Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert

By Elizabeth Rottenberg

This book explores several canonical works of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. The surprising juxtaposition of Kant's moral philosophy, Freud's reflections on obsessional neurosis, and Flaubert's peculiar late novel Bouvard et Pécuchet forms the basis of a compelling argument linking each of these central works around the problem of moral thought as it fundamentally determines the modern subject in relation to time. The book engages an area of emerging importance in contemporary critical thought, the problem of ethics or "otherness" as a crucial factor at play in speculative and literary works. The readings in this book provide insight into the ways in which three fundamental philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary texts can be reread in light of their confrontation with a seemingly inhuman force at the heart of the foundation of the human subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: May 24, 2005
• ISBN: 9780804780940

Elizabeth Rottenberg

Elizabeth Rottenberg is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and a practicing psychoanalyst in Chicago. She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert (Stanford) and the editor and translator of many books by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard.

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MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher

Editor

Stanford

University

Press

Stanford

California

2005

e9780804780940_i0001.jpg

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rottenberg, Elizabeth, 1969–

Inheriting the future : legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert / Elizabeth Rottenberg.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804780940

1. Moral conditions in literature. 2. Ethics in literature. 3. European literature–18th century–History and criticism. 4. European literature–19th century–History and criticism. 5. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804–Criticism and interpretation. 6. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939–Criticism and interpretation. 7. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821–1880–Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PN56.M59R68 2005

809′ .93353–dc22

2004030247

Typeset by TechBooks in 10.9/13 Adobe Garamond

Original Printing 2005

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

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To Ari

Acknowledgments

Above all, I wish to thank Cathy Caruth whose brilliant insight has been the source of so much inspiration and guidance. My thanks also to Danielle Follett whose unrelenting good sense has taught me the consolation of philosophy.

Table of Contents

MERIDIAN - Crossing Aesthetics

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Note on Sources and Key to Abbreviations and Translations

Prefatory Note

Introduction - Of Human Bondage

§1 - The Legacy of the Future Kant and the Ethical Question

§ 2 - Freud When Morality Makes Us Sick: Disavowal, Ego Splitting, and the Tragedy of Obsessional Neurosis

§ 3 - Flaubert Testament to Disaster

Postscript - Last Words

Notes

Works Cited

Index

MERIDIAN - Crossing Aesthetics

Note on Sources and Key to Abbreviations and Translations

Kant

Apart from the Critique of Pure Reason, all references to Kant are to Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Ak), ed. Königliche Preussische (later Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 volumes (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyer, 1902). References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions. Specific works cited in the main body of the text are referred to by means of the abbreviations listed below; those cited only in the notes are given with full title. The translations used are listed as follows and, except in the case of the Critique of Pure Reason, are referred to immediately following the reference to the German text. It should be noted that I have silently modified the English translations throughout. Where there is no reference to an English translation, the translation is my own.

Freud

All translations of Freud’s work will refer to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974). For a critical discussion of the Standard Edition’s translations, see Bruno Bettelheim’s 1982 article in The New Yorker, Freud and the Soul, 1 March 1982, 52–93. All references to this edition will be abbreviated SE followed by volume and page number. German references will be to Freud’s Gesammelte Werke, 18 volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1999). I have silently modified the Standard Edition translations throughout.

Flaubert

For all letters written after 1875 (and therefore not available in Jean Bruneau’s Pléiade edition), I have referred to the Conard second edition of Flaubert’s letters and its supplement. For correspondence with Guy de Maupassant, George Sand, and Ivan Turgeniev, I have used the excellent collections published by Flammarion. All translations of Flaubert’s correspondence are my own. In the case of Bouvard et Pécuchet where two page numbers are given, the first always refers to the French edition of the text. I have silently modified the Earp and Stonier translation throughout.

Je größer das Denkwerk eines Denkers ist, das sich keineswegs mit dem Umfang und der Anzahl seiner Schriften deckt, um so reicher ist das in diesem Denkwerk Ungedachte, d.h. jenes, was erst und allein durch dieses Denkwerk als Noch-nicht-Gedachtes heraufkommt.

—(Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund)

The greater the work of a thinker—which in no way corresponds to the scope and number of his writings—the richer is that which is unthought in this work, namely, that which for the first time and through this work rises to the surface as having not-yet-been-thought.

—(Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason)

Prefatory Note

In French law, there is a saying: le mort saisit le vif (the dead invests the living). In this adage, the verb saisir (to seize) not only expresses the power of the dead over the living. It also refers to a right, the legal right of a living person—la saisine (Code civil, article 724)—that goes into effect immediately upon the death of a testator. Indeed, as we will see, this legal use of the verb saisir translates one of the most fundamental principles of hereditary acquisition. Inheritance confers on me a right, and this right is exclusive because the authorization to accept belongs to me alone. The right to an inheritance is not a possession, however, and it should not be confused with an unqualified gain or even with something whose desirability can be assumed. Rather the exclusive authorization to choose whether I will or will not have the legacy in question is mine regardless of my choice; my desire to be possessed of such a choice has no bearing on the possibility of my chosenness. The right to accept or refuse a legacy is not something I choose. It is my election to the necessity of choice.

