Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of
Abductions
by
Extraterrestrials.
Extraterrestrials.
Paul-de-Man-Material-Events
.
About a week after this unsuccessful attempt she was able to relate the dream, which had recurred several more times.
Its content derived from a powerful transference.
The patient dreamed that I was approaching her, and the dream ended every time by her waking in fright.
After other transference symp- toms had made a detailed analysis of this incident necessary, the reason for conceal- ing the dream had disappeared.
I should like to mention briefly the motives which lead patients to attach such importance to an immediate writing-down of their dreams.
It is in many cases a transference-phenomenon.
The patient who brings to the analytical hour notes of a dream unconsciously desires to show the physician that the dream particularly relates to him.
In some cases a dream set down in writ- ing and handed to the analyst is in effect a gift to him" (34-35).
2. "For 14 years Ju? rgenson let it be thought that the startling voice of his mother on the bird-call recording was an unexpected event. He now admits that he had been experimenting for several months before with the aim of receiving 'some- thing' on electro-magnetic tape" (Stemman 94).
3. Under the subsection titled "First Contacts" in Breakthrough, Raudive summarizes their relationship: "Towards the end of 1964 a book appeared in Stockholm under the title Ro? sterna fra? n Rymden (Voices from Space). The author's name was Friedrich Ju? rgenson.
"All my life I have been preoccupied with parapsychological problems, especial- ly with those concerning death and life after death. These problems play a part in all my books and particularly in Der Chaosmensch und seine U? berwindung (Chaosman and His Conquest). . . . After the war I lived in Sweden and I am close- ly connected with those interested in parapsychological research in that country. Ju? rgenson's name struck me as that of an outsider.
"Reading Ju? rgenson's book carefully several times gave me a very definite im- pression of the author as a highly sensitive and susceptible man. Many of his ideas seemed to me to have been formed by a vivid imagination; the kind that could con- jure up pictures in an empty room or voices out of the stillness. Later in his book, however, he came to develop a fascinating theme: he maintained that with the help of tape-recorder, microphone and radio he was able to hear voices on tape which he called 'voices from space'; that these voices did not belong to any other 'physical' world, but to a world in contrast to ours, a spiritual world; that the voices were those of the dead. Ju? rgenson gives a detailed account of this in a book called Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen (Radio-Link with the Dead), 1967. He heard not only the voices of near relatives or friends, but also those of historical personages of the recent past, such as Hitler, Go? ring, Felix Kersten, the Yoga-author Boris Sacharow, the controversial Chessman etc. . . .
"I felt an immediate sympathy towards Friedrich Ju? rgenson: all that he told me had a ring of sincerity and deep emotional involvement. . . .
"Renewed contact with Ju? rgenson and deeper insight into his personality and his life's history confirmed my view that this man was utterly sincere; that he was completely immersed in the mystery of this phenomenon and firmly convinced that he was dealing with a world beyond--a world into which we merge after death and where we continue our activities in a transcendental existence. Faith and intuition
can never harm a cause; for my part, I endeavoured to understand the phenomenon in its factual sense" (13-15).
4. In one of the books he was moved to write to popularize Raudive's research, Bander wonders "whether it will be possible in the near future to 'dial M for Mother'" (63). But even if Bander doesn't, we can put on Freudian ears and hear the murder with which mother gets associated.
5. Jung's resistance targets psychoanalysis and media technology. In his analy- sis of an actress's UFO dream--the dream thus "comes from California, the classic Saucer country, so to speak"--Jung overlooks the endopsychic perceptiveness of the dreamer, and symptomatically confuses auto-analytic breakthrough with psy- chotic breakdown. In the dream the UFO, which the dreamer first takes to be real, is identified as a trick: "'I looked up behind me and saw someone with a movie pro- jector. '" Jung informs us right away, before commencing commentary, that the "dreamer, a young film actress, was undergoing psychological treatment for a marked dissociation of personality with all the accompanying symptoms. " The commentary, a comment on Jung's disappointment in the actress, is the only one in Jung's collection that does not take the UFO into any account: "The dream insists on the projection character of the UFO. . . . It is not easy to see why the dream brings in the UFO at all, only to dispose of it in this disappointing way. . . . Any in- sight into the nature of the UFO phenomenon is not to be expected from this dream" (Flying Saucers 66-69).
6. Raudive's study, Breakthrough, appeared first in 1968 in German under the title Unho? rbares wird ho? rbar (The inaudible becomes audible). "The publication of the book caused a near riot in parapsychology. The basic attitude was reactionary. Several parapsychologists argued that Raudive was merely picking up radio inter- ference. Others denied that 'taped voices' could even exist and complained that Raudive was projecting his own ideas as to what the random sound on the tapes meant. These arguments are hackneyed and easily refuted. While it must be admit- ted that the voices are often unintelligible, very often they will call Raudive's name quite clearly. When I listened to examples of Raudive's tapes, in a few instances very clear voices were heard, even overlapping with his. It is inconceivable that radio pickups could consistently call Raudive's name or that radio pickups would consistently be picked up on Raudive's tapes, not only in Germany but in England as well" (Rogo 80).
