I’m thrilled to see what already promises to be a lively and important exchange. I write here in hopes that more readers will chime in. I have just a few thoughts on the work’s style and method, since, although Archive Feelings strikes me as a model of expository clarity, it is also a book headily intoxicated with ideas and uncompromisingly theoretical in its bent (its lifedeath being also an inebriated sobriety). Thus what Gurd calls Telò’s “discursive machine,” running alongside tragedy and allowing “the rhymes and resonances between these two discourses” to emerge, seems also, to me, an instrument so keyed up with excitation, the cerebral intensity of its strings of readings pitched so high, that it often brings the reader right to the edge of shattering. Like the best works of its kind, it holds out the sort of experience that throws one into a bodily loop, setting the book down only to pick it up again seconds later, not from any intellectual surfeit but from the painful sharpness of the appetite it excites. It is an unbearably exciting book, and, once caught in its lubricious machinery, we are swept inexorably along by the drive to, like Telò’s Thelma and Louise, “keep goin’!”

Part of this energy, I think, emerges from its stylistic procedures. For instance, it often compresses otherwise voluminous commentary into a brisk run of adjectives, or unpacks a surprising payload from the aesthetic contours of a single word—or a single letter (I’m thinking now of the “p,” “pa,” or “m” of Philoctetes). It never looks away the language of tragedy, and for me at least, much of the “pleasure-in-pain” of Archive Feelings lies in this exquisitely painstaking attention to detail, details which, seemingly effortlessly spilling from Telò’s pen, we ourselves are at rapturous pains to soak up. To take just one example, in his reading of the non-closure of the Agamemnon, we get discerning suggestions on ejaculatory metaphorics (“the outré juxtaposition of ganei (‘liquid sheen’) and sporêtos (‘sown seed’), where rain is confused with male seed”), metrical inundation (the gush of gore “engulfing the verbal and metrical flow”), and the “stickiness” of sound (where psakadi gloms together initial syllables of sphagên and kakphusiôn), confronted by an anorgasmic grammar (“aspectual incompleteness of the present tenses”), and the formal implications of stage materials (the imperfect “closure of the net, intimating its anarchivic porosity”) (244-245). However we understand its methodology, the work’s sometimes grisly lifeblood is surely this commitment to close reading (what Telò, following D.A. Miller, calls “too-close” reading). Whether this commitment comes as one renewed or simply undead, Telò shows himself stubbornly and almost shamelessly alive to the queer nuances that suffuse Greek tragedy (in fact, to confess a felicitous misreading of my own that proved somewhat telling, I initially mistook Telò’s phrase espousing “closest reading” (34) to say “closet reading,” a lapsus oculi condensing associations with bedroom closeness and closet drama, to say nothing of its queer epistemology of obliquity).

Of course, although Archive Feelings surely “contains,” as Gurd says, “the most original theory of tragedy in a generation,” Telò would doubtless refuse the opus the status of telos. Not least because for him the jouissance of tragedy “radically contests the very notion of orgasmic teleology” (241). In its interrogation of closure, the work is itself shaped by an anti-closural ethic: it offers rather than asserts, poses questions rather than imposes answers, and forwards interpretative possibility rather than articulating its putative constraints. In short, it refuses to play the Father by imposing hermeneutical law. On the other hand, Mario Telò has tendered a book which bears, to my mind, some likeness to the Freudian Mother. Its seething waters engender what Freud described as the “oceanic feeling” of religious ecstasy, the rapture of dissolving into the marine abyss of pure being which, to risk producing a “terrible grimace” with a watery pun, “Mario” could be said to name. Part of the “undoing” of the self which the work so beautifully explores.

But there is nothing tepid about this work. The intimacy evinced with the texts it embraces is sometimes so ardent that we feel we should be embarrassed to look on. But of course, we are not mere witnesses, and there is no mimetic distance to shelter us. Instead, we cannot help but ourselves grow feverish in the throes of its intellectual fervor. And if, as Gurd cogently states and Telò here elaborates on, this book is utterly of the moment, a book for our time of perpetual crisis and unending stuckness, we can only wonder with warm anticipation what new horizons of reading it will have opened up, in classical studies and beyond.

Let me first say, I love Sean’s commentary. It is beautiful and expansive. But I am wondering how Sean’s notion of the discursive machine differs from Foucault’s concept of the way people like Freud and Marx are founders of entire discourses (“What is an Author”), that is to say new modes of investigating and speaking about the world? The founders of discourses do not simply represent the “author functions” of discrete texts that make specific claims about the world. Rather they enable entire new ways of speaking. If that is true, then the death drive in this conception becomes a kind of archive that enables new forms of enunciation, and that would include the kind of enunciations we find in Telòs’s brilliant reading of tragedy, without Telò having to accept every empirical claim Freud himself made. Is that quasi-pataphysical? Or does this look more like the way Plato makes possible neoplatonism, Cicero’s De Republica, Augustinian theology etc. Or is pataphysics just the way discourse actually works, at least in the kinds of hermeneutic and figurative discourses that are typical of modern (post)humanist work?

David, thank you so much for your brilliant response. Rapturous, stubborn, shameless, feverish, “oceanic”: these are perfect characterizations of the affective force of tragic language’s “discursive machine,” which my “closest” readings and their idiosyncratic style tried to bring out or, if you will, remove from the closet of a certain kind of academic discourse. My attempted revival of radical deconstructive reading through the emotionally invested, madly (or even maddeningly?) personal rendition of affective, stylistic hyper-closeness (which, as in every relation, perilously navigates the borders of proximity and distance) is an attempt to problematize the very opposition between reparative and paranoid reading and to make a contribution to the current debate on queer formalisms. The danger and “inappropriateness” of (hyper)closeness are, to an extent, alternative ways of appreciating tragedy beyond the ethical, cognitive, and cultural-historical framework that is still dominant.

Thank you so much, Allen! Perhaps what you are suggesting, Allen, is a model of discourse similar to ever-expanding, ever-contracting matter. So, there is perhaps a way to connect the Derridean archive (nourished by a differential death drive) and posthumanist notions of matter, which are already, to an extent, anticipated by the proto-post-humanist sections of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (see the recent contributions by Tracy McNulty and Miriam Leonard)

If I may open a slightly different thread here in relation to discursive machines, I kept reflecting while reading Archive Feelings that the anti-cathartic impulse in the work could find traction from the fate of cathartic therapy itself. There was a moment when the scholarship on Aristotelian catharsis and the early Breuer-Freud cathartic therapy found a perfect discursive link up. It can be found in Hermann Bahr’s Dialog vom Tragischen (Berlin, 1904), in which a character literally holds Jacob Bernays’ essay in hand to reconcile classical philology with Studies on Hysteria, tracing a rather Nietzschean reading of Greek civilization that points towards tragedy not as a metaphysical consolation, but as a hysterical cure. The Apollonian world of heroic ideals created by Homer put unrelenting pressure on the average Greek, who could hardly live up to their example, so “the whole culture of the Greeks was then set upon and surrounded by hysteria.” But the Greeks still had the strength to create the institution of tragedy as cure: “tragedy in practice does nothing different from what those two doctors [viz., Breuer and Freud] do: they remind a people made ill through culture of what they do not wish to be reminded,” the savage emotions that lie hidden beneath the surface of the civilized citizen.

This constellation of ideas was not just brought about by the coincidence that Bernays was Freud’s wife’s uncle. There are many reasons why fin-de-siècle psychology returned to Aristotle and the cathartic paradigm, which seemed well suited to the new performance culture of hysteria. Once again, the hedonic agenda set the tone: if the psyche is now seen as a psychophysical entity, a Fechnerian system that manages energies by seeking to establish an equilibrium, then the discharge provided by catharsis has an important function of decreasing unpleasure. The psychic pain caused by “strangulated affect” seeks an outlet, either through symptoms (by which it will only repeat itself, sadly, morbidly, antisocially in a seemingly endless loop) or through the more definitive burn-off of “cathartic therapy”—so the early theory went. Hence, the Lustprinzip of the mental economy was inextricably bound with pain, since the mind’s endogenous excitation was forever producing unpleasure and “more rationality” (especially post-Nietzsche) was hardly a solution to an unavoidable human condition.

But even Freud found cathartic therapy was a better story than a clinical reality. Initially, he fell for the seduction of affective narrativity and reparative catharsis, but the infatuation did not last, for neither his patients nor the world really worked that way. While patients got some relief and satisfaction from catharsis, it proved only partially effective, leading to the recurrence of symptoms which led in turn to further need for catharsis. The danger was that this cycle just created a passive dependence in place of conscious insight, and the patient’s desire for catharsis could itself become a form of resistance. It’s just hard, in the end, to work through things with drama queens.

So can we suggest, then, that the cathartic theory of tragedy has revealed itself to be just a well developed resistance to theory? Historically we return to it time and again in hopes for some tidy explanation for our fascination with the dark pleasures of Greek tragedy, but are we in effect caught in a loop of explanatory self-satisfaction? Mario’s book is boldly leading us out of this trap in which many have been stuck since Aristotle’s day.

I love your De Manian formulation, Richard. Freud’s attachment to catharsis might be imputed to his perennial desire for scientific legitimation in the anti-Semitic, positivistic Vienna of his time. What’s the use of psychoanalysis if it doesn’t provide a solution, a form of efficacious healing? This healing aspiration is shaped by what Paul Kottman has recently called science’s melancholic subjectivity, a kind of voracious cognitive introjection of the object, which he has pitted against the objectivity of the humanities—or, we may say, of theory as opposed to science and positivistic scholarship. This objectivity entails a fundamental respect for “the recalcitrance of the object,” in Adorno’s words. Making the loop of symptoms emerge, come out into the open is not small feat for psychoanalysis. The symptom, as you say, is an “outlet,” an externalization, a kind of “release” in its own right. Would it be too weird to call it a kind of anti-cathartic catharsis? Freud’s insistence on casting psychoanalysis as a “science” is his death drive, if you will. Just as the notion of cathartic equilibrium is caught in the loop of reconstructing an imagined status quo ante, as I argue in the introduction of the book, Freud’s attachment to the cathartic model figures his constantly frustrated, never fulfilled effort to fit into the scientific status quo, into a positivistic disciplinary equilibrium that is radically incompatible with psychoanalysis.

I am grateful to be part of this discussion.

Reading Sean Gurd’s remarks and Mario’s response, two questions come to mind.

First:

Gurd notes that Mario is offering a “theory of tragedy” and he compares Mario’s theory favorably to Hegel’s. I understand a “theory of tragedy” to be something like what A.C. Bradley sketched, a century ago, when he wrote about “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy.” That is, a theory of tragedy would be something like a poetics; a cognitive account of what tragedies (works of that genre) are, and of why they matter.

