Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia

Schwenger, Peter

doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100047

“…Interiority and exteriority are constituted not as opposites but as intimately and problematically linked." 28 All this desperate psychic manipulation leads inevitably to a loss of energy in the ego, an abaissement. As Klein notes, "if this projective process is carried out excessively, good parts of the personality are felt to be lost to the self.…”

Section: Judgment Nightmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle

Mayo¹

2019

James Joyce Quarterly

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "The Dead" begins with someone else's story. 1 Lily, the maid, is not only "literally run off her feet," but, as every Joyce student knows, somehow her "literally" has slipped past more exacting, educated censors, subtly putting her own harried, overworked, ungrammatical self front and center (D 175). Hugh Kenner's "Uncle Charles Principle" suggests that Joyce's rhetoric is something machinic, "in such delicate equilibrium, like the components of a sensitive piece of apparatus, that they detect the gravitational field of the nearest person." 2 Thus, just as Simon and his moocow give way to another, larger story, so does Lily's agitated introduction in "The Dead" merge into another voice, under the "gravitational field" of another presence, this one less harried, more chatty, partial not to Lily but to the employers running her ragged. As Margot Norris points out, this voice has turned into a cool warning targeted back at Lily herself: "But the only thing [the sisters] would not stand was back answers" (D 176). 3 One of the most familiar elements of Joyce studies, Kenner's Principle offers a means of describing this dynamic in Joyce's prose; it is what he calls "great economy" and an "iridescent" way to delineate character (15). If "The Dead" engages great pain, beauty, conflict, and critique, all under the aspect of empirical, secure, late-Victorian narration, then the critical instigator of this double structuring, of this hiding in plain sight, is the Uncle Charles Principle. Through a series of new close readings, and then an analysis of these readings alongside Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theory of projective identification, 4 we can see how the Principle moves far beyond the aesthetic realm, grounding terms such as "equilibrium" and "sensitive piece of apparatus" into the rhetorical and political negotiations of the text at hand-negotiations Joyce forces us to participate in, whether we like it or not.

show abstract

“…Klein was fascinated by the precise terms on which children acted out and narrated their play, which she believed sought relief from the unconscious anxieties of that inner object-world (Kristeva, 2001(Kristeva, [2000). Her focus on the lifelong recurrence of infantile anxieties led her to prioritize the creative and terrifying place of mothers in psychical development, making major waves in a field preoccupied with fathers as a locus of psychical repression (Chodorow, 1989;Kristeva, 2001;Rose, 1993;Sa´nchez-Pardo, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A wizard of disquietude in our midst: Melanie Klein and the critical geographies of manic reparation

Seitz

¹

2023

Environ Plan D

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article invites critical geographers to reconsider the conceptual offerings of Austrian-British object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), whose metapsychology has had a significant but largely unacknowledged contemporary influence on the field via theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lauren Berlant. Excavating the Kleinian genealogies of Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading” and Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” I argue that geographers engaged with these ideas would benefit from a more sustained consideration of Klein’s influence on them. I then point to the potential utility for critical geographers of just one of many Kleinian concepts that has largely remained off the map of recent debates: ”manic reparation,” sometimes referred to as mock reparation or manic denial, which defends against the anxiety of wanting to repair a damaged object of attachment. Sketching possibilities for how this concept could productively illuminate concerns near and dear to critical geographers—such as the political ecologies of climate change, critiques of neoliberal multiculturalisms, debates over urban development, and abolition geographies—I argue that Klein’s idiosyncratic, though at times problematic and counterintuitive, body of work offers critical geographers an insightful, expansive, and underutilized conceptual vocabulary for examining the affective dimensions of a wide range of political formations.

show abstract

Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle

2020

James Joyce and the Jesuits

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "The Dead" begins with someone else's story. 1 Lily, the maid, is not only "literally run off her feet," but, as every Joyce student knows, somehow her "literally" has slipped past more exacting, educated censors, subtly putting her own harried, overworked, ungrammatical self front and center (D 175). Hugh Kenner's "Uncle Charles Principle" suggests that Joyce's rhetoric is something machinic, "in such delicate equilibrium, like the components of a sensitive piece of apparatus, that they detect the gravitational field of the nearest person." 2 Thus, just as Simon and his moocow give way to another, larger story, so does Lily's agitated introduction in "The Dead" merge into another voice, under the "gravitational field" of another presence, this one less harried, more chatty, partial not to Lily but to the employers running her ragged. As Margot Norris points out, this voice has turned into a cool warning targeted back at Lily herself: "But the only thing [the sisters] would not stand was back answers" (D 176). 3 One of the most familiar elements of Joyce studies, Kenner's Principle offers a means of describing this dynamic in Joyce's prose; it is what he calls "great economy" and an "iridescent" way to delineate character (15). If "The Dead" engages great pain, beauty, conflict, and critique, all under the aspect of empirical, secure, late-Victorian narration, then the critical instigator of this double structuring, of this hiding in plain sight, is the Uncle Charles Principle. Through a series of new close readings, and then an analysis of these readings alongside Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theory of projective identification, 4 we can see how the Principle moves far beyond the aesthetic realm, grounding terms such as "equilibrium" and "sensitive piece of apparatus" into the rhetorical and political negotiations of the text at hand-negotiations Joyce forces us to participate in, whether we like it or not.

show abstract

Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle

Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle

A wizard of disquietude in our midst: Melanie Klein and the critical geographies of manic reparation

Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About