7. Raudive explains: "The sentence construction obeys rules that differ radi- cally from those of ordinary speech, and although the voices seem to speak the same way we do, the anatomy of their speech apparatus must be different from our own" (in Kubis and Macy 106).
8. "Turner pointed out that the communicators, with whom Raudive claimed to have established contact, included Hitler, and there was a strong 'neo-Fascist undertone' to some of the voices" ("Our Next Program" 71).
9. Raudive's mother communicated to her son from the beyond, in three lan- guages at once, that she loved the Jews: "'Mona, ljubi judi'" (Breakthrough 36). 10. But as Turner observed of Raudive's recording of Churchill's voice from the beyond, which aired on British television at the time the Voice Phenomenon had everyone's attention: "This is obviously one of Churchill's less important speeches
which he saved to broadcast from the other side" (in "Our Next Program" 71).
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176 Laurence A. Rickels
11. Henry Mandel, for example, who doesn't invite any Nazis to his talk-show masses, does tune in, same time, same station, Churchill's ghost: "I wish to remind you in your experiences that, although on a lesser scale than what I underrwent in the last Life Experience--reminding you also that I was the being upon whom many decisions depended, and I underwent grueling responsibilities during the days of the late holocaust of World War Two--I must tell you that your experiences are the same, although on a lesser scale. . . . The 'V' for Victory . . . let it be yours now and evermore. There is no reason to ever accept any intimation of defeat" (156).
12. The Allies had taken note of German broadcasts during the war, which had a clarity of sound and a staying power that beat all records. The mystery was solved in 1944 with the Allied liberation of Radio Luxemburg: a new magnetic tape recorder of unheard-of capacities was waiting for the booty call. As Friedrich Kittler tells the story, the media loop between record and radio had been one-way all the way. Developed in the 1940s for the purpose of war reporting along battle lines where no record had gone before, the magnetic tape recorder, through motori- zation and mobilization, released broadcasting from its record stores. The acoustic chamber of warfare could now be played back (Kittler 162-73). In his Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions, Steven Lubar gives more evidence for the first use of magnetic tape recording: "During the war the Germans improved the tape recorder enormously and put it to use in radio stations, record- ing and rebroadcasting propaganda. (Hitler insisted that all radio programs be recorded so that nothing unauthorized could be broadcast. )" (183). But the credit he gives the enemy is overextended: he thus begins his history of television with the German precursor Nipkow (243), whose alleged role as father of TV was a Nazi plant. Edward Kellogg confirms the scoop on tape: "Development of magnetic coatings on paper or other base materials was undertaken by the AEG [Allgemeine elektrische Gesellschaft] in Germany about 1928, but up to the outbreak of war nothing of outstanding quality had appeared. At the close of the war the American occupying forces brought back samples of a new German magnetic tape and equip- ment. The magnetic material was a finely divided iron oxide, mixed with and coat- ed on a thin Cellulose base. . . . In cleanness of reproduction, low ground noise and volume range the German system set a new high standard" (215).
13. Hence the overlaps between alien abduction and the child-abuse charge, which as charge is made ultimately against the father of psychoanalysis. Whether as fiction implanted by the analyst or therapist, or as the scene of a crime that analysis with its interest in fantasy and transference helps cover up, repressed memories literalize, split off, and project onto analysis the memory of a repression. The white snow of TV sets now signals the last recollection before hypnosis-induced blackout covers another abduction episode. A repressed memory is always in the first place a memory of a repression that can or cannot come up in session. Whenever it is a question of "The Law of Psychic Phenomena," subsections surface on "Psychotherapeutics. " It is therefore not entirely now-ive that Californian psychotherapist Edith Fiore decided to specialize in overcoming resistances to re- membering the repressed memories of alien abduction, close encounters of the fourth kind. She first made a name for herself in the supermarket checkout head- lines when she published her first specialization, treatment of patients suffering from phantom possession (The Unquiet Dead). In her second book, Encounters,
Fiore declares her split reception of the truth of her patient's repressed memories: "I am a therapist, so my primary goal in doing regressions to close encounters is to help the patient overcome symptoms, problems, and difficulties. Recently, I've taken on the additional role of a UFO investigator, in which collecting data (expos- ing the event) is the primary objective. Often in doing an investigation, I decided to ask questions that may actually have led the person in the suspected direction in order to facilitate our work. If a strict researcher had been peering over my shoul- der, he would have frowned and shaken his head, because he would have been after proof of the validity of the contact, whereas my goal may have changed to quickly relieving anxiety that had surfaced" (5).
