Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/ur.2021.065.1_2/03
An Analysis of "Fragment": Literature, Hysteria, Bisexuality
Mirela Dakić
orcid.org/0000-0002-1117-2145
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
ABSTRACT
The essay starts with Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, relating its discordant lines of argumentation with the psychoanalytic concept of (bi)sexuality, as it was developed from Studies on Hysteria to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the latter of which was published in same year as the “Dora case”. We consider the aspects in which Freud’s contradictory analysis of the case becomes central to the feminist debate on hysteria in Hélène Cixous’s and Catherine Clément’s classic The Newly Born Woman. The analysis points to the constitutive relation of the authors’ disagreement on hysteria and different conceptions of literature and politics presented in their study and the subsequent polemical discussions. We further approach the dissent about the political and methodological framework of feminist criticism in the Anglo-American reception of the French authors, wherein gynocritics Elaine Showalter and Sandra M. Gilbert renounce the question of hysteria. Alternatively, deconstructive critical reading by Peggy Kamuf is grounded in Derrida’s approach to literature. Kamuf traces the main misunderstandings in Cixous’s reception, by interpreting her oeuvre as emblematic of so-called semi-theory and semi-politics, trying to deconstruct oppositions between a theoretical, political, and poetical text. Through the lens of semi-theory, the relation between Cixous’s semi-concept of a woman, as a reference without a referent, and the psychoanalytic understanding of bisexuality and hysteria, has far-reaching consequences on the reading of psychoanalytic text as literary and hysterical, as it compulsively repeats the very fragmentary pattern it tries to interpret.
Keywords
hysteria, literature, feminist criticism, bisexuality, politics
Hrčak ID:
267118
URI
Publication date:
22.9.2021.
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