Review: The Subject of Power

Author(s): Leo Bersani

Reviewed work(s):
Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison by Michel Foucault
La Volont de Savoir, Vol. 1 of Histoire de la Sexualite by Michel Foucault
La Prison Romantique: Essai sur L'Imaginaire by Victor Brombert
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 2-21
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464879
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 THE SUBJECT OF POWER

LEO BERSANI

Michel Foucault, SURVEILLERET PUNIR: NAISSANCE DE LA PRISON.

Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Michel Foucault, LA VOLONTE DE SAVOIR, vol. 1 of HISTOIREDE LA
SEXUALITt.Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Victor Brombert, LAPRISON ROMANTIQUE: ESSAISUR L'IMAGINAIRE.
Paris: LibrairieJose Corti, 1975.

The era of prisons may be nearly over. Foucault suggests two reasons
for this at the end of Surveiller et punir: the particular type of delin-
of contempor-
quency produced by prisons is ill suited to the illegalisms
structures, at the same time that penal and judiciary functions
ary power
have been taken over by other, more pervasive networks of control.
Prisons provide a gaudy display of a society's disciplinary intentions; in a
a supplementary degree of intensity to the
sense, they merely bring
"normalizing power" at work elsewhere in society. The most original
he studies the
analyses in Foucault's work are perhaps not those in which
(now anachronistic) institution of prison itself, but rather those in which
he spells out the disciplinary mechanisms elaborated by modern West-
ern societies in order to deal with deviations from the norm. In schools,
of the of-
prisons, courtrooms, and mental hospitals, the seriousness
fense and the gravity of the illness are measured in terms of their dis-
tance from a normative ideal; and punishment is inseparable from a
corrective, curative process designed to close the gap between the nor-
mal and the anomalous. The Age of Reason, for example, dreams of a
universal secularization of religious techniques of continuous spiritual
surveillance. The architectural model of such surveillance is Bentham's
be used as
Panopticon, a model of great institutional flexibility (it could
a
the design of a prison, a hospital, factory, or a school) which guarantees
the constant visibility of the prisoner (the patient, the worker, the stu-
dent) and the anonymous invisibility of his guard. Bentham's scheme
individualizes
gives us the ideal figure of a political technology which
2
human beings in order to homogenize them. Difference can be reduced only by
being first of all defined.
The mechanisms of power studied by Foucault produce the individuals they are
designed to dominate. Because of this, they are essentially different from techniques
of "thought control." Foucault's interest centers not on the coercive techniques by
which we can be brought around to embrace a certain body of beliefs, but rather on
the ways in which the thinking subject itself is created as the delimiting field of
possibility for all thought. Critiques of power almost invariably define power as a
repressive force; Foucault, on the other hand, insists on the nonrepressive nature of
power. The "hypotheses repressives," as they are called in La Volont6 de savoir,
tendentiously posit hidden targets of social repression. On one side, we would have
the prohibitive voices of power in society; on the other, the victims' buried desires,
inhibited, negated desires clamoring for liberation. The radical change of perspec-
tive on the operations of power which Foucault proposes would involve our asking if
both the notion of power as primarily repressive and the notion of the victimized
desires as anterior to the forces which prohibit them are not in fact themselves
products of a program of omnipotent, omnipresent control. Our very awareness of
some "'natural" or "repressed" self belongs to an exercise of power to which we
would like to oppose that self. For power produces knowledge. Because all relations
of power constitute fields of knowledge, and because knowledge implies and even
constitutes power relations, a study of the birth of prisons inevitably becomes a
statement about the epistemological achievements of the same historical period.
Penal law and the human sciences have a common matrix in a specifically modern
mode of exercising power, a mode which has given birth not only to the institution
of prison, but also to man himself as the object of a scientific discourse.
A certain myth about Man has been used to explain and to control the behavior
of the human subject. The question of the subject is, however, not exhausted by a
critique of the complicity between the political exercise of power and the description
of human nature proposed by the presumably disinterested "human sciences."
What, exactly, is the place of the subject in the networks of power, both as he is
"traversed" by power strategies and as he himself exercises power? Foucault writes
in La Volonte de savoir that "power relations are at once intentional and non-
subjective" [p. 124]. Instead of seeking to explain power by a series of calculations
that take place prior to its exercise, Foucault discovers the intentionality intrinsic to
all power along the surfaces of its tactics. Power [le pouvoir] "is not an institution, it
is not a certain power [la puissance] with which certain people would be endowed: it
is the name given to a complex strategic situation in a given society" [La Volonte de
savoir, p. 123]. Power is everywhere, but it does not proceed from a seat or origin of
power. It is the result neither of an individual's decisions, nor of a ruling class's
interests, nor of the decrees of groups in control of the machinery of government,
nor of the choices of those who make the most important economic decisions in a
society. Power is everywhere not because anyone possesses enough of it to impose
his designs on an entire society, but rather because "it is produced at every instant,
at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another" [La Volonte de
savoir, p. 122]. Power is both productive and omnipresent by virtue of its being
immanent to all types of relations; relations of power "are the immediate effects of
the divisions, inequalities and imbalances produced [in all other kinds of relations:
economic, sexual, pedagogical, etc.], and, conversely, they are the internal condi-
tions of these differentiations" [La Volonte de savoir, p. 24]. Foucault's notion of
power is more satisfactorily spelled out in La Volonte de savoir than in Surveiller et
punir, but the detailed analyses of disciplinary techniques in the earlier book are
already firmly grounded on the assumption that "power is exercised rather than
possessed" [Surveiller et punir, p. 31]. The power of the state would be an effet
d'ensemble, the result of an attempt to immobilize, to encode, to make permanent,
and to serialize or realign or homogenize innumerable local (and necessarily unsta-
ble) confrontations. The state gives an immobilizing intelligibility to the scattered,
wildly productive effects of these power-generating confrontations.
diacritics/September 1977 3
 Power does not originate in the subject. Superficially, Foucault's view of the
extraordinarily diffusive nature of power would seem to justify political inertia. How
is it possible to resist power when its location is so problematic? Even more troubling
is the suggestion that our very sense of being oppressed may itself be a mode of
oppression: our view of society as issuing sexual inhibitions, for example, produces
certain discourses about sexuality which add to that dossier of the "truth" of sex
which Western societies have been meticulously putting together since the end of
the sixteenth century. But Foucault's position may actually be an exceptionally fruit-
ful point of departure for political action. Even in Surveiller et punir, where he tends
to suggest that every modern discourse about man contributes to the strategic de-
signs of a "disciplinary society," Foucault points out that the overthrowing of the
multiple "micro-powers" which infiltrate our lives doesn't obey an all or nothing
principle. To make revolutionary goals depend on the control of the operations of
government, as the Communists have done, proceeds from a glamorous illusion of
power as something which can be possessed. Foucault (like Deleuze) sees that by
making the state an excessively privileged power apparatus, Marxists have been led
to the correlative, anti-revolutionary, organization of the Party as an absolute, cen-
tralized instance of power. Foucault's definition of power provides a novel and most
credible explanation of why no revolutionary government in modern times has
avoided becoming an oppressive super-bureaucracy. Having originally located power
in what is perhaps at most an organizational codification of multiple power tactics at
work everywhere in society, the so-called revolutionary state is condemned to ever
more rigid exercises of authority in a hopeless effort to contain those "leaks" of
power which are in fact the very essence of the activity of power.
In La VolontL de savoir, the potential for resistance inscribed in the very exercise
of power is more explicitly stated. There is no need to invoke some richly rebellious
4
subjectivity. Relations of power include, by definition, the adversary role; they are
inconceivable without the points of resistance present everywhere in a power net-
work. The subjection of others is never a stable achievement of power. In a sense,
power always produces more than it needs, but this is equivalent to saying that it
always gets less than it aimed for. The mass of documentation about the self and its
desires which individual human beings in our society are willing to give in order,
perhaps, to be created as individuals (who can be observed, known, possessed) is
always more than the perfectly obedient response to explicit or implicit coercions. At
least some of the effects of one local tactic can join up with effects of another tactic,
thereby producing an effect contrary to the strategic intent behind either of the two
tactics; in this way, transitory, mobile points of resistance come into being which
may eventually be grouped together and strategically coded in more massive efforts
to undo given institutionalized blocks of power in society. As schematic as this may
sound, it represents an attempt to imagine rigorously, without the aid of an ideologi-
cally loaded view of historical necessity, the exact ways in which the dominant
configurations of power in our civilization may already include the resistances capa-
ble of changing those configurations. Foucault's political activism is like a neat
geometrical calculation: where, exactly, are the points of uneasy equilibrium, of
greatest friction, of explosive contact in the contemporary power network? He in-
vites us to ask this question, and to move in on these points.
Even more: Foucault's own work illustrates how an exuberant productiveness
intrinsic to the exercise of power can work against a strategic intent. By appearing to
obey the imperative of diagramming (and perhaps thereby constituting) the self, one
may subvert the underlying strategy by responding excessively to the formal appeal
of the diagramming activity itself. The result is an act of resistance, the diagram of a
diagram. Foucault surely knows that the important project he is now engaged in-a
six-volume study of the history of sexuality (of which La Volonte de savoir is volume
1)-cannot help but generously confirm a principal thesis of that study: that we are
all suffering from "a generalized discursive erethism" about sex, and that we expect,
from our analytic verbalizing of sex, "multiple effects of displacement, of intensifica-
tion, of reorientation, of modification in desire itself" [La Volonte de savoir, pp. 45
and 33]. Foucault's own discourse conforms to the cultural imperatives he de-
nounces. But his map of the awesomely neat coordinations between the exercise of
power and the production of knowledge includes effects which neither of those
abstractly active verb-nouns [/e] pouvoir and [/e] savoir can perhaps wholly account
for. The sustained impersonality of his work turns the analytic light on the
confession-producing mechanisms rather than on the psychic content-the delecta-
bly troubled desires of an individual soul-which those mechanisms pursue. Also,
the succulent orders of Foucault's prose-the startling schematizations of history
into categories, sub-categories and enumerative units, the apparently inexhaustible
urge to repeat, the sensual play with various rhetorical devices for the expression of
certain logical oppositions-are a dazzling display of controlled power, at the same
time that they alert us to what might be called the possibilities of a subversive
wandering in place or lingering in even the most relentlessly programmed analytic
sequences.
The points of resistance in a "discourse of knowledge" can be the consequence
of a certain play in the productive impulse itself. The ambiguous energetics of the
pouvoir-savoir network works to defeat the orders of power and of knowledge. On
the one hand, the intent of power is always an immobilizing of experience through
an ordering of it. Power is consummated-and exploded-at the (perhaps incon-
ceivable) moment when its diagrams survive its frictional diagramming activity. On
the other hand, it defeats its own objective by always producing in excess of the
calculable requirements of a strategy of domination. This excess production may
take the form of a critically self-reflective exercise of power (the demystifying dia-
gramming of a diagram), or of a supplementary bavardage which may lend itself to a
regrouping of several elements in the networks of power, or, finally, of a kind of
pleasurable repetitiveness which somewhat indolently postpones the completion of
diacritics/September 1977 5
an immobilizing tactical move. Foucault is particularly adept at this last technique for
maintaining adversary frictions and postponing closure: a leisurely revolving around
a single point, a willingness to submit an idea to a variety of rhetorical textures and
syntactical groupings, create a happy structural imbalance in his writing which resists
the powerful linearity of an argument which would otherwise have nothing to do but
be closed.