14. "EVP [Electronic Voice Phenomena] voices typically speak in short, cryptic and sometimes grammatically poor phrases. They speak in a variety of languages, regardless of the languages known to the listeners" (Guiley 107). "Voices also re- port that they communicate through one of many 'central transmitting agencies' on the Other Side" (107).
15. It was always first in the recording, rather than in the direct telephone con- nection, for example, that we made audio contact with the dead. Parapsychology is as scientific or science-fictive as the space program: mediums possessed and ventrilo- quized at a se? ance or the ghostly caller at the other end of the line just don't cut it.
16. According to Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (second paragraph of section 6), Schiller was the inspiration or placeholder for Freud's Trieblehre.
17. Hans Loewald, for example, still finds application for Freud's 1914 theoreti- cal elaboration of transference and transference neurosis in the treatment of charac- ter neurotics (a population that, since the end of both world wars, has been on the rise). "If we do not cling to the word 'symptoms,' but include the wider areas of char- acter and of ego pathology, this still stands today as the procedure at which we aim. In this sense transference neurosis is not so much an entity to be found in the patient, but an operational concept. We may regard it as denoting the retransformation of a psychic illness which originated in pathogenic interactions with the important per- sons in the child's environment, into an interactional process with a new person, the analyst, in which the pathological infantile interactions and their intrapsychic conse- quences may become transparent and accessible to change by virtue of the analyst's objectivity and of the emergence of novel interaction-possibilities" (429).
REFERENCES
Abraham, Karl. "Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams? " In Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis, ed. Hilda Abraham, trans. Hilda Abraham and D. R. Ellison. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1955 [1913]. 33-35.
Bander, Peter. Voices from the Tapes: Recordings from the Other World. New York: Drake Publishers, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. "U? ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire. " In Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Roy Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenha? user. Vols. 1 and 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980.
Cle? ment, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 [1981].
de Man, Paul. "Kant and Schiller. " In Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 129-62.
Resistance in Theory 177
178 Laurence A. Rickels
------. "The Resistance to Theory. " In The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 3-20.
Derrida, Jacques. "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War. " Trans. Peggy Kamuf. In Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. 127-64.
------. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1998 [1996].
The Encyclopedia Americana. Vol. 26. Danbury, Conn. : Grolier, 1999.
Fiore, Edith.
Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by
Extraterrestrials. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.
------. The Unquiet Dead. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1961 [1930].
Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997. Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. New York: Facts
on File, 1992.
A History of Technology. Ed. Trevor I. Williams. Vol. 7, The Twentieth Century
c. 1900 to c. 1950. Part II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Jung, Carl Gustav. "After the Catastrophe. " In Civilization in Transition, trans.
R. F. C. Hull. New York: Pantheon, 1964 [1945]. 194-217.
------. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Trans.
R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1978.
------. "Wotan. " In Civilization in Transition, trans. R. F. C. Hull. New York:
Pantheon, 1964 [1936]. 179-93.
Edward Kellog. "History of Sound Motion Pictures. " In A Technological History
of Motion Pictures and Television, ed. Raymond Fielding. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. 174-220.
Kittler, Friedrich. Grammophon Film Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose,
1986.
Kubis, Pat, and Mark Macy. Conversations beyond the Light: With Departed
Friends and Colleagues by Electronic Means. Boulder, Colo. : Griffin Publishing
in conjunction with Continuing Life Research, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power. "
In E? crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1977). 226-80.
------. Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. Book 1, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester. New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1988 [1975].
Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. " In E? crits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977. 1-7.
------. "Presence of the Analyst. " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed.
Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 480-91.
------. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Ed. Joan Copjec. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 [1973].
Leigh, Janet (with Christorper Nickens). Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. New York: Harmony Books, 1995.
Leites, Nathan. "Transference Interpretations Only? " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed. Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 434-54.
Loewald, Hans W. "The Transference Neurosis: Comments on the Concept and the Phenomenon. " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed. Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 423-33.
Lubar, Steven. Infoculture. The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
Mandel, Henry A. Banners of Light. New York: Vantage Press, 1973. "Our Next Program Comes to You from the Other World. " In Out of This
World: The Illustrated Library of the Bizarre and Extraordinary. New York:
Columbia House, 1976. 69-74.
Raudive, Konstantin. Breakthrough: Electronic Communication with the Dead
May Be Possible. New York: Zebra Books, 1971.
Rogo, D. Scott. An Experience of Phantoms. New York: Taplinger Publishing
Company, 1974.
Stemman, Roy. The Supernatural: Spirits and Spirit Worlds. London: Aldus Books,
1975.
Winter, Frank H. "Camera Rockets and Space Photography Concepts before
World War II. " In History of Rocketry and Astronautics. AAS History Series, vol. 8, AAS, San Diego (1989): 73-102.
