Since its publication, Freud’s case study of Sergueï Pankejeff (better known as the Wolfman), From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, has made the patient he studies no less famous than the analyst himself, for many of the concepts being brought up therein are crucial to Freud’s understanding of sexuality, above all that of anal eroticism. Leaving aside all the minute details he uses for the purpose of analysis, I’d like to begin by looking specifically at the horror the Wolfman experiences from his dream impression of witnessing a horde of wolves standing upright on their paws. The anthropomorphization of the wolves through their assumption of the upright gait exerts a castrating impact upon the then four-year-old Wolfman, for once the wolves transgress the boundary between human and animal by taking the upright, or if you will, erect, gait, they are immediately phallicized, rendered as a stand-in for the Wolfman’s father, who had more than once threatened teasingly to “gobble [him] up”
(The “Wolman” and Other Cases 230). The cannibalistic fantasy of being devoured by his father exerts an emasculating influence by putting him in a masochistic/passive position.
This sense of castration becomes subsequently the very source of his jouissance, but it is the very thought, or, better put, shame, of being brought down to the ground which ultimately promises him most gratification.
The Wolfman’s excitement at seeing in his adult years women of a subordinate class origin frozen in the position of crouching on all fours is another permutation on the same fantasy of castration in which he does not necessarily appear to be the castrated party. It is, so to speak, an inverted version of his desire in shame. When the Wolfman, according to Freud’s narrative, “saw the girl crouched down cleaning the floor, on her knees with her buttocks
projecting and her back horizontal, he recognized the position that his mother had assumed in the scene of coitus he had observed. In his mind she became his mother, he was overcome by excitement as that image was activated, and behaved in a manly fashion towards her like his father, whose actions he could then only have understood as urination” (The “Wolfman”
291). Apparently here Freud construes the Wolfman’s pleasure in more phallic terms than, say, in the primal scene per se, where his identification with his mother in the same subordinate position leads him to pass a stool right on the spot, the climactic status of which not only interrupts but also substitutes for his parents’ orgasm. Only by attributing a phallic agency to the act of urination which chronologically takes the place of the Wolfman’s defecation in the primal scene, could Freud, albeit insecurely, keep the Wolfman’s masculine identity intact, without sacrificing the passive agency of the jouissance inherent in the perverse sexual attraction of his unconscious identification – not exactly with the crouching peasant girl, but rather with the very positioning of crouching.
Both the primal scene and the Wolfman’s later encounter with other female inferiors revolve around a fantasmatic structure, into which, if we follow the arguments by Laplanche and Pontalis, the subject’s selfhood is dispersed rather than consolidated. “The subject is invariably present in these scenes,” they contend. “Even in the case of the “primal scene, from which it might appear that he was excluded, he does in fact have a part to play not only as an observer but also as a participant, when he interrupts the parents’ coitus” (318).
Working like a script or a mise-en-scène, fantasy is, according to Laplanche and Pontalis,
“not an object that the subject imagines and aims at, so to speak, but rather a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible” (318). Laplanche and Potalis’s interpretation of the Wolfman’s fantasy of shame thus challenges Freud’s emphasis on the Wolfman’s re-territorializing agency in their privileging of the sequence of fantasmatic scenarios over the shoring up of individual subjective boundaries. Seen from a slightly different perspective, this is precisely the
juncture where shame enters the scene of a desiring fantasy, for, more often than not, in the fantasmatic series or sequencing of events, the shame of being degraded from one’s conscious class or gender identity amounts to the shame of being degraded from the habitual form assumed by one’s ego or selfhood. This degradation brings one closer to the animalistic kind of being that precedes the repression or sublimation of the subject’s desire or instinctual functions. Hence, the more regressively inhuman the fantasized scenario, the more sexually titillating the stimulus will become, as the very act of fantasy will bring the subject back to an early stage when primal repression has not set in.17
Contra contemporary theorization of shame that emphasizes the face as the site where shame, as the window of one’s selfhood or personhood, is established as a positive affect, Freud’s underdeveloped theory of shame, as I have been at pains to demonstrate, casts the establishment of the face/humanity/civilization in a much more ambivalent light.18 The whole issue of sublimation that has been raised in this grim work on human aggression seems to be asking: “Is humanity or selfhood absolutely worthwhile?” In Freud’s system, to be human or to be a coherent self is to stand up, that is, to rise from the ground and to renounce all the shameful odors and gestures associated with one’s “animalistic” or effeminate stage of life. To the degree that the tropes or imageries on the chain of association all work in tandem with one another metonymically, one needs to pay close attention to how these tropes or imageries figure in relation to one another in the guise of, say, the human body, physical movements/postures, affects and desire, crystallized in excrement, animals or other grotesque acts or forms. As the shameful undercurrent of civilization, or humanity’s other, animals,
17 Another case in point is “going down” on someone. One might, in perfect accord with Freud’s theory of human “uprightness,” find the act degrading, while it is equally undeniable that oral sex remains the mainstay of many cultures’ sexual fantasies which, with varying degrees, view shame or degradation as something integral to erotic gratification.
