ABSTRACT

The concept of “interpassivity” applies to the process of composition, because in order for a writer to establish his or her authority, that writer articulates himself or herself by means of a textual other. Viewed conventionally, the transaction establishes the writer as active and the text as passive, as an object through which the author speaks. Viewed psychoanalytically, however, the transaction elucidates the paradox of subjectivity formation: because the textual other constitutes its subject author, that author becomes passive. Even more problematically, though the text retains stature and presence in the realm of the symbolic, it consists of silent language and remains void of living vocality; it too is passive. The text operates in the same fetishistic fashion as the object voice, in the sense that it leaves something to be desired and paradoxically forecloses on its writer’s claim to authority. Writers struggle to compose themselves, to make themselves present in their own iterations, yet their desires remain unfulfilled. Before we say that all writers suffer from extraordinary psychic clamor, however, we should remind ourselves that “interpassivity” is not an “excessive phenomenon which occurs only in extreme ‘pathological’ situations,” but the “feature which defines the most elementary level, the necessary minimum of subjectivity.”1 This proposition suggests that Shelley shared the same fantasy with all writers and that composition itself replays the necessary horror of castration, for without it there would be no poets, as without castration there would be no subjects.