I have moved from a summary of Foucault's view of the "disciplinary society" to

a consideration of him as "a writer." Such a move may appear to dismiss Foucault's
profound mistrust of the writer label. In an interview published a couple of years ago
in the Nouvelles litteraires [March 14, 1975], Foucault said: "I am shocked that any-
one can call himself a writer. I am a merchant selling instruments [marchand d'in-
struments], a recipe-maker, a cartographer." The cartographer maps out power
strategies; he diagrams diagrams. He does not express a self. Deleuze, in a review of
Surveiller et punir, noted that to Foucault, there can be only one answer to the
question "what is writing?": "to write is to become, but it is certainly to become
something else than a writer." Foucault's writing refers us to the politically signifi-
cant activities of groups attempting "to provoke a mutation in the diagram" ["Ecrivain
non: un nouveau cartographe," Critique 373 (1975), 1226].
But the relation between writing and power-and, more particularly, between
literature and power-is more complicated than these dismissive remarks suggest.
The power of literature is both fierce and somewhat laughable. As a causal factor in
the major events of social and political history, its role is undoubtedly very modest;
in any case, it may be that only a small group of New York intellectuals still believe
that books can be responsible for such things as Stalinism, McCarthyism, and ter-
roristic radicalism. On the other hand, the writer's most personal diagrams of power
are necessarily mediated through the more general designs of power in literature as
a social institution-designs which are already in the process of being enacted be-
fore any writer inscribes his first sentence. Literature may not have much power, but
it should certainly be read as a display of power; and it is a peculiarly instructive
model of that play of complicity and resistance which characterizes the innumerable
local confrontations of power in human life. Its place in that network is surely not
central, but in its lateral position it performs in exemplary and inconsequential fash-
ion the thrillingly inexhaustible tactics of control which constitute the entire network
of power in society.
The thrill is of course crucial, for every resistance to power is an exciting
counter-exercise of power. There is no protest against power which does not rejoice
in its own capacity to control and to dominate. It is this rejoicing strength which is
depressingly elided in discussions of Foucault as simply diagramming diagrams;
such an approach de-realizes him as a writer and absorbs him into the petitions and
marches of groups seeking to provoke minor mutations on the map of political
power. The joy of self-confident strength is certainly not elided in Foucault's own
writing: he overwhelms the most massive machinery of oppression not so much by
the scholarship which uncovers its history and its inner workings, but rather by those
reckless synthesizing moves which teach us that the exercise of a certain form of
even excessive intelligibility can be a way not to describe scientifically a network of
power (a hopelessly problematic project), but rather to master an adversary power
by reducing it (and elevating it ...) to one's own superior version of its sense. The
resistances to power in all interesting writing propose alternatives performed with a
more or less ruthless excitement.
I will be proposing that the political role of literature as an institution can be
measured by a superficially nonpolitical analysis of the individual writing subject. In
the subject, power slips-and in literature this process of slippage becomes uniquely
visible. But to study power in a single writer may require an appeal to an analytic
framework for which Foucault has only minimal sympathy. The immensely intelligent
reductionist enterprise of Deleuze and Guattari in L'Anti-Oedipe should have settled
once and for all the question of the complicity between psychoanalysis and
6
bourgeois strategies of domination. The idea of that complicity was certainly not
original with Deleuze and Guattari, but they made the point of the bourgeois
"mamma-papa" power play in Freudianism more colorfully, if more repetitively, than
anyone else before them. In his history of sexuality, Foucault himself, in far more
interesting fashion, is emphasizing the continuities between certain fundamentals of
psychoanalytic theory and technique (especially the notion of a normative psycho-
sexual growth and the insistence, in treatment, on a total exposure of the "truth"
about one's sexuality) and disciplinary tactics already laid out in the sixteenth-
century revisions of the Catholic pastoral. Without rejecting these arguments, one
might also suggest that psychoanalysis has produced the most effective points of
resistance to the power strategies which it has often ingloriously served. At its best,
the recent discovery of "French Freud" has been an effort to locate in Freud himself
those speculative developments which wreak havoc with his own systematizations,
which return in his later work as supplementary disruptive movements that trivialize
those "central" theoretical certainties (the teleological apotheosis of genitality, the
attribution of "reality-testing" to the secondary processes) responsible for the
politicizing of psychoanalysis within a reactionary pouvoir-savoir complex. As a par-
ticularly vigorous exercise of power, psychoanalysis has produced a discourse of
knowledge in almost absurd excess of the theoretical "needs" of its own operations
as an institutionalized practice. And this excessive productivity includes an account
of the very possibility of excessive productivity. Psychoanalysis thus makes a mock-
ery of its own disciplinary role in our society by a certain speculative wildness which
also provides us with instruments (Freud: marchand d'instruments. . .) for the map-
ping out of points of resistance within the enclosing diagrams of strategies of power.
These disruptive speculations concern, most notably, the uncontrollable mobility of
desiring fantasy, and the importance of death for an understanding of the energetics
of ecstatic movements of power. In the spirit of Foucault's work, I would like to
attempt a brief diagram of a certain diagram of power. But I also would like to
suggest that the important work of a political cartography of power can be done with
both objects and instruments of analysis subject in Foucault's own work to great
suspicion: psychoanalysis will help us to study certain intersecting diagrams of
power both in a particular literary form (the realistic novel) and in the activity of the
single writing subject (first James, then Stendhal).

