Identification Papers Notes

Identification Papers by Diana Fuss

Acknowledgments

• The author expresses gratitude to friends and colleagues for their support and assistance during the development of the ideas in the book.
• Specific individuals mentioned include Marcia Ian, Carolyn Williams, Lee Edelman, Ed Cohen, and David Halperin, who provided support, encouragement, and a workspace.
• The author also thanks Walter Hughes, Eric Santner, and Eduardo Cadava for their commentary, questions, and intellectual discussion.
• Numerous other friends and colleagues provided comments on portions of the manuscript, including Thomas Keenan, Cathy Caruth, Cora Kaplan, Elin Diamond, Andrew Parker, Jann Matlock, Rebecca Walkowitz, Marjorie Garber, Michael Warner, Geeta Patel, Wayne Koestenbaum, Joseph Litvak, Andrew Ross, and Michael Goldman.
• The author is grateful to Mary Ann Doane, Carole-Anne Tyler, Judith Butler, James Fuss, Wahneema Lubiano, Daniel Boyarin, Mary Jacobus, Ellis Hanson, Jay Geller, Tom Foster, Bill Martin, Dianne Sadoff, Gwen Bergner, Gayle Wald, and Ann Pellegrini for sharing their work and insights.
• William Germano is acknowledged as the author's editor for his loyalty, support, and friendship.
• Eric Zinner is thanked for his patience, direction, and taste in cover designers.
• Institutional support was received from the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University and Harvard University’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies.
• Fellowship support from Princeton University is acknowledged for enabling travel to libraries and summer writing.
• The book is dedicated to the author's mother, Joanne Fuss.

Acknowledgements of Previously Published Chapters

• Chapter 2 previously appeared as "Freud’s Fallen Women: Identification, Desire, and ‘A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,’" in The Yale Journal o f Criticism 6:1 (Spring 1993): 1–23.
• Chapter 3 was first published as "Monsters of Perversion: Jeffrey Dahmer and The Silence o f the Lambs," in Media Spectacles, eds. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 181–205.
• Chapter 5, "Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification," previously appeared in diacritics 24:2–3 (Summer-Fall 1994): 20–42.

