SPECTRE

By Laurence A. Rickels

Ian Fleming whittled the effigy of James Bond out of his experiences with the British naval intelligence during World War II. After the publication of his first Bond novel, CASINO ROYALE, in 1952, 007 quickly became a cultural icon in the Cold War and a fixture in our collective consciousness. In SPECTRE, Laurence A. Rickels examines Fleming’s novels and film adaptations like never before, looking awry at Bond through the sieve of psychoanalytic theory, history, and Kulturindustrie.

Within the Bond universe, SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is the global terrorist organization run by supervillain Ernst Stavro Bloefeld. Fleming added SPECTRE late in the game for the crossover into the film medium. The ghostly amalgam of perpetrators and victims of the Nazi era, SPECTRE deconstructs and manipulates the opposition of the Cold War in order to promote the welfare of an organization that is in every sense an underworld. For Rickels, SPECTRE is a theoretical apparatus whereby he monitors and measures the flows, intensities and codings of the Bond universe while using it to read other texts, ranging from the writings of Goethe, Shakespeare and Derrida to the post-Freudian theories of Melanie Klein. This visionary, richly allusive study breaks new ground while extending ideas developed in such works as ABERRATIONS OF MOURNING and NAZI PSYCHOANALYSIS. Rickels’ approach is at once playful and pointed as he looms over Bond and lays him bare on the chaise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312228092

Book preview

SPECTRE

Copyright © 2013 by Laurence A. Rickels

ISBN 978-1-312-22809-2

First Anti-Oedipal Ebook Edition, December 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. Published in the United States of America by Anti-Oedipus Press, an imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Cover Design © 2013 by Matthew Revert

Interior Layout by D. Harlan Wilson

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OTHER BOOKS BY LAURENCE A. RICKELS

I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

The Devil Notebooks

Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema

Nazi Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War

Nazi Psychoanalysis, Vol. 2: Crypto-Fetishism

Nazi Psychoanalysis, Vol. 3: Psy-Fi

The Vampire Lectures

The Case of California

Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts

PRAISE FOR THE WORKS OF LAURENCE A. RICKELS

Aberrations of Mourning

"For Rickels, the link between technology and mourning isn’t merely Freudian and speculative, but also solidly historically grounded. In his excellent book Aberrations of Mourning, he points to the advent in the west of recording devices such as phonographs and gramophones before in fact mortality rates had been reduced by mass inoculation, even among the better off. Many middle-class parents, following the fad for recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’ or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became a tomb. ‘Dead children,’ Rickels writes, ‘inhabit vaults of the technical media which create them.’ Bereavement becomes the core of technologies; what communication technology inaugurates is, in effect, a cult of mourning—indeed, Rickels even suggests replacing the word ‘mourning’ with the phrase ‘the audio and video broadcasts of improper burial’ . . . Researching my own novel C, which takes place during precisely this period of emergence, I found evidence everywhere to support Rickels’ claim." —Tom McCarthy

Nazi Psychoanalysis

He brilliantly traces discourses on the relationship between pilots and their aircraft, spinning out all kinds of associations around men and machines, treating psychoanalysis as a kind of privileged discourse on the ‘ongoing technologization of our bodies’ that ran through the twentieth century. —Paul Lerner, University of Southern California

"The author’s knowledge of his own writing seems to produce a form of textuality that is forever sliding into the category of materiality . . . The author of Nazi Psychoanalysis has sought to develop a style that holds the line between a concern for content and a preoccupation with form in order to fight the restrictive nature of the modern symbolic order . . . Rickels’ liminal textuality combines the normal position of the analyst and the dislocated situation of the patient in a mode of writing that is always-already becoming coherent/incoherent. This is the mark of what I want to call his post-modern schizo-style . . . Rickels’ schizo-style allows us to see how psycho-pathologies emerge from the same hyper-reflexive modern moment that gave birth to psychoanalysis itself." —Mark Featherstone, Keele University

The Case of California

Rickels has written an important book reading psychoanalysis at the end of our century. His intent is to complete Adorno’s refiguring of Mickey Mouse into his own Rickelsian refiguration of Freud’s project. —Sander Gilman, Emory University