To examine the politics of realistic fiction is to discover layer upon layer of

conflicting intentionalities of power. In the nineteenth century, realistic novelists
usually judge their society with great severity. But the critical judgments passed on
society by Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal and George Eliot are qualified by a form which
provides this society with a reassuring myth about itself. Their fiction gives us an
image of social fragmentation contained within the order of significant form, and it
thereby suggests that the chaotic fragments are somehow socially viable and morally
redeemable. The realistic novel, for all its apparent looseness, is an extremely tight
and coherent structure: it encourages us to believe in the temporal myth of real
beginnings and definitive endings, it portrays a world in which events always have a
significance which can be articulated, and it encourages a view of the self as or-
ganized (if also ravaged) by dominant passions or faculties. These ordered signifi-
cances of realistic fiction are presented as immanent to society, whereas in fact they
are the mythical denial of that society's destructively fragmented nature. The strain-
ing toward coherent, enclosing sense in literature is a power tactic consonant with a
larger cultural strategy which elevates a certain type of intelligibility into the very
criterion by which we are expected to recognize or to legitimize "experience." And
an implicit agreement about the natural shape of human experience is of course far
from politically neutral: it creates a field of irreducible "truth" to which all new
versions of social organization must conform, and which insures that any criticism of
existing social arrangements will not transgress restrictive notions of possibility
which both inspire and emasculate political criticism.

diacritics/September 1977 7
 The hero in realistic fiction is frequently a threat to these designs. Fundamental-
ly, he rebels against the idea of his own nature implicit in the definitions which
society proposes to him of his duties and satisfactions. The hero is an intruder in a
world of significantly related structures, of unambiguous beginnings and definitive
conclusions. But the technical premises of the realistic novel-the commitment to
intelligible, "full" characters, to historical verisimilitude, to the revealing gesture or
episode, to a closed temporal frame-already doom any adventure in the stimulating
improbabilities of behavior which would resist being placed and interpreted in a
general psychological or formal structure. The realistic novelist, in spite of his
glamorously troubling heroes and heroines, has opted for, is in fact insisting on, the
readability of the human personality. And this readability is at the heart of the com-
forting message which the writer is sending to his society: the apparent chaos of
social life is a relatively harmless illusion because of those predictable continuities
among different people's desires (as well as among the desires of each individual)
which allow behavior to be interpreted, structured, "plotted." The menacing in-
stances of illegibility in that text must be erased. The fact that the novelist often has
very little to say about his heroes or heroines, or that what he does have to say comes
dangerously close to incoherent density, dooms these figures to ceremonies of
expulsion. The unintelligibility or even the mere vagueness of the hero (think of
Proust's Marcel, of Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, of Fabrice and Clelia, of Ahab, of
Prince Myshkin) is enough to seal his fate. In Foucault's terms, the dispositif de
normalisation in realistic fiction would be the epistemological reduction of its
characters to conditions of analytic intelligibility. No such reduction takes place in
the cases of the heroes and heroines I mentioned a moment ago. These figures
expose the factitious nature of the social and esthetic orders in the name of which
they will be sacrificed. The reader, the novelist, and the society within the work of
fiction stand in fascinated awe of characters who embody a secret excess or violence
which may prefigure a structural explosion (in the novel and in society), but which
also awakens the self-preserving energies of powerful orders.'
But this is only part of the story. In the nineteenth century we frequently find

1 The last two

paragraphssummarizea position which I develop in ChapterTwo of A Future
for Astyanax.

8
within the literary work a privileged place of exile from the literary work. That place is
the prison cell. Victor Brombert has written a fascinating book on the myth of prisons
in modern writing. His literary investigation is an indispensable supplement to
Foucault's account of the birth of prisons within the power networks of modern
Western societies. Now as a legitimate first reaction to the romantic literature of
prisons, one may be struck by the staggering political frivolity of this literature-a
frivolity all the more shocking in those writers who pride themselves on both their
realistic observation and their artistically active sense of social responsibility. The
writers studied by Brombert are, for the most part, indifferent both to the official
justifications of prisons and to what may have been its real political function in our
disciplinary societies. Instead, they intone a hymn of praise to prisons. Prison is the
space of dreams, poetry and metaphysical freedom; in prison man is reborn, he is
saved, he descends into the depths of his own being and soars beyond himself into
infinite space. Over and over again, Brombert finds in the writers he studies the twin
motif of resserrement and essor; imprisonment would seem to be the precondition
of self-transcendence. Felix carcer.
Several things are involved here. First of all, a mystification. The myth of the
romantic prison is in part merely a literary aping of language used by the founders of
prisons themselves. Brombert quotes from an 1838 work by L6on Faucher, De la
Reforme des prisons,2 in which the author concludes that the source of the imposed
sentence of penitentiary life is the voluntary penitence of monastic life. The notion
of salvation is crucial to the enthusiasm for cells which pervades the texts of penal
reform. Brombert notes the irony of the fact that the corrective function of prisons is
spiritualized in post-Revolutionary French society by an appeal to religious models of
conversion. But it is here, so to speak, that literature pulls a fast one on its own
collaborative intentions. The very surrender to a rhetoric of salvation in the literary
treatment of prisons works against the disciplinary aim of the penitentiary power
apparatus. It is as if the argument for the spiritualizing potential of prisons became
excessively persuasive: the prisoner escapes from prison (and from the entire net-
work of power which supports it) by an extravagant conversion to spirit, a conversion

2
Prisonreform,as Foucaultemphasizes, was contemporaneous with the birthof prisons. For
150 years, prisons have managed with stunning success to get themselves accepted as the best
remedy for their continuously recited defects.

