ABSTRACT
In “Freeing Impersonality: The Objective Subject in Psychoanalysis and Sense & Sensibility,” Anna Kornbluh asks: “Who is speaking in a text?” This leads to the issue of free indirect discourse (FID), a literary question that is also a Lacanian question. The psychoanalytic concept localizing the subject as an effect in the field of the Other shares many features with the literary practice of FID. A Lacanian grammar will hystericize the listener/reader by merging subjective and objective, interior and exterior, character and narrator, reader and reason. Such a grammar is shared by inventors like Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Freud. Thus Austen’s first published novel was recomposed in the third person to support the innovation of FID, whereas it had been composed as an epistolary novel. Kornbluh attends to the many ways in which this novel theorizes the impersonal subject. Its formal principles involve the “objective” character of subjectivity, by which is meant the refractions of the Other that summons the self, the abstractions of perspective, the geometries of desire, the language that speaks, themes that psychoanalysis will formalize.