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III. Re-Marking "de Man"
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Paul de Man as Allergen
J. Hillis Miller
WHY READING DE MAN MAKES YOU SNEEZE
It is easy to see why the institution of literary study in the United States, or, in a different way, in Europe, including journalistic reviewing in both regions, is antipathetical to de Man and needs to suppress him in order to get on with its business. De Man's work is a violent allergen that provokes fits of coughing, sneezing, and burning eyes, perhaps even worse symptoms, unless it can be neutralized or expelled. "Aller- gen": a substance that causes an allergy. The word allergy, oddly enough, comes from the German Allergie, meaning "altered reaction," a Teu- tonic formation from the Greek allo, other, plus ergon, work. The "gen" in allergen means generating or causing. De Man's work as al- lergen is something alien, other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that otherness. The best antihistamine might be to forget his essays altogether and get on with the reproduction of some form or other of aesthetic ideology. The trouble is that once you have read de Man seriously it is difficult to do that without a vague uneasy feeling that you are laying traps for yourself and others, or, to put it more sim- ply, as de Man himself put it in the first paragraphs of "The Resistance to Theory," promulgating something false, perhaps dangerously false.
In a remark near the beginning of the "Kant and Schiller" essay, which, it should be remembered, is the transcription of an oral perfor- mance, Paul de Man observes that though his Cornell audience has been "so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent," nevertheless, in this case as in others in his experience, "it doesn't take you too long before you feel that you're getting under people's skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain
183
184 J. Hillis Miller
questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, when certain issues are bound to come up. "1 My figure of de Man as allergen is a slight transposition of this figure. An allergen causes an al- lergic reaction. It gets under your skin or into your nose, and "there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur. " You sneeze or break out in a rash. The figure is only a figure. It compares what happens to some people in reading de Man to what happens in a certain material reac- tion to a foreign substance by a living organic body. The figure is not innocent, however. In comparing something seemingly "abstract," in- tentional, linguistic, or "spiritual," reading, to something material, au- tomatic, autonomic, and involuntary, something "bound to happen," that is, an allergic reaction, the question of the relation of language to "materiality" is raised. Does any substantial connection justify the fig- ure? This is one of the central questions in de Man's conception of a "material event. " How can a linguistic act, such as the formulations reached by Kant's philosophic rigor, intervene in the "material" world and bring about what de Man calls "the materiality of actual history"? 2 How can writing or reading be a material event? How can speech be an act? As I shall show, de Man's transformation of the usual meaning of "materiality" (the transformation is itself a speech act) goes by way of a new conception of the relation of language to that reconceived materiality.
Almost any page of de Man's work, but especially the beginnings and endings of essays, contains rejections of well-established received ideas about literary study. These rejections can best be characterized as ironically and joyfully insolent or even contemptuous, as well as dis- mayingly rigorous and plausible. 3 Salient examples are the first two pages of "The Resistance to Theory" and the last three pages of "Shelley Disfigured. "4 De Man's essays have the structure he identifies in "The Concept of Irony" as "the traditional opposition between eiron and alazon, as they appear in Greek or Hellenic comedy, the smart guy and the dumb guy" (AI 165). De Man is of course the eiron, the smart guy, and all the previous experts on whatever topic or text he is discussing are the alazons, the dumb guys. 5 The received ideas he attacks, often fundamental assumptions of our profession, are charac- teristically called aberrant, deluded, or simply false. The reader can only hope or assume that "This does not, cannot, mean me! Surely I would not make such stupid mistakes. " De Man forestalls that defen- sive move, however, when he asserts, for example, in the "Kant and Schiller" essay in Aesthetic Ideology, that everyone, including himself,
however ironically, in a collective "we," is still bewitched by aesthetic ideology:
Before you either contest this [what he has been saying about Schiller's distortion of Kant], or before you not contest but agree with it and hold it against Schiller, or think that it is something we are now far beyond and that we would never in our enlightened days do--you would never make this naive confusion between the practical and the pragmatic on the one hand and the philosophical Kantian enterprise on the other-- before you decide that, don't decide too soon that you are beyond Schiller in any sense. I don't think any of us can lay this claim. Whatever writing we do, whatever way we have of talking about art, whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching, whatever the standards are and the values by means of which we teach, they are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian. They come from Schiller, and not from Kant. (AI 142)
De Man goes on to make a warning that certainly applies to what has happened in his own case, in spite of the fact that he was protected by being a Sterling Professor at Yale, which is about as much security as you can get:
And if you ever try to do something in the other direction [in the direc- tion of Kant, that is, rather than Schiller] and you touch on it you'll see what will happen to you. Better be very sure, wherever you are, that your tenure is very well established, and that the institution for which you work has a very well-established reputation. Then you can take some risks without really taking many risks" (AI 142).