When it occurs, an act of inheritance (the acceptance of a legacy) is an extraordinary act: on the one hand, because it elicits from the heir a response to a chosenness; on the other hand, because any true act of inheritance always implies momentous decisions and responsibilities. Until there is a decision on the part of the heir, a legacy cannot but remain suspended, hovering between acceptance and rejection.

Inheriting the Future explores the implicit but unarticulated relation between legacy and morality. If every act of inheritance requires decision and responsibility, then the question What should I do? is no longer simply discursive or theoretical: it is also moral. But let us not forget that the critical concept of moral possibility comes to us from Kant who literally refers to it as a bequest, a Vermächtnis of speculative reason. This book examines the notion of morality in the late work of Kant and analyzes its nineteenth and twentieth century extensions in the writings of Flaubert and Freud. In all three writers, I suggest, the definition of morality is bound up with this more fundamental problem of legacy. Kant’s analysis of possession, Freud’s study of obsessional neurosis, and Flaubert’s stylistic innovations thus require us to rethink the concept of autonomy in terms of an inheritance that is not ours to refuse.

Beginning with Kant’s distinction between an external object of choice and an object of respect that possesses a dignity, Chapter 1 points to an example of possession that not only lies beyond the concept of ownership but also conditions the very possibility of moral action. Chapter 2 then turns to the case of obsessional neurosis in Freud—to that illness where those affected seem possessed by a peculiar force of super-moral obligation. Finally, in the posthumous work of Flaubert, Chapter 3 investigates the legacy of a narrative temporality that forces us onward, indefinitely, relentlessly, in the name of sameness.

Because the structure of inheritance gestures beyond philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, this book does not simply focus on three authors, it also covers three centuries and three disciplines. One might further speculate that legacies—because they exceed all traditional notion of boundary—always speak in more than one voice (idiom, language). Indeed, as I have tried to show, every legacy points to a structural predicament, a fissure that forever prevents what we call epistemology from closing itself off in spatiotemporal terms. The question of legacy is not simply a question that is left to the future: it is the question that must be left to the future. And yet, as attested by the examples of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert in this book, a legacy is also an ongoing obligation to which we are bound to respond.

Introduction

Of Human Bondage

Back to the Future

What is the moral legacy of the Enlightenment? How, to use Kant’s 1784 definition of Aufklärung, has "man’s emergence [Ausgang] from his self-incurred immaturity [aus seiner selbstverschulde-ten Unmündigkeit] (Auf 33; 54) left its mark on the twentieth century? Are we to remember the Enlightenment as but a moment of shallow and pretentious intellectualism characterized by individualistic tendencies and an unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority as we read in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary? Or is there perhaps at the heart of the Enlightenment another Enlightenment: one that not only gestures beyond the individualistic tendencies of the Enlightenment and its contempt for tradition" but also—precisely because it always gestures beyond the Enlightenment—comes to us through its heirs?

Freud, I will suggest, is one of the Enlightenment’s truest heirs in this sense. Indeed, in his controversial and unsettling book The Future of an Illusion (1928), Freud issues a indictment of religion so scathing that it is rivaled only by the devastating attack on religion’s claims to supersensible knowledge that we find in Kant’s critical philosophy. All religious ideas, Freud contends in this book, are illusions—dangerous to reality and motivated solely by wish-fulfillment. And yet in this most anti-religious of treatises, Freud ends up pointing to something in reason itself that takes us beyond the scientific grounds from which he launches his attack. In this text that condemns our psychical need to humanize the non-human forces of the external world, in a manifesto that equates religious belief with a kind of neurotic infantilism, there is, I will argue, a trace of something distinctly moral. Moreover, as we will see, Freud’s concept of reason not only points to a strange common compulsion, it also links this compulsion to a notion of right and futurity.

No civilization can decide never to make further progress in its thinking just as no religion can decide never to reform its churches. It simply does not have the right, says Freud. No people can make such a decision because a decision of this kind—in the words of Kant this time—would be opposed to the humanity in their own persons and so to the highest Right of the people (MS 327–28; 137). Freud’s common compulsion in The Future of an Illusion, I will argue, brings to mind the Enlightenment in its insistent call to reason, but also, I would claim, in its recognition of something whose grounds are no longer to be found in objective knowledge. Freud’s recourse to a common compulsion, I will suggest, repeats Kant’s positing of a cognitive drive in What Is Orientation in Thinking? (1786). At the heart of The Future of an Illusion, in other words, lies a thoroughly Kantian legacy.

