Since we are talking about Lacan, therefore about psychoanalysis, I will begin with a personal reminiscence, almost a confession. It could borrow its title from Milan Kundera's novel The Joke, for it all started with a silly practical joke. In the fall of 1968, when I was a new student at the Ecole normale supérieure, I overheard friends preparing one of the idiosyncratic pranks that used to be one of the privileges of that French cathedral of learning. They had espied with some nervous envy how the famous psychoanalyst would be driven to the school's entrance to emerge with a beautiful woman on his arm and make his way to the office of Louis Althusser, who was then the Ecole's administrative secretary. By contrast with the nondescript student style of the school, Lacan was known to draw crowds from the city's select quarters, a medley of colorful intellectuals, writers, artists, feminists, radicals, and psychoanalysts. It was easy to rig the speakers connected with his microphone. A tape consisting of animal squeals and pornographic grunts had been rapidly put together. Now was the moment to see how the master and his audience would react to this insolence; not having had time to finish lunch, still clutching an unfinished yogurt pot, I followed the conspirators. We arrived late (our X-rated tape was to be aired close to the end of the seminar) into a crowded room, in which dozens of tape recorders had been set on the first row of tables in front of a little stage. There Lacan was striding and talking to the forest of microphones; behind him was a blackboard on which was written: “The essence of psychoanalytic theory is a discourse without words.” Clearly, he was begging for our rude interruption! Precisely as I entered the room, Lacan launched into a disquisition about mustard pots, or to be precise, the mustard pot, l'pot d'moutard'. His delivery was irregular, forceful, oracular.

The experience of reading a book written in Italian but conceived in a foreign cultural world is unusual in modern Italian literature. Such an experience, normal in the anglophone, francophone, and the Spanish-speaking world, has become less rare in the past decade thanks to a number of books written, often in cooperation with authors of Italian birth, by foreigners who have immigrated to Italy. Most of these books are in diary form and document the autobiographical struggles of Africans or East Europeans who travel throughout Italy or make Italy their new home. This phenomenon is in the process of evolution, but the literature it has already generated offers the promise of producing a body of work of great interest. Because of the current growth of the multicultural population in Italy, this kind of literature is destined to become a fixture of twenty-first-century Italian culture.

Even though the literary output of these new immigrants might not yet have created an enormous body of work or vast outpourings of scholarly analysis, the cultural impact of this new wave of non-Italian migratory tales written in Italian has provoked rethinking about the concepts of migration, exile, and frontier literature in Italian culture. Up to the 1990s, Italian scholarship had rarely perceived the themes of migration and frontier as two faces of the same literary phenomenon.

Compare the following two questions, both of which greatly exercised ancient Greek and Roman thinkers:

1. 1 What is a good human life?

2. 2 Why isn't the earth falling?

They appear about as different as any two questions could be. The first is one that most of us continue to consider important today. The second is not a question we are likely even to think worth asking: however little physics we know, we know enough to realize that the question itself rests on false suppositions.

Despite this and other contrasts, those who manage to get inside the subject – Greek and Roman philosophy – to which this book aims to provide an entry route should find that the two questions come to exercise an equal fascination. They may even find that the two of them have more in common than at first appears, as I shall suggest below.

The book of nature is written in a mathematical script. Human nature finds itself called upon to decipher this text, and it is perhaps more deeply implicated in this activity than a mere external reader would be. The idea that there is a text outside that demands attentive and renewed reading fails to do justice to the complexities postulated by Freud, for whom the unconscious is equipped with its own inner text. Any reading that is to be done then presupposes the existence of a relation between these interiorities and an exterior that they are engaged with. There is a question here of giving an interpretation of a text, but there is also a question of whether a mathematician may be needed in order to address these questions of exterior, interior, and the frontier between them.

The psychoanalyst is called on to be a poet – or, as Jacques Lacan occasionally phrased it, to be a poem. Analytical work, at the same time, “scientifically” purifies the subject. Lacan held to both these opinions, and he was not alone in the analytical movement in wanting to bridge the gap between them. Such themes were present from the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Freud put forward claims on both sides of this divide; on the one hand, he described how words have a magical power, and on the other, he suggested that psychoanalysis can be formalized as a science.

INTRODUCTION

The last years have seen a shift in the winds of culture. The approaching storm - or the dissipation of the existing storm clouds, depending on your perspective - has been widely heralded as the “postmodern shift.” Postmodernity has as many interpretations as it has advocates and critics put together, which renders it impossible to begin a chapter of this sort with a pithy definition. But all (or at least most) of its descriptions exhibit two important features: a thoroughgoing critique of the “modern project” (when and what that was being a matter of deep contention), and an insistence that the solution to the problems of modernity lies not in a return to premodern questions and answers, but rather in moving beyond the modern project to something radically new and different.