"Provocative (and often hilarious), The Case of California explores the ‘bicoastal logic of modernity,’ with California as one coast and Germany as the other . . . Startling and brilliant." —San Francisco Bay Guardian

Reading from an array of psychoanalysts, theorists, techno-cultists, psychic disturbances and juvenile converts, Rickels frames the dynamic transference of episteme, ectoplasm from Germany to California and its subsequent impact on the survivors of this endopsychic re-location . . . In California, Rickels observes an entire population of unmourned dead (from splatter films’ zombies to neo-Christian vegetarians and ‘impostor’ adolescents) building bodies to house and preserve the perennial youth (unyouth) of their post-paternal and trans-psychoanalytic culture. —Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California

Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema

Ottinger’s filmic subjects—the marginal, the freak, the exile, or the nomad—find their way into the fabric of Rickels’ text; detours into tangential literary evaluations, psychological musings, lengthy quotations, and even interviews with Ottinger herself work together to form a word-montage augmented by Ottinger’s own photographic work. For instead of choosing stills from those films being discussed, Rickels intersperses Ottinger’s photographs taken before and during filming to underscore his thoughts on the films in each chapter. Paired with his textual journeys into numerous arenas from journalistic history to Freudian psychology to Thomas Edison, these photos remain not static, but instead take on a nomadic quality as they wander among the words. The passion for collecting identified as central to Ottinger’s work here has been virally contracted. Additionally, Rickels’ language—playful, impish, and at times even joyfully impudent—celebrates the natural artifice present in Ottinger’s approach to difference and the marginal. —Carrie Smith-Prei, University of Alberta

The Vampire Lectures

It’s the ultimate book to give to anyone who makes fun of you for liking vampire novels or films. —Anne Rice

Rickels mines the study of cult phenomena, including vampire attacks, burial rituals, and sexual taboos that are recounted in legends, literature, and folklore. This vigorous contribution to literary and paranormal theory collections will enhance the pursuit of often remote scholarship into mythology and sorcery. —Library Journal

In the vampire’s attempt to come to terms with his own need to kill, he becomes a proto-Übermensch, a material/maternal disrupter of the paternal line of reproduction, a subverter of the Law whose only law is incest. Now, this may not be your cup of tea, philosophically or otherwise, but it’s a genuinely intense brew. In fact, it’s almost creepy. —Erik Davis

The Devil Notebooks

Cultural criminologists are likely to be attracted to Rickels’ attention to the expressive, aesthetic and emotional qualities of the Devil fictions he examines. Most importantly, his focus on the Devil as a figure of certainty is provocative precisely because it allows for the examination of a subject that has been marginalized in cultural criminology and criminology in general: the law-abiding citizen. As neither criminal nor victim but potentially both, the law-abiding citizen is the taken-for-granted background entity in the imagination of criminologists, particularly if criminology is defined as the study of crime, criminal and the criminal justice system. —Anita Lam, York University

"The Devil Notebooks establishes the astonishing extent to which contemporary pop culture has been preoccupied with demons, succubi, possession, aliens, sexuality of all kinds, and the end of the world. The Devil, then, offers up a counter-history of humankind—a history from below as it were—that Rickels deploys with verve in a truly fascinating and important study of how and why the world as we know it has gone to Hell." —Michael Dorland, Carleton University

I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

"A Deleuzoguattarian rhizome that deterritorializes a wide array of psychic, anthropological and literary assemblages, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick is the most compelling and philosophically creative book in the growing library of PKD Studies." —Extrapolation

Rickels does not force the fictions into the mold of his mostly psychoanalytic concepts, but rather bounces the concepts off the texts and leaves the reader to work out what they have dislodged. —Science Fiction Studies

Rickels does not merely invite readers to see Dick’s work the way he does; instead, the theoretical framework invites a broader vision that includes and projects outward from science fiction and fantasy. —Studies in Popular Culture

Aside from its perfect fit of critic and subject, Laurence A. Rickels’ book provides the most thorough and exhaustive reading of Philip K. Dick’s literary work that exists. He goes through all the novels literally, both the science fiction works and the so-called mainstream novels Dick did not publish in his lifetime. The reader of science fiction should welcome a book like this, which is both knowledgeable of the SF tradition and creatively analytical. I could not put this book down once I began to read it. —George Slusser, University of California-Riverside