Introduction: Figuring Identification

• Identification is portrayed as a seemingly simple yet complex process, involving compensation for the loss of love-objects.
• Freud's quote: "If one has lost a love-object, the most obvious reaction is to identify oneself with it, to replace it from within, as it were, by identification."
• Lacan's perspective: What one cannot keep outside, one always keeps an image of inside. Identification with the object of love is as silly as that.
• Identification involves incorporating images or likenesses of lost love-objects, creating phantoms or spectral remains within the subject.
• Identifications can emerge suddenly and have a powerful impact, leading to both pleasure and emotional turmoil.
• Identifications are erotic, intellectual, and emotional, influencing the unconscious and unsettling identities.
• Jean-Luc Nancy's definition of identity: identity is “the Self that identifies itself.”
• Identification produces self-recognition and operates as a mark of self-difference.
• Identification aids and abets identity, but also challenges and destabilizes it.
• Identity becomes problematic through identification, preventing it from being a fixed ontological given.
• Identification involves a detour through the other, shaped by history and culture.
• Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen equates subjectivity with identification: the subject is identification; the I is another.
• Subjectivity is the place of the other, where one desires as another and becomes other.
• Every relation, including self-relation, responds to the call of the other, who exceeds and withdraws us from ourselves.
• Maurice Blanchot describes the other exposing one to unity while withdrawing one from uniqueness.
• The paradox of approximating identity through retreat is a theme in philosophical discourse on alterity.
• French Hegelianism, influenced by Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology o f Spirit, informs psychoanalysis's interest in identification.
• Psychoanalysis struggles to grasp identification, which eludes analytic desire for possession and appropriation.
• Psychoanalytic literature offers numerous qualifiers to categorize types of identifications.
• Psychoanalysis mimes its object, with epistemological possession enacting incorporation.
• Freud seeks to approximate the other, contrasting his rational approach with mystical views of otherness in previous models.
• Freud's theory of psychical identification replaces sympathy, imagination, and suggestion with a scientific approach.
• Freud acknowledges the power of language and textuality, using literary tropes to describe psychoanalytic concepts.
• Transferences are defined as new editions or facsimiles, drawing on the language of book production.
• Freud recognizes the figurative nature of scientific discourse, noting that psychological terms are part of a figurative language.
• Psychoanalysis aligns with literature as a form of narratology, anticipated and compromised by language and texts.
• Freud insists that psychoanalytic case histories are scientific documents, guarding against rhetorical encroachments.
• The psychoanalyst is a medical man, not a man of letters, and psychoanalytic writing is science, not fiction.
• Psychoanalysis opposes tropes to establish its truth claims, but relies on a logic of metaphoric exchange and displacement.
• Metaphor, the substitution of one for the other, is internal to identification.
• Greek metaphora (transport) implicates identification in figuration.
• Psychoanalysis is a scientific discourse on metaphorization.
• The book aims to read traces of figurative logic within psychoanalysis, which forgets its metaphorical history.
• The book adopts a critical methodology of reading Freud against Freud, influenced by feminist scholarship and queer performativity.
• Eve Sedgwick examines how identifications work in everyday experience, challenging the presumption that identities wholly correspond to identifications and that sexuality is a seamless whole.
• Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter use psychical identifications to examine identity politics.
• Butler notes that identifications are never fully closed, are inevitably failed, and are vehicles for one another.
• Disidentification may represent identifications already made and denied in the unconscious.
• Feminist film theory considers the dynamic of identification and disidentification in spectatorship.
• Mary Ann Doane argues that female spectators overidentify with their image on the screen, binding identification to the desire to desire.
• Kaja Silverman argues that even orthodox masculinities are sites of porous identifications and ambivalent desires.
• Feminist theory engages with identification across discourses and cultural differences.
• The form, strength, or trajectory of particular identifications cannot be foretold.
• Identifications are mobile, elastic, and volatile, exceeding social, historical, and political determinations.
• Barbara Harlow suggests identification is a political choice, specifically with oppressed social groups.
• Douglas Crimp supports identifications across identities to build effective political coalitions.
• Other critics see risks in constructing social movements on psychical fantasy, citing the danger of imperializing cross-cultural identifications.
• Rey Chow analyzes violent fantasies of displacement underlying nostalgic identifications with cultural others.
• Doris Sommer refers to the presumption of identification as overly sentimental or self-indulgent.
• Every identification involves symbolic violence, a measure of mastery and possession.
• Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter offers a way out of this dilemma, evaluating how any identification is purchased through exclusions.
• A serious difficulty in designing a politics around identification is that the unconscious plays a formative role.
• Despite challenges, identification is central to the political bond.
• Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis o f the Ego understands politics through the individual's relation to the social group.
• Social groups are constituted through identification.
• Freud's description of the political bond as a conscious identification contradicts his insistence that identifications are involuntary.
• Tensions in the psychoanalytic literature on identification structure contemporary usages of the term.
• Identification is both voluntary and involuntary, necessary and difficult, dangerous and effectual, naturalizing and denaturalizing, psychical and social.
• A politics of identity must address how identity is compromised by identification.
• The poststructuralist notion that identifications may incorporate nonidentity, and disidentifications may harbor the very identity they deny, should be taken seriously.
• The book attempts to think through these questions by examining identification, returning to psychoanalysis.
• The book focuses on Freud's work, where identification is first systematically formulated, but also includes Freud's revisionists.
• The project situates the contemporary interest in identification in its intellectual and cultural context.
• The notion of identification has a history with theoretical problems, ideological incoherencies, and conceptual difficulties.
• A conceptual difficulty is the confusion surrounding identification's relation to desire.
• Freud distinguishes identification (the wish to be the other) from sexual object-choice (the wish to have the other).
• Desire for one sex is secured through identification with the other sex.
• Psychoanalysis’s distinction between wanting to be the other and wanting to have the other is precarious.
• Parveen Adams challenges whether one can deduce whom Dora might desire from her identifications.
• Marcia Ian refers to the polarization of identification and desire as one of Freud's great mistakes.
• Freud uses this to theorize homosexual desire as contradictory.
• Same-sex desire is explained away by cross-identification with the opposite sex.
• Freud's opposition denies heterosexual identifications.
• In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud defines identification as a form of desire.
• Borch-Jacobsen describes desire as a type of identification: desire is precisely a desire to be a subject.
• The displacement of the identification/desire opposition opens up new ways of thinking about sexual identity formations.
• The question is why Freud keeps them apart.
• Chapter One addresses this question by looking at instances where Freud calls up identification.
• Freud summons and reworks identification to keep in place a normative theory of sexuality based on oedipal relations.
• Identification is required to keep the homosocial and homosexual from collapsing.
• The changes in figuration over forty years tell us about constructing sexuality as an epistemological object.
• Psychoanalysis is a mixed metaphor system.
• Subsequent chapters are organized around metaphors and theoretical questions.
• Freud elaborates identification through gravity, ingestion, and infection.
• The next three sections address these figures, pairing each with a selected cultural text.
• Texts are chosen for their interest in contemporary theoretical work on sexuality and difference: the psychoanalytic case history (gravity), the serial killing film (ingestion), and the girls’ boarding school novel (infection).
• Chapter 2 analyzes Newtonian rhetoric in Freud's “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”.
• Chapter 3 uses Jonathan Demme’s The Silence o f the Lambs to explore the power of the oral-cannibal incorporation model over representations of gay male sexuality.
• Chapter 4 revives Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia to critique the infection model of identification in a girls’ boarding school scenario.
• Critical confrontation between psychoanalytic theory and cultural production demonstrates how psychoanalysis shapes representations of sexual identity.
• The concluding chapter on Frantz Fanon poses questions about identification, revealing cultural and political investments governing self-other relations.
• Fanon's work clarifies how politics has haunted identification from the beginning.
• Identification is not only how we accede to power but also how we learn submission.
• Colonial relations, identification can operate as the ontological privilege of the colonizer and the subjugated condition of the colonized. Racial identity and racist practice alike are forged through the bonds of identification.
• This chapter places psychoanalysis within colonial history, suggesting that colonial history shapes the understanding of identification.