diacritics/September 1977 9
by which he spectacularly removes himself from the coercions of history and from
the disciplinary orders of language itself.
This transcendental leap effected within the confining walls of a prison cell is
only one version of a widespread phenomenon of escape in nineteenth-century
literature. The realistic novelist, for example, is continuously plotting escapes from
the very constraints and agreements into which he has entered in order to produce
realistic fiction. I spoke a moment ago of a certain thinness or vagueness in such
novelistic protagonists as Fabrice del Dongo, Milly Theale, Prince Myshkin and even
Marcel in A la Recherche du temps perdu. We might say that this vagueness is the
hero's "soul"-not the modern soul defined by Foucault (the "correlative of a
certain technology of power on the body," the mechanism thanks to which power
relations give rise to scientific discourses about personality, conscience, the psyche
[Surveiller et punir, p. 34]), but rather a gap or hole of being into which the historical
individual merely disappears. Nothing is stranger in the realistic novel than a certain
shrinkage at the novel's center, a wasting away of heroic characters which we
nevertheless come to recognize as the only manner of describing their heroism. The
expulsion of the hero is, then, frequently an ambiguous event: it may strike us as a
tactic by which the hero has simply made himself unavailable to the sacrificial pres-
sures surrounding him. The moment when there is no longer anything to say about
the hero is simultaneously the occasion of his immolation and the occasion of a
fabulous defeat for the sense-making conspiracy which he has both fortified and
ruined by his scandalous lack of sense.
The power in this self-erasure is perhaps nowhere more evident than in James.
Now James's novels are model demonstrations of the definition of power proposed
in La Volonte de savoir. Like Foucault, James is interested in the types of discourse
produced by the exercise of power. He is not interested in power as the presumed
possession of those who govern, and as a result it has been decided by "politically
conscious" Anglo-American critics that James is a nonpolitical novelist. But a James-
ian dialogue is almost an abstract diagram of political processes from beginning to
end. That is, it maps out the intimidations and negotiated concessions which come
into play as a result of the imbalances and inequalities immediately produced by a
relation between two "points" (two human subjects). In composing dialogue, the
intensely political novelist is primarily interested neither in using talk as a means of
moving his story ahead nor in allowing his characters to make a scenic display of the
essential psychic drives behind their behavior. Rather, like James, he organizes talk
in view of multiple local efforts to redress the balance of power, to apply the always
unstable pressures and counter-pressures which repeatedly and briefly subject the
other to the speaker's control.
Perhaps the richest Foucaldian flavor in Jamesian dialogue is provided by the
exact equivalence established by James's characters between exercising power and
knowing. Pressures are applied, gains are made, retreats are covered almost entirely
through a complex system which manufactures things to be known. The awe with
which a Jamesian hero announces that he "sees," or that someone else "knows,"
expresses his thrilled appreciation of the extended field of power created by each
new luminous insight. And not to know what someone else knows is a correlative
loss of power: in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, the superficially
powerful instigators of plot (Kate and Densher, Charlotte and Amerigo) are plunged
into impotence by their anguished ignorance of what, precisely, Milly and Maggie
may or may not know. And it is this identification of power with the knowledge
produced (or concealed) by talk which would justify our defining the subject of
James's fiction as the power of literature itself. Because of James's remarkable indif-
ference to that diversification of behavior by which other novelists seek to convince
us that their characters have more than verbal authority, his novels demystify litera-
ture's claim to be a reflector of nonliterary life and they diagram the specific
mechanisms of power when its exercise is limited to verbal exchanges. And yet these
exclusively literary diagrams, by virtue of their very limitations, have the exemplary
value of demonstrating that transactions of power always involve communications,
10
and that these communications frequently take the form of equivocal donations of
knowledge.
It may, then, come as a shock when the Jamesian heroine suddenly appears to
renounce her wish to know. Milly Theale and Maggie Verver offer themselves unre-
servedly to the manipulations of others: Milly recklessly asks others to give her the
cue for how she will think about herself, and Maggie adheres, without the slightest
deflection into truth, to the decorous lie that nothing is wrong with her marriage. It is
as if they had both erased themselves as active agents from the pouvoir-savoir net-
work surrounding them by an absolute submissiveness to the pressures of that
network. In the case of Milly, this self-effacement is so radical as to make her novelis-
tically insignificant; her mildness risks becoming a boring surface unavailable to the
frictions of fictional interest. At the same time, her uncompromising mildness
seduces Densher away from Kate and ruins their scheme to get her money. The
originality of The Wings of the Dove is that Milly wins within the power schemes
articulated by the novel (such as conflicting personal loyalties, and plots to become
rich) not simply because of the infectious nature of some irresistible, more or less
Christian, spirituality, but above all because James allows her to become intolerable
as a novelistic character. She meekly inserts herself within the discourse of knowl-
edge produced by those who would control her and begins acting like their passive
"dove"; but then (by what mysterious reversal?) no longer having anything to say or
to do, and thereby having lost her right not only to be interesting but even to exist
within a literary work, the dove swoops down on the others and petrifies them in
mute worship of her own unarticulated, nonanalyzable worth. The radical imbalance
between the intentionality of power and the productivity of power could hardly be
more clearly documented. The Golden Bowl may, however, provide an even more
visible demonstration of this by virtue of Maggie's not having to die in order to
exercise absolute power. The novelistic dullness peculiar to Maggie is that she does
almost nothing but repeat herself. While the other characters literally make literature
by their continuous verbal adjustments to one another's thrusts of verbal power,
Maggie hardly bothers to adjust to the shifting positions of strength in talk: she
merely keeps telling the others what they have told her to believe. And this almost
mindlessly inattentive repetition descends on the world of tactical talk, and like
Milly's dovelike nature, brings the novel to an end by forcing everyone else to shut
up and by reducing the Prince, as he says in the novel's last paragraph, to "seeing"
nothing but Maggie herself.
There is more: the resistance to power could be attributed to the unlocatability
of the point of resistance. I suggested a few pages back that power may slip in the
subject. The peculiar phenomenon we have encountered in James may be defined as
the disappearance of the novelistic heroine within the novelistic discourse which she
does nothing to resist. Invisibility is the consequence of conformity. It is not that
Milly and Maggie have secrets which they protect by embracing other characters'
versions of their lives. On the contrary: Milly is a dove, and Maggie's marriage is
"right," but it is precisely by helping to establish these fictions as truth that Milly and
Maggie open a distance between discourse and being which no discourse will
ever be able to cross. I do not mean that being is more profound than language.
Rather, all discourses which propose definitions of the self are always received by a
hopelessly distracted subject. And this distraction is the space between the articu-
lated orders of knowledge and the continuously shifting objects of attention, of
desire and of power which constitute the subject as a history of self-displacing
appropriations of reality-appropriations which are only provisionally structured and
peripherally or belatedly linguistic. Unlike propagandistic writing, literature is an
exercise of power which self-destructively points to the impossibility of its claim to
power-generating knowledge. The irony intrinsic to literature is performed in the
relatively nonself-conscious form of realistic fiction through the ambiguous center-
ing of a figure whom the language of the novel can't really locate. Even when, as in
the case of realistic fiction, literature complies with a politically charged cultural
belief concerning the intelligibility of experience, it seems unable to avoid also deliv-
diacritics/September 1977 11
ering a message about the ease with which one can, as it were, move to the side of
any stabilizing fiction.
To say this is by no means to contest Foucault's view of the effectively coercive
nature of all the discourses about personality or the psyche which are crucial disci-
plinary instruments in the modern exercise of power. I do, however, wish to suggest
that literature, exactly because it is power enacted uniquely as a form of organized
knowledge, can serve the politically useful role of dramatizing the nothingness of all
epistemological fictions. Literature is philosophy entertainingly performing the
reasons for its own radical frivolity. If descriptive systems have enormous authority
in our lives, it is perhaps largely because, however much they tyrannize us, they also
protect us from the frightening invisibility of our "nature," from that constant gliding
of our desires which both sustains life and ruins the possibility of any settled under-
standing of life. Literature liberates to the extent that it takes the risk of undermining
its obviously enormous investment in reliable descriptions and settled understand-
ing.
However, we have seen in the case of James that the literary work seems able to
accept this risk only by a self-sacrificial move. The Jamesian novel is a feast of
diagrammatic talk; and yet, like Densher and Amerigo at the end of the novels which
trace their conversions from the enjoyable agitations of verbal power moves to
certain inexpressible loyalties, the reader himself is manipulated by language into a
position not covered by language, a position of fascinated absorption in the power of
an unarticulated passion. The Jamesian move to the side of fictions which would
stabilize being appears to be incompatible with any literary articulations at all. It is as
if the bias of significant form in realistic fiction precluded the possibility of any
literary manifestations of the distractions of being to which I referred a moment ago.
The realistic novelist expresses his suspicion of his own commitment to settled mean-
ings in cataclysmic ways: the alternative to imprisoning relations of sense is a dream
of wholly unrelated being. Perhaps no novelist has ever spoken more finely of the
relational aspect of all human experience than James in his Prefaces, and yet, from
Isabel Archer's insistence to Madame Merle that she is not to be measured by an
"envelope of circumstances" or a "cluster of appurtenances" [The Portrait of a Lady
(New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 186] to the Assumption of Milly Theale,
James pursues an ideal of the "free" self as the unrelated self. It is of course possible
to say that this pursuit is itself in a relation of opposition to the world of relations in
James's fiction, and that this structural function exhausts its significance. But there is
a stronger pressure generating the Jamesian ideal, a pressure connected to James's
exceptionally developed sense of the sinister opportunities for power present, to
quote Foucault again, "at every instant, at every point, or rather in every relation
from one point to another." The only absolute escape from power is to escape from
relations themselves. The most sophisticated resistance to power-a resistance
which, however, produces unattackable power-is a denial of the conditions which
generate power.

