Like Klein’s texts, Freud’s texts are also stylistic exemplifications of the theories they propose. I will turn to Freud in Chapter 10. Freud does his thinking through his language, particularly through his metaphors and in the way he structures the responses of his readers to his texts. I will show how metaphor is key to an unlikely historicism in Freud’s view of the unconscious that is neither biologistic nor archetypal but concrete and material, and focused on the history of Europe as it emerges from the Middle Ages into modernity. This chapter will also include an examination of the relation between Marx and Freud, and an assessment of the economics of John Maynard Keynes in relation to psychoanalysis.

Coda: The Challenge of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

The revisions in my own life have circled around a single theme that requires another of our contemporary genres to describe, the genre that used to be called autobiography that is today called life-writing. Autobiography as a mode suggests that the subject whose life is narrated remains in place. Life-writing, by contrast, suggests that the subject is not only always in process, but that that process is very overtly one of revision and self-revision. In my case, my life has been, for the same period of time that has seen the rise of theory, a revision of something that resists being revised: a form of illness. This is the subject of my Coda, an account of temporal lobe epilepsy—a disability, yet another topic of contemporary inquiry. I describe it not only in language, but as language, and in two ways: as the language of the nervous system, and as the language of a patient trying to describe it to deaf ears. It has dogged my experience like a companion who is no friend. This narrative concludes this book by foregrounding both the reality of revision as the inevitable condition in which one lives, even in extremis, and the peace, however tentative and absurd, that one achieves by means of writing. By making illness an archive, one buries it while it is still alive.