18 For a trenchant critique of the current trend among shame theorists that values the face at the expense of the socio-cultural figuration of shame as epitomized in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, see Ruth Leys’s From Guilt to Shame, Chap 4. I have tremendously benefited from her work and the seminar she taught on shame at Johns Hopkins University in 2003.
for one thing, abound in Freud’s study of the Wolfman, so much so that in another exemplary lengthy note supplemented to the bottom of Chapter 5, Freud would go so far as to posit animals performing anal sex as the true cause that produces the child’s dream of wolves at the age of 4, which then reminds the Wolfman, through deferred action, of his observation of his parents having sex in like fashion when he was only 18 months old (The “Wolfman” 256).
Human actors, in the fantasized act of coitus a tergo, collapse into their animal doubles. Or is it the other way around? Or, perhaps, it does not really matter. One may well wonder why the sex being performed between the sheep dogs observed by the Wolfman as a four-year-old must be of an anal kind. Freud asks rhetorically at one point, “What else [than seeing the anus as the part of the woman’s body receiving the penis] could he have thought when he watched this scene at the age of eighteen months?” (The “Wolfman” 277) The equation on Freud’s part of the Wolfman imagining his parents having anal sex with the Wolfman perceiving the sheep dogs as having anal sex is borne out by Freud’s insistence that it “leaves us no choice . . . but to conclude that it must have been ‘coitus a tergo’ [from behind], ‘more ferarum’ [in the manner of the beasts]” (The “Wolfman” 256). There is no further explanation as to why coming from behind is by any means bestial. The metonymic connection is taken simply as a given.
The evolutionary model underlying Freud’s slippery equation between animal sex and anal sex is, in fact, symptomatic of a whole set of cultural imaginary of humanism, which in turn informs both lay people’s conception of humanity and the whole Western philosophical thinking around the opposition between the human and the animal. For example, in The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben draws on Heidegger to develop his thesis on the vexed relation between humanity and animality in terms of their capacity of feeling boredom.
To both Agamben and Heidegger, boredom is precisely what at once baffles and reaffirms such a distinction. “[B]oredom brings to light the unexpected proximity of Dasein and the animal.” Agamben argues, “In becoming bored, Dasein is delivered over to something that
refuses itself, exactly as the animal, in its captivation, is exposed in something unrevealed”
(65; emphasis original). Boredom is a state in which one finds oneself limited, riveted to his or her current circumstance and in which one finds oneself having nothing to do whatsoever with the given environment. It is, so to speak, a situational enclosure that circumscribes the subject in a captivated condition that is reminiscent of animals, which have been construed by humans to know no interest other than organic functions such as eating and mating. Though both “open to a closedness” (emphasis original), human beings nonetheless manage, with limited success, to be aware of the existence of other “possibilities” (66). In Agamben’s words, “Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human” (70;
emphasis original). The closedness of the boring environment, while reducing Dasein to an animal-like state, also arouses the sense of boredom peculiar to humanity on account of its openness to “possibilities,” perhaps in the form of an unconscious positing of a full range of human potentialities outside the inhibiting confines, something that connects Dasein to the world it inhabits.
Couched in psychoanalytic terms, the openness and the active mode of the human, as opposed to the closedness and the inactivity of its animal counterpart, is no less phallic than Freud’s account of the upright gait assumed by the human species. Indeed, one may even go so far as to regard them as fully compatible with one another. To the extent that humanness can be defined, however precarious the definition, on the ground of aggressivity or activity, boredom thus comes to take on the very status of an antithesis that reversely proves humanity as more able, or simply as possessing more possibilities (particularly with regard to an unforeseen futurity) than animals, in very much the same way men were once defined as smarter, as more capable qua guarantor of a better time to come than their wives or mothers.
The domesticity of these housewives has not only rendered them more susceptible than any
other group of people to the attack of boredom, but, alas, as is more often the case, their groundedness in or rivetedness to the enclosed domestic space has all too easily turned them into the very embodiment of boredom itself. Furthermore, if we regard Agamben’s definition of boredom as a gloss on Freud’s account of civilization and domesticity, we may well maintain that Freud’s understanding of humanity or subjectivity is also informed by a gendered logic of cognitive sensitivity. Whereas the animal does not have the agency to feel, not to mention articulate, any sense of boredom, the human being, on the contrary, possesses the ability to be alert or awakened to its own captivation. The distinct sense of being bored by one’s material confines, in other words, has been viewed as an unquestionable defining trait of one’s very humanity. One may recall, what is more, that in Western philosophy, humanity is always inherently coded masculine, and that in Freud’s allegory of the domestication of fire, women, albeit allotted the role as domestic guardian, are in fact ambiguously aligned with the domesticated fire or animal. It follows that the anthropocentric myth established in Freud’s account of subjectivity, though universalized as the theory of the subject, has been marred by potential inconsistencies or internal aporias from the outset. That is, despite, or rather because of, the neurotic rigidity of its constitutive terms that would constantly require the subject to feel and speak distinctly, and to identify manifestly as a particular gender and sexuality, the Western subject constantly risks falling off the track and deviating into perversity whenever the internalized superego is off guard. The Wolfman’s fantasy of being subjected to a feminized, animal-like state has showcased precisely this danger -- that even the most normative version of the Cartesian subject would still have difficulty keeping his erect posture and remaining in his masculine/humanist position.
