ABSTRACT
Photography, according to Walter Benjamin’s frequently cited homology, first revealed the existence of an optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis revealed the instinctual unconscious. After Althusser and the critical turn towards psychoanalysis in the 1970s, Benjamin’s comparison between the technology of modernity and Freud’s science of human desire was subtly re-figured: the unconscious, famously, became political (as, for example, in Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, 1981). And while many continued to insist that if in the political unconscious men and women and their circumstances appeared, perhaps not quite upside down in the camera obscura of false consciousness, then certainly beside themselves, this arose as much from historical life process as from the splitting of the ego, for others the future for literary and cultural theory lay with a psychoanalysis newly equipped to take on both desire and history. In the current critical climate, however, there is a growing suspicion that in its rapid ascent within humanities studies psychoanalysis might be forgetting itself: forgetting its own history, forgetting that it is a part of what it claims to speak about, forgetting, indeed, that there can be no psychoanalysis without the transference. The two October books reviewed here offer different defences against what could be called psychoanalysis’s own historical amnesia: Rosalind E.Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious which takes us back to Benjamin’s homology in order to propose not only a new version of modernist art, but also a way of doing an art history that has learnt its lessons from psychoanalysis; and Joan Copjec’s more avowedly polemic Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists which takes to task those who would charge psychoanalysis with an uncritical ahistoricism.