At the same time, as Gurd notes and as Mario confirms, any good theory of tragedy (like Mario’s) incorporates and is marked by an affective response to tragedies. This can produce what Mario understatedly calls “a disconnect between the non-scholarly experience of watching or reading tragedy and the practice of writing about it.” In short, it seems that theoretical accounts of tragedies cannot outrun our felt responses to them; and so, our felt responses cannot be warranted by any cognitive practice. Theories of tragedy, in this sense, themselves express something tragic: the insuperability of, and the theoretical indefensibility of, what Mario (after Sianne Ngai) calls our “ugly feelings.” The more we can tarry, theoretically, with this – what to call it? – impasse, the closer our ways of teaching or talking or philosophizing about tragedy themselves become tragic. When Mario’s thinking tarries in this way, he gives us room to do the same. Whether such room can be put to any salutary use at all is, I think, an open question.

The openness of that question puts into question the value of both theories of tragedies, like Mario’s, and of tragedies themselves. I understand this aporia to be what Plato hit upon in Republic 10, when he tried to establish the authority of philosophy vis-à-vis the grieving, affective helplessness that tragedies express.

Second:
Mario is concerned, in the book and in his response to Gurd, to offer what he calls a “rejection of the reparative.” Why should the reparative require rejection? In my longer response to Mario, to be published here in a week or two, I try to say something more about Mario’s aims in this regard. But, here, I want to wonder aloud about the meaning of rejecting the reparative, or of what Mario also calls the “anti-reparative.”

Given Mario’s turn to Freud in the Archive Feelings, let me state my musings in psychoanalytical terms, although I think the issue could also be stated in terms provided by what Martha Nussbaum once called “therapies of desire,” readable in the ancient Hellenic, Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. If there is some analogy between the kind of reparation at work in medicine (for a fever or a broken leg, say) and possible kinds of reparation when it comes to a broken heart, or deep feelings of shame – and that is, of course, a big ‘if’ – then psychoanalysis and certain moral philosophies (Plato on tragedy, the Stoics etc.) might be seen as attempts to see where the analogies do and do not work. I understand the most intriguing dimensions of such philosophies to unfold when ‘cures’ for the soul (offered by religious healers, say, or the therapy industry) cease to be credible in the way that plaster casts are credible as ‘cures’ for a broken arm. As Adam Philips puts it, “a culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.”

I take it that Mario, like the most adventurous psychoanalysts, wants to ask what our view of life would be like – both in theory and in practice, in life as we live it – if our tragedies had no curative moment whatsoever. But why should asking this require the (theoretical) rejection of reparation, or an “anti-reparative” aesthetics? Doesn’t this rejection foreclose the very openness of tragedy? Why not, somewhat more dialectically, speak instead of a cure of the wish to be cured, or of a reparative relation to inherited ideas of reparation?

Perhaps Mario really wants to insist: There is no reparation. But, if so, then from what theoretical vantage is he then claiming to be speaking?

Tragedies show, again and again, how what we wish to reject or expel is precisely what has already invaded us at the core. Which makes me wonder: What reparative work might be going on at the core of any rejection of reparation?

I can certainly agree there was a strategy of legitimation going on with Breuer and Freud’s recourse to the concept of catharsis. Early on in the development of psychotherapy, Freud indulged in a constant clinical improvisation, using hypnosis, suggestion (the pressure technique), and finally landing on free association as a method of interaction with the analysand. But as I’ve argued before in relation to the archaeological analogy, we should see these strategies of legitimation not simply as external, or as you say, aimed at the “anti-Semitic, positivistic Vienna” of his time. They are also internal to the interactions with his early analysands, and are therefore transactional analogies. Unlike Charcot’s performing grisettes, Freud’s early patients were not only among the richest women in Europe like Anna von Lieben and Fanny Moser, many of them were also Jewish, like von Lieben and Elise Gomperz, wife of the famous classical scholar Theodor Gomperz, who was himself in conversation with Breuer on the interpretation of catharsis. Scholars like Peter Swales and Volker Langholf have suggested these early patients had a strong effect on Freud’s early formulations, and their high degree of culture might have made the cathartic paradigm (which was both theatrical—i.e., bourgeois—and secular) appealing as a description of the unusual process of memory work. Jonathan Lear has emphasized how this theatrical paradigm functions to put the hysteric in a position of sympathetic self-spectatorship, negotiating the boundary between proximity and distance in her own recollection of trauma. And some psychoanalytic authors like Joyce McDougall overtly deployed metaphors of theatricality for the analytic space for some time (Theatre of the Mind, Theatre of the Body).

But as for your second point, the symptom is an anti-cathartic expenditure of energy in Freud’s thinking, a bit like flaring natural gas. But as it does not address root causes, it loops endlessly in a waste of energy. Freud’s mixture of “catharsis and archaeology” has a lot to do with his desire not just to join science, but to extend it. Charcot had done much to fix an iconography of hysteria as a florid seizure disorder, a project typical of a nosographer hoping to locate a morbid entity in a taxonomy of disease. But Freud was more eager (and arguably was under more pressure) to cure it, and drove deeper into its etiology, hence the shift from symptoms to causes in his approach. The problem with Freud is that his eagerness to find a winning narrative of cure often put him well over his skis (Breuer was far more reluctant to claim such wins). So to return to your final point, we might say his final acceptance of another human impulse that is not towards health but rather entropy gave him another option for why people are so damnably difficult to cure from mental distress. I think it’s true over time he grew more comfortable with his pessimism, which is why the later Freud has greater affinities with tragedy. Once he’d created his “scientific myth” of the primal father, which he even called the Urvatertragödie, he’d left the simplistic mechanism of catharsis well behind.

Thank you, Paul, for both of your points. Si parva licet, my “theory” of tragedy, especially if compared to Plato’s and Hegel’s, would be better called an anti-theory, one that, by heeding and almost inhabiting affective disruption, the “ugly feelings” that many theorists of tragedy are bothered by and seek to rein in, contests the normative framework intrinsic to any theory of the tragic. My deep, unruly engagement with critical theory (an obsessive eclecticism, which I know, Paul, you will have a lot to say about in your “official” response) is precisely my own way to voice the need for an anti-theory of tragedy, to express the idea that a theory of tragedy can only be an anti-theory, as it were.

“The wish to be cured” is precisely what I mean by “reparative.” I should have called it a reparative desire. I thus don’t think that we are in disagreement. For me, “this wish to be cured” is the objet petit a of the tragic experience and of many theorizations of tragedy. Precisely because I deconstructively believe, as you say, that “tragedies show, again and again, how what we wish to reject expel is precisely what has already invaded us at the core,” I see the reparative (the idea that tragedy does cure us) as a kind of closure, as an illusory rejection or expulsion of the “ugly feelings,” a kind of reinscription of the tendency to coopt tragedy into a liberal agenda (what I am afraid projects like Nussbaum’s essentially do).

I’m interested in what Mario had to say about not wanting to be cured when watching/reading tragedy and Richard’s comments about the resistance to theory.

Let me begin with resistance to theory: Classical Studies as an institution has for a long time been very resistant to Freud and Freudianism, especially since Jean-Pierre Vernant’s famous critique of the Freudian psychoanalysis of Sophocles’ “Oedipus”. And yet, much recent scholarship in classical reception studies, which has argued time and again that modern performances of tragedy cathartically manage to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable, rely (often unknowingly) on Freud’s initial approbation of an Aristotelian interpretation of tragedy. And this is not just ironic; I think this irony is pernicious. The exploration of the reception of antiquity in modernity ends up so often re-idealizing, re-glorifying, re-classicizing the ancient Greek past. “Greek tragedy can say what we still cannot!” so the refrain of classical reception scholars goes. Classical reception studies supposedly cures Classics, that decadent, degenerative, limping aristo, the last of his line. Classical reception studies breathes new life into the old codger. Classical reception studies reminds the illiterate masses that Classics really does – timelessly, universally – matter. It’s a certain sort of Freudian-Aristotelian edifice – a theory – which underpins the classicist’s resistance to theory and their joyful, naive celebration of the survival of the classics.

But I think we should be wary of this cure. Re-idealizing the classical past is not going to help anyone. Idealizing centralization of the Graeco-Roman past always entails the marginalization of something else. Every act of remembering is also an act of forgetting. And that for me is the value of “Archive Feelings”. Instead of soothing us, this book unsettles us. If there is no catharsis, there is no end to thinking, to working through, to trying things out, to getting things wrong, to messing up, to making a mistake, to being a failure. Not putting an end to reading is an affirmation of working in collaboration rather that in competition, to envisaging novel, anti-capitalistic, anti-neo-liberal modes of knowledge production. “Archive Feelings”, for me, doesn’t seek to offer another way of propping up – of curing – Classics. Rather it puts Greek tragedy into contact with all sorts of other literary and cultural traditions and horizons. It offers an opening to exploring the ancient Mediterranean world in every-changing intellectual constellations. That seems to me to be a much more equitable and more secure future for the study of “stuff” like Greek tragedy.

Classics as “that decadent, degenerative, limping aristo, the last of his line”–sounds very much like Oedipus, Dan. But then you knew that. As we discussed recently in another symposium on another book in our series, Michelle Zerba’s Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire and a Poetics of Indirection, we’re groping for an approach that embraces complex convergences instead of unilinear, causal arguments that reduce reception to a matter of: classical text x —> influence on modern text y = perennial power of classical text x (Classics wins again!). That old model of “the classical tradition” can be blamed for wanting to pull the same rabbit out of different hats over and over again.

Here I think reflection on the modern production of the ancient archive is always a useful place to begin, how it is structured in the very act of archiving (e.g., ancient “literature” as a series of printed texts), and how this archival production and reproduction are always already embedded in modern cultural practices. I think Mario’s displacement of tragedy from a performative context and his refusal to give in to the desire for recreating a cultural moment in Periclean Athens are helpful in reframing this engagement to be more radical from the start. But as often is the case, we struggle with the implications of what the outcomes look like: what is “produced” by this cultural production, what are the “research outcomes” our administrative software can input and aggregate? The Freudian condition we most suffer from in academia is, after all, the narcissism of small differences.

JP Vernant’s “Oedipus without the Complex” was a classic instance of disciplinary policing, and yet if you read the essay, you’ll find his most burning questions about Greek tragedy are fundamentally psychoanalytic in nature:

“To what extent is man really the source of his actions? Even when he seems to be taking the initiative and bearing the responsibility for them does not their true origin lie elsewhere? Does not their significance remain to large extent hidden even from the one who performs them, so that it is not so much the agent that explains the action, rather the action that, by revealing its real meaning after the event, reflects light upon the agent’s nature, revealing what he is and what in actual fact he has unwittingly done.”

Here the resistance to theory really did lead to the return of the repressed. Had Vernant been less invested in playing the disciplinary policeman, his engagement with contemporary psychoanalysis would have been far more enriching than the petulant essay that he wrote instead.