In summary, the very notion of subjectivity, in Western psychoanalytic or philosophical tradition, has been defined against animality in terms of its full possession of a cognitive sensitivity. As a subject in good standing, not only does one need to undergo the psychic
process of individuation, as Freud has painstakingly described in “Mourning and Melancholia”
as well as his numerous other works, but one must also retain a capacity to feel and subsequently to understand the meaning of that particular feeling. The subject matter of the underdeveloped theory of shame in Civilization and Its Discontents illustrates, as if in a Biblical manner, precisely the lesson that to be human is to feel and to know the shame attributed to the lower part of one’s body, especially all the instinctual and erotic functions associated with the anus. The distinct sense of boredom that Agamben holds only belongs to the human being when it finds itself confined testifies to the same assumption of the human subject as a thinking and sensible/sensitive being. Strictly defined, the so-called subjectivity would have difficulty to sustain when it comes to women or perverts, for both groups have proved to come dangerously close to their instinctuality. It goes without saying that in a foreign context such as the Chinese culture, in which shame is couched in terms of one’s regard for the community rather than one’s distinct perception or feeling regarding oneself, the whole theory built up by Freud seems beside the point. One must look askance at where the subject, or, if you will, the theory of the subject, fails to come into being, in order to gain a better understanding of what I call liminal non-subjectivity in the Chinese communities.
“Red Rose and White Rose”
Eileen Chang can serve as an ideal point of departure for an inquiry into this liminal mode of non-subjectivity. Widely considered the greatest psychological realist in the early twentieth century (and arguably, of the whole century), Chang is deft at incorporating Western narratorial techniques, such as free indirect discourse and, in her later stage, stream of consciousness, to probe her characters’ thinking processes. It is a critical consensus that she
has been deeply influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis.19 Most critics, however, seem to base their assertion upon the assumption that Freud’s understanding of, say, fetishism or Oedipal fixation are universally true, and that his influence on Chang can thereby be testified in her direct application of those psychological insights into the Chinese context. None, to my knowledge, has clearly specified how Chang has revised or rewritten psychoanalysis in fictional terms rather than accepting in toto Freud’s ideas without further reflecting on the applicability or universality of his knowledge.20 For example, when they undertake an analysis of her short story “The Golden Cangue,” they are usually content with the superficial observation that the female protagonist Chi-chiao harbors an incestuous attachment to her son.21 What they tend to neglect is how this incestuous attachment is inextricably bound up with her disregard for personal boundaries, and the fact that she must bide her time in a highly hierarchical extended family until she may accede to the most powerful position within the clan and gain full control over all the other family members, in order to do eventually whatever she likes with those to whom she is Oedipally bound. In any case, these latter dimensions are all very typical of the Chinese extended family in the early twentieth century, and, sadly, in this century they are still typical of many nuclear families in the Chinese community, which have raised their children to become mindless, zombie-like creatures, whose only expertise is to unreflexively memorize textbooks ad verbatim and to strictly follow their parents’ orders. Few critics are willing to compare Oedipality in our context with its Western counterpart and risk polemics by concluding definitely that while
19 See, for example, Liu Yen and Shui Ching’s works, both of which claim that Chang shared a profound interest in psychoanalysis with her contemporaneous May Fourth writers.
20 Chang Hao has been more careful in her treatment of Eileen Chang’s indebtedness to psychoanalysis. She claims that Eileen Chang has “transformed” psychoanalysis so “it can better fit our culture and tradition” (86;
my translation). But how exactly such transformation has been carried out remains unclear. Throughout Chang Hao’s book, it seems, whenever she comes close to this question, she always ends up explaining it away by attributing Eileen Chang’s pathological treatment of her characters not to the pathology of the Chinese culture but to, say, her father’s abuse of her in her childhood. The displacement of the author’s
pathologization of the Chinese to the pathologization of the author proper is quite suggestive, for this discursive evasion is apparently an act of psychic defense that Freud would readily designate as disavowal.
21 See, for instance, Chang Hao 71.
Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus complex revolves around the premise that it is a developmental stage that one needs by all means to get past, or, in orthodox Freudian terms,
“resolve,” in Eileen Chang’s universe few people have successfully transcended that stage and become fully individuated. They are simply stuck with one another – both affectively and ideationally.22 Accordingly, it would be wrong to characterize only Chi-chiao as repressive disciplinary technique or ideology that has been so sanctified, so taken for granted in our culture that many – lay people and critics alike – have not quite managed to note that what appears as virtuous in our community would be immediately labeled as pathological in
“resolve,” in Eileen Chang’s universe few people have successfully transcended that stage and become fully individuated. They are simply stuck with one another – both affectively and ideationally.22 Accordingly, it would be wrong to characterize only Chi-chiao as repressive disciplinary technique or ideology that has been so sanctified, so taken for granted in our culture that many – lay people and critics alike – have not quite managed to note that what appears as virtuous in our community would be immediately labeled as pathological in