Legitimately Freudianesque; or, Sometimes A Wolfe Is Just Your Mother

The advisor sends me an email saying I should "respond" to this article.  It contains the words "species" and "race" in the title and thus falls squarely within the purview of the chapter I'll be working on when I finish the current one.  As I begin reading it I realize I don't know what the word "respond" really means.  Does he want me to consider it seriously?  Employ it as foil?  Long years have led me to believe that I've been requested to rehearse the strong form of Cary Wolfe's argument on the local level and "respond" to it on the global.  I should construct an uber-un-strawman and address it.  Only "address" no more informs me of how I'm supposed to react to this article than "respond." 

Because Wolfe rebukes particular psychoanalytic arguments in predictably psychoanalytic ways, my initial response consisted of pure revulsion.  The whole way in which any psychoanalytically-informed critic incorporates all anti-psychoanalytic thought back into a psychoanalytic framework disgusts me.  By defining one's work as "anti-psychoanalytic" one begs to be re-incorporated, I understand that.  But oftentimes the anti-psychoanalytic lable is applied by the psychoanalytic critic and not the non-psychoanalytic author.  But I digress.   

My larger issue with the article is that it lack stakes.  Such stakelesness points to my core objection to what Hoblo calls "Higher Eclectism."  It's merely descriptive.  It articulates a personal opinion in a philosophical language without any concern for the implications of such juxtapositions.  So when Wolfe reduces 250 years of complex thought on the process of speciation into a human/other binary I simply want to spit.  I understand that Wolfe creates that binary only to tear it down—but that's exactly what I mean by "stakelessness."  Instead of rummaging through the archives and reading the actual debates on the human/animal distinction, Wolfe invents an anthropology. 

He's certainly correct to note that, among the laity, the assumption of human superioty reigned supreme long after special creation had been scientifically debunked.  But wouldn't it be appropriate to establish that in the essay?  Why the faux universalism which refuses to acknowledge the existence and contemporaneity of these debates?  I understand that Wolfe claims these debates are ongoing—but why then does he remain firmly in the theoretical tradition?  Would it not be enriched by homologous debates in the history and philosophy of science?  Note that I'm not accusing him of redefining another discipline's problems in the language of his own.  I see no evidence of meta-plagiarism. 

I do see evidence of arrogance.  Of self-satisfaction in the superiority of his theoretical knowledge.  Of a desire to enshrine the contingent in the pantheon of the universal.  What annoys me is that the dynamic—a combination of Freudianism and relation to the category of the animal—he identifies at work in Hemingway seems fundamentally sound.  I only wish it were identified as being the product of a particular historical moment in which everyone was Freudianesque.

Comments

[T. Scrivener]

If I might venture an opinion, what really annoys me is the refusal to accept the possibility that for once there might be no great big secret, no key to all mythologies and to the universe. Not all closets have skeltons in them and that's where theory ( at least the little I have read) goes wrong, it assumes there are whole graveyards worth of the stuff in every cabinet, famous mathematical proof to the side(1) not everything is intresting.

(1)- The proof runs something like this, if not everything were intresting then there would be a least intresting thing, this thing would be intresting by virtue of being the the least intresting thing. So the next unintresting thing must take it's place but that must be intresting because...

[T. Scrivener]

I think I might have found a phrase that describes what I think is wrong with a lot of theory "the hermeneutics suspicion". Does anyone else think that that might be what's really wrong with theory?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

T., first, I apologize for not addressing your earlier comment more promptly. Second, vis-a-vis psychoanalytic theory, I think you've hit the nail on the head: some houses have no closets and therefore nothing in them. That all were assumed to have many for a span of seventy some-odd years is an historical reality enshrined in many a work of literature, which is why I think the author ends up being right for all the wrong reasons.

And yes, "the hermeneutics of suspicion" has been used to describe theory. (Scroll down to the comments in particular.)