I have said that de Man's work is threatening to "us all" because al- most any page contains cheerfully taunting rejections, explicit or im- plicit, of "our" most basic ideological assumptions, the ones "we" most need to get on with our work, the ones the university most needs to get on with its work. His counterintuitive concept (it is not really a concept) of materiality is an example of this.
DE MAN'S MATERIALISM
The "'s" in this subhead is a double genitive, both objective and sub- jective. It names both de Man's theory of materiality and the way his own writings may show materiality at work or may be examples of materiality at work.
2. "For 14 years Ju? rgenson let it be thought that the startling voice of his mother on the bird-call recording was an unexpected event. He now admits that he had been experimenting for several months before with the aim of receiving 'some- thing' on electro-magnetic tape" (Stemman 94).
3. Under the subsection titled "First Contacts" in Breakthrough, Raudive summarizes their relationship: "Towards the end of 1964 a book appeared in Stockholm under the title Ro? sterna fra? n Rymden (Voices from Space). The author's name was Friedrich Ju? rgenson.
"All my life I have been preoccupied with parapsychological problems, especial- ly with those concerning death and life after death. These problems play a part in all my books and particularly in Der Chaosmensch und seine U? berwindung (Chaosman and His Conquest). . . . After the war I lived in Sweden and I am close- ly connected with those interested in parapsychological research in that country. Ju? rgenson's name struck me as that of an outsider.
"Reading Ju? rgenson's book carefully several times gave me a very definite im- pression of the author as a highly sensitive and susceptible man. Many of his ideas seemed to me to have been formed by a vivid imagination; the kind that could con- jure up pictures in an empty room or voices out of the stillness. Later in his book, however, he came to develop a fascinating theme: he maintained that with the help of tape-recorder, microphone and radio he was able to hear voices on tape which he called 'voices from space'; that these voices did not belong to any other 'physical' world, but to a world in contrast to ours, a spiritual world; that the voices were those of the dead. Ju? rgenson gives a detailed account of this in a book called Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen (Radio-Link with the Dead), 1967. He heard not only the voices of near relatives or friends, but also those of historical personages of the recent past, such as Hitler, Go? ring, Felix Kersten, the Yoga-author Boris Sacharow, the controversial Chessman etc. . . .
"I felt an immediate sympathy towards Friedrich Ju? rgenson: all that he told me had a ring of sincerity and deep emotional involvement. . . .
"Renewed contact with Ju? rgenson and deeper insight into his personality and his life's history confirmed my view that this man was utterly sincere; that he was completely immersed in the mystery of this phenomenon and firmly convinced that he was dealing with a world beyond--a world into which we merge after death and where we continue our activities in a transcendental existence. Faith and intuition
can never harm a cause; for my part, I endeavoured to understand the phenomenon in its factual sense" (13-15).
4. In one of the books he was moved to write to popularize Raudive's research, Bander wonders "whether it will be possible in the near future to 'dial M for Mother'" (63). But even if Bander doesn't, we can put on Freudian ears and hear the murder with which mother gets associated.
5. Jung's resistance targets psychoanalysis and media technology. In his analy- sis of an actress's UFO dream--the dream thus "comes from California, the classic Saucer country, so to speak"--Jung overlooks the endopsychic perceptiveness of the dreamer, and symptomatically confuses auto-analytic breakthrough with psy- chotic breakdown. In the dream the UFO, which the dreamer first takes to be real, is identified as a trick: "'I looked up behind me and saw someone with a movie pro- jector. '" Jung informs us right away, before commencing commentary, that the "dreamer, a young film actress, was undergoing psychological treatment for a marked dissociation of personality with all the accompanying symptoms. " The commentary, a comment on Jung's disappointment in the actress, is the only one in Jung's collection that does not take the UFO into any account: "The dream insists on the projection character of the UFO. . . . It is not easy to see why the dream brings in the UFO at all, only to dispose of it in this disappointing way. . . . Any in- sight into the nature of the UFO phenomenon is not to be expected from this dream" (Flying Saucers 66-69).
6. Raudive's study, Breakthrough, appeared first in 1968 in German under the title Unho? rbares wird ho? rbar (The inaudible becomes audible). "The publication of the book caused a near riot in parapsychology. The basic attitude was reactionary. Several parapsychologists argued that Raudive was merely picking up radio inter- ference. Others denied that 'taped voices' could even exist and complained that Raudive was projecting his own ideas as to what the random sound on the tapes meant. These arguments are hackneyed and easily refuted. While it must be admit- ted that the voices are often unintelligible, very often they will call Raudive's name quite clearly. When I listened to examples of Raudive's tapes, in a few instances very clear voices were heard, even overlapping with his. It is inconceivable that radio pickups could consistently call Raudive's name or that radio pickups would consistently be picked up on Raudive's tapes, not only in Germany but in England as well" (Rogo 80).
