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Chapter 7 draws on eastern European Marxism to introduce historical materialism dialectically into the psychology of queer theory. To propose a new political role for unconscious messages and desires, I conceptualize the unconscious as a psychic device that is shaped by class- and racial dynamics. On the basis of a Soviet Marxist theorist, Nikolay Marr, who argued that
2 Class unconsciousness Meyerhold’s chronotope A scribble of ribbon winds over a grid (Figure 2.1). The axes are numbered, clearly intended to identify the spaces of the grid and thus to locate the ribbon precisely. The handwritten notes along the sides of the grid explain that the drawing is a “spatial-chronometric” notation of the scene – a plan of movement across the stage, with approximate timing. The drawing graphs the movement of two entities, marked “S” and “B,” along with the time when they cross particular points. Although the author of this graph is
between a satire’s immediate geopolitical claims (protecting and extending Britain’s territorial holdings) and visual metaphors that work against those claims constitute a puzzling phenomenon that I will term the cartographic unconscious. Many of the prints examined here exhibit a complete disregard for the location, strategic value or anything else that the public might know about distant territories
2 The invention of the unconscious Inward the course of empire takes its way (Frederic Myers) The search for the self The quest for the historical Jesus was not restricted to the universities or the established Churches. Across Britain and the United States, working-class radicals debated the historical basis of the Gospel records. Before George Eliot’s translation of the Leben Jesu appeared, plebeian secularists had issued cheap pirated editions of Strauss’s work. Their turn to historical enquiry was driven by a very different set of motives to those which
defined. We envisioned The Graphic Unconscious not as a proper theme per se but as a theoretical device to mobilize the imprint, along with its implied characteristics, seriality, and dissemination, and to re-read – indeed re-imagine – critically the field of contemporary artistic production. The Graphic Unconscious refers to the unconscious
This article proposes a reading of Le Fanu‘s ‘Carmilla’ in relation to the ideas of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, particularly Laplanche‘s notion of the enigmatic signifier. Laplanche refigures the inauguration of human sexuality as a failure on the infant‘s behalf to meaningfully translate the enigmatic messages received from the adult world, which, Laplanche argues, are freighted with unconscious sexual meaning. Unable to fully metabolise these enigmatic signifiers, the infant is prone to trauma, as the un-translated residues of the adults address sink into the unconscious to form powerful unconscious fantasies that continue to trouble the subject. A parallel is drawn here with Laura‘s relationship with the mysterious but alluring Carmilla, whose enigmatic desire both fascinates and repels Le Fanu‘s narrator from the moment of Laura‘s childhood trauma but whose enigmatic language remains indecipherable. Carmilla herself is finally seen as the allegorical figure of the Gothic itself: profoundly enigmatic and potentially traumatising.
Based on the author’s experience as both a journalist and an independent researcher working regularly in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), this article examines the many constraints that journalists face in areas of armed conflict. It considers two unusual aspects of journalistic practice observed in the DRC: first, the reporters’ lexical dependence – that is, how the language journalists typically use to describe war is borrowed, sometimes unconsciously, from the war-related rhetoric developed in other fields – and second, journalists’ practical dependence on humanitarian organisations and how this might influence the articles they produce.
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explores the different aspects of nineteenth-century culture, in search of a historical reality to which people can awake in a revelatory act of political consciousness. However, the uncanny effects of his archival approach impinge on this revelatory and sublime process. Rather than revealing the political, economic, and technological latent content of the past, representations of the material object confront consciousness with the unfamiliar and abject forms of the repressed collective unconscious. The Gothic tropes of Benjamin‘s text are the traces of the melancholy haunting his concept of a demystifying revelation of historical and material truth.
This essay reads the opening of Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time against its high-modernist reception history to recover its Gothic unconscious. My argument first traces the repressed horror tale at the heart of ‘Combray I’ by foregrounding tropes of fear and imprisonment; I then recontextualize Proust within the Gothic tradition, drawing explicit comparisons to Poe and Radcliffe. I suggest that the narrators invocation and subsequent repression of Gothic forces, in particular of the uncanny, constitutes the novels primal dialectic and plays a constitutive role in the dramas of memory and desire.