Thank you so much for including me in this discussion – I have learned a huge amount from Mario’s amazing book and from this debate. I hope you’ll forgive me for being a bit flat-footed in my request for clarification here. I’d like to go back to Paul Kottman’s ‘Two Thoughts’ response where he asked about the value of Greek tragedy. I’m with you, Mario, when it comes to your argument that Greek tragedy is not cathartic (as I suspect are most classicists these days). I’m also persuaded, I think, that there is little that is curative or reparative about the operations of Greek tragedy, but does that mean that there is nothing salutory (Paul’s term – a good one), in reading or watching tragedy? If the value lies just in the pleasures of tragedy ‘nourishing our never-ending agony, our stuckness, our inability to escape the ‘torture chamber’ in which are confined, (un)sheltered’ (Mario above) and in the ‘absence of release, glorious reveling in being stuck’ (Sean Gurd above) then I think I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I can see the pleasure and the value in tragedy’s disruption of norms (Mario above) but, again, if that is its only or even main value then it wouldn’t we tire of it? Wouldn’t it be a bit tediously indulgent? For me (and I’m not an expert on tragedy nor as conversant with high theory as my fellow discussants here so I may just be being a bit thick) but for me part what is salutory about watching or reading tragedy (and I mean salutory rather than reparative or curative, though I wonder now if and where they slide into each other) are the ethical engagements it demands of its viewers and readers – its prompting us to ask why we are stuck, and invitation to imagine and debate other choices and other outcomes. This engagement sometimes (it depends on the tragedy) feels to me the opposite of stuck, to take us beyond the stuckness of the characters in the drama. Where/how do the ethical engagements of tragedy fit in Mario’s analysis?

PS David Youd’s reminder to make something of the punning possibilities in Telò and telos is rather lovely.

PPS re Richard’s intro – I wasn’t being entirely serious when (following Aristotle) I suggested menstruation as an alternative to ejaculation…!

Thank you so much, Helen, for your comment! I completely understand the discomfort, which is often evoked by my investment in the ethics of negativity (something that for me doesn’t coincide with nihilism). Isn’t finding a space for the expression of forms of willful, radical refusal enough of an attraction for viewers or readers of tragedy? “Indulgent” is a morally (or moralistically) charged term. My position aligns with that of Afropessimists like Fred Moten and Stephen Best, who argue that the social structures of systemic oppression call for aesthetico-political moments of deep disruption, of abolitionist dismantling. The kind of ethical engagement that you propose—one that goes beyond the unconditionally oppositional stance of stalling, that is, arresting the status quo through the affective inhabitation of negative agency—seems to me to carry the danger of normative re-inscription, of being coopted back into the Symbolic structures that tell us not to be stuck, not to be self-indulgent, to reject ugly feelings and, instead, to embrace forms of reparative participation. My impression is that the focus on the ethics of tragedy, which has occupied the history of tragic scholarship since the Romantic period, can make us miss the opportunity to connect tragedy with the radicality of the impossible.

Hello all! What I most relish and want to celebrate about your spectacular book, Mario, is the sensation it gives me of entering into a movement, or a series of different experiences of movement in response to tragic poetics (flowing, slipping, surging, rushing, shivering, fitting, plateauing, squirming, churning, undulating, looping, circling, buzzing, falling, flying, coasting, slowing, tarrying, coming to a halt). So I’m interested that many of the responses above focus on stuckness, rather than movement within stuckness, which emerges as a key concept in the book.

I find myself tracing the spaces between stuckness as the experience of not moving, and other ways stuckness is parsed in the book and in this conversation (as never-ending, as struggle, delay, waiting, waiting out, suspension, circling, spiralling). It occurs to me that ‘stuckness’ is a vividly onomatopoeic word that names a reaction to an experience rather than the experience in itself, which we (or perhaps there is no ‘we’) might also symbolize differently as a staying-with, an endurance, tolerating, or holding. The psychotherapist might say that tolerating the experience of not-moving (or what in the book becomes lifedeath) is a condition of possibility for the processing or integration of trauma over time – an understanding far removed from a repressive purity politics of reparation and hope. Stuckness is a diagnosis tinged both with trauma and with a defence against trauma – a defence that, like the death-drive, performs the power to make things stop changing, to stop life/vulnerability/being in time: stuckness merges, or threatens to merge, tragic characters’ traumythic compulsion (to use your infectious phrase, Mario!) with our own readerly-participant response, and at the same time seems to defend against that contagion or overwhelm. This, for me, is part of why the book succeeds in revving up these exciting and excited conversations, and why dialogue is so important in reckoning with the consequences, in practice, of the book’s insistent rejection of the ‘notion that critics should, or even can, place themselves outside or beyond the text and refuse any risk of affective contamination’ (36). We can sense and track that risk not (just/so much) in the pyrotechnic discourse of ‘agony’, ‘excruciating joy’, ‘torture’, ‘shattering’, a vocabulary that, when repeated, seems to me strangely abstract and depersonalised, but in our responses to the much more banal ‘There is nowhere left for me to go’. There is always the fear that an open-ended engagement with the possibility (rather than, or as well as, the impossibility) of the therapeutic ‘carries the danger’ of pulling us back into the normative symbolic structures that tell us ‘not to be stuck, not to be self-indulgent, and to reject ugly feelings’ (MT 3.16.22). It is also true that, at this historical juncture, the system’s thanatological power to correctively consume critiques of itself is horrific, and we have already introjected stuckness as shamefully self-indulgent and ugly. But I also see that any move that looks risky, dangerous and self-exposing in the face of that master has the capacity to disturb its defences, even as it is humiliated and quashed. To me, this is one way of parsing what Derrida said in his final interview, ‘deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life’. The ‘emancipatory potential’ of Edelman’s thesis excites me, but also seems to signal an avoidance, or defence, that is both reassuringly human and tragic: no-escape is weaponised, but can’t in the end be tolerated.

My own process of staying with the paradoxes that dance or spasm through the book would go something like this: On one hand, the hope of reparation is a death drive, which is always a fantasy of escape and mastery, because it hopes to stop change-over-time and therefore defend against the vulnerability and materiality of life; the death drive often operates (catastrophically and grotesquely in the US) to ‘incite’ (I would be tempted to say ‘structurally underpin’) ‘oppressive powers – patriarchal, capitalistic, tyrannical’, and at the same time ‘threaten them, pushing against their deceptive promises for the future’ (AF 23). As I understand it, Mario, you want to draw out the doubleness of the death drive as, on one hand, a will to master and still life (i.e. to overcome vulnerability and différance) or a fantasy of escape/stillness beyond life, and, on the other, as a raging movement that involves a (fantasy of) violent destruction whereby the process of destruction is as crucial as the realisation of transcendence that is the seductive, fantasized telos or archê of non-being. The book ‘zeroes in’ on the mobility in the death-drive’s momentum, and here again I feel acutely the core provocation of whether we are describing or traumatically re-enacting (‘reproducing the feeling of’ AF 279) tragic intensities. What comes into my awareness (which includes an awareness of the particular way my trauma is constellated here as an individual and within a collective female unconscious) is the extent to which this process of destruction channels a violent will to dominate almost identical in logic to the denial of vulnerability and relationality that is the fantasy of death-as-nothingness, or death-as-escape. I find myself asking whether, even though the death-drive is (or even ‘makes us’) human, it follows that the bid to resist the defence that is the death drive, in the name of life (that is, vulnerability, relation) must turn, as its first resource, to the movement of the drive itself, rather than to other kinds of movements that the death-drive annihilates. The book leaves me grappling with the tensions it suspends between, on one hand, staying with the doubleness of the death-drive as both horror and escape from horror, both unleashed movement and the fantasy of immobility, and on the other, wanting to separate out the ‘movement of the death drive toward its destination’ from the ‘destination itself’ (AF 34), a shift which would acknowledge what is being defended against, give back the shame of stuckness, and begin to tolerate ‘death in life’.

What that amounts to, for me, is a book that not only keeps alive the fever of tragic form, but is also a creative force in itself. I am shaken and changed by it.

Thank you so much for your characteristically brilliant, profound, lyrical response, Victoria. The way you conceptualize one of the sensations of suspension circulated by the book—an interpretive and affective suspension between preserving the duplicity of the death drive and separating its movement from the destination—exemplifies the movement in stuckness that you articulate so beautifully at the beginning of the response. In a sense, this suspension is an expression of the tension—present in the book and in tragic form as well—between the Freudian idea of the death drive, predicated on the motion toward non-life, and the Lacanian/Zizekian one, based on a circular movement within life. (My impression is that in Archive Fever, Derrida oscillates between them).

When you say, “What comes into my awareness (which includes an awareness of the particular way my trauma is constellated here as an individual and within a collective female unconscious) is the extent to which this process of destruction channels a violent will to dominate almost identical in logic to the denial of vulnerability and relationality that is the fantasy of death-as-nothingness, or death-as-escape,” you raise a very important point. Would it be a cop-out to say that this will is undermined by its very violent energy, as it were?

Your poetic reflections about movement in stuckness make me think “Situation 5,” one of the videos created by Claudia Rankine in collaboration with her husband, John Lucas, for her book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). As Shaun Meyers puts in the latest issue of SAQ (121.1, 87):

Even as the mise-en-scene of “Situation 5” evokes progress, through its sonic and visual unfolding of spoken words and a motion picture unbroken by the still shot, its background track makes sounds void of direction. The forward motion conveyed by the rapid advance of Rankine’s words spoken over unfolding footage of black men in vehicular transit works in tension with the affects of suspension imparted by the poem.

Hello all, again. What I most relish and want to celebrate about your spectacular book, Mario, is the sensation it gives me of entering into a movement, or a series of different experiences of movement in response to tragic poetics (flowing, slipping, surging, rushing, shivering, fitting, plateauing, squirming, churning, undulating, looping, circling, buzzing, falling, flying, coasting, slowing, tarrying, coming to a halt). So I’m interested that many of the responses above focus on stuckness, rather than movement within stuckness, which emerges as a key concept in the book.