Can the enterprise of resistance to the dominant discourses of power in litera-

ture take place through more positive verbal strategies? Brombert writes very per-
ceptively about the importance of writing in the salvation myth of the romantic
prison. We might think of the connection between literature and prisons in terms of
a dilemma of communication. Prisons block the transmission of messages. The pris-
oner has to invent systems of communication: secret alphabets, underground cir-
cuits for conveying messages, nonverbal codes of transmission. The literature of
prisons is rich in such ingenuities, and they take on ontological significance as figures
for a paradoxical outside interiority. Brombert studies this paradox (reminiscent, as
he points out, of the Christian notion of dynamic immobility) in his excellent chap-
ters on Hugo, Nerval and Stendhal. The latter provides an especially striking illustra-
tion of the links between prison and writing, and between writing in prison and the
problematics of the "place" of the subject. It is of course tempting to think of
Stendhal as the least complicated advocate of the felix carcer myth. The Stendhalian
12
chasse au bonheur ends in prison; the prison cell is the hero's escape from an
imprisoning society. Prison is also, as Brombert says, an escape from the father, or,
more exactly, from the constraining identity inherited from the father. In prison, the
Stendhalian hero is reborn, but he is not reborn as a "person." Brombert remarks
that for Julien Sorel, prison is "the discovery of the present" [La Prison romantique,
p. 79]. The repudiation of the past implicit in the hero's repudiation of his father
raises the possibility of the hero being produced by his prison.
In a sense, Stendhalian prisons realize perfectly the transforming intentions
which, as Foucault shows, are at the heart of their disciplinary role. But it is of course
his own activities which correct and transform the Stendhalian prisoner, and this
correction involves nothing less than the disappearance of the subject as a trans-
formable object. And, especially in La Chartreuse de Parme, systems of disguised
communication are crucial to this joyous disappearing act. The secret alphabets of
the Stendhalian hero subversively jumble the script of correctional procedure to
which prisons owe their preeminence. The happiness with which Fabrice invents a
secret code in order to communicate with Clelia should remind us of Stendhal's own
pleasure in all those furtive, enigmatic and misleading inscriptions (his pseudonyms,
his perversely inconclusive dialogues with himself, the remarks scribbled on his
belts and suspenders) by which he sought to improvise himself as a constantly
renewed evasive movement. Brombert writes of Stendhal that "walls, masks, per-
sonifications [. . .] guarantee existential freedom" [La Prison romantique, p. 87]. We
might add that this freedom is inseparable from a conception of writing as perpetual
absence. The writer, as besieged by his hostile readers as his hero is besieged by the
hostile society which imprisons him, can get his message through only by inventing
literature (just as Fabrice has to invent the means of communication which will allow
him to "speak" to Clelia). The Stendhalian sentence is-ideally-one in which the
writer can never be located (and attacked); the hurried, improvised rhythms of
Stendhal's fiction point to a type of narrative in which the writer would be out of his
sentences before the reader could imprison him in them. The Stendhalian "self,"
G6rard Genette has noted, is "unnamable, language cannot approach it without disin-
tegrating into multiple substitutions, displacements and detours at once redundant
and elusive" [" 'Stendhal' " in Figures II (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), p. 159]. The
stabilizing fictions which writing resists would no longer even have to be incorpo-
rated into the act of writing; they would all be on the side of an invisible, outmaneu-
vered reader. Being would be a question of accelerated tempos, and art a strategy of
exuberant dodges.
But there is more-or less-to the exemplary case of Stendhal. For his fiction
pays tribute to far more conventional comforts and securities about the place of the

diacritics/September 1977 13
self than what we might expect from his interest in self-scattering disguises. Even the
persistently ironic Stendhalian sentence is firmly anchored (as Brombert has shown
better than anyone else) in easily discernible commitments. The agitations of Sten-
dhal's self-protective gestures (in particular, his disclaimers of enthusiasm for his
lovable heroes) are designed to irritate the reader into a position of weakness; they
do not really protect the narrator from being identified at all. On the contrary: they
simultaneously force the reader to recognize the narrator's passionate nature and
defy him to make fun of passion. Brombert speaks of Stendhal's "dream of a meta-
language, of a special language, which would allow him not to say anything, or rather
to say what cannot be said" [La Prison romantique, p. 89]. "I would like to be able to
write in a sacred language," Stendhal notes in Promenades dans Rome. The discipli-
nary pressures of vain, stupid and tyrannical society push Stendhal into two con-
tradictory modes of resistance: he seeks to make himself unlocatable by becoming
excessively visible as a succession of masks irreducible to a portrait of personality,
but he also seeks invulnerability by erecting a fortress to safeguard "what really
counts," to protect his true being. The metaphor of prison lends its resources to
both these tactics. The prisoner's semiotic ingenuities introduce him to circuits of
being in which the self is identical to the mobile graph of its displacements. But
prison walls also allow him to hide the secret treasures of his essential self. Both
Stendhalian fiction and Jamesian fiction simultaneously demonstrate their commit-
ment to a permanent mobility and indeterminacy of being, and to an apotheosis of a
fixed, essential self in an inexpressible passion wholly unavailable to a language
always pointing toward the happy moment of its own sacrificial disappearance.
The capacity of the writing subject to suggest that he is always elsewhere (always
distracted from his own speech) can produce both excess and silence. It could of
course be said that this is the inescapable nature of literary language: the absences
evoked by language are always both more language (already uttered, and yet to be
uttered) and the silent purity of unmediated being (a fiction treacherously alluded to
by the very language which should convince us of its impossibility). But this is a
rather pale way to discuss the strategic penchants of literature at determined histori-
cal moments and in the works of particular writers. In realistic fiction, for example,
the yearning for an extra-literary (and meta-historical) salvation can best be under-
stood in tactical terms. The subordination of an extravagantly productive mobility of
being to the dream of an omnipotent and unrelated self is a surrender to the very
orders of fiction from which the unrelated self would seem to promise escape. A
brief psychoanalytic inquiry will help us to see this surprising complicity between the
nonverbal paradise of sacrificed heroes and the busy but always coherent verbal
orders of the realistic novel.

