Rejoinder to Walter Benn Michaels

Author(s): Leo Bersani

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 158-164
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Critical Response
II

Rejoinder to Walter Benn Michaels

Leo Bersani

Walter Michaels' remarks on my reading, in A Future for Astyanax, of

Balzac's La Peau de chagrin provide me with a welcome opportunity to
clarify my argument.' In the course of his strikingly original essay, "Sister
Carrie'sPopular Economy"(CriticalInquiry 7 [Winter 1980]: 373-90), Mi-
chaels argues very persuasively that "SisterCarrie is not anticapitalist at
all and is, in fact, structured by an economy in which excess is seen to
generate the power of both capitalism and the novel" (p. 390). Michaels
finds the opposite point of view in Astyanax:he understands me as "ap-
proving" desire and, unlike Dreiser, regarding it as "anticapitalist." Ap-
parently, I insist "on the opposition between desire and what [I perceive]
as the capitalist economy of realism" (p. 386).
The page in A Future for Astyanax to which Michaels refers is, I'm
afraid, not unambiguous. I do, however, say, in connection with the
orgiastic banquet given by the former banker Taillefer early in La Peau
de chagrin, "All sorts of 'debauched spending' are inherent in a capitalistic
economy. It is an economy dependent on speculation and the accumu-
lation of debts." I quote Raphael de Valentin's remark that "all excesses
are alike," and it was at least my intention to emphasize Balzac's percep-
tion of capitalism as, in Michaels' words, "an economy of powerful ex-
cess," as well as his shrewd sense of all desire as a kind of speculative
excess.
Michaels himself quotes from the above passage in Astyanax; how,
then, does he come to feel that I wish to oppose desire and capitalism?
The question is all the more interesting in that Michaels does not, I
believe, misread me. And I suggest that the confusion may have to do
1. See my A Future for Astyanax (Boston, 1976).
?1981 by The University of Chicago, 0093-1896/81/0801-0011$01.00. All rights reserved.

158

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1981 159

with my own failure to misread Balzac. La Peau de chagrin crudely alle-

gorizes Balzac's fascination with the excess intrinsic to desire and his
terror of that excess. In desire, excess peculiarly inhabits a lack; desire
is an "empty" appropriation of absent satisfactions. Its fundamental proj-
ect is perhaps to explode the boundaries between the self and the world.
What Michaels acutely calls "a principle of discrepancy, an imbalance
built into the very possibility of" defining money ("if money . . . is the
desire for money, then money can never quite be itself"), is crucial to
the ontology of desire (p. 375). Desire transforms objects into a longing
for them, into fantasy objects; in desire, objectsconstitutethe subject. The
pleasure of desire is not the pleasure of possession or fulfilment but
rather the pleasure of the exploded boundary, of the self overloaded or
shattered by the internalizing, in desiring fantasy, of its effects on the
world. If, as Michaels writes, "desire ... is most powerful when it out-
strips its object," this is not merely because of an antagonism between
desire and satisfaction (p. 383). Rather, desire "outstrips its object" by
internalizingit; the excess of desire is a function of its fantasmatic nature.
Following a line of thought proposed by Jean Laplanche, I have
recently been arguing that the "imbalance" just referred to shatters the
subject into sexuality. The latter does not describe merely one category
of desire; desire, rather, produces sexuality. "It may well be," Freud
wrote in Three Essays on the Theoryof Sexuality, "that nothing of consid-
erable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some
component to the excitation of the sexual instinct." It is as if beyond a
certain threshold of intensity, consciousness can no longer "bind" its
contents, and unbound, mobile, fragmented thoughts and images erot-
icize consciousness.
In a sense, the Balzacian fantasy of the castrating effect of desire
is ontologically accurate: consciousness is "cut off" from the security of
a stable, unified self by the fragmenting excitement of desire. In Freud,
the Oedipal fear of castration as punishment for a specific type of sexual
desire is merely a sublimated version of a more fundamental character-
istic of all desire. (Indeed, the Oedipal myth in Freud should perhaps
be read as a part of a disguise of the nature of sexuality through a
quadruple strategy: that myth narrativizes, historicizes, socializes, and
moralizes the constitution or genesis of sexuality.) If Balzac's naive melo-
drama is closer to the ontological point, the mystique of chastity in his
work is a logical defense against the orgiastic excess inherent in desire.
Feodora's sexual coldness is a way of forestalling all excesses-that is, of

Leo Bersani, professor and chairman of the department of French

at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of A Future for
Astyanax, Baudelaire and Freud, and the forthcoming work, The Death of
Sttphane Mallarm6.