Certain stereotypes notwithstanding, theologians are highly sensitive to shifts in the wind. As Walter Lowe points out in chapter 14 of this volume, Karl Barth recognized the exhaustion of the “modern” German intellectual projects (Hegel, neo-Kantianism, von Harnack) already in the opening of the twentieth century and proclaimed an anti-modernist (and in that sense, at least, postmodern) program. With no less insight, Paul Tillich put his finger on the pulse of the postwar intellectual–existential climate when he published his highly successful The Courage to Be (1953) and began formulating his mature systematic theology. One detects a similar cultural acuity in the death-of-God movement, in Langdon Gilkey’s naming and reaping of whirlwinds, and the diverse forms of liberation theology that have left an indelible impression on theology at the turn of the millennium.

One way of telling the story of modernity and postmodernity is by charting the relationship, often volatile and sometimes violent, between Scripture and tradition. At stake is the nature and locus of divine authority: does it reside in the canon or in the community?

In one sense, the postmodern condition would seem to be a swing back to the authority of tradition, in particular, to the authority of interpretative traditions. On the other hand, the postmodern situation brings to light certain reductionistic tendencies in thinking about language and literature. Some look to the later Wittgenstein as indicating a new way of thinking about language. Interestingly, Wittgenstein's emphasis on language use correlated to forms of life brings back the very Scripture/tradition dynamic in a postmodern key. For what is tradition if not a form of life to know and glorify God? And what is Scripture if not a certain use of language to name God?

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION IN MODERNITY: FROM REFORMATION TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Protestantism: the eclipse of tradition?

From one perspective, the Reformation was a victory of the Scripture principle over ecclesial tradition. The reality, however, is more complex, for the Reformers did not object to the use of the church fathers or deny that the Bible ought to be interpreted in the context of the life of the ongoing church. What they rejected was rather the elevation of noncanonical, and hence human, traditions that were thought to supplement the revelation given in Scripture. The Reformers’ so-called “Scripture principle” identified the Bible as God’s word in human speech, while the notion of the priesthood of all believers handed Scripture to the laity and encouraged them to interpret it for themselves.

Jacques Lacan is a thinker and clinician whose apprehension of recording and broadcast media allows him to live on posthumously with the pop star status he gained in post-war Parisian intellectual life. He is not only a serious rival to the official heirs of Freud, but has emerged as a rival of that other superstar, Jean-Paul Sartre. The history of his exclusion (or excommunication) from the International Psychoanalytic Association, and his subsequent notoriety is crucial for the theorization of his reception in Anglophone academia: there is an aura of transgression, or the smell of sulfur surrounding the sovereignty of his actions and thinking. His insistence on the signifier is key to an undoing of a humanist hermeneutics that swaddled more orthodox receptions of Freud. In addition, Lacan's interest in cybernetics seems to anticipate the plague of questions raised by technological progress. The reactions to his deviation from psychoanalytic orthodoxies revealed the religious fervor with which the guardians of Freudianism tried to protect their territory. Today, Lacan's work continues to teach us lessons, not only about psychoanalysis, but about media and history as well.

Playing the master on the airwaves allowed for Lacan to perform as both charlatan and master – consider his performance in Télévision: his analytic attitude seemed like a posture of pure provocation of his more conservative colleagues. In his pedagogical performances, Lacan demonstrated that all forms of inter-subjectivity, whether mediated by transference or other forms of telecommunication, are based upon a bewitching mirage of reciprocity or mutual understanding.

Why speak of the “mirror stage” as an archive that has been obliterated? The reason is both simple and complex. First, there is no existing original of the lecture on this subject delivered by Jacques Lacan at the 16th congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), which took place in Marienbad between the second and eighth of August 1936. After he had been speaking for minutes, Lacan was interrupted by Ernest Jones, the chairman, who considered that this French participant, of whom he had never heard, was exceeding the time allotted to each speaker. At this time, the rule regulating the duration of each spoken contribution was already being applied at international conferences. Lacan, who regarded the interruption as a humiliation, quit the conference and went on to the Olympic Games in Berlin to see at close quarters what a sporting event manipulated by the Nazis was like. One might well see some connection between the forceful manner in which Jones interrupted Lacan's talk and Lacan's notorious invention of “variable sessions” marked by radical brevity and a sense of deliberate suspension. All his life, Lacan would struggle with an impossible control over time, as evinced by the masterful analysis presented in his 1945 essay on “logical time.”