Realism formulates as esthetic doctrine a relation to the world which belongs to

the Lacanian category of the Imaginary. It will be remembered that the imaginary
construct of the self in the "mirror stage" is already both an ideal and a persecutory
self. Lacan has said that this alienated self-perception prepares the way for that
identification with the rival which accompanies the resolution of the Oedipus com-
plex. The "identificatory reorganization of the subject" which is brought about by
the "introjection of the imago of the parent of the same sex" is possible because it is
preceded by "a primary identification [that of the "mirror stage"] which structures
the subject as a rival of himself" [Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 117]. To the extent that
this Oedipal reorganization includes the formation of (or a new pre-eminence for) a
super-ego, we might question any sharp distinction between what Lacan has called
primary or preparatory identification and the secondary identification which occurs
only as part of a process of sublimation made possible by the Oedipal stage. That is,
in the intrasubjective relation "which structures the subject as a rival of himself," we
may have not simply a "preparation" for the "secondary" identification which re-
solves Oedipal tensions, but perhaps above all a model for the identification which
presumably designates a resolution of rivalry. Both the ideality and the persecutory

14
nature of the post-Oedipal super-ego have their analogies in the originally consti-
tuted self.
The constitution of the self as Lacandescribes it resembles the constitution of a
super-ego. In Freudiantheory, the super-ego is formed by the introjection of paren-
tal authority, and especially of parental interdictions. These interdictions are in-
separable from two other aspects of the super-ego: first of all, its nature as an
idealized version of the parent, and secondly, its intellectual function as an observer
of the self. The super-ego could be thought of as an explanatory fiction meant to
"cover" those mental operations which simultaneously idealize the judging parent
and create a ferocious version of the parent's judgment. Freud suggests that this
affective complex is energized by the id, that is, by desiring impulses in the uncon-
scious. The emergence of an idealized instance of the personality would therefore
be a legitimizing of instinctual forces which, however, the super-ego condemns.
The complex genesis of the super-ego suggests that it may be the disguised
representative, in the post-Oedipal personality, of the Freudiandeath instinct. The
parentalauthorityinternalized in the super-ego is connected, before the resolution
of the Oedipus complex, with instinctualrenunciation. In the case of a little boy, for
example, the fantasized castratingfather had demanded that the child renounce his
desire for the mother. "Fantasized"is crucial, for it would be misleading to stop at a
definition of the super-ego as the internalizationof parental authority. The father-
judge is alreadyan internalizedfigure, a fantasy of the real father. What, then, is the
exact difference between the punishing father of Oedipal fantasies and a super-ego
which presumablyindicates a successful resolution of Oedipal conflicts?The answer
may be that the super-ego doesn't internalize anything; rather, it is the result of a
process of self-differentiation which borrows from the image of an already inter-
nalized parent. We could say that the super-ego is the id which has become its own

mirror.The fantasyparent-judgemaydo little more than provide a moraljustification

for the pleasure of self-destruction. In the super-ego, what Freud calls primary
erotogenic masochism becomes a cultural and ethical imperative. The immense
importance of the Oedipus complex for the death instinct would be that Oedipal

diacritics/September 1977 15
fantasies present the death wish in the form of a morally and socially necessary
interdiction of desire. In the super-ego, the id, separated from itself, finds pleasure
in attacking itself. The obvious sadistic aspect of the super-ego perhaps hides a more
profound masochism which becomes evident if we think of the super-ego as desire
turned against itself. The super-ego is a spectral id.
How different is the super-ego from the Lacanian specular self? In a sense, the
formation of the super-ego repeats the constitution of the self. But the self as Lacan
describes it is simultaneous with a separating from the self. And the super-ego, as I
have just suggested, is not so much a fantasy-identification with a parental figure as it
is an alienating distancing of the self from itself. If the Lacanian Imaginary identifica-
tion of the self in the other is simultaneous with the formation of an ideal and
persecutory self, then Melanie Klein is right to locate the appearance of a super-ego
in infancy rather than at the much later moment when the child incorporates the
Oedipal father. There would be no reason to discuss Kleinian theory as a grotesquely
improbable fable (as most psychoanalysts do). For the formation of conscience may
not require elaborate mental operations incompatible with infancy. Rather, if we
juxtapose Klein's proposals with Lacan's view of self-creation through self-alienation
in the stade du miroir, we come to the conclusion that it is impossible to constitute a
total self without creating the super-ego. A complete, unified, total self is an ideal,
other self, the potential persecutor of an uncoordinated, mobile, desiring subject. It
is a psychological myth which corresponds to the subjective experience of psychic
division (and not totality): the division between desiring impulses and those same
desiring impulses turned against their own mobility and seeking a final fatal dis-
charge.
The relevance of Lacan's Imaginary order to realistic fiction can be argued from
different points of view. First of all, there is the mode in which the projection of
human feelings into landscapes and objects is enacted (a projection which, in
Balzac, is so complete as to give to houses or streets the status of moral figures in an
allegorical drama). We are meant to be aware of this projection not as an interpreta-
tive view of the world so intense as to result in a fusion of the passionately interpret-
ing self and external reality, but rather as an objective description by a dispassionate
narrator. It is precisely such "objective" description which results in the an-
thropomorphic nature of the world in realistic fiction. An impassive-or even better,
wholly impersonal-narrator faces "blocks" of himself in the world. He becomes an
alienated presence in the things he describes. In most realistic novels, the narrator is
not a character in the story; he is an omniscient presence without a name, and he is
characterized by his presentation of a world presumably distinct from him. The
passion which informs the great descriptions of realistic ficition from Balzac to Zola
and Proust is the passion of wishing to capture alien forms. The most extreme,
anxiety-ridden version of this passion is the frantic attention which Marcel brings to
the world in A la Recherche du temps perdu. And even in the case of Proust's
narrator, who does play a central role in his story, there is no fully constituted
character at the "point" from which the description proceeds. Narrative description
in realistic fiction could even be thought of as an attempt to appropriate a character
for the one psychologically empty or at least incomplete presence in the novel: the
narrator. The realistic novel is the "mirror stage" of literature.
We find something similar in the relation between the narrator and the hero.
The paradigm of realistic fiction has usually been defined as a confrontation between
an exceptional individual and an unexceptional social milieu. This is true enough,
but the hero is also confronted by a sort of partial version of himself. This, again, is
the narrator of realistic fiction, a presence at once infinitely fascinated by and infi-
nitely mistrustful of the main object of his attention. Stendhal is the clearest case of a
narrator whose alienated and ideal self is in the heroes of his fiction, but a similar
relation exists between Balzac and Lucien de Rubempre, George Eliot and Dorothea
Brook, Melville-lshmael and Ahab. And in all these cases-although once again
Stendhal provides the most striking model-the narrator's knowledge of his hero is
deeply paranoid. He distrusts his alienated and ideal self, and in fact he very often
16
ends by having him killed. But this should make us suspect that in the narrator we
see the subject already playing the moral part of the ideal self's role. The roles and
functions of the Imaginary order may be distributed in very complex fashion. If the
hero is an ideal self, he also embodies the danger and guilt of desire and is therefore
condemned by a conscience operating through the narrator's voice. The hero's
death is realistically explained as the triumph of more or less prosaic history over
idealism or over-reaching ambition, but, in psychoanalytic terms, it is also intelligible
as manifesting the narrator's paranoid terror of the self he would both passionately
appropriate as an ideal and passionately reject as an instance of dangerously
energetic desire.
Finally, the attempt to possess a total form is expressed in what I called earlier
the compulsive intelligibility of realistic fiction. To a large extent, the totality which
the narrator discovers in the world is a totality of sense. The narrator's ambivalent
relation to his heroic alter ego is contained within the larger, and essentially more
comfortable, relation between the narrator and a world he makes sense of. The hero,
after all, is a doubtful totality and therefore a dangerous (if also desirable) alienated
self. Now perhaps all relations to the world dominated by the order of the Imaginary
are condemned to a nonproductive time, that is, to the time of exact repetition. The
enterprise of constituting the self in the other and of transforming the other into an
alter ego means that, ideally at any rate, all relations are perceived as relations
between identical terms. In fiction, this would mean a perfect equivalence between
narrative descriptions or analyses of characters and the behavior of these characters.
Sartre's complaint about the "essentializing" of individuals in traditional fiction
could be rephrased as the unmasking of the writer's project of reducing the events of
fiction to a parade of sameness. Balzac would be an extreme case: his characters'
lives tend to mirror the expository portraits made of them at the beginning of a novel.
To the extent that the hero is inadequate to, or in excess of any narrative account
which could be made of him, he disrupts the security of specular identifications; his
unaccountable mobility brings a threatening imbalance into the work. He is, how-
ever, reintegrated into the ideal adequations of specular (pseudo-) relationships by
being expelled from the work in which he disturbs them. The Jamesian and Stendhal-
ian narrators, for example, protect their heroes' and heroines' retreats from fiction;
it is as if the narrator could be at one with these exceptional figures only beyond the
work. The ambiguous distribution of functions between the narrator and his hero
(each one being simultaneously the desiring and the condemning self, the frag-
mented existence and the total form) is corrected through a projected transcen-
dence of those conditions which make possible any distribution of functions at all.
The most profound appeal of all those "unrealistic" transcendental leaps in realistic
fiction (and in the myth of the romantic prison) may lie in the promise of a perfect
self-absorption-that is, in the elimination of all distance between the desiring sub-
ject and an ideal self, and in an escape from the frictions, the resistances, the mere
accidents of power inherent to all articulated relations.
In realistic fiction, this dream of absolute power is pursued within a struc-
ture of paranoid mistrust (between the hero and society, between the hero and
the narrator). What is the relation between paranoia and narcissism? Let us look
briefly at Freud's re-presentation of Dr. Schreber's own account of his illness.
Perhaps the most striking fact about this celebrated case of paranoia is that the
doctor ends exactly where he began: in anticipating the pleasure of taking a "pas-
sive" homosexual role. In one sense, nothing at all happens in the course of his
illness except that the original fantasy is replayed later on in an infinitely more
glamorous way: as a result of allowing himself to be impregnated by God, Schreber
will redeem the world by giving birth to a new race. Freud explains the feelings of
persecution which occur between these two versions of sexual submission to
another male figure as an attempt to ward off the homosexual wish fantasy. "It is a
remarkable fact," Freud writes, "that the principal forms of paranoia can all be
represented as contradictions of the single proposition: '/ (a man) love him (a
man)'" ["Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of