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160 Critical Response Leo Bersani

forestalling a sexualizing invasion of the self by the fantasmatic objects

of desire.
Feodora, however, is ambiguous in La Peau de chagrin. Michaels
quotes me as asserting that "the most successful profiteer" is the "hoard-
er,"whose "nondesiring egotism profits from the speculative investments
of others" (p. 386). But the hoarder referred to in this passage is spe-
cifically identified as Feodora, and it is true that in this novel Feodora's
ability to kill desire brings her social, financial, and sexual success. But
to the extent that she embodies an extreme line of defense against desire's
economy of excess, she is of course unrepresentative of social and psy-
chological economies characterized throughout the novel by extravagant
spending. There is, however, what might be called a certain gliding in
her novelistic function. Balzac rather enigmatically ends the novel with
the pronouncement that Feodora "is everywhere, she is, if you like,
Society." It would be more accurate to say that her resolute retentiveness
is a reaction to the catastrophically disintegrating effects (in the self and
in society) which are for Balzac the effects of energetic desire.
It was surely misleading of me to suggest that "the real fate of
speculative desire in capitalistic society" is always disastrously risky in-
vestments (p. 386), for it is apparently on the basis of this suggestion
that Michaels moves to the conclusion that I oppose speculative desire
to the economy most natural to capitalism. On the contrary: I do not see
the speculator as a threat to the capitalist economy, but it is obvious that
the capitalist economy of excess does threaten to destroy individual spec-
ulators. It is, I think, Balzac's terror of this threat (which he himself had
experienced in his risky business speculations) which leads to the gliding
referred to above. Feodora, who in fact represents a refusal of Balzacian
society, is surreptitiously displaced into the position of becoming its rep-
resentative. So that the capitalist economy is, in Balzac's fantasmatic
tactic, at once an economy of excess and an economy of nondesiring
hoarders.
This move is not unlike that of Freud's in the crucial seventh chapter
of The Interpretationof Dreams. There the displacements and condensa-
tions characteristic of the primary process are simultaneously presented
as intrinsic to unconscious desires and intrinsic to the censoring dream-
work, which would merely be using displacement and condensation as
a strategy to disguise what Freud calls the "perfectly rational" dream
thoughts and therefore to allow them to slip "unnoticed" into a dream.
In both Balzac and Freud, a profound insight about a certain economy
of excess (in the individual unconscious and in a capitalist society) is at
once affirmed and repudiated. There is no dialectical relation between
what is affirmed and what repudiates it; one position, so to speak, merely
collides with the other. In Freud, desire's particular economy of excess
is devalued when it becomes a mere defense tactic against an unconscious
economy already tamed as a result of this move. In Balzac, Raphael's

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1981 161

panicky self-castration becomes "unnecessary" if Feodora "is Society."For

she moves from being his double to being an eerily reassuring symbol
of a social entity from which (self-)spending has been evacuated. Su-
perficially, it would seem even more dangerous than before to allow
oneself to desire and to spend if only the hoarder succeeds. More pro-
foundly, the possibility of Feodora as Society novelistically realizes a fan-
tasy of nonsexualizingdesire-that is, of desire's power separated and cut
off from its explosive nature. In this final version of castration in La
Peau de chagrin, castrated desire is the precondition of desire's power.
Toward the end of his essay, Michaels begins a very intriguing ar-
gument. The "deconstructed self" alluded to in the second half of A
Future for Astyanax does not, he writes, herald "the death of a certain
bourgeois mystification" but rather repeats "an account of self ... already
implicit in the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo" (p. 388).
However, an up-to-date version of nineteenth-century gentility appar-
ently prevents me (and others) from seeing the similarity between the
excesses of desire we praise in literature and capitalism's economy of
excess. And we save ourselves from the scandalous power of desire by
imprisoning it within the "irony intrinsic to literature." "Literature," I
wrote in an essay on Foucault from which Michaels quotes, is "an exercise
of power which self-destructively points to the impossibility of its claim
to power-generating knowledge."2 Thus I indulge, one would suppose,
in a politically and socially vacuous defense of desire--of desire already
made impotent, deprived of the power of excess, by the inherently ironic
nature of the literary mode in which I celebrate its performance. The
ironic reveals its links to the genteel "in their common contempt for and
fear of the principles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism.
One might even go so far as to argue," Michaels concludes, "that the
besetting problem of modern American critical thought has been its
inability to imagine an opposition to capitalism free of both gentility and
irony" (p. 390).
This is extremely stimulating, and it is a challenge to which I can
of course only begin to respond here. First, while Michaels' quote of my
remark concerning the "irony intrinsic to literature" leads to a good
polemical point, I persist in feeling that it is hardly the sign of what he
calls a "relentless high-mindedness of a certain strain of American crit-
icism" (p. 390) to maintain that there is a crucial difference between
capitalistic excess in the strictly verbal economy of literature and capi-
talistic excess on, say, the world oil market. The irony of the literary text
to which I refer is nothing more than an awareness of that difference
inscribed in the text. Literature's involvement with political and economic
structures of coercion is "skeptical" not because it is scandalized by power
and excess but, on the contrary, because literature can exist only in the