I find myself tracing the spaces between stuckness as the experience of not moving, and other ways stuckness is parsed in the book and in this conversation (as never-ending, as struggle, delay, waiting, waiting out, suspension, circling, spiralling). It occurs to me that ‘stuckness’ is a vividly onomatopoeic word that names a reaction to an experience rather than the experience in itself, which we (or perhaps there is no ‘we’) might also symbolize differently as a staying-with, an endurance, tolerating, or holding. The psychotherapist might say that tolerating the experience of not-moving (or what in the book becomes lifedeath) is a condition of possibility for the processing or integration of trauma over time – an understanding far removed from a repressive purity politics of reparation and hope. Stuckness is a diagnosis tinged both with trauma and with a defence against trauma – a defence that, like the death-drive, performs the power to make things stop changing, to stop life/vulnerability/being in time: stuckness merges, or threatens to merge, tragic characters’ traumythic compulsion (to use your infectious phrase, Mario!) with our own readerly-participant response, and at the same time seems to defend against that contagion or overwhelm. This, for me, is part of why the book succeeds in revving up these exciting and excited conversations, and why dialogue is so important in reckoning with the consequences, in practice, of the book’s insistent rejection of the ‘notion that critics should, or even can, place themselves outside or beyond the text and refuse any risk of affective contamination’ (36). We can sense and track that risk not (just/so much) in the pyrotechnic discourse of ‘agony’, ‘excruciating joy’, ‘torture’, ‘shattering’, a vocabulary that, when repeated, seems to me strangely abstract and depersonalised, but in our responses to the much more banal ‘There is nowhere left for me to go’. There is always the fear that an open-ended engagement with the possibility (rather than, or as well as, the impossibility) of the therapeutic ‘carries the danger’ of pulling us back into the normative symbolic structures that tell us ‘not to be stuck, not to be self-indulgent, and to reject ugly feelings’ (MT 3.16.22). It is also true that, at this historical juncture, the system’s thanatological power to correctively consume critiques of itself is horrific, and we have already introjected stuckness as shamefully self-indulgent and ugly. But I also see that any move that looks risky, dangerous and self-exposing in the face of that master has the capacity to disturb its defences, even as it is humiliated and quashed. To me, this is one way of parsing what Derrida said in his final interview, ‘deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life’. The ‘emancipatory potential’ of Edelman’s thesis excites me, but also seems to signal an avoidance, or defence, that is both reassuringly human and tragic: no-escape is weaponised, but can’t in the end be tolerated.

My own process of staying with the paradoxes that dance or spasm through the book would go something like this: On one hand, the hope of reparation is a death drive, which is always a fantasy of escape and mastery, because it hopes to stop change-over-time and therefore defend against the vulnerability and materiality of life; the death drive often operates (catastrophically and grotesquely in the US) to ‘incite’ (I would be tempted to say ‘structurally underpin’) ‘oppressive powers – patriarchal, capitalistic, tyrannical’, and at the same time ‘threaten them, pushing against their deceptive promises for the future’ (AF 23). As I understand it, Mario, you want to draw out the doubleness of the death drive as, on one hand, a will to master and still life (i.e. to overcome vulnerability and différance) or a fantasy of escape/stillness beyond life, and, on the other, as a raging movement that involves a (fantasy of) violent destruction whereby the process of destruction is as crucial as the realisation of transcendence that is the seductive, fantasized telos or archê of non-being. The book ‘zeroes in’ on the mobility in the death-drive’s momentum, and here again I feel acutely the core provocation of whether we are describing or traumatically re-enacting (‘reproducing the feeling of’ AF 279) tragic intensities. What comes into my awareness (which includes an awareness of the particular way my trauma is constellated here as an individual and within a collective female unconscious) is the extent to which this process of destruction channels a violent will to dominate almost identical in logic to the denial of vulnerability and relationality that is the fantasy of death-as-nothingness, or death-as-escape. I find myself asking whether, even though the death-drive is (or even ‘makes us’) human, it follows that the bid to resist the defence that is the death drive, in the name of life (that is, vulnerability, relation) must turn, as its first resource, to the movement of the drive itself, rather than to other kinds of movements that the death-drive annihilates. The book leaves me grappling with the tensions it suspends between, on one hand, staying with the doubleness of the death-drive as both horror and escape from horror, both unleashed movement and the fantasy of immobility, and on the other, wanting to separate out the ‘movement of the death drive toward its destination’ from the ‘destination itself’ (AF 34), a shift which would acknowledge what is being defended against, give back the shame of stuckness, and begin to tolerate ‘death in life’.

What that amounts to, for me, is a book that not only keeps alive the fever of tragic form, but is also a creative force in itself. I am shaken and changed by it.

Thanks Mario, too kind 🙂 I think it’s exactly right that in Archive Fever’ Derrida oscillates between’ Freud and Lacan. I suppose I would want to say that what he is enacting, therefore, here and elsewhere, is a wave or undular rhythm that is neither Freud’s line nor Lacan’s circle. It’s interesting that you hear the background track in the Situation 5 video as sounds ‘void of direction’ – if you’re referring to the video I’ve seen, it’s jazz, isn’t it? Doesn’t a pulse, or beat, or momentum underlie even the most complex jazz rhythms? There is the forward movement of Rankine’s words, the sitting with the intolerable and familiar prison of intergenerational trauma, and also, a rhythm that is neither linear nor circular, and that cannot be accounted for in Lacan’s scheme.

Thank you so much, Vicky, for your beautiful, poetic comment. What you say makes me think of Fred Moten’s theorizations of the beat, the pulse, and the syncopation of jazz, and, especially, of the comparison that, in many interviews, Toni Morrison makes between the sonority of the tragic chorus and jazz. In a sense, my use of various theories of the death drive—and, especially, my own oscillation between them—is an attempt to capture the affective-psychic rhythm or beat of tragic form. In the epilogue, I do refer to Toni Morrison, but I plan to go back to her while editing, with Stephen Best, her Cornell MA thesis on Aristotle’s Poetics, Faulkner, and Woolf.

Mario’s response also makes me think of recent scholarship on ancient drama which is not invested in understanding / accessing the “original” performance. Scholars such as Johanna Hanink (Brown University) and Lucy Jackson (University of Durham) have been exploring the canonization and ancient reception and re-performance of fifth-century drama. While their work is historicist, the very existence of this scholarship demonstrates how reception studies and non-historicist writing such as Mario’s is helping to disrupt orthodox work on ancient texts and their contexts – how they were always already mutating and being re-performed. Their canonization was also their multiplication. Indeed, for me, “Archive Feelings” is interesting because it is not committed to historicizing Greek tragedy and yet at the same time, it does offer ways for us to think about how and why writers like Aeschylus were avant-garde. Mario’s nod to Aeschylus’ “Niobe” is a helpful reminder here.

Mario’s turn to Freud also helpfully reminds us that there is no engagement with antiquity which isn’t also – primarily – an excavation of one’s own self – a self-discovery more than anything else. For all the scientific positivism that Freud spoke and wrote, he has also offered different ways of thinking about our relationship with the (ancient) past. I’m thinking here of his 1907 essay “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva.'” Freud examines how the protagonist of Jensen’s novel, Norbert Hanold, a classical archaeologist, learns nothing about Roman Pompeii when he visits the site. Instead, he re-vivifies his childhood love for Zoe Bertgang, whom he had mistaken for the ghost Gradiva. While for Freud, Norbert’s excavation of his past showed Freud that the psychoanalytic cure was possible (we really could get back to the original trauma/the original performance), Freud also knew that the archaeological analogy didn’t quite work: the archaeologist, as I’ve just said, didn’t make any discoveries about ancient culture in Pompeii – all he found was himself. For Jacques Derrida, that was one of the crucial lessons of psychoanalysis: the present frames and structures any understanding of the past. There is no text without context. There is no archive without the politics, ethics, and economics which facilitate the very possibility of the archive.

One of the things that Professors Telò and Orrells’ brilliant exchange makes me think about, is what does it mean to embody the past? I mean embody here in the most literal of senses. Not to understand it, not to interpret it, but to enact it with our bodies. To let it flow out of us. To release ourselves within it. When we put on a tragedy, we not only have an intellectual experience of it, but we enact it, if only in our minds. Clytemnestra’s dance of death, Agamemenon’s final bloody ejaculation. These are not just ideas, not just signifieds, but phenomena that leave their traces (Spurs) within us. They changes us down to the neuronal and endocrine level. The breath picks up, the heart beats faster. This in a real sense is what Classics DOES. It marks us, makes us, breaks us.

The interpretive intellectual level, the problem solving, the towering technical erudition: none of that is irrelevant or unimportant. That too is a form of bodily interaction, that too modifies the response we have. But it is generally a secondary response. A moment that tries to make sense of what just happened to us, what we just did to/for ourselves. At its best, it is an extended and careful remaking of ourselves through this intense interaction with moments of great intensity. At its worst, it is a defensive reaction, a drive to surround the past, tame it, reduce it to a series of problems to be solved.

John Adams would go back to his apartments at Cambridge when he was a student at Harvard and recite Cicero at the top of his lungs. In letters, he describes the sensation. We can imagine his breathing. Throughout most of history this is the way these texts were experienced. I like to think of Adams becoming excited as he rattled off the list of Catiline’s perversities, his voice rising, his breath quickening.

Archive Feelings is a brilliant reading of tragedy. But it is so much more. It is a call for a reading of the ancient past with our bodies and not just our brains. It is a call to move beyond various police actions that monitor the boundaries of texts and their meaning, saying what they must and must not mean. It demands that we enjoy these texts, that we love these texts in all their strangeness, their beauty and their horror. As the statue says in Rilke’s “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” “you must change your life.”

“With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.” Pater, “Conclusion,” from “The Renaissance”.

Thank you, Dan, for your generous comment. What you say about the convergence between reception studies (both historicist and non-historicist) and my non-historicist approach to reading is super-interesting. Isn’t the very idea of an avant-garde Aeschylus, who looks ahead of his time, an implicit demonstration of tragic form’s untimeliness, of its discomfort with the temporally contingent dimension of its performative Sitz-im-Leben? This for me has implications not only for dramaturgy, but for the nexus of affect and psychology that the aesthetic can capture. The avant-garde represents a desire to get out of time (backward and forward, or backwardforward, as Derridean hauntology would put it), which is precisely one of the possible ways of conceptualizing the death drive. The notion of the post-dramatic that you are talking about is another way of looking at this, I think.

Your comment, Allen, is beautifully lyrical! Thank you! I love the image of John Adams “becoming excited as he rattled off the list of Catiline’s perversities, his voice rising, his breath quickening.” How can we translate this embodiment into an interpretive act, how can hermeneutics become a visceral inhabitation of the spasm, of the convulsion, of the scream, of breathlessness? This is what Archive Feelings seeks to do, implicitly (unconsciously?) responding to the policing imperative I often heard in graduate schools that impressions and emotions should be banned from interpretation (this is clearly the prohibition behind the new critical “affective fallacy”). In a sense, affective modes of reading gathered under the umbrella term of post-critique have helped us articulate similar questions, but they lose me when they propose “just reading” and when they tell us to focus on what the text says instead of what it doesn’t, thereby re-establishing a kind of hierarchical hermeneutics and seeing deconstruction and psychoanalysis as the enemies of emotional reading. Tragedy, it seems to me, offers us the opportunity (or, in a sense, urges us) to perform the minor or minoritarian gesture (as Deleuze and Guattari would put it) of unconditionally welcoming—and embodying—the imaginative possibilities of the literary.

“Acceleration, hoarding, vertiginous suspension, breathless looping, affective bulimia or binge eating, serial cutting, trying to enter or fold in upon oneself, autoimmune inflammation, the orgasm as unfinished, non-teleological pleasure: these are the intimations of aesthetic experiences that I use to articulate my model of anti-catharsis. I regard these potentialities as “archive feelings” because they all arise from the effort to recapture a phantasmatic archê that, directly or indirectly, points to the ultimate origin, non-existence.” (Telò 2020: 4).

