Holden Rasmussen

This article is a translation of Jacques Nassif’s 1967 reading of Sigmund Freud’s “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions.” The text appeared in Cahiers pour l’Analyse, a Paris-based, student-led journal that published articles related to psychoanalysis and epistemology. This article offers a rereading of Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten,” shifting the focus from perversion to the role of fantasy, as if the elaboration of fantasy were Freud’s manifest project. Nassif’s reading yields insight into the centrality of castration and castration fantasies to the overall structure of fantasy and subjectivity. Furthermore, he proposes that his reading offers an “archaeology of the subject” as opposed to a case-historical or model-based theory of the subject. The full elaboration of this methodological approach is left open. This text remains an underexplored resource for researchers in the psychoanalytic field and contributes significantly to ongoing inquiries into the interplay between sexual difference, science, fantasy, and subjectivity.

This article is a translation of Jacques Nassif’s 1968 article “Freud et la science,” which appeared in Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Nassif assesses the compatibility of the psychoanalytic theory of repetition with the concept of the epistemological break. If epistemological breaks are ruptures with the past, then how does that apply in the case of psychoanalysis as both a general science and a clinical practice? As Nassif notes, the concept of repetition is fundamental to both registers of psychoanalysis: as a behavior outside the clinic and as an instrumental phenomenon within the clinic. Given the fundamentality of repetition, what is the status of the break in the field and function of psychoanalysis? Nassif’s answer is that psychoanalysis breaks with the past by virtue of a repetition of a previous series of breaks in the psychological sciences. This series of breaks appears across the works of Jean-Martin Charcot, John Hughlings Jackson, Hippolyte Bernheim, and Josef Breuer. After a close-reading of Freud’s engagement with Charcot’s work, an examination of his tutelage under Charcot, and an assessment of the novelty of Charcot’s methods and theories, Nassif suggests that epistemological breaks imply a subsequent “repetition of the break” [répétition de coupure]. However, how Freud makes his own inaugural break through the repetition of a previous series of breaks remains to be elucidated. Nassif’s article thus attempts to “repeat” the origins of psychoanalysis, and to shed light on the applicability of the notion of the epistemological break in contested “sciences,” like Marxism and psychoanalysis. The article ends with a note that a sequel is to follow. Nassif later incorporated the material from this article into his major 1977 book Freud, l’inconscient.

In a 1967 article for Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Jacques Nassif shifts the focus of Freud’s “‘A Child is Being Beaten’” from the aetiology of perversions to the question of fantasy. Nassif concludes that there is a fundamental fantasy exhibited in these cases and conducts an “archaeology” of this fundamental fantasy, locating the origin of fantasy with the origin of sexual difference: castration and the Oedipus complex. In the final lines of the article, Nassif wonders if “another fantasy,” with a different verbalization that corresponds to a “another body,” could be built on this structure, but admits his reading does not permit an answer to this question. I propose that a reading that shifts the focus in the text again provides both an affirmative answer to Nassif’s question as well as indications of an elaboration. On my reading, without abandoning Nassif, ambivalence is the conceptual focus. Ambivalence, as Freud formulates it, is not just the reversal of feelings into their opposite, like love transformed into hate. Rather, ambivalence is the co-presence of things “different in their nature,” and this co-presence modifies these things chained together. In the context of the fantasy in “‘A Child is Being Beaten,’” this shift in conceptual focus results in an alternative schema of the Oedipus complex, an analysis of drive as a linguistic representation of the ambivalent relation, and the Lacanian concept of the letter as the precipitate of this ambivalent relation circuited by the drive. The conclusion, here, is that the fantasies recorded in the text do not only express a fundamental fantasy about the origin of the sexes, as Nassif suggests, but express a fundamental fantasy about the conditions of signification tout court. The article ends on an open question—cued by Nassif’s closing question in his essay—regarding the possibility of further reconciliation between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of this analysis of ambivalence, drive, and the letter.

In a series of presentations at Sainte-Anne Hospital, published in English under the title _Talking to Brick Walls_, Lacan offers one of the few explicit references to Bataille in his _œuvre_. He interposes a stark disagreement between himself and Bataille on the status of possible knowledge regarding ontological questions. Lacan reads Bataille as a mystic who proposes that the pursuit of knowledge is a futile task and that knowledge of being is _only _possible _per viam negativam_. In order to advance this reading, Lacan emphasises Bataille’s fixation with “nonknowledge.” At first glance, one can understand why Lacan identifies him as a mystic, and many commentators on Bataille’s writings offer similar reading; however, this ignores subtle nuances of Bataille’s arguments regarding what he calls “inner experience.” More crucially, it ignores his explicit rejection of mysticism on the very basis of the knowledge that results from nonknowledge. This comparison frames a problem for fundamental ontology, of which I hope to elaborate only one aspect: The incompleteness of thought implies a non-relation between thought and being, and we can have a knowledge about this non-relation through an analysis of the limit as phantasmatic and structural rather than as real.

The emphasis Malabou places on both the erasure and possible reappropriation of the clitoris, which she requalifies as an “organ of thought” (13), warrants considering broader questions concerning negativity, relationality, and power. We raise two related questions, which we further explore at the end of this review. First, what does Malabou's analysis of the negative and its relationship to thought and femininity imply about the ontological category of relationality in toto? If the relation between negativity and the feminine is central to thought, as Malabou seems to suggest, then this implies that negativity also has a prominent role in structuring relations in general. Second, how can the clitoris be disassociated from the negative without being turned into a new “positive,” or into a symbol grounded on a too familiar logic of othering? Arguably, this is the most pressing question for feminist philosophy in an age when gender and sexuality are under constant scrutiny inside and outside of the academe.