Abstract
This paper investigates the potential of the concept of sublimation for thinking subjectivity at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory. I first rehearse a recent argument by Whitebook that Freud’s notion of sublimation presents a nonviolent integration and expansion of the ego, which can mediate the modern dichotomy between the rational subject and nonrational impulse and desire. On this view, sublimation turns subjectivity into a site of possibility in the context of modern, rationalized thought and society. I then argue that the concept of sublimation offered to critical theory in this form is insufficiently developed. Both Freud and Adorno analyze a deep-seated destructiveness of the modern subject, which turns up right at the heart of attempts to mediate the dichotomies of rationalized modernity. What is needed to counter this problem is a theory of love in which love is not separated from, but, rather, correlated with drive and desire, and can thereby get on a level with the unconscious or unacknowledged, impulsive nature of death-bearing subjectivity in enlightened modernity. A central conception in Kristeva’s development of Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of transference love, delivers such a theory and thereby develops the concept of sublimation in the way that is needed at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory.
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Notes
Whitebook’s essay “Weighty objects: On Adorno’s Kant–Freud interpretation” is a development of his earlier thought on sublimation in Perversion and utopia (1995).
Freud’s theory of the defusion of drives and the death drive’s convergence on the superego provides an economic account of the vicissitudes of drive within sublimation. This account is left unsupported by any explanation of the dynamic factors. It sounds implausible for this reason: the experiential ground for the marked emergence of the death drive is lacking. The lacuna is filled by Kristeva’s extensions of Freudian thought when she shows the correlation between primal loss and the upsurge of death drive at the outset of subject formation. Death drive is, first, a drive response to a fundamental loss of self, as happens where an autonomy achieved in mastery over nature is undone through the mediation of ego and the excised impulse. This mediation is what has defined sublimation thus far and, with Kristeva, one can see that it is the condition for a loss of self. Her correlation of loss and death drive is discussed at length in section 4.1 below.
See Julia Kristeva, Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (1982), Tales of love (1987), and Black sun: Depression and melancholia (1989). See also Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and modernity (2004) for a detailed treatment of Kristeva’s thought on narcissism.
See Kristeva 1982, chapter 1.
See the chapter “Ego Affectus Est: Bernard of Clairvaux, Affect, Desire, Love,” in Kristeva 1987.
Although it is more common to contrast the thought of Irigaray and Kristeva, particularly where the relation to Freud is in question, there is a point of commonality in their respective projects here. Irigaray, too, stresses the need of a movement of subjectivity that “remains in me,” which she calls “enstasy rather than ecstasy.” Irigaray distinguishes enstasy as the movement of I and other that nonetheless remains “in me... but [is] available for meeting with the other” from the movement of an ecstasy that goes beyond I and other, leaving the self for “an inaccessible absolutely other beyond sensibility, beyond the earth.” The enstasis is the condition for recognition of the other (2004, p. 9). In Tales of love Kristeva introduces an original exorbitance of the ego, a loving transference toward otherness, which forms what I am calling the instans and makes this dimension of the narcissistic structure of subjectivity elemental to the self in love. In Kristeva, one might say, the ecstasis of the alienated absolute is resorbed in the ego ideal, the instans, which then becomes the elemental component of and support for loving relationship.
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Beardsworth, S. From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis. Cont Philos Rev 40, 365–387 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-007-9068-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-007-9068-z