One of the things I love about Telò’s book is that while it presents itself as a theory of tragedy, it is in fact a theory of reading. I recently began an article on “unspeakable enjoyment” in Catullus with this quotation. I could imagine any number of texts that I could read under this rubric from Catullus to the Catilinarians to Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne”. Indeed, it is perhaps uniquely well suited to moments of lyric intensity. This is a kind of wide-open reading, a transformative reading. It is deeply based in a close reading of the text. It is not fanciful, but it is deeply committed to the power of our fantasies in the most profound Freudian sense, to the imagination of a world beyond the law.

Mario’s book is a reminder that we need to push aside the facile tendency to circle the wagons of “theory” around a precious “object” like Greek tragedy, as if we are simply changing lenses on a microscope. The interactions of theory and literature are never so hygienically articulated—nor should they be. Hence the book is as much about the reception of Freud as it is about the reading and reception of tragedy. The death drive remains a contested legacy, particularly in the wake of ego psychology’s strategic avoidance of it. To commit to it is to join in the fray, to make Freudian theory “unsafe” again for a reparative therapy of adaptation-through-crisis. By engaging openly with the reception of the death drive along with a host of post-modern thinkers and by running this “discursive machine” as Sean calls it alongside Greek tragedy, Mario is releasing some unsettling, energetic possibilities, what Dan calls “a gallery of gorgeously obscene thought experiments.”

This reminds of other “gorgeously obscene thought experiments” from those heady days of early psychoanalysis, especially the spectacularly speculative Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality of Sándor Ferenzci. If one is worried that Freud’s original literary view of catharsis is too modeled on the male orgasm, with the interplay of Vorlust and Endlust, foreplay and teleological release, then Ferenczi’s theory that intercourse is in fact regressive in nature certainly turns that around. The book grew from his conviction of the necessity to free up analogies between the biological and mental sciences, an “utraquistic” methodology that allows for discursive machines to integrate the realms that one’s training did so much to separate. Ferenczi first deconstructs genital sexuality, which one might be tempted to consider the telos of sexual development and the evolutionary raison d’être of sexuality itself, as “urethro-anal amphimixis,” a synthesis, as it were, of the earlier urethral and anal pleasures of childhood, a simultaneous desire to give away and to retain. Sexual intercourse is effectively a man’s transitory satisfaction of a desire to return to the mother’s womb—a remarkable reversal of the usual idea that in intercourse a man “possesses” a woman, “makes her his.” But like Freud, Ferenczi plays out the implications of this both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, such that the “regression to the womb” not only draws on the individual’s intrauterine experience, but the species’ former evolutionary experience as aquatic life. The trauma of birth thus rhymes with the trauma of the recession of the oceans and the necessity of adaptation to terrestrial life. And now the intrepid penis can be seen in a new light: “the penis in coitus enacts not only the natal and antenatal mode of existence of the human species, but likewise the struggles of that primal creature among its ancestors which suffered the great catastrophe of the drying up of the sea.” The conclusion: “in genitality is to be found the expression, and perhaps the belated abreaction, of not only an ontogenetic but also a phylogenetic catastrophe.” So doing someone is undoing the fully realized self and the species, or undoing undoing, or both at the same time. The penis becomes the ouroboros. But note even here there remains that residual, reparative need to suggest catastrophe can be “abreacted” by the pleasure principle.

A feminist could certainly slam Ferenczi for making such a weirdly phallocentric paean to intrauterine existence; this was a curious thought experiment indeed. Ever since I first read it years ago, I’ve not been able to conjure away the idea of a man in the throes of passion shouting, like Xenophon’s Greeks, “Thalatta! Thalatta!”

Thank you, Richard, for this beautiful comment! A real, fun tour de force.

You help us establish very promising connections, I think, between Ferenczi and the anti-teleological readings of the male orgasm in feminism (Kristeva and Irigaray especially) and in the deconstructive phenomenology of Jean-Luc Nancy, which I engage with in the last chapter of the book. This is another demonstration of the fact that, as Jacqueline Rose and Judith Butler (among others) have demonstrated, (Freudian) psychoanalysis need not be seen as the enemy of feminism. (I am sure we will come back to this topic after Helen’s response and my response to her are published).

Another aspect that your post raises is the link between the death drive, catharsis, and the concept of the “oceanic,” which Freud discusses at the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents. The repetition thalassa thalassa could perhaps be used as a starting point for a new reflection on the relation between the “oceanic” and the death drive. In the book I suggest we replace catharsis as a mode of affective reception with other liquid dynamics, but I wish I had given more space to the “oceanic.”

I hate to make sex a tragedy, but Ferenczi’s reading of genital intercourse also makes it quite the archival performance, tracing as it does the whole phylogenetic history of the species, the ontogenetic development of the individual, and, in its procreative possibilities, the potential for a genetic future, that is, the illusion of a future of the individual through its offspring. Talk about the “dizzying loop of lifedeath!” It’s a weird celebration of catastrophe, in Ferenczi’s reading.

I’ve really enjoyed reading this exchange. Mario’s mention of Aeschylus’ Niobe made me think of how we can (re)read several moments of Aristophanes’ Frogs in terms of tragedy’s “postdramatic possibilities.” This comedy suggests that there was quite extensive theorizing of tragedy as an artform already within the fifth century, long before Plato embarked on the Republic. In light of Mario’s work, what I find really striking about the play’s commentary on Aeschylean and Euripidean tragedy is how it dwells on a kind of supremely anti-Aristotelian, anti-mythos “aesthetic recalcitrance” (Archive Feelings, p. 9).

Mario highlights above how Niobe’s silence is anti-representational in disrupting any distinction between pre-performance and performance. This is what the character of Euripides in Frogs makes clear when he describes how Aeschylus “wanted the spectator to sit there, waiting for the moment when his Niobe would make a sound; meanwhile the play went on and on” (919-20, trans. Sommerstein). But I was wondering if we could also think of all the famous repetitions in the parodies of the two tragedians’ work in similarly anti-representational terms. Take, for instance, that famous “oil bottle” (lēkythion) with which Aeschylus is able to finish every line of Euripides’ prologues (1198-24). I know its various meanings have been endlessly debated (see M. Griffith, Aristophanes’ Frogs [Oxford 2013], pp. 130-31 for a useful summary), but two effects of this episode particularly stand out to me. First, every time Euripides tries to get his story going, it’s reduced to and stalled by the same banal object. Second, the lēkythion, as remarks in this comedy and others (e.g., Thesm. 139-40) make clear, is a supremely phallic object, so the repetition of not just “oil bottle” but “lost his oil bottle” (lēkythion apōlesen) suggests the failure to reach a climax over and over again. Of course this is a comical jibe at Euripides’ own (lack of) poetic virility, but it also feels like we’re being constantly brought back to, as Mario puts it, “a point in time anterior to the exposure to tragic excitation” (Archive Feelings, p. 14). We get pushed back to the beginning, so that pre-performance and performance come together in an endlessly recursive deflation.

Frogs can certainly be mined for other instances of pleasure-in-pain as an experience of tragedy. In Archive Feelings, Mario shows how Dionysus’s response to the scatological jokes in the comedy’s opening scene reveals the god of theater’s own sado-masochistic fantasies (Archive Feelings, p. 263). Another example is the repeated cry of iē kopon (literally, “aiee beating!) in Euripides’ parody of Aeschylean choral lyric, which has a physical impact on Dionysus (this time diarrhetic rather than emetic!): he exclaims, “What a load of beatings! Well, I for one want to get to a bathroom, for the beatings have made me all sore down below” (1278-80). But Dionysus isn’t even allowed this release, since Euripides tells him emphatically “no” (mē, 1281): he can’t go until he’s heard more choral lyrics, which contain the battering runs of phlattothrattoplattothat (1283-95). Dionysus never gets to relieve himself—he has to endure many more lines of tragic parody without any cathartic climax. Again, all these repetitions produce and expose, to draw from Mario’s language once more, a sort of stuckness—the “modes of recalcitrance materialized in poetic form as (repressed) tragic pleasures (Archive Feelings, p. 9).

This comedy also, I think, is itself “a performance of Greek tragedy’s postdramatic possibilities” in the sense of being playfully non-reconstructive—and this gets us back to Dan Orrells’s initial post in this chain. For example, Dionysus at one point remarks that what he enjoyed about Aeschylus’ Persians most was when the ghost of Darius appeared “and the chorus straightway clapped their hands together like this and said iauoi” (1029). This line is funny in part because, for all of Aeschylus’ insistence on the play’s militaristic values, it turns out Dionysus didn’t care about the content of Persians and instead just liked the chorus’ clapping and singing. But the moment he describes never actually occurs in Persians, at least not in the text as we have it. There are plenty of vowel-filled, foreign-sounding cries in this tragedy, but the chorus does not emit this particular cry, nor is there anything quite like it or an indication of its accompanying choreography at the moment when Darius comes onstage. Given the various other accurate quotations from other plays by Aeschylus, we can assume that Aristophanes is deliberately misquoting here. In doing so, he extends the tragedy’s bounds beyond any “original performance,” inviting new meanings, new readings. And really that’s what the entire long scene of tragic parodies is doing as well: for even if individual quotations accord with the texts of tragedies that survive today (or form the fragments with which we try to piece them together), none of this pretends to be a faithful reconstruction. What it does reproduce, however, is a sense of what tragedy does to its audiences. That Aristophanes homes in on the kind of “affective force” that Mario himself explicates is a testament to the importance of Archive Feelings.

Thank you so much, Naomi, for your perceptive and generous post! I agree with you that there are many ways to see the complexities of the “archive” (with its confusion of preservation and loss) in Frogs. The play ends with the restoration of the “arch-“aic Aeschylus, even if the desired tragic archê—the object of Dionysus’s literal death drive—is Euripides. The textual complexities and uncertainties of the finale of the play also exemplify an ironical failure of the archive, if you will, and force modern dramaturgs to embark on post-dramatic experiments…

I love what you say about the famous scene of the loss of the little flask. As I suggest somewhere else, the phrase “he lost the little oil flask” has the same arresting power of Niobe’s silence. I would add that the oil flask is a metallic container of a life-giving substance—something that perhaps recalls Niobe as a lithified mother…but there is much more that one could say. In psychoanalytic terms, the repetition of that line—so iconic of Frogs!—is perhaps an image of the insistence of the maternal jouissance…(a feeling that ties in well with the mythical biography of Dionysus).

When reading Naomi Weiss’s perceptive comments on the lekythion in Aristophanes’ Frogs, I very much liked the focus on a climax that never comes, a limit that is always seen but never really crossed. I know we have been very focused on Derrida’s Archive Fever for obvious reasons, but I wonder if we do not also want to think more carefully about “To Speculate on Freud” from the Postcard. This is Derrida’s careful deconstruction of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. To drastically oversimplify, what he shows is that Freud consistently posits a limit and its transgression, a place beyond the yin and yang of the pleasure and the reality principles, but never really gets there, that the limit constantly reasserts itself and this is necessary for its transgression to even be conceived. Derrida then traces this logic back to the peras and the apeiron in Plato’s Philebus (okay, yeah, that is my favorite dialogue). What this seems to indicate is that the death drive is only conceivable as a beyond that is both necessary and impossible to conceptualize. Jouissance then is less about a climax (what Lacan calls phallic joussance as opposed to jouissance proper) but is always about a kind of loss of identity before the unlimited or what Lacan would call the Real. One might even call it the sublime.

Thank you so much, Allen, for reminding us that jouissance is primarily anti-climactic, anti-teleological (anti-phallic)—and entails a loss of identity.

To make a small point about Derrida and the position of Archive Fever within his oeuvre: it is so interesting that parts of The Postcard overlap with the seminar La vie la mort (or, lavielamort) that he gave in 1975–1976 but was published only in 2019—and the year after (the annus horribilis of COVID!) in English translation.

I agree with Allen that what is salutary in the aesthetics of tragedy is precisely the possibility of refusing restoration. Those who follow Bernays’s take on catharsis (the least moralistic one) emphasize the non-restorative force of the experience, its expansion of sensory capabilities, with no return, but with the coming about of some kind of non-regressive equilibrium (or “cleansing”). But for me the very notion of equilibrium presupposes a before and an after. (The word restaurant in English, referring to a place where one finds a kind of physical equilibrium through food, contains, in fact, a re- and etymologically suggests, as the dictionary explains, the idea of “restor[ing] to a former state”). When I talk about the possibility of refusing restoration, I think, for example, of a Philoctetes who does not accept the promise of healing at the end of Sophocles’ play. Can we really be on board with the prospect of healing through reintegration in the army, through an annihilation into the military whole, through a cooptation into the colonialist project? There is no question that these are the implications of accepting Philoctetes’ catharsis (an obvious figuration of our own) as we read the play today. (And historicizing the so-called ethics of epic/tragic heroism seems to me quite a weak move.) What we need to do, I propose, is to read against representation, to retrieve intimations of refusal of this scenario that are embedded in the texture of the tragic language. This is not just a question of valorizing indeterminacy or openness, but of being attuned to the fact that the tragic stems precisely from the emergence of impersonal formal forces, vectors of aesthetic-political dissensus, that undo the reparative scenarios created by the representational level. This is why I agree with Richard that, as others have observed, we should go beyond the fetishization of (the original) performance as the hermeneutic archê, as the mysterious origin that makes sense of everything. For some reason, we always fall into the positivistic trap of performance criticism even when we seem to be accepting this idea in principle. Daniel Orrells’s use of the category of the “postdramatic” seems to me very productive—a way perhaps of reconciling a (historically intedeterminate) notion of performance with the interrogation of the non-representational. The salutary in Philoctetes is a kind of self-projection into feminine liquidity, into a continuation of the undulating back and forth warmly tended by his only companion—the disease.

This is just a brief note to say: I really enjoyed reading Professor Karen Bassi’s commentary on “Archive Feelings”. What a wonderful reading of Aristotle’s “Poetics,” which will change the way I teach this text now, when I put it in touch with modern theoretical debates about tragedy. Professor Bassi helps us see how Aristotle’s text contains an autocritique of its own argument, and therefore how this text allows for different, contrasting modern receptions and applications.

Thanks very much to you both for this exchange! I have learned so much from following along with this symposium over the last few weeks.

My question has to do with Mario’s suggestion above that “catharsis may entail its own undoing or impossibility.” As Mario says in the Introduction to Archive Feelings, Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is “prescriptive more than descriptive” (6) in its location of pleasure in the release of painful emotion. When I read this, I can’t help but think of Zizek’s formulation of the superego as the grim and joyless injunction to “enjoy!” Looking at Prof. Bassi’s summary of Aristotle’s account of catharsis above, I see something very mechanical in this circuit of prescribed pleasure. I am almost imagining Aristotle as the authoritarian superego of philology, commanding all us readers to enjoy our catharses. Prof. Bassi’s comment above that “I, for one, have never experienced it” points to the fruitlessness of this injunction.

But more broadly, I wonder what the relationship is between the stuckness of anti-catharsis (which I understand as a dullness that leads to paradoxical pleasure), and the intensity of catharsis (which can have a forced quality to it that paradoxically strips it of intensity). “Ugly Feelings” have come up a lot in this conversation, and this is an insight I have found so valuable in Ngai: so often she points out the ways in which ostensibly intense or sharp feelings wind up playing out in a dull way—the “interesting” actually engenders a lack of engagement, shock is actually sort of boring, etc. So, does catharsis undo itself not just because of the parasitic relationship of the pleasure principle to the death drive, but also because of the inherent forced boringness of intensity? (Or is the latter just a symptom of the former?)

Thanks very much to Dr. Graf for these provocative questions. It strikes me that the “inherent forced boringness of intensity” is precisely the condition that the pandemic has so vividly imposed upon all of us. Is boredom (how to define this feeling…?) a precondition of Aristotle’s catharsis and/or its refusal? The question is mediated by the experience of drama or embodied mimesis, in which time and space are both inhibited and extended – with another inferred reminder of the pandemic. Confined to the space and time of the staged environment, does witnessing a tragedy release us/free us from our mundane lives (defined by emotional states or attachments, by “pity and fear”) or does it situate us more firmly in the grip of the mundane? Here I refer to Dr. Graf’s “circuit of prescribed pleasure” as the mundane and repetitive circuit of capitalism. To the extent that “living through” or “living in” the pandemic frames and constrains our everyday lives, we are something like tragic characters caught in the throes of pleasure/pain. The pandemic alerts us to the dead end of Aristotle’s catharsis and to the persistent return of Telò’s anti-catharsis in human life.

A million thanks, Chiara, for participating in the conversation, for your very apt evocation of Zizek’s superegoic imperative “Enjoy,” and, especially, for bringing up the issue of intensity.

One of the ways I conceptualize anti-cathartic aesthetics—and this is completely in line with your final point—is by connecting catharsis with the desire for an “imagined fullness of feeling,” a phrase I use in relation to Euripides’ Phoenissae (p. 85). In a choral ode of this play, pity (eleos) is presented by the Chorus as sharp as the blade that Jocasta will use to kill herself. As I put it:

In the duplication of the prefix homo- (“the same”) we can detect the Chorus’s, and our own, archive fever, a desire for a complete assimilation to (and of) the characters’ experiences, the fantasy of capturing—in the sense of reproducing and appropriating—an imagined fullness of feeling. Besides channeling the insistence of fear, the song’s repetitions communicate the insistent energy of this fantasy of appropriation. We get a glimpse of the deeply anti-cathartic impetus that tragedy awakens in its audience by making them wish to access, assimilate, and preserve the death-driven actions of its characters. The frustration of this impetus leads to the jouissance of hoarding—a satisfaction found in boredom, in a lack of satisfaction that, in the midst of depleting saturation, breaks and pierces just like the pity and fear described by the Chorus.

What I am saying is that the mimetic nature of the aesthetics of catharsis—its reliance on the re- of re-production, re-creation etc, that is, the archival spacing—inevitably entails a dulling of intensity. Intensity is also, to an extent, a fantasy, or its own form of object petit a, if you will.

In the same chapter, I also seek to make the case for what I call “the death-driven intensity of tedium—the wearing down of form that keeps the play going.” Tedium is the propulsive engine of Phoenissae; it produces a kind of paradoxically distributive or durational intensity—an intermittent but perhaps also continuing punctum, as it were.

I very much look forward to seeing your edited book on intensity, a great topic!

Thank you, Karen, for this wonderful comment! I am glad that before me you brought up the issue of mimesis, which you have beautifully illuminated in your own scholarship. To me, catharsis does sound like the capitalistic command often heard during the pandemic (before we even had a vaccine) that we need to get on with our lives, that the economy cannot stop, that we have to return to a (fantasized) status quo ante, to the “normal” life before the catastrophe. Unfortunately, those who have evoked the cathartic power of Greek tragedy as an antidote against pandemic blues (not just classicists, but also the New Yorker) seem to me to reinforce this logic.

I am reflecting on Karen’s words, “Freud presents memory as locked in a cycle of repression and repetition, a cycle that betrays a similar compulsion. Both are symptoms of the death drive, the yearning for an (impossible) return to a prior originary state.” This fits nicely in the contour of Freud’s own theory of the origins of tragedy, so tightly imbricated in his “scientific myth” of the Urvater and one of the many things crammed into Freud’s most “archival” of works, Totem and Taboo. If I may, I’d like to run with that in the spirit of Mario’s archival performance of tragic anti-theory, since there is a fascinating connection here between Freud’s endless looping back to the father and the invention of patriarchy in relation to the Greek tragedy.

The historical primal father was, as it were, a metaphor waiting to happen: his sexual monopoly and tyranny were ended when the brothers kill and eat him, yet he returns time and again in symbolic form, stronger than ever, powered up by the ambivalent yearning of the fraternal clan simultaneously to be and be rid of the father. As Freud describes it,

With the introduction of father-deities a fatherless society gradually changed into one organized on a patriarchal basis. The family was a restoration of the formal primal horde and it gave back to fathers a large portion of their former rights. There were once more fathers, but the social achievements of the fraternal clan had not been abandoned; and the gulf between the new fathers of a family and the unrestricted primal father of the horde was wide enough to guarantee the continuance of the religious craving, the persistence of an unappeased longing for the father. (SE, Norton edition p. 185)

How interesting it is that Freud posits the “religious craving” in the gap between fraternal patriarchy and the savage autocracy of the primal father (whom elsewhere Freud identified with Nietzsche’s Superman). The father loops back twofold now, as god the father and the totem animal, but in a fascinating “allegory” in which “The scene of the father’s vanquishment, of his greatest defeat, has become the stuff for the representation of his supreme triumph”—i.e., the animal sacrifice of the totem (a traumatic repetition of the murder) is now celebrated to the glory of the father god as a sacrifice in his honor. Thus the attempts to expiate the traumatic event through “traumythic” performance in ritual do little to assuage the collective guilt, further proof that “cathartic” rituals do not restore a prior state of innocence or moral cleanliness, they simply replicate the lifedeath of the Father as the ideal of human power, and surrender to him more and more.

Thus at the end of Totem and Taboo, when Freud inserts his own theory of the origin of Greek tragedy in tacit rivalry with Nietzsche, he focuses on the tragic hero’s necessary suffering and tragic guilt. With clear impatience, Freud rushes to rescript the pattern of Aristotelian tragedy in his own traumythic terms:

He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the Hero of the great primeval tragedy which was being re-enacted with a tendentious twist; and the tragic guilt was the guilt which he had to take on himself in order to relieve the Chorus from theirs. The scene upon the state was derived from the historical scene through a process of systematic distortion—one might even say, as the product of a refined hypocrisy. (SE, Norton edition p. 193)

So, if there is a restoration to be had through catharsis, it is the restoration of hypocrisy through a kind of scapegoating ritual, one guaranteed to perpetuate the neurotic rituals of a traumatized society. Tragedy would thus be a kind of gain from illness, not a cure. Small wonder that theorists of a more disruptive variety see Aristotelian catharsis as a coercive system, not a liberatory one. In the words of Augusto Boal, “The coercive system of tragedy can be used before or after the revolution…but never during it!” (Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 46).

Mario’s insistence on the death drive and the archive in relation to a thorough engagement with Greek tragedy empowers more than a rereading of tragedy; for me, it has helped me trace further the uncanny filiation of the death drive in relation to Freud’s long entanglement with the father complex, patriarchy, and religion. Since the Oedipus Complex posits the fundamental crisis of childhood in the confrontation of the emergent subject with the antinomies of ambivalence—i.e., simultaneous incestuous desire and parricidal rage, Eros and aggression in their most traumythic forms—it is no wonder why Freud runs this course from the 1890s to the 1920s. And in our retrospective view of Freud, it should inform our excursions into the Freudian archive.

But now the horizon of theatricality returns—is this the return of Mario’s repressed? In Freud’s view, ritual performance merely energizes the archival forces of memory/repression; tragic performance’s excavation by a Freudian philology would merely uncover its “refined hypocrisy.” But here’s a thought: Rather than empowering the moment of performance as the only “true text” of tragedy, that point to which echt philology must return obsessively, forensically, in order to justify itself as a discipline, a truly archival philology could both incorporate theatricality and see beyond it, not fetishize it, but rather play with it as yet another haunting. Would that be a fair extension of your view, Mario? Should we not learn to play with the play within the play?

As I read Karen Bassi’s learned response and the various replies, one thing sticks with me. Bassi says that catharsis in Aristotle is normally taken to function like carnival in Bakhtin, a momentary release before restoration. On this view, carnival is a momentary overturning that actually reinforces hegemony. This is a common reading of Bakhtin. By the same token, catharsis then figures the momentary apparition of terror, the return of the repressed, all the better to inoculate us against its return. We take our purgative and flush pity and fear from the system and go back to being good bourgeois citizens, paying calls, taking our daily constitutional round the Ringstrasse.

But there is another reading of carnival. Many scholars of Bakhtin read it as an evocation of Stalin’s permanent revolution. Each new overturning produces not a settling restoration but a new normal founded on terror. Bodies are open, registers of existence are confused, subject and object become abject. As in La Durie’s famous evocation of the Carnival at Romans, we have not a brief interlude but a massacre.

In previous responses, we have worried about is the anticathartic reading a responsible understanding of tragedy? What would it mean to be stuck? to not proceed to a telos, which is always in some sense a restoration? Would this be self-indulgent? But what if, like carnival, to refuse the restoration and to embrace the purge per se were a vision of revolution, which did not lead us back around the Ringstrasse ?

Robespierre at the height of the French Revolution wrote:
“if the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”

As we face, the very real possibility of the end of the world whether through climate catastrophe or through nuclear miscalculation, the possibility of a return to the normal seems increasingly like denial rather than restoration. Is there not also something salutary is in refusing restoration, in seeing a carnival that sweeps it away? Can we really imagine a radically different existence without (at least psychic) terror? Is not tragedy on some level also the possibility of the carnival unleashed?

As Lacan says in his reading of the Antigone, no one can long live beyond the veil Ate, but the possibility of that crossing, of actually moving beyond the calculation of the pleasure principle is the very possibility of ethical action as something beyond the mere repetition of the pursuit of accepted goods, of the pursuit of goods, of the endless capitalist production of goods. This as he notes is the ethics of psychoanalysis.

Is such a reading a self-indulgent aesthetics? or is Mario’s anticathartic reading of tragedy on some level the condition of possibility for a reimagination of the world? One that leads not back to the endless trek round the Ringstrasse, which seems destined to lead not to tragedy but actual annihilation, but to a new road, a poros beyond aporia, a road to come. Are our choices really only Stalin or a restoration that in itself leads to terror? Or might an anti-cathartic reading of tragedy be one way finally to think differently?

“…perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution. The liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into action. No matter that the action is fictional; what matters is that it is action!”

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed

As I read Karen Bassi’s learned response and the various replies, one thing sticks with me. Bassi says that catharsis in Aristotle is normally taken to function like carnival in Bakhtin, a momentary release before restoration. On this view, carnival is a momentary overturning that actually reinforces hegemony. This is a common reading of Bakhtin. By the same token, catharsis then figures the momentary apparition of terror, the return of the repressed, all the better to inoculate us against its return. We take our purgative and flush pity and fear from the system and go back to being good bourgeois citizens, paying calls, taking our daily constitutional round the Ringstrasse.

But there is another reading of carnival. Many scholars of Bakhtin read it as an evocation of Stalin’s permanent revolution. Each new overturning produces not a settling restoration but a new normal founded on terror. Bodies are open, registers of existence are confused, subject and object become abject. As in La Durie’s famous evocation of the Carnival at Romans, we have not a brief interlude but a massacre.

In previous responses, we have worried about is the anticathartic reading a responsible understanding of tragedy? What would it mean to be stuck? to not proceed to a telos, which is always in some sense a restoration? Would this be self-indulgent? But what if, like carnival, to refuse the restoration and to embrace the purge per se were a vision of revolution, which did not lead us back around the Ringstrasse ?

Robespierre at the height of the French Revolution wrote:
“if the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”

As we face, the very real possibility of the end of the world whether through climate catastrophe or through nuclear miscalculation, the possibility of a return to the normal seems increasingly like denial rather than restoration. Is there not also something salutary is in refusing restoration, in seeing a carnival that sweeps it away? Can we really imagine a radically different existence without (at least psychic) terror? Is not tragedy on some level also the possibility of the carnival unleashed?

As Lacan says in his reading of the Antigone, no one can long live beyond the veil Ate, but the possibility of that crossing, of actually moving beyond the calculation of the pleasure principle is the very possibility of ethical action as something beyond the mere repetition of the pursuit of accepted goods, of the pursuit of goods, of the endless capitalist production of goods. This as he notes is the ethics of psychoanalysis.

Is such a reading a self-indulgent aesthetics? or is Mario’s anticathartic reading of tragedy on some level the condition of possibility for a reimagination of the world? One that leads not back to the endless trek round the Ringstrasse, which seems destined to lead not to tragedy but actual annihilation, but to a new road, a poros beyond aporia, a road to come. Are our choices really only Stalin or a restoration that in itself leads to terror? Or might an anti-cathartic reading of tragedy be one way finally to think differently?

I would like to add my appreciation for Professor Karen Bassi’s commentary, which I find very helpful. This exchange with Mario also helps me to better see how Aristotle’s text and its reception might be brought into conversation with the contemporary theoretical concerns that animate Mario’s book.

Thanks for this reply, Mario.

— On the issue of how a “Platonic/Freudian approach” would work in the practice of reading:

Here is one suggestion, which I think takes up Freud’s example: Rather than ask only how we might read these ancient texts – that is, how they look to us by our lights – we might also ask: How do we see ourselves, by the lights of Sophocles or Euripides?

I take it that Freud modeled such a “practice of reading” in, for instance, the way that Mourning and Melancholia draws illumination from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

I think one could certainly draw on the example of Nicole Loraux, too, as Mario suggests.

— Mario asks: “Would, for example, a dialogue between Plato and Freud privilege grief and mourning rather than some of the other “ugly feelings” that I focus on?”

The first sentence of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia reads:
“…we will now try to throw some light [erhellen] on the nature of melancholia by comparing it with the normal affect of mourning.”

Of course, one could read Freud as making this comparison so as to draw a distinction between mourning and an ‘ugly feeling’ – “grief and mourning rather than…” Similarly, Freud could be read as meaning to “privilege” mourning while pathologizing melancholy.

However, one might also read Freud as suggesting that the comparison of melancholia to mourning is needed, not for the sake of drawing distinctions or privileges, but because the comparison [Vergleichung] might allow these feelings or states, and their implications, to illuminate one another, and perhaps help us map the contours of our ignorance about this whole field.
If Freud’s trauer somehow translates Plato’s achos, then it is also worth remembering that Plato’s Socrates spoke of “excess grief.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) now includes “Prolonged grief disorder,” while others today refer to “chronic mourning.” I mention all this only suggest that it remains unclear how we map our ignorance about “ugly feelings” – whether we can sense the contours of such feelings at all – without prolonging our references to mourning (if not our mourning, too).

— Mario writes: “Now I would say (or say more clearly) that mimetic distance seems difficult to maintain—the death-driven dynamic of mimesis (stemming from the loss intrinsic to imitation) inevitably spills over to us.”

Yes. Although, by the very same token, tragedies also embody how mimetic practices are as difficult to avoid as they are to maintain.

— Lastly: Like you, Mario, I am struck Joyce’s repetition of the word “arrests” in that passage from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Given that the passage is a commentary on Aristotle, and bearing in mind Joyce’s supreme attention to words, it is hard not to imagine that Joyce is also invoking Aristotle’s theory of motion and rest – as well as its difference to Galileo and modern physics. For the latter (for us moderns, maybe) rest is always, as Mario puts it, “a forced rest or a restless rest.”

Thank you so much, Paul, for your comments. Is it too obvious (and predictable) to mention the fact that after the 1917 essay Freud abandoned the distinction between mourning (a kind of “cathartic” grief) and melancholy, recognizing the difficulty of even conceptualizing a grief that fully stops?

Since the book is also an attempt to bring contemporary art into dialogue with ancient tragedy, I want to mention a sculpture by Alighiero Boetti titled Self-Portrait (http://artfcity.com/2012/08/10/alighiero-boetti-at-moma-from-sarcasm-to-sap/), which Paul has brought to my attention. Here we see the “danger” of cleansing—that is, being inundated. In my reading of Hamlet’s evocation of Hecuba—which is usually read as an allusion to catharsis—I say: “As a viewer of a Hecuba-inspired performance, Hamlet is affected by her drowning; he is enveloped in her watery archive.” When we mourn, can we ever be spared from drowning in melancholia?

Mario responded to Paul saying, “Now I would say (or say more clearly) that mimetic distance seems difficult to maintain—the death-driven dynamic of mimesis (stemming from the loss intrinsic to imitation) inevitably spills over to us.” To this Paul has responded, “Yes. Although, by the very same token, tragedies also embody how mimetic practices are as difficult to avoid as they are to maintain.”

Why is it that we would assume the death drive gets around the problem of mimetic distance, and therefore, circumvents a facile application of the pleasure-principle to go “beyond the pleasure principle” and “beyond mimesis”? Instincts are our mythology, as Freud said, and we like to conjure them up to solve our problems. But there’s a good orthodox Freudian argument to be made that would rather blithely attach the death drive to tragic catharsis that might go like this.