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Just when I thought I had been cast out of U.S. academic publishing like an older, no-longer-cute pet, I was discovered and rescued by a writer, D. Harlan Wilson, to appear alongside other bona fide writers in his new press. Burn bridges burn! SPECTRE nonetheless has a history. The invitation to deliver the 2007 Otto and Ilse Mainzer Lecture at New York University provided the occasion to sift through my teaching-related encounters with James Bond and the Superhuman and to bring into the foreground the underlying reading of Melanie Klein and her crypt. The James Bond paper, more or less, appeared in German translation as the central panel of my 2012 book Geprüfte Seelen, a title that is a Daniel Paul Schreber citation: tested souls. It was flanked by more exploration of the concept of reality testing, but within the corpus of Philip K. Dick.

The chain of signifiers I pulled as Mainzer Lecturer I thought entitled my Bond reading, since already imbued with acceptance, to catch up with one of those standing invitations I guess I alone take seriously. But it turned out that the initials of the name drop stood for culture industry. How could the die messages (as P. K. Dick would say) pummeling me in my work environment at UC-Santa Barbara, from the department throughout the hierarchy of the administration, driving me to get lost, not be networked with all the other coordinates of the academic world? It’s a small-minded world after all. Sentence by sentence we enjoyed many of your insights, but there was also some wondering at just whether there would be any limit to the puns you are willing to pull out of the hat. Is it really out of or into my hat that the members of the board imagined I jack my limitless pun power? I’m reminded of an exchange I once witnessed. The woman tried to shock her man by extolling Jean Genet’s sex practice with a pistol. But he only declared his surprise that Mr. Genet was able to stick his dick up the barrel.

CONTENTS

The SPECTRE Trilogy

Accidie: To Be or Not to Be

Klein, Hamlet & Lacan

One in All & All in One: Sibling, Mother & Son

Between Hamburg’s Good Clean Fun & Vienna’s Depletion: The Transvestite in Berlin

He’s No Drag, He’s My Brother: Sibling Bonds

Klein’s Case of Hans & the School Ground of Childhood Symptoms

The Depressive Position

Trial Runs of the Mastermind

Therapy License

Hamlet’s Ghosts: Jacques Derrida, Carl Schmitt, Alexander & Margaret Mitscherlich & Friedrich Jürgenson

From Maternal Blob to Wound Woman

Love-Death at the Border to the Death Wish

Denial & Vengeful Ghosts

Security Service

Only the Lonely

Caspar, Hamlet & Hans

Bibliography

About the Author

The SPECTRE Trilogy

In the world of James Bond, SPECTRE is the acronym for a mouthful of vengefulness: Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. But since it doesn’t quite add up, what in fact occupies the foreground is the ghostly word SPECTRE. In Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, for example, those secretly involved in the organization bearing an acronym that retains the first word’s first two letters to spell SPECTRE seem unprepared to encounter their identifying name as a word in the mix of everyday meaning and metaphor. Bond tests Largo with what he considers an association of words: ‘When I came to the table I saw a spectre.’ He said the word casually, with no hint at double meaning (143). Largo has to slap his face back on and ask Bond what he means. Bond said lightly, ‘The spectre of defeat. I thought your luck was on the turn’ (144). Largo counters with bravado:

My friend wishes to put the evil eye upon my cards. We have a way to deal with that where I come from. He lifted a hand, and with only the first and little fingers outstretched in a fork, he prodded once, like a snake striking toward Bond’s face . . . Bond laughed good-naturedly. That certainly put the hex on me. But what did it do to the cards? Come on, your spectre against my spectre! (144)

After he wins three hands down, Bond once more won’t give it a rest. He orders champagne and caviar for three. ‘My spectre also deserves his reward.’ Wondering again whether the shadow that flickered in Largo’s eyes at the word had more significance than Italian superstition, he got up and followed the girl between the crowded tables to the supper room (145-46). Bond is able to utter SPECTRE in the mix of metaphor. On the other side of the game, however, his