more than it is to situate the early modern, for the texts are sometimes related in such a way as they naturally lead up to the modern and the postmodern. There are several mentions of works and authors "foreshadowing," "anticipating" or "indebted" to others, but these terms are more often used in the context of making a claim for continuity rather than actually establishing the extent of this continuity. Any unease with this approach stems from a view that discourse and institutions are ineluctably linked, and so to argue for a continuity of discourse is also to argue for a continuity in institutions and the disciplines of knowledge, which is an aspect not fully developed here. As the early modern--- which is less a period than it is a periodization--- recedes from us in time, commendable works such as this one remind us that time and history are not the same thing and of Marcuse's comment on Freud: "Time loses its power when remembrance redeems the past." B. Ricardo Brown Asst. Prof. of Cultural Studies Pratt Institute Brooklyn, New York