Introduction: neoclassicism

In his homage to Stravinsky, Milan Kundera explains that Stravinsky's experience of forced emigration triggered a change in his musical style no less reactionary than irrevocable. Also an émigré, Kundera sees emigration as a wound – the ‘pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign’. Stravinsky, like any émigré artist, suffered estrangement from the ‘subconscious, memory, language – all the understructure of creativity’ formed in youth. Leaving the place to which his imagination was bound caused a kind of ripping apart. Kundera believes that emigration erased Russia for Stravinsky. After that, his homeland became the historical landscape of music, and his compatriots were the composers that populate that history. Kundera describes the advent of Stravinsky's neoclassical style as a metaphorical recognition – and achievement – of a new home with the ‘classics’ of European music:

‘A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country – he can have only one country – and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life.’ These words were uttered by Stravinsky at a banquet held in his honour in Moscow on 1 October 1962. The eighty-year-old composer had returned to his homeland after an absence of fifty years. In the intervening period he had acquired first French and then American citizenship, and developed an increasingly hostile attitude towards his native country and its culture. This hostility had been fully reciprocated by the Soviet musical establishment. Now, as the guest of the Union of Composers, Stravinsky was seemingly performing a complete volte-face by wholeheartedly embracing his Russian identity. For Robert Craft, his assistant and amanuensis, this was nothing short of a ‘transformation’, and he was astonished, not only to witness Stravinsky and his wife suddenly taking ‘pride in everything Russian’, but to observe at close hand how ‘half a century of expatriation’ could be ‘forgotten in a night’. Craft's diary of the famous visit contains many revealing comments about a composer who was a master of mystification.

Like his younger contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, with whom there are some intriguing biographical parallels, Stravinsky did not care to be pigeon-holed or linked with any particular artistic trend after he left Russia. Above all, because of a sense of cultural inferiority which stemmed from the fact that Russia's musical tradition was so much younger than that of other European nations, he came to disavow his own musical heritage, which necessitated embroidering a complex tapestry of lies and denials.

When Chroniques de ma vie was published in 1935, Stravinsky sanctioned what has become his most famous remark: ‘Music is powerless to express anything at all.’ Even if he capitulated to the ventriloquism of his ghost writer Walter Nouvel on that occasion, Stravinsky's faith in the precept of objectivity, ‘perhaps the overriding feature of Stravinsky's modernism’, pervades his aesthetic manifesto, Poetics of Music (1942), to the extent that his ‘explanation of music as I conceive it’ is egoistically declared not to be ‘any the less objective for being the fruit of my own experience and my personal observations’. Objectivity, and its ascendance over what he called ‘the subjective prism’, was, or became, Stravinsky's distinctive habit of mind, an aesthetic and compositional position maintained in relation to any musical material, including his own free inventions. ‘What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallisation –’, he wrote in Poetics, ‘is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally submit to the law: Apollo demands it.’ Stravinsky's identification with the Apollonian – order, selection, construction, logic and unity – exemplifies the rationalising tendency within modernism and dominates, but does not expel, the Dionysian – freedom, fantasy, emotion, expressivity and irrationality.

One way of characterising the modernist period might be to say that it was the age of Picasso, Stravinsky and Joyce: geniuses who brought about revolutionary changes in the procedures for their arts and publicised them from Paris, so contributing to the myth that it was the avant-garde capital of Europe at that time. Other capitals were home to great geniuses as well – Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Mann – people who, while quite different from Stravinsky, were also very influential modernists and were well out of his cultural range. Indeed, to understand them, we would be moved towards modernist considerations to which Stravinsky was deeply antipathetic. His ‘rivalry’ with Schoenberg (whether it was actual or invented by defenders of the atonal, such as Adorno) is not nearly so important as his intellectual differences from him, including his refusal to write the kind of music that ‘develops’, as it does within the German tradition. But it is the modernist tradition in France – that of Debussy, Proust and Matisse – which influenced at least the early Stravinsky. This was a world that grew out of the Symbolist tendencies so strongly supported by Diaghilev and his circle in Russia and one that produced works such as Fireworks, Zvezdolikiy, The Firebird and, most obviously, The Faun and the Shepherdess, influenced as it was by Debussy, Ravel and Dukas.

When one examines the earliest works of a great composer, it is almost Inevitably with hindsight that one does so. Hearing the earlier works through the portal that the later, more well-known works supply can be a strange experience, through which hindsight often hardens into self-reassurance. Does one hear a familiar foretaste of this here, a pre-echo of that there? Is there a discernible quality to the early works that is evident to us today, but which contemporary listeners seem to have overlooked? Such questions are easy to ask and carry a hint of smugness, but, conversely, is anything to be gained by turning the presumptions around – by dwelling, for example, on the ordinariness that allowed the composer's contemporaries to remain unaware of the genius in their midst? Surely not: for such inversion merely preserves the same impoverished agenda in negative.

Questions of style impinge on the assessment of ‘early’ works in ways that demand examination in the present context. Consider the early works of Mozart as an alternative case to those of Stravinsky: as Charles Rosen has famously argued, the received idea of the ‘classical style’ is defined for us today by the mature works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, rather than by the music of their many accomplished contemporaries. It is not that Mozart's music is recognised as similar to that of, say, J. C. Bach, Kozeluch and Kraus, and can be measured against it, revealing Mozart's ‘superiority’.

Introduction

Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik was published in 1949, at a decisive turning-point for music in the mid-twentieth century. In this highly influential book, Adorno put forward a dialectical reading of the New Music in the form of a critique of its two most extreme representatives, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The effects were dramatic, providing a rallying cry for the generation of new composers emerging in the immