“And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation

Abstract

A & Q 73 psychoanalytic turn in Asian studies is not a reduction of, but rather a return to, an epistēmē of Asia. Meera Lee is assistant professor of Asian/Asian American studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. 6 notes I have taken the term imaginary ethnography from the works of literary critic and psychoanalytic theorist Gabriele Schwab. 1. For a more detailed discussion of psychoanalysis’s transformation, see Oliver (2004, xiii). 2. The notion of “colonizing ratio” appears in the concluding part of Foucault’s (1970) The Order of Things. For an expanded account of “colonizing ratio” and “countertransference,” see also Lambert (2013), who explained the cultural imaginary between a literary critic and the stranger. 6 works Cited Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Les Mots et les choses. New York: Vintage Books. Lambert, Gregg. 2013. “Strangers, Analysts, and Literary Critics: On the ‘Unhappy’ Marriage of Psychoanalysis and Ethnology.” Keynote address presented at the Affect, Politics, Psychoanalysis: International Conference, National Taiwan University. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwab, Gabriele. 2012. Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press. “And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation Haun Saussy The three questions the editors ask are an invitation to Bovaryism, the lure of the lives one hasn’t lived—in Emma Bovary’s case, a poisonous enchantment. Who, in the literary profession, has not felt that lure? Like the rhapsode in Plato’s dialogue Ion, we know all about war, shipbuilding , economics, law, medicine, not from direct practical experience but 74 A & Q by being plunged into the representations of them all. And, because we read the dialogue well enough to see that it is a prolonged send-up of the self-satisfied rhapsode, we often think we ought to have gone into one of those fields that would teach us how to get our hands around something more substantial than a representation. Julie Stone Peters’s (2005) wonderful essay about interdisciplinary envy tells us what happens when we directly confront the objects of our professional “reality hunger”: the practical professionals in law, too, think of their field as overly technical , formal, distanced from reality, and look to us literature specialists to restore the living, breathing, bleeding texture of experience through our magical art. Something similar would probably happen on the other side of whatever interdisciplinary fence you chose. When I think about what “fields or subfields outside my current area of expertise” I could and should have gone into while I had the chance, it is not with the regret of having done the wrong things with the last twenty-five years of my life. I say this at the risk of sounding selfsatisfied . There are languages I should have learned (Russian, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Turkish, Portuguese) and reasons why I should have learned them: to plunge into Acmeist poetry, Chekhov and Formalist criticism; to consider the Vedas and the epics from close up; to understand another huge, multicultural, early empire; to have a handle on Central Asia as it impinges on China and Europe; to read Pessoa; and other reasons I can’t imagine before getting involved in those languages and the paths to which they might lead. That is how languages are. To learn a language is to start on a long-term relationship. In the unlikely event that I could show up (mirror, mirror on the wall) at my first squirrel-infested attic apartment in New Haven in 1983 to speak with my earlier self, the advice I’d want to give would be mainly about personal and sentimental matters—which are outside the scope of this article. About the things of the mind, here’s roughly what I’d say: “Soak up all of that good deconstruction stuff you can—it’s not going to be around forever. Learn a lot of classical philology, because, as you’re already surmising, that’s where the tools of deconstruction were first forged. Take some classes on philosophy with the professional philosophers , despite the flashes of antagonism occupying...