Abstract
This chapter extends the now routinised use of psychonalysis within film and literary criticism to the analysis of theoretical discourse.1 In the critical practices of film and literary studies, psychoanalysis is applied to the analysis of texts, as well as to the analysis of text/spectator or text/reader relationships. In neither case are the findings of such researches deemed to bear any direct relationship to a text’s author. In place of an auteurist approach to the relation between texts and their authors, psychoanalytic textual analysis posits, rather that ‘meanings … are actually produced in and through the operations of … texts.’ (Kuhn, 1994, p74). Psychoanalytic criticism argues, moreover, that ‘… the meaning-production process is not always immediately discernible … The operation of the meaning-construction process has, as it were, to be unearthed, for it is precisely the work of ideology to conceal its own operations/(Ibid.) As this account of psychoanalytic criticism reveals, this approach to textual analysis has most usually been deployed to unearth the production of hidden social meanings. Psychoanalysis has less usually been deployed, that is, in the analysis of affects and their relation to social meanings and world views. This is the aim of the following chapter.
‘(t)hinking starts with drives’ (Caldwell, 1995, p25)
‘…(t)he ideal of dispassionate inquiry is an impossible dream …’(Jagger, 1997, pl90)
‘I simply indicate that I know it and thus make myself known as the one who knows.’ (Felman and Laub, 1992, p63 emphasis in the original)
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© 2007 Susannah Radstone
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Radstone, S. (2007). Theory and Affect: Undivided Worlds. In: Perri Six, Radstone, S., Squire, C., Treacher, A. (eds) Public Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598225_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598225_9
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