Intertexts

Review of Masocriticism, Paul Mann, Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Jose Santos Although even to the author Masocriticism looks like asmorgasbord of dis¬ parate articles having very little in common with each other, many having been published separately in different journals as far back as 1994, Mann assures us in his introduction that there is acommon thread to them all. This is somewhat debatable, the total lack of transition between chapters having a lot to do with this impression of disjunction. The first chapter, “The Afterlife of the Avant-Garde,” introduces itself like athought on—shall we say adeconstruction of—literary criticism’s assumptions. Mann, stating that all he has to offer his readers are “suspi¬ cions, fears, urges, superstitions, etc.” (1), draws the limits of interpretation. After this somewhat disturbing confession of weakness from the critic him¬ self, acondition that he believes is not his alone, Mann goes back to the topic of his chapter, namely the afterlife or, as he puts it, the death, of the European Avant-Garde, from 1871 to 1968. First blaming the Avant-Garde for its own demise through its overt sense of representation (“it talked, wrote, painted itself to death” [4]), Marm reassesses this somewhat narrow point of view by going on to explain how the European capitalist economy recuperates everything it produces, including its own opposition. He then pursues to invoke three major intel¬ lectual figures: Sade, Freud and Bataille. Once again, though, by acknowl¬ edging the weakness of his thought in that regard he precludes any criticism on the part of the reader that these thinkers have been used and abused in the critical discourse of the last three decades. Sade serves the author’s argu¬ ment in that he pushed language to its limit, silence. Freud’s compulsion of repetition confirms the author’s belief that everything is linked to the death principle. And finally, Bataille’s economical view of wasteful expenditure seems to tie together Mann’s fundamental belief that every cultural produc¬ tion, starting with writing, is doomed to complete nothingness. Chapter 2, “Masocriticism,” is divided in four parts and thirty-three points, varying in length from asentence (Number 33: “Everything is true, nothing is permitted”) to apage-and-a half-long paragraph. Mann’s sapping process of literary criticism is perhaps nowhere more glaring than in this eponymic chapter. For example, in section 6, the author raises the question of choice. Why do we choose to write on aparticular writer, and what makes us choose aspecific criticism (freudian, marxist, lacanian) to interpret his/her texts? In section 26, Mann gives abetter sense of what he means by “masocrit¬ i c i s m ” : Intertexts, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2002 “If criticism is masochistic, masocriticism as such only appears at the moment of its failure, when theory is forced to relinquish its most funda¬ mental project: the assimilation of the other into its own proper homology: the very imperialism of the will to truth” (41). The third chapter, “The Exquisite Corpse of Georges Bataille,” starts with aquote from Marguerite Duras saying in her usual peremptory style that people keep entertaining the illusion that, some day, they will be able to talk about Bataille. Although acknowledging that such astatement could be made of more or less any major writer, Mann contends that there is indeed something special about Bataille’s thought in that it resists any attempt at interpretation by the mere feet that he “attacks his own meanings and then attacks its inability to void them” (52). After revie-wing Bataille’s most important concepts of expenditure and transgression, Mann states that these notions amoimt to “nothing” because they exhaust their own meaning as they are developed. The author offers an example, not only of Bataille’s killing of his own theory but also of any delusional attempt from criticism to interpret his philosophy, the femous special issue on the philosopher published by the Yale French Studies 1990. Although careful not to hurt the contributors’ sensitivity by adding that his own interpretation of Bataille would fell to the same degree, Mann claimsthatthephilosopher’sconceptsarealwaysrecuperatedbycriticaldis¬ c o u r s e . a s m Inchapter4,“Nietzsche,theTragic-Real,andtheExquisiteCorpseof...