diacritics/September 1977 17
Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," in Three Case Histories (New York: Collier Books,
1963), p. 165]. But Freud also maintains that the paranoid symptoms are a step on the
road to recovery. For the repression of "I love him" had involved a detachment of
libido from the world; in paranoia, libido returns to the world (although in the form
of hostility), and so the process of reconstructing relations with external reality has at
least begun. The detachment of libido "happens silently; we receive no intelligence
of it, but can only infer it from subsequent events" [p. 174]. There is, I think, an
additional silence in Freud's own analysis: he "skips" the reason for Schreber's
repression of his original homosexual feeling. We can, however, infer that reason
from the doctor's subsequent symptoms. I would suggest that the negative sign of
other men's hostility toward Schreber had already been present in the desire for sex
with another man. The repression of that desire (as distinct from conscious guilt,
confusion, horror, etc.) makes no sense except in terms of an overwhelming danger
which is made admirably explicit in the return of the repressed: the danger of being
attacked. In other words, the paranoid symptom is the cause of the repression. The
paranoid stage analyzes the components of "I love him" in ways which will allow that
erotic perception to be repeated without danger.3 Megalomania now becomes a
defense against persecution, and it is as if the mere power of Schreber's self-love
were enough to defeat a hostile universe and to transform God Himself into the lover
who will allow Schreber to repopulate the universe with repetitions of himself. The
importance of narcissism in this paranoid scenario suggests that the repressed
homosexual desire was already a narcissistic desire. Indeed, in the final triumph of
homosexual love, homosexuality is little more than a convenience for the triumph of
narcissism: Schreber needs God's sexual interest in order to reproduce himself.
Freud of course sees homosexuality in general in terms of a narcissistic object-
choice. But his own study of paranoia should make us suspicious of any such
generalization. What Dr. Schreber's case suggests is that it is repressed homosexual

3 "Paranoiadecomposes just as hysteriacondenses. Or rather,paranoiaresolves once more

into their elements the products of the condensations and identificationswhich are effected in
the unconscious" ["Notes Upon . .. A Case of Paranoia,"p. 149].

18
 desire which is narcissistic, and that it is repressed because of the danger of narcis-
sism. The importance in paranoia of fantasies of being attacked leads us to suppose
that the repressed "homosexual" impulse included a desire to be attacked by the
other self which the subject was seeking to appropriate erotically. "I love him" is
repressed because it really means "I love me," and "I love me" is by nature a
destructive self-alienation. The subject's attempt to appropriate a self external to
himself is, as I suggested earlier, equivalent to the creation of a super-ego as a
murderously complete double of the fragmented desiring subject. Narcissistic sexual
desire is essentially masochistic; the subject fantasizes an ecstatic death as the result
of being attacked by an alien self.
The course of Dr. Schreber's illness could be traced in the form of a circle. He
returns to where he began, but with the difference that self-love is, apparently, no
longer the expression of a masochistic wish to be attacked. The function of the
paranoid stage is to allow him to experience his narcissism not as a trauma but as a
cure. The paranoid scenario (of persecutors attacking a megalomaniacal subject) is
an extraordinary effort to retrieve narcissism from masochism. In a sense, however,
the result is still death, but it is a death identical to the immortality of the subject.
Schreber's glorious delusions are an even graver detachment of libido from the world
than his earlier repression of affect. Schreber's "recovery'! justifies his withdrawal
from the world: it disguises the catastrophe of an individual's retreat from all desire
as the triumphant act of giving birth oneself to all possible objects of desire. The
power sought by narcissistic desire is an equation of self-perpetuation and self-
annihilation.
The paranoid structure of the realistic novel serves a function analogous to that
of Schreber's delusions of persecution. Society's treacherous attacks on the hero
allow the narrator to resolve his troubled relation to his alter ego in the form of a
union which transcends the conditions and relations of the novel. Thus, rather than
think of the hero's fate only as a consequence of the nature of society, we might
consider that the image of society in much realistic fiction is itself a function of the
hero's escape from or rejection by that society. In Le Rouge et le noir and La Char-
treuse de Parme, for example, society's persecution of Stendhal's heroes serves a
wish to withdraw from the world which is evident from the very start of their social
careers. We might even say that Julien Sorel's paranoid mistrust of others (what
Stendhal calls his "insane distrust") secretly provokes the attacks which then justify
his suicidal attachment to prison. The Stendhalian narrator's sympathy for his
heroes' happy withdrawals from the world is both a way of collaborating with socie-
ty's expulsion of the hero and an implied escape for the narrator himself from the
plots (and the novelistic plot) which he has been busily elaborating. The sacrifice of
the hero projects, somewhere beyond the work, a wordless version of the specular
identifications which the work itself has been able only to approximate. Could we
also say that the relation between paranoia and narcissism in realistic fiction provides
us with a diagram of more general social structures? The violently competitive ener-
gies which find their way into realistic fiction may belong to a paranoid structure of
social life in which the most profound objective of power is a suicidal self-
celebration. In spite of his compliance with those sense-making imperatives of our
culture to which I referred earlier, the realistic novelist would, then, also be thought
of as one of Foucault's radical cartographers. The map he draws of modern social
relations is adequate precisely to the extent of its secret dependence on aspirations
presumably incompatible with the "realistic" possibilities of social life. In heroes
such as Fabrice, Ahab, Prince Myshkin and Milly Theale, realistic novels trace an
intentionality violently repudiated by those very energies in society which it may in
fact sustain. To satisfy narcissistic desire is the aim of the paranoid pursuit of power.