Tragedy is a perfect outlet for the problem of the death drive. As Freud often notes, the instincts of Eros and death “seldom—perhaps never—appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and very different proportions and so become unrecognizable to our judgment” (SE 21:119). Sadism and masochism show such strong alloys, and sadism is especially productive in that “the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge,” (SE 21:121), certainly a win-win on the instinctual tensions front. And yet, sadism is not the only possible alloy in the crucible of the pleasure principle.

But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence. The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. [SE 21:121]

Thus while Freud goes on to see a cosmic struggle between Eros and the death drive, it is equally clear that he keeps telegraphing the solution: the externalization of aggressive instinct onto objects, which, as a European Jew, all too often turns into a kind of scapegoating he knew all too well.

Now, the essential problem of guilt, which is the sickness inherent in the civilizing process, is the outcome of parental ambivalence (ontogenetically and phylogenetically). In the late Freud, “Whether one has killed one’s father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death” (SE 21:132). So now let’s apply this to his earlier reading of the audience’s reaction to watching Oedipus Tyrannus. The play subtly awakens the repressed Oedipal feelings in us, and initially it seemed simply that relief from our regime of Oedipal repression brought the Endlust of tragic catharsis. It is based on the méconnaissance of ourselves with Oedipus, for if we truly, consciously brought our Oedipal feelings to full awareness, we’d run out of the theater like Hamlet’s uncle, caught in our act of feeling guilty. Here we see why early on, Oedipus and Hamlet are deployed so closely together, since effectively Oedipus is Freud’s mousetrap play to stimulate our latent guilt and open us up to his theory. One used to just assume Oedipus’ self-blinding is a nod to the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the symbolic castration (two eyes = two balls) in deferred obedience to the father. But what if, to follow Freud’s later characterization of tragedy in Totem and Taboo, this is a “refined hypocrisy” in many overdetermined senses, scapegoating our own guilt on the figure of Oedipus and enjoying our satisfaction of his undoing by “Fate” (a power we know Freud likes to equate with “only a later projection of the father,” SE 21:185), which provides us with either sadistic or masochistic satisfactions depending on your particular Oedipal timbre (cf. his analysis of Dostoevsky). Given the ego’s defensive structure, this presupposes mimetic distance, which enables the space of play through our identification with the character on the stage (see “Psychopathic Stage Characters,” SE 7:305-306, 308-309).

So why would satisfaction of the endopsychic pressure of the death drive not be tied to mimetic distance? Again, isn’t this similar to the endless killing and dying of first-person shooter games, where the ludic realm allows us to run with our instinctual repetition compulsion? And why would the discharging of aggressive instinct, as in “getting your gun off,” not be seen as cathartic? The late Freud presents this challenge to the early Freud: unlike the theory of cathartic therapy, which optimistically sought to abreact or discharge discrete energic quanta of “strangulated affect,” the death drive presents the need for incessant flaring of aggressive energy that is no longer simply traumatic in origin. It’s not a hard move to then see all “sublimated” forms of violence, like sports, games, and tragedy, as distanced attempts to wrest control of this internal pressure. As I said, this would be a conventional Freudian line of argument. Ultimately Freud was very pessimistic about the effectiveness of sublimation for most people, and while such a cathartic mechanism might be carved from the later Freud, I’m equally sure he would not think it sufficient to truly solve the problem of civilization. When he talks of the “mild narcosis” of art, he certainly shows his doubts.

I have been following this interchange between Kottman’s lucid response. Mario’s replies, and now Richard’s reply with great interest. One reason I will confess is that while I love Mario’s book, and I use it in my own work, I also love the Poetics and have no intention to stop. I understand that the notion of a purgation of pity and fear, a catharsis, does in fact imply a purification and hence a restoration. There is a medical metaphor at work here, and hence a therapeutic aim.

But I also want to recall that Beyond the Pleasure Principle opens with Freud’s discussion of Austrian soldiers who come home from the trauma of the Great War and suffer from repetition compulsions. They may repeatedly dream of the same horrible moments. They may have certain rituals that must be performed–hand washing, touching certain objects, arranging their affairs in a certain order. None of these behaviors can be understood as the pursuit of pleasure, or even as the simple attempt to modify or sublimate that pursuit to prevent unpleasure. Many of these behaviors are debilitating, or in the case of dreams terrorizing.

Freud deduces from this that there must be a beyond of the pleasure principle, a beyond of vitalism that leads towards a form of self-quieting or dissolution. This is not a restoration of health. The action does not purge the patient of the trauma, but like the game of Little Hans it may give just a brief moment of power, a moment of suspension in which trauma is held at bay before remerging. This is a kind of loop as we move back and forth between fort and da. This is not the jouissance of the instrument, of getting your gun off. It is closer to the terror of the Kantian sublime, which always had the potential to tip over into dissolution and abjection.

As I read Mario’s book, the stuckness he wants to highlight is that moment of suspension before the loop begins again, before the reel of Hans is cast out into the Real of Lacan once more. This is an aspect of tragic enjoyment (and not just the joy of tragedy) that cannot be described through catharsis, I would submit, and cannot return us to the pursuit of pleasure.

And yet, and yet …. The mechanism of the mythos as described by Aristotle does indeed provide a satisfaction. The single completed action of a certain magnitude does both expose us to the cognition of certain feelings and bring a sense of closure. It does not do this in place of the looping of the death drive, anymore than soldier’s repetition compulsion means he cannot simultaneously pursue pleasure within the constraints imposed by the reality principle in other realms. These happen simultaneously and on different levels. This is why Mario’s readings have an applicability far beyond simply the texts of tragedy, and why Aristotle continues to be a resource for understanding the nature of a specific genre construction, whether in the texts of Sophocles or Racine.

From Mario: “Is it too obvious (and predictable) to mention the fact that after the 1917 essay Freud abandoned the distinction between mourning (a kind of “cathartic” grief) and melancholy, recognizing the difficulty of even conceptualizing a grief that fully stops?”

— Not at all. Indeed, I was suggesting that even in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ there is more “und” than “oder.”

I’m delighted that you also appreciate that Boetti piece, Mario. As I mentioned to you via text — and now more publicly — a good title for Boetti’s autoritratto could be what you call “anti-theory.” Or, “obsessive compulsive theorizing.” It embodies something like philosophizing as symptom. Fevered thinking might cathartic, after all.

Thanks, all, for inviting me to be a part of such a rich discussion.

Hi folks,

It’s been so fascinating to follow these exchanges over the past month about such a captivating book. I think now is a moment for me to intervene briefly, in part because I am very struck by Helen’s response and how it engages with various critical frameworks in and beyond Mario’s book, asking in particular if his reading can be thought of as feminist – to which Mario has replied, “yes, it is both queer and feminist.”

I find this debate to be a tricky and important one. Mario writes so beautifully in his book of tragedy from an interpretative position we can label as “queer.” To take one example,

We may see tragedy forge bonds, affective moods, and dispositions that can be regarded as ‘queer’ not just because they twist heteronormative kinship, but because they draw upon aestheticized expressions of refusal, futility, abeyance—negative yet possibly emancipatory sensations mobilized by formal expressiveness. (10)

Helen, for her part, quotes Victoria Wohl’s excellent essay on tragedy and feminism, which asks whether “liberatory alternatives” exist, “subsist,” in the undercurrent of tragedy.

Mario suggests that the Medea we see at the end of the play, high above the stage in her chariot drawn by dragons, is not escaping triumphantly but rather teetering in a “vertiginous suspension” (112), stuck and contained rather than – as we may have hoped! – in flight.

In this debate, “catharsis” or, more simply, “escape” reads as (oddly) both normative and feminist; while stuckness, refusal, futility – this is queer. So it is that Lee Edelman enjoins readers to resist the futurity represented by the “Child,” to inhabit the refusal of the machinations of reproductive futurity, while Jack Halberstam cautions that Edelman’s theory holds a hint of anti-womanhood in its construction, inasmuch as it associates women with the oppressive structures of society through the (chosen or otherwise) affective embodiments of pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing: “woman becomes the site of the unqueer: she offers life, while queerness links up with the death drive.”

And here Helen’s proposal of menstruation rather than ejaculation as a reading of catharsis becomes so intriguing to me: look how quickly we loop from ejaculation as the moment of release/pleasure in a framework that involves no further temporality or consequences beyond itself (that’s the point!) to menstruation as the body’s cyclical, painful release from childbearing and yet also its normative participation in the seasonality of life cycles – maturation, childbearing, menopause and so on. (Wait, whose body? But nevermind.) A loop and also a teleology – the death drive or the thing it’s driving away from? Jouissance or its oppression?

I’m veering here, so I’ll just close with another appreciative quote from Mario on his embrace of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “ardent reading”: “the philology as feeling that informs my mode of reading leads me to seek out-of-joint syntax, dislocated semantic configurations, and subliminal patterns of signification, fervently alert to the radical possibilities of micro and macro formal elements” (37). Any reader of Mario knows the deeply intense, indeed vertiginously skillful embodiment of tragic language one finds in his own language. That messiness Helen cites here, and that Mario excavates, is the life behind all of these questions. It is what makes his reading indispensable.

“A queer instinct, indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic home!” So says Freud of the death drive in the New Introductory Lectures (no. 32). Or rather, so James Strachey says Freud says. Freud wrote rather ein sonderbarer Trieb, a “strange drive” to give an alternate rendering, showing the interesting problem of both sonderbar and Trieb in English retrospect. Freud scholars may quibble over the meaning of the words Trieb and Instinkt in Freud’s work, but both Eros and the death drive earn their queerness at the get-go by their very lack of forgone teleology. The instinctual energy of libido very early on was precisely interesting to Freud on account of its flexibility; like all drives, libido creates pressure, seeks its aim of satisfaction, yet can find its satisfaction in myriad ways, unlike thirst and hunger. Instincts have predictable, stereotyped patterns for satisfaction, but the drive is far more open-ended. The introduction of the death drive didn’t change that, just overrode the simplistic teleological view that the organism is life driven and nothing else—what psychological theory could rest on that simplistic assumption? Freud found his ultimate mythology in Eros and the death drive, which could be seen as a tragic dualism infinitely greater than Oedipal ambivalence—which might be why ego-psychology preferred to abandon it. But as early as the 1950s, Norman O. Brown though rather, “We need, instead of an instinctual dualism, an instinctual dialectic” (Life against Death, p. 83).

I think one thing is clear from all this discussion: Mario’s book has indeed opened up a view of tragedy and tragic pleasure that is far more a dialectic now than a deadening dichotomy, more inclusive in its range of queer options, more demanding in its hyperawareness of tragic language, more extensive in its postdramatic interests, and more creative in its hedonic phenomenology. I certainly believe the range of responses here in this symposium can attest to this, and I am extremely grateful to all who posted here for their engagement.