ABSTRACT
Modernist genealogies run in uneasy parallel with the history of psychoanalysis and feminism. Compare Lionel Trilling’s argument with readings of the relation between modernism and psychoanalysis, and this affirmation of the self perhaps begins to look like a too hastily claimed victory for humanist criticism in a quarrel which is by no means over. Psychoanalysis runs the risk of becoming the unhistoricized ghost at the banquet–responsible for pointing out, for example, how Anglo-American modernism, in spite of itself, is more avant-garde than it will dare admit, or has had the insight to recognize. For Trilling the death drive is a redemptive thesis which, because it affirms ‘a biological sense of self, leaves a triumphant ‘residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control’. Culture may be thought of as a Kismet–we flee from Bokhara to escape its decrees, only to fulfill them in Samarra’.
