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and suspiciously. (This is what Tim Dean took Slavoj Žižek to task for in
his article on “Art as Symptom.” And, from a different perspective, what
Bruno Latour calls the death of “the critical spirit” under the engine of
symptomatic reading.) The possibility that social critique does not always
or even necessarily spell social change haunts the edges of every humanist
project that imagines it is also doing political work.
So has a hermeneutics of suspicion failed in some fundamental
way, by producing blind spots of its own or by replacing iconoclasm with
more iconoclasm? Let us take for example the moral certitude that drives
corrective readings of phenomena such as Primitivism and Orientalism.
The relationship that Modernism bears to both discursive practices has
been much noted, especially in art historiography, and is almost exclu-
sively thought of as a form of theft on the part of Euro-American colonial-
ism in the name of empire or “love.” But appropriation as the sole mode
of understanding the relationship between the West and its racial others
has produced certain limitations. For instance, this kind of reading tends
to reproduce Modernism, Orientalism, and Primitivism as monolithic
structures even as it reifies the ideal of an authentic or genuine other on
the other side—what Edward Said so famously alluded to as the “brute
reality” of the East.
Today, we are justifiably wary of reifying definitions of culture
and certainly of essentialized notions of identity; yet at the same time,
corrective theories of creolization, métissage, and hybridity have often
ended up reinforcing the empirical, geographical, and biological fact of
boundaries and borders, recalling the imperatives they seek to undermine.
Suspended somewhere between fetish and fact, the objects of Orientalism
and Primitivism remain persistently ghostly.
This paradox also feeds into an impasse in liberal discourse
when it comes to the recuperative project of transforming objectified indi-
viduals into full, healthy subjects. The attribution of subversive parody,
for instance, to historically disenfranchised subjects is almost a reflexive
gesture these days, but as Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter and others
have pointed out, this move necessarily repeats, at times even reconsoli-
dating, the very stereotypes that it is meant to dispel in the first place. The
assignation of agency often comes at the price of neglecting the material
circumstances as well as the afterlife of power, and it just as often pre-
sumes authorial intention and its effects. Agency is thus this highly prized
yet severely undertheorized entity. Is there a third position besides that of
the victim or the parodic?
90 Psychoanalysis without Symptoms
The problem is that when we come to certain kinds of social subjects (raced
and gendered subjects, for instance), that separation between person and
thing is precisely what has been thrown into jeopardy. That is, it is the
fraught relay between persons seen as vehicles for certain drives and sat-
isfaction and persons seen as “inanimate and manipulable” objects that
presses us to really reconsider what I would call the politics of objecthood
that has so long been glossed by the politics of identity and subjecthood.
What is the relationship between these two levels of objecthood?
One apparent connection in the context of discrimination must be how the
physical objectification of another (making the other into an object in the
sense of material deprivation) facilitates and naturalizes the structural
positioning of that other as the object/recipient of one’s own desires or fears.
In short, the objectification of another human subject renders that subject
a supposedly natural object, subject to property regulation and other forms
of subjection. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman suggests that this
insight is in fact built into the property laws of slavery. She maps the peculiar
form of self-extension on the part of the slave master as an “extensive capac-
ity of property—that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his
embodiment in external objects and persons” (21). Under what conditions,
then, can we speak of the enslaved’s subjectivity and his/her own relation-
ship to objectness? More importantly, what are the means through which
self-extension (or agency) may be imagined for such individuals?
This problem of mediating the meanings of objecthood or
objectness haunts the history of psychoanalysis itself, where the relation-
ship between subjecthood and objecthood has always been ambivalent—
ironic, since psychoanalysis continues to provide one of the most sustained
d i f f e r e n c e s 95
[. . .] from out the slashed garments about [Christmas’s] hips and
loins the pent black Blood seemed to rush like a released breath.
It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks
from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to
rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not
to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid
d i f f e r e n c e s 99
My gratitude to Emily Apter, Elaine Freegood, and Sharon Marcus for their insights and for
bringing my thinking to this question of symptomatic reading through their conference “The
Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath” held at Columbia University
and New York University, May 1 and 2, 2008.
anne anlin cheng is Professor of English and at the Center for African American Stud-
ies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis,
Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press, 2001). She is currently working on
a study of Josephine Baker as a fulcrum through which to explore the relationship between
the modern ideal of the “denuded” surface and the staging of racialized skin at the turn of
the twentieth century.
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