In a passage from La Volonte de savoir which I quoted much earlier, Foucault

defines the universal conditions for the production of power: relations of power are
the "immediate effects" of the inescapable imbalances and inequalities in all rela-
tions "from one point to another." The purposeful exercise of power in the human

diacritics/September 1977 19
 subject is an effort to master those divisions and differences. But the fate of power,
as I have been suggesting, depends in large measure on the limitlessly duplicitous
pleasure which accompanies its exercise. The reduction of difference is the major
totalitarian enterprise of both societies and individuals. And a politically effective
understanding of this enterprise requires, I believe, an analysis of the fantasized
ecstasy of death which may sustain the narcissistic strategy of obliterating differences
and enslaving history to a pseudo-process of self-repetitions. Psychoanalytic inquiry
is neither irrelevant to politics, nor is it necessarily in the service of reactionary
powers; rather, it can help us to map some of the perversities and duplicities in the
performances of power. Furthermore, are the analytic strategies of Freudian inquiry
irremediably uncongenial to the spirit of Foucault's investigations? Deleuze, explain-
ing the sense in which the enonce for Foucault hides nothing and yet is not im-
mediately visible, writes that there is nothing unsaid or repressed which would be
internal to the champ enonciatif, "but there is a lack-or an excess-correlative to
this field, and characteristic of its formation" ["Ecrivain non: un nouveau carto-
graphe," p. 1225]. But has it not been one of the achievements of recent Freudian
thought in France to demonstrate the non-hidden (the non-profound) nature of the
repressed, its elusive presence (not hidden and yet not immediately visible) along
the signifying chain of discourse? The repressed is produced by the discursive tactics
of the subject. We might remember that for Freud himself, the detachment of libido
in Schreber's illness is not a hidden event somewhere behind the visible stages of his
illness; rather, it is visible (although not immediately ...) as the lack between "I love
him" and "the world hates me" which can be inferred from (because it is inscribed
in) the excess of the paranoid proposition.
In any case, those of us interested in Freudian speculations may perhaps be
forgiven even if we somewhat force the compatibility of Foucault with
psychoanalysis. For his work is, after all, one of the most important and most original
enterprises of contemporary thought. In contrast to the pallidly glamorous absorp-
tion in absence which has become the dominant fashion in academia, Foucault offers
us rigorously traced diagrams of the real historical constraints under which we live.
Superficially, the extreme generality of the definition of power in La Volonte de
savoir depoliticizes the notion of power: power is produced in all relations from one
point to another. But this definition should help us both to see the political pressures
in all types of relations, and to discriminate among the various orders and intensities
of constraint in the divisions and differences engendered by all contacts. I think, for
example, that La Volonte de savoir invites us to reformulate our sense of violence.
The frictional meeting of differences is always an event of violence. We should,
however, distinguish between what might be called the narrative violence of human
history and the violence intrinsic to our perception of the universe as multitudinous
mobile forms. Works of art frquently aim to de-narrativize our sense of reality in an
effort to rehabilitate the latter type of violence. The work of art provides us with an
alluring "other" version of the body's inescapable implication in violence. But what,
exactly, are the modes of contact and resistance in art between narrative and formal
violence? How do certain esthetic conventions promote and help to institutionalize
the forms of violence? How are strategies of power invested and distributed in the
representations of violence?
To address ourselves to such questions in our study of literature might prove to
be a refreshing alternative to the current craze for scrutinizing the gaps in literary
language. The demonstrations of power in literature may always be conditioned by a
fundamental impotence of literary language. But this very impotence, far from being
merely a factor of de-realization, complicates the diagrams of power in literature; its
negativizing effect is itself open to strategic exploitations. For all his reluctance to be
considered as a writer, Foucault implicitly proposes questions crucially relevant to
the practice of literature. But I have also been arguing that literature performs power
in ways which can perhaps be adequately accounted for only by a psychoanalytic
vocabulary. As Brombert's masterful study of the essentially literary myth of the
romantic prison suggests, the scene of literature is ideally suited to a display of the
20
human subject's duplicitous exercise of power. The literary work is ontologically
slippery (in the undecidable relation of literary language to the subjects it proposes
to describe) and yet unable not to stay in place (the book cannot flee from our
scrutiny). It is limitlessly coercive (the book speaks to the reader's silence; it allows
for his responses only in its own anticipatory formulations of them) and yet it has no
power to resist our violations of it. The literary work simultaneously, and paradoxi-
cally, immobilizes and disorients being; it is a permanently shifting (and shifty) inert
object. Finally, literature is always an image of the frictional differentiations which
constitute power; even when it does not explicitly treat the social operations of
power, writing can't help but be a procession of verbal differences. And yet the
writer also uses the system of differences which is language as the "other" in which
he more or less secretly works to appropriate a self, to perpetuate the same.
By virtue of these contradictions, literature points to something fundamentally
incomprehensible in power. This is not to say that power resists all diagrams of it, or
that maps of power cannot provoke mutations in the dominant cultural strategies of
domination. On the contrary: the mutation may even be more probable if analyses
of power take into account the vicissitudes to which the infinitely perverse move-
ments of desire subject all intentional uses of power. As I have attempted to suggest
with the model of realistic fiction, the modes of excitement in the exercise of power
may even include an explosive end to the frictions of confrontation and the suicidal
apotheosis of the subject beyond the conditions of life itself. Literature is the con-
junction of a purely coercive aim with bizarre forms of jouissance for which the
vocabulary of coercion may finally be inadequate. The desiring subject is indispens-
able to a treatment of the subject of power. For it is in the moves of desire that power
slips; and those moves trace the sometimes catastrophic, sometimes beneficent
productivity of our displaced-or, even better, our deranged-being.

Leo Bersani's A Future for Astyanax will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of Diacritics: his
Baudelaireand Freudis to be published this fall. Mr.Bersaniis Chairmanof the FrenchDepart-
ment at the Universityof California,Berkeley.

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