Extra-Mural Psychoanalysis

Introduction HISTORICAL STUDY is generally thought of as reliable and down-to-earth, so Walter Benjamin's fanciful mention of a called 'historical materialism' seems a bit shocking. The surprise is not so much puppet's Turkish attire or hookah in its mouth as its purpose-built role--to win philosophical disputes by dealing out empirical facts while secretly relying on theology. Benjamin is critiquing a historicist practice lacking armature; he advocates instead engagements capable of brush[ing] history against grain--the sort of approach New Historicism subsequently adopted. (1) Still, image of an automaton carries unsettling implications of a mechanical, manipulable, and, at worst, potentially deceptive capacity in historicist study. Because historical materialism may mystify its own theoretical principles, Benjamin calls for a methodology bolstered and tempered by philosophical consideration. Benjamin's puppet serves as a reminder of ongoing critical dispute, especially visible in early modern studies, between historicist practice and transhistorical theory. The long dominance in literary study of historicism, recent advent and development of cultural studies, and inflated rumors of death of have given license in some camps to avoidance of hermeneutic or methodological questions, and even to a disdain for theory, particularly psychoanalytic theory. Of course, attacks on are not new; in Paul de Man's famous take, the resistance to is a resistance to use of language about language, so that theory is itself ... resistance. (2) Theoretical engagements with historicism are, and aim to be, disruptive, for acknowledgment that facts themselves are subject to ideological shaping complicates narratives history can tell--with damage to de Man's own reception after revelation of his wartime involvements offering a case in point. Psychoanalysis, a altogether concerned with stories told about past, has its own developed historiography, which is skeptical of certainties, alert to layered and redoubled meanings, and interested in implications of transference, while accepting of unfolding nature of discourse. (3) Thus Jacques Derrida can characterize resistance to as one of cards dealt to our time and suggest not only self-resisting tendency embedded in system of thought like an auto-immune process but also inventiveness of resistance itself. (4) In recent years, continued evolution of psychoanalytic thought, together with creative forms of resistance and what Derrida called invagination of by other discourses, has resulted in work wedding analytic methods and principles with other lines of inquiry, including historicism. (5) Such cross-fertilization is clearly visible in Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor's influential Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, as well as in recent publications by Harry Berger, Jr., Marshall Grossman, Julia Lupton, Tracey Sedinger, and others, including those whose work follows. (6) The unanticipated appearance of psychoanalytic in all three papers of a plenary session devoted to postmodern theory/early modern belief at a recent meeting of Shakespeare Association of America was genesis for this forum, which offers a sample of work being done at juncture of psychoanalytic and other discourses, especially historicism, in study of early modern literature. These developments do not herald a new synthesis of historicism and psychoanalysis, for two discourses are typically combined in contestatory or dialectical ways, in scholarship that exploits as well as explores tension between empiricist and theoretical models. Yet new sense of flexible borders suggests that we can identify arrival in early modern studies of what Jean Laplanche called extra-mural psychoanalysis (le psychanalyse hors-lesmurs). …