7. Raudive explains: "The sentence construction obeys rules that differ radi- cally from those of ordinary speech, and although the voices seem to speak the same way we do, the anatomy of their speech apparatus must be different from our own" (in Kubis and Macy 106).
8. "Turner pointed out that the communicators, with whom Raudive claimed to have established contact, included Hitler, and there was a strong 'neo-Fascist undertone' to some of the voices" ("Our Next Program" 71).
9. Raudive's mother communicated to her son from the beyond, in three lan- guages at once, that she loved the Jews: "'Mona, ljubi judi'" (Breakthrough 36). 10. But as Turner observed of Raudive's recording of Churchill's voice from the beyond, which aired on British television at the time the Voice Phenomenon had everyone's attention: "This is obviously one of Churchill's less important speeches
which he saved to broadcast from the other side" (in "Our Next Program" 71).
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176 Laurence A. Rickels
11. Henry Mandel, for example, who doesn't invite any Nazis to his talk-show masses, does tune in, same time, same station, Churchill's ghost: "I wish to remind you in your experiences that, although on a lesser scale than what I underrwent in the last Life Experience--reminding you also that I was the being upon whom many decisions depended, and I underwent grueling responsibilities during the days of the late holocaust of World War Two--I must tell you that your experiences are the same, although on a lesser scale. . . . The 'V' for Victory . . . let it be yours now and evermore. There is no reason to ever accept any intimation of defeat" (156).
12. The Allies had taken note of German broadcasts during the war, which had a clarity of sound and a staying power that beat all records. The mystery was solved in 1944 with the Allied liberation of Radio Luxemburg: a new magnetic tape recorder of unheard-of capacities was waiting for the booty call. As Friedrich Kittler tells the story, the media loop between record and radio had been one-way all the way. Developed in the 1940s for the purpose of war reporting along battle lines where no record had gone before, the magnetic tape recorder, through motori- zation and mobilization, released broadcasting from its record stores. The acoustic chamber of warfare could now be played back (Kittler 162-73). In his Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions, Steven Lubar gives more evidence for the first use of magnetic tape recording: "During the war the Germans improved the tape recorder enormously and put it to use in radio stations, record- ing and rebroadcasting propaganda. (Hitler insisted that all radio programs be recorded so that nothing unauthorized could be broadcast. )" (183). But the credit he gives the enemy is overextended: he thus begins his history of television with the German precursor Nipkow (243), whose alleged role as father of TV was a Nazi plant. Edward Kellogg confirms the scoop on tape: "Development of magnetic coatings on paper or other base materials was undertaken by the AEG [Allgemeine elektrische Gesellschaft] in Germany about 1928, but up to the outbreak of war nothing of outstanding quality had appeared. At the close of the war the American occupying forces brought back samples of a new German magnetic tape and equip- ment. The magnetic material was a finely divided iron oxide, mixed with and coat- ed on a thin Cellulose base. . . . In cleanness of reproduction, low ground noise and volume range the German system set a new high standard" (215).
13. Hence the overlaps between alien abduction and the child-abuse charge, which as charge is made ultimately against the father of psychoanalysis. Whether as fiction implanted by the analyst or therapist, or as the scene of a crime that analysis with its interest in fantasy and transference helps cover up, repressed memories literalize, split off, and project onto analysis the memory of a repression. The white snow of TV sets now signals the last recollection before hypnosis-induced blackout covers another abduction episode. A repressed memory is always in the first place a memory of a repression that can or cannot come up in session. Whenever it is a question of "The Law of Psychic Phenomena," subsections surface on "Psychotherapeutics. " It is therefore not entirely now-ive that Californian psychotherapist Edith Fiore decided to specialize in overcoming resistances to re- membering the repressed memories of alien abduction, close encounters of the fourth kind. She first made a name for herself in the supermarket checkout head- lines when she published her first specialization, treatment of patients suffering from phantom possession (The Unquiet Dead). In her second book, Encounters,
Fiore declares her split reception of the truth of her patient's repressed memories: "I am a therapist, so my primary goal in doing regressions to close encounters is to help the patient overcome symptoms, problems, and difficulties. Recently, I've taken on the additional role of a UFO investigator, in which collecting data (expos- ing the event) is the primary objective. Often in doing an investigation, I decided to ask questions that may actually have led the person in the suspected direction in order to facilitate our work. If a strict researcher had been peering over my shoul- der, he would have frowned and shaken his head, because he would have been after proof of the validity of the contact, whereas my goal may have changed to quickly relieving anxiety that had surfaced" (5).
14. "EVP [Electronic Voice Phenomena] voices typically speak in short, cryptic and sometimes grammatically poor phrases. They speak in a variety of languages, regardless of the languages known to the listeners" (Guiley 107). "Voices also re- port that they communicate through one of many 'central transmitting agencies' on the Other Side" (107).
