Amnesiac Passages : Melville’s Pierre, Blanchot and the Question of Psychoanalytic Reading

As a mode of knowledge, psychoanalysis is caught in a singular paradox. It is, on the one hand, an undeniably momentous chapter in the history of human self-understanding. It makes available to systematic description and inquiry a clandestine region of psychic life, hitherto revealed only in the scattered intimations of poets and philosophers. Not content with casting light on this uncanny territory, psychoanalysis cultivated an instrument to bring it under the rule of knowledge, “to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id” (Freud, The Ego and the Id 56). The scale and gravity of this achievement is aptly conveyed in Freud’s imperial metaphor: the id’s recalcitrant indigenes, ferociously resisting the incursions of the knowing ego, are painstakingly induced to yield to it. The conquistador’s abundant reward is nothing less than knowledge of the fundament of psychic life itself.