To Forget Everything: On the Possibility of Psychoanalysis in Literary Studies

Dawid MATUSZEK

Zakład Poetyki Historycznej i Sztuki Interpretacji, Instytut Nauk o Literaturze Polskiej im. Ireneusza Opackiego, Wydział Filologiczny, Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach, pl. Sejmu Śląskiego 1, 40-032 Katowice , Poland

Abstract

The article comprises the author’s original methodological proposal inspired by the psychoanalytic discourse, exemplified, essentially, in the writings of Freud and Lacan. The author constructs his theory of reading around the figure of forgetting and holds that an act of reading must involve forgetting (e.g. forgetting institutional knowledge, the techné, and the duties towards interpretational communities). The claim that it is the process of continuous forgetting that constitutes the ‘motor’ of reading may, on the one hand, be considered as a revolutionary transgression of the fossilized academic discourse, but on the other hand it risks an inevitable conservation of this discourse. The stake is the status of the psychoanalytical theory. The author argues that the only revolutionary violation psychoanalysis may provoke is limited to the fields of literary studies and creative reading. On the other hand, the only relatively sovereign subject psychoanalysis might constitute is that of a mature reader who by passing to the act (passage a l’acte ) of reading revolutionizes her object, as well as the Other, from the inside of the academic discourse.

Translated by Dorota Chabrajska

Keywords:

psychoanalysis, literary theory, reading, subject, memory, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Henryk Sienkiewicz