At the root of a psychological "compulsion [Zwang] lies the history of a philosophical drive [Trieb]." Indeed, with this shift from psychology to philosophy, we pass from a critique of the human need for psychical mastery (for a closed cognitive system) to another and more enigmatic need: the need of reason not to be reinscribed within a cognitive system. Only by returning to the Enlightenment, I will suggest, do we emerge from it with new, more enigmatic, moral insight.

A Tale of Two Cities

I begin with two examples, the juxtaposition of which will help lay the groundwork for the relation between Freud and Kant. What lies in the future, says Freud, is the primacy of the intellect. Although the voice of the intellect is soft, "it does not rest until it has gained a hearing [sie ruht nicht, ehe sie sich Gehör geschafft hat]."¹ Indeed, this restlessness, according to Freud, is "one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future [in denen man für die Zukunft der Menschheit optimistisch sein darf ]" (SE 21: 87). The primacy of the intellect (der Primat des Intellekts) is our best hope for the future, even if this future is only a distant one.

What thwarts the progress of civilization and represents its greatest danger is religion. In spite of their incontrovertible lack of authentication, Freud marvels, religious doctrines have always exerted the strongest possible influence on humankind. What is so remarkable, says Freud, is the sheer inner force of doctrines whose effectiveness is wholly independent "of recognition by reason [von der vernünftigen Anerkennung] (SE 21: 45). Religion—or that most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization (SE 21: 18)—is so effective, Freud explains, because it ministers to the narcissistic needs of human beings. Religious teachings are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking [Niederschläge der Erfahrung oder Endresultate des Denkens]: they are illusions through and through, but they are also, at the same time, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind" (SE 21: 47).

The relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision for there to be a future. Although religious teachings may at times resemble other kinds of teaching that lay claim to our belief and tell us something about the world, they must be distinguished from them. When we are told, for example, that the town on Konstanz lies on the Bodensee (SE 21: 37–38), anyone who does not believe it can always go and see and thereby verify the correctness of the assertion. Unlike religious teachings, assertions of a historical nature demand belief in their contents, but not without producing grounds for their claims (SE 21: 38–39).

In What Is Orientation in Thinking? (1786), Kant presents us with an example of belief identical in form to Freud’s Konstanz example. Again this example is used to illustrate the difference between a belief whose grounds for considering something to be true are by nature devoid of all objective validity and a belief whose grounds are objective but are consciously regarded as inadequate (DO 141; 244). Only in the latter case can the belief in question ever be transformed into knowledge:

It is therefore perfectly consistent that something should be considered historically true purely on the strength of testimonies [bloß auf Zeugnisse], as in the belief that there is a city called Rome and the fact that someone who has never been there should nevertheless be able to say ‘I know’ and not just ‘I believe that Rome exists.’ (DO 141; 244)

Like the Konstanz example in Freud, the Rome example² here moves easily between belief and knowledge. In both cases, historical belief is based on objective grounds of knowledge. In neither case, therefore, is historical belief the kind of belief that is under discussion.

And yet, the Rome example in Kant’s argument serves a completely different function from that of the Konstanz example in Freud’s. For Kant, the example of a belief that can become knowledge is not a strong example of the production of objective grounds but, on the contrary, a weak example (even a counterexample) of the production of subjective ones. The belief that there is a city called Rome is not a strong example of belief because the belief can eventually become knowledge. In this way, the belief that Rome exists serves only as a foil for the belief that is to be treated as the opposite of knowledge: namely, the belief that can never become knowledge and which Kant calls a rational belief (Vernunftglaube). Instead of leading us to the primacy of intellect, in effect, Kant’s example already indicates a possibility beyond objective principles of reason.

For Kant the notion of rational belief is not opposed to reason. Rather it emerges from reason, from a need inherent in reason itself (DO 136; 240). Although a rational belief must be distinguished from an insight capable of fulfilling all the logical requirements for certainty—indeed, a need must never be regarded as an insight—the conviction of truth of a rational belief is not inferior in degree to knowledge ... even if it is totally different from it in kind (DO 141; 245). I will suggest in what follows that rational belief is not only a necessary presupposition for finite rational beings, as Kant argues, but also a rational remainder of a need that could begin to account for the inaugural grounding or founding of speculative reason itself. Since this rational remainder is not accessible to speculative reason, as we will see, it is only ever conveyed through it. Indeed, as it turns out, it is to this rational remainder that Freud’s common compulsion can be seen to testify.

A Human Need

Freud sees religion as civilization’s response to the hostility of which it is itself the object. Every individual, Freud tells us