15. It was always first in the recording, rather than in the direct telephone con- nection, for example, that we made audio contact with the dead. Parapsychology is as scientific or science-fictive as the space program: mediums possessed and ventrilo- quized at a se? ance or the ghostly caller at the other end of the line just don't cut it.
16. According to Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (second paragraph of section 6), Schiller was the inspiration or placeholder for Freud's Trieblehre.
17. Hans Loewald, for example, still finds application for Freud's 1914 theoreti- cal elaboration of transference and transference neurosis in the treatment of charac- ter neurotics (a population that, since the end of both world wars, has been on the rise). "If we do not cling to the word 'symptoms,' but include the wider areas of char- acter and of ego pathology, this still stands today as the procedure at which we aim. In this sense transference neurosis is not so much an entity to be found in the patient, but an operational concept. We may regard it as denoting the retransformation of a psychic illness which originated in pathogenic interactions with the important per- sons in the child's environment, into an interactional process with a new person, the analyst, in which the pathological infantile interactions and their intrapsychic conse- quences may become transparent and accessible to change by virtue of the analyst's objectivity and of the emergence of novel interaction-possibilities" (429).
REFERENCES
Abraham, Karl. "Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams? " In Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis, ed. Hilda Abraham, trans. Hilda Abraham and D. R. Ellison. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1955 [1913]. 33-35.
Bander, Peter. Voices from the Tapes: Recordings from the Other World. New York: Drake Publishers, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. "U? ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire. " In Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Roy Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenha? user. Vols. 1 and 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980.
Cle? ment, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 [1981].
de Man, Paul. "Kant and Schiller. " In Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 129-62.
Resistance in Theory 177
178 Laurence A. Rickels
------. "The Resistance to Theory. " In The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 3-20.
Derrida, Jacques. "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War. " Trans. Peggy Kamuf. In Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. 127-64.
------. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1998 [1996].
The Encyclopedia Americana. Vol. 26. Danbury, Conn. : Grolier, 1999.
Fiore, Edith.
Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by
Extraterrestrials. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.
------. The Unquiet Dead. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1961 [1930].
Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997. Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. New York: Facts
on File, 1992.
A History of Technology. Ed. Trevor I. Williams. Vol. 7, The Twentieth Century
c. 1900 to c. 1950. Part II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Jung, Carl Gustav. "After the Catastrophe. " In Civilization in Transition, trans.
R. F. C. Hull. New York: Pantheon, 1964 [1945]. 194-217.
------. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Trans.
R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1978.
------. "Wotan. " In Civilization in Transition, trans. R. F. C. Hull. New York:
Pantheon, 1964 [1936]. 179-93.
Edward Kellog. "History of Sound Motion Pictures. " In A Technological History
of Motion Pictures and Television, ed. Raymond Fielding. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. 174-220.
Kittler, Friedrich. Grammophon Film Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose,
1986.
Kubis, Pat, and Mark Macy. Conversations beyond the Light: With Departed
Friends and Colleagues by Electronic Means. Boulder, Colo. : Griffin Publishing
in conjunction with Continuing Life Research, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power. "
In E? crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1977). 226-80.
------. Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. Book 1, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester. New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1988 [1975].
Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. " In E? crits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977. 1-7.
------. "Presence of the Analyst. " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed.
Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 480-91.
------. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Ed. Joan Copjec. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 [1973].
Leigh, Janet (with Christorper Nickens). Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. New York: Harmony Books, 1995.
Leites, Nathan. "Transference Interpretations Only? " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed. Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 434-54.
Loewald, Hans W. "The Transference Neurosis: Comments on the Concept and the Phenomenon. " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed. Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 423-33.
Lubar, Steven. Infoculture. The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
Mandel, Henry A. Banners of Light. New York: Vantage Press, 1973. "Our Next Program Comes to You from the Other World. " In Out of This
World: The Illustrated Library of the Bizarre and Extraordinary. New York:
Columbia House, 1976. 69-74.
Raudive, Konstantin. Breakthrough: Electronic Communication with the Dead
May Be Possible. New York: Zebra Books, 1971.
Rogo, D. Scott. An Experience of Phantoms. New York: Taplinger Publishing
Company, 1974.
