'Psychological' -- from Moll Flanders to Clarissa

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Oct 2 14:25:40 PDT 1999


Hi Carrol:
>> To paraphrase Pfister, Freud doesn't, for instance, 'explain' psychological
>> novels (and other modern cultural and social artifacts); the latter
>> contributed to the making of Freud.
>
>It is also interesting that Freud's most famous theory took its name
>from a literary work so clearly unfreudian (so clearly political
>rather than "psychological) as *Oedipus*. That play -- perhaps
>responding to the first appearance of "citizens" as opposed to
>"subjects" in history -- does however (to the modern reader,
>but this may be anachronistic) seem to play with that famous
>question of 19th c. lit, "Who am I?"

This is a terrain that you know far better than I do, so perhaps I shouldn't quibble, but I'd like to add that in ancient Greek tragedy and philosophy, the question "Who am I?" seemed to make sense to the extent that the "I" stood in an analogical relation of sorts to the polis (e.g. the fate of Oedipus and of the polis over which he reigns, Plato's idea of [self-]mastery with regard to the individual and the polis, etc). As you noted, Antigone is something of an exception to this analogical individuation; perhaps, Hegel was inadvertently on the right track when he said that women are an eternal irony of the community or something to that effect (if that comment can be wrested out of its context).

In any case, the near impossibility of reading Sophocles, Plato, etc. without encountering the embryo of the modern individual in their works reminds us of a difficulty of stripping the 'history of the West' of teleological pitfalls. Again, Hegel gave us a hint (that can be read against the Hegelian grain): "The well-known is unknown, precisely because it is well-known." A hint that Marx follows in his analysis of labor.

Yoshie



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