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, An Outline o f Psycho-analysis (1940), The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74), $23:193$.
2. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1981), $243$.
3. Sandor Ferenczi speaks of identification as an encounter with the ghosts of one’s past. Ferenczi notes that as an object of the patient’s transferences, the physician is simply one of many “revenants” in whom the patient finds once again “the vanished figures of childhood.” See Ferenczi’s Sex in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1950), $41$. More recently, in a fascinating set of cultural readings on the failure of introjection, Laurence Rickels represents the identificatory subject as a haunted transmitter of the dead. See Rickels’ The Case o f California (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), $10$.
5. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Borch-Jacobsen notes that the subject’s place, in fantasy, is always that of the other ($18$). See also Borch-Jacobsen’s Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) and The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing o f the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), $13$. For more of Blanchot’s theory of alterity, see The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1993).
7. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading o f Hegel (New York and London: Basic Books, 1969). Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen analyzes at length the importance of Kojève and his teaching for postwar French thought in Lacan: The Absolute Master. For more on the influence of Hegel on contemporary French philosophy, see Judith Butler’s Subjects o f Desire: Hegelian Reflection in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), and Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations o f Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
8. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and The Subject o f Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise, trans. Trezise et. al. (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1993); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1991); Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohn (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1981); Luce Irigaray, An Ethics o f Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell et. al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987).
9. Identification is only one philosophical approach among many to the problem of alterity. It is beyond the ambitions of this book to track the many different treatments of otherness outside the tradition of psychoanalytic thought, a project that belongs more properly to a sociology of knowledge. Such a study might begin by looking to the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
10. It enacts what Jane Gallop has called in another context a “massive reading transference.” See Reading Lacan (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), $30$.
11. Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots o f Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), and Léon Chertok and Isabelle Stengers, A Critique o f Scientific Reason: Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan, trans. Martha Noel Evans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Chertok and Stengers cast this paradigm shift as a tension between the histories of “heart” and “reason.” Ruth Leys studies the evolution of a new concept of mimesis in a reading of the imitation-suggestion school of American sociology. Following Borch-Jacobsen, Leys highlights the “antimimetic turn” in the modern theory of mimesis—the assumption that “there must be a subject who precedes mimesis and out of whom identification or imitation is produced.” The ontological self is smuggled back into the mimetic paradigm under cover of this antimimetic requirement. See “Mead’s Voices: Imitation as Foundation, or, The Struggle Against Mimesis,” Critical Inquiry $19:2$ (Winter 1993): $285$. See also Leys’ “The Real Miss Beauchamp: Gender and the Subject of Imitation,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York and London: Routledge, 1992): $167–214$.
12. Freud writes to Albert Einstein: “It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this?” Standard Edition $22:211$.
13. Freud: “What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. . . . Some of these transferences have a content which differs from that of their model in no respect whatever except for the substitution. These then—to keep to the same metaphor—are merely new impressions or reprints.” See Freud’s Fragment o f an Analysis o f a Case o f Hysteria (1905), Standard Edition, $7:116$.
14. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1918), Standard Edition $18:60$. Peter Brooks reads the type of figuration in question as “catachresis”—the trope that displaces the literal and the figurative, the factual and the rhetorical. See Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), $41–42$.
15. Lacoue-Labarthe makes this point eloquently in his investigation of philosophy’s indebtedness to literature. See Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of fables in The Subject of Philosophy, $1–13$. The interpretation of psychoanalysis as narratology is a position generally associated with the work of Peter Brooks. See Brooks’s Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), and Body Work: Objects o f Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).