Stemman, Roy. The Supernatural: Spirits and Spirit Worlds. London: Aldus Books,
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Winter, Frank H. "Camera Rockets and Space Photography Concepts before
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III. Re-Marking "de Man"
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Paul de Man as Allergen
J. Hillis Miller
WHY READING DE MAN MAKES YOU SNEEZE
It is easy to see why the institution of literary study in the United States, or, in a different way, in Europe, including journalistic reviewing in both regions, is antipathetical to de Man and needs to suppress him in order to get on with its business. De Man's work is a violent allergen that provokes fits of coughing, sneezing, and burning eyes, perhaps even worse symptoms, unless it can be neutralized or expelled. "Aller- gen": a substance that causes an allergy. The word allergy, oddly enough, comes from the German Allergie, meaning "altered reaction," a Teu- tonic formation from the Greek allo, other, plus ergon, work. The "gen" in allergen means generating or causing. De Man's work as al- lergen is something alien, other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that otherness. The best antihistamine might be to forget his essays altogether and get on with the reproduction of some form or other of aesthetic ideology. The trouble is that once you have read de Man seriously it is difficult to do that without a vague uneasy feeling that you are laying traps for yourself and others, or, to put it more sim- ply, as de Man himself put it in the first paragraphs of "The Resistance to Theory," promulgating something false, perhaps dangerously false.
In a remark near the beginning of the "Kant and Schiller" essay, which, it should be remembered, is the transcription of an oral perfor- mance, Paul de Man observes that though his Cornell audience has been "so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent," nevertheless, in this case as in others in his experience, "it doesn't take you too long before you feel that you're getting under people's skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain
183
184 J. Hillis Miller
questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, when certain issues are bound to come up. "1 My figure of de Man as allergen is a slight transposition of this figure. An allergen causes an al- lergic reaction. It gets under your skin or into your nose, and "there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur. " You sneeze or break out in a rash. The figure is only a figure. It compares what happens to some people in reading de Man to what happens in a certain material reac- tion to a foreign substance by a living organic body. The figure is not innocent, however. In comparing something seemingly "abstract," in- tentional, linguistic, or "spiritual," reading, to something material, au- tomatic, autonomic, and involuntary, something "bound to happen," that is, an allergic reaction, the question of the relation of language to "materiality" is raised. Does any substantial connection justify the fig- ure? This is one of the central questions in de Man's conception of a "material event. " How can a linguistic act, such as the formulations reached by Kant's philosophic rigor, intervene in the "material" world and bring about what de Man calls "the materiality of actual history"? 2 How can writing or reading be a material event? How can speech be an act? As I shall show, de Man's transformation of the usual meaning of "materiality" (the transformation is itself a speech act) goes by way of a new conception of the relation of language to that reconceived materiality.
Almost any page of de Man's work, but especially the beginnings and endings of essays, contains rejections of well-established received ideas about literary study. These rejections can best be characterized as ironically and joyfully insolent or even contemptuous, as well as dis- mayingly rigorous and plausible. 3 Salient examples are the first two pages of "The Resistance to Theory" and the last three pages of "Shelley Disfigured. "4 De Man's essays have the structure he identifies in "The Concept of Irony" as "the traditional opposition between eiron and alazon, as they appear in Greek or Hellenic comedy, the smart guy and the dumb guy" (AI 165). De Man is of course the eiron, the smart guy, and all the previous experts on whatever topic or text he is discussing are the alazons, the dumb guys. 5 The received ideas he attacks, often fundamental assumptions of our profession, are charac- teristically called aberrant, deluded, or simply false. The reader can only hope or assume that "This does not, cannot, mean me! Surely I would not make such stupid mistakes. " De Man forestalls that defen- sive move, however, when he asserts, for example, in the "Kant and Schiller" essay in Aesthetic Ideology, that everyone, including himself,
however ironically, in a collective "we," is still bewitched by aesthetic ideology:
Before you either contest this [what he has been saying about Schiller's distortion of Kant], or before you not contest but agree with it and hold it against Schiller, or think that it is something we are now far beyond and that we would never in our enlightened days do--you would never make this naive confusion between the practical and the pragmatic on the one hand and the philosophical Kantian enterprise on the other-- before you decide that, don't decide too soon that you are beyond Schiller in any sense. I don't think any of us can lay this claim. Whatever writing we do, whatever way we have of talking about art, whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching, whatever the standards are and the values by means of which we teach, they are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian. They come from Schiller, and not from Kant. (AI 142)
De Man goes on to make a warning that certainly applies to what has happened in his own case, in spite of the fact that he was protected by being a Sterling Professor at Yale, which is about as much security as you can get:
And if you ever try to do something in the other direction [in the direc- tion of Kant, that is, rather than Schiller] and you touch on it you'll see what will happen to you. Better be very sure, wherever you are, that your tenure is very well established, and that the institution for which you work has a very well-established reputation. Then you can take some risks without really taking many risks" (AI 142).
I have said that de Man's work is threatening to "us all" because al- most any page contains cheerfully taunting rejections, explicit or im- plicit, of "our" most basic ideological assumptions, the ones "we" most need to get on with our work, the ones the university most needs to get on with its work. His counterintuitive concept (it is not really a concept) of materiality is an example of this.
DE MAN'S MATERIALISM
The "'s" in this subhead is a double genitive, both objective and sub- jective. It names both de Man's theory of materiality and the way his own writings may show materiality at work or may be examples of materiality at work.