2. See my "The Subject of Power," Diacritics 7 (Fall 1977).

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162 Critical Response Leo Bersani

economy of desire's excess, desires not deflected and ultimately defeated

by the power of effective physical realizations. It is precisely desire's
omnipotence in literature which makes the literary work irreducibly alien
to the weakening brutalities of physical coercion.
These are rather obvious differences (and one need not be hope-
lessly genteel to perceive them), although some French and French-
inspired critics have managed to make the mechanics of literature's pow-
erlessness-and of its ceaselessly ironic removals from its own state-
ments-seem formidably complicated. In any case, given another ten-
dency, this time in a criticism inspired by an Anglo-American brand of
liberal humanism, to confuse literary and nonliterary exercises of
power-it continues to be necessary, as I think Michaels recognizes, to
insist that the emptily limitless power of language severely restricts the
authority of the writing and reading of literary texts.
I do not, however, think, as Michaels perhaps suggests I do, that
the fundamental irony of literature about its own power way con-
stitutes "an opposition to capitalism." If, on the other hand, in--anywe
recog-
nize-as Michaels aptly insists that we should-the analogies between
the economies of excess in desire and in capitalism, then we must of
course also recognize that any defense of what I called in A Future for
Astyanax the desiring mobility of the "deconstructed self" may also be
a defense of the speculative excesses intrinsic to capitalism. I did not
treat these analogies in Astyanax, except very summarily in the couple
of pages on Balzac. My point about realism in that book was that realistic
fiction tended to provide nineteenth-century society with a reassuring
myth about psychic order and intelligibility. That is, for all the sharp
criticisms of industrial capitalism in the realistic novel, I suggested that
the latter "gives us an image of social fragmentation contained within
the order of significant form-and it thereby suggests that the chaotic
fragments are somehow socially viable and morally redeemable.... The
ordered significances of realistic fiction are presented as immanent to
society, whereas in fact they are the mythical denial of that society's
fragmented nature."
My project in Astyanaxwas to examine some "nondestructive versions
of fragmented desires." Michaels has helped me to see a certain glibness
in this project-a glibness which I would now define as a failure to be
sufficiently explicit about similarities between capitalistic fragmentari-
ness and fragmented desires, say, in Rimbaud, Robert Wilson, and His-
toire d'O. I certainly did not argue for an opposition between these two
general economies, but I did not adequately confront the problem of
passing from what might be called an ontological complicityof desire with
a capitalisticeconomyof excess to the possibilityof strategic and subversivedif-
ferentiation within that complicity.We cannot be "outside" a capitalist econ-
omy of desire-and it would certainly be naive to think that we can. But
within that economy there are moves which I have recently come to

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1981 163

think of as nonmimetic (and therefore distancing) saturations or pro-

ductively mistaken replications.
These are difficult, perhaps even impossible, notions. Ulysse Dutoit
and I have, nonetheless, recently attempted to suggest their viability in
our essays on the representation of historical violence in neo-Assyrian
palace reliefs and on Pier Paolo Pasolini's subversively faithful relation
to Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in the film Sal.3 What we
seem to be moving toward in these pieces is, it's true, a certain "revin-
dication" of the aesthetic-not, however, because of art's "skeptical re-
lation" to political and economic structures of coercion or because of
art's sophisticated irony, as Michaels puts it, "toward the claims made on
behalf of their own validity by morality, society, and even interpretation"
(p. 390). Rather, the "aesthetic gestures" which interest us result from
a certain appetite for formal representations, an appetite whose mobility
and excessiveness might forestall the destructively dissipating realiza-
tions of desire by which, for example, a capitalist economy turns against
and colonizes its own movements of speculative excess. From this per-
spective, the aesthetic would not constitute what has traditionally been
understood as political opposition to oppressive structures of power.
Rather, it would be, in Foucaultian terms, one of those resistances to
power created by all moves of power. More specifically, it would be a
resistance in the mode of an accelerated participation, and the function
of this acceleration would be to de-form projects of power before they
reach that point of stabilization at which they effectively block otherform-
giving projects or impulses. Finished works of art can only refer very
obliquely to what I am calling the aesthetic here. For the latter simul-
taneously proposes and repudiates form; it is an enigmatic equivalence
between formal elaborations and a continuous slippage of both sense
and desiring intentionality away from any locatable forms.
This is of course very sketchy and very tentative. The precondition
for a more specific and more satisfactory working out of the historical
uses to which an aesthetic of mobility might lend itself is probably a more
rigorous analysis of what I referred to earlier as the sexualizing effect
of desire's economy of excess. Perhaps only a Freudian critique can both
demystify the glamor of desire and of excess by exposing the teleology
of masochism, even of suicide, inherent in that sexual economy and also
propose how sexuality may be freed from death--or, more exactly, how
the climactic self-explosiveness inherent in desire can be averted by a
kind of denarrativizing of desire's self-destructing movements. A new
theory of sublimation might point to the possibilities for deflecting the
deadly seriousness of desire within the play of a symbolizing conscious-
ness.

3. See Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, "The Forms of Violence," October8 (Spring 1979),
and "Merde alors," October13 (Summer 1980).

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164 Critical Response Leo Bersani

This is a big program, but to think about it might, at the very least,
divert us from what has become the dead end of an overly Gallicized
academy's mechanical "deconstructions" (and wasting) of all texts. At
best, to address some of the issues which Michaels has helped me to
outline here, issues engaged in a very original way by his essay, might
help to defetishize the literary text and to replace ourselves, or finally
to place ourselves, at the exciting points of contact between the body and
representations or between desire and history.

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