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E Tat Pre Sent Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms: French Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 3, 373 - 379 Doi:10.1093/fs/kni143
E Tat Pre Sent Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms: French Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 3, 373 - 379 Doi:10.1093/fs/kni143
3, 373 379
doi:10.1093/fs/kni143
ETAT PRESENT
HAUNTOLOGY, SPECTRES AND PHANTOMS
COLIN DAVIS
# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French
Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org
374
COLIN DAVIS
4
References are to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, LEcorce et le noyau (Paris, Flammarion, 1987;
rst published 1978). See also Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de lhomme aux loups (Paris,
Flammarion, 1976).
5
Fors: les mots angles de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, in Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le
verbier de lhomme aux loups, pp. 7 73.
6
For a review of work in this area, see Claude Nachin, Les Fantomes de lame: a` propos des heritages
psychiques (Paris, LHarmattan, 1993), pp. 175 202. See also Nachin, Le Deuil damour (Paris, Editions
universitaires, 1989); Didier Dumas, LAnge et le fantome: introduction a` la clinique de limpense genealogique
(Paris, Minuit, 1985); Serge Tisseron, Secrets de famille: mode demploi (Paris, Editions Ramsay, 1996);
Serge Tisseron et al., Le Psychisme a` lepreuve des generations: clinique du fantome (Paris, Dunod, 1995,
2000).
375
and popular culture. A notable success in this domain was scored by the
psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron in his book Tintin chez le psychanalyste
(1985). Analysing a sequence of Tintin albums in which Captain Haddock
is haunted by the ghost of an ancestor, Tisseron speculated about a
possible connection between the ghosts illegitimate origins and a drama
of legitimacy in the family history of Tintins creator Herge. Subsequent
biographical research undertaken after Herges death showed that Herges
father was indeed the illegitimate child of an unknown father; and in subsequent publications Tisseron took credit for deducing this secret purely
from the analysis of the ctional albums, even though he had in fact been
mistaken in suggesting that the illegitimacy was most probably on
Herges mothers side of the family.
Literary critical work drawing on the thought of Abraham and Torok
most frequently revolves around the problem of secrets, even if it
generally neither achieves nor seeks the biographical conrmation found
by Tisseron. The work of Nicholas Rand, especially his book Le Cryptage
et la vie des uvres (1989), deserves particular mention here. Rand was instrumental in demonstrating the relevance of Abraham and Torok for literary
criticism, and he also helped extend their work through his later direct collaborations with Maria Torok.8 The other major study that should be
mentioned in this context is Esther Rashkins Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (1992). This book offers what is still the best short
account of Abraham and Toroks concept of the phantom and an attempt
to develop a critical approach on the basis of it through readings of
Conrad, Villiers de lIsle Adam, Balzac, James and Poe. Rashkin is keen
not to set up a prescriptive model for interpretation, but to attend to the
specicity of each individual text. The works she studies are in distress,
harbouring secrets of which they are unaware, but which the reader or
critic may be able to elicit. Her readings track down secrets and bring
them to light. In her chapter on Balzacs Facino Cane, for example, she
endeavours to make intelligible Canes perplexing obsession with gold
(Family Secrets, p. 82). She nds a possible solution in what she suggests
is the secret drama of his Jewish origins, and this in turn is reected in
the narrators unconscious desire to know the story of his own origins.
7
For criticism drawing on the work of Abraham and Torok, see, for example, Esther Rashkin, Family
Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton University Press, 1992); Nicholas Rand, Invention
poetique et psychanalyse du secret dans Le Fantome dHamlet de Nicolas Abraham, in Le Psychisme
a` lepreuve des generations, pp. 79 96; Nicholas Rand, Le Cryptage et la vie des uvres: etude du secret dans les
textes de Flaubert, Stendhal, Benjamin, Stefan George, Edgar Poe, Francis Ponge, Heidegger et Freud (Paris,
Aubier, 1989); Serge Tisseron, Tintin chez le psychanalyste: essai sur la creation graphique et la mise en sce`ne
de ses enjeux dans luvre dHerge (Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1985), and Tintin et le secret dHerge
(Paris, Hors Collection Presses de la Cite, 1993); Colin Davis, Charlotte Delbos Ghosts, FS, LIX
(2005), 9 15.
8
See in particular Maria Torok and Nicholas Rand, Questions a` Freud: du devenir de la psychanalyse (Paris,
Les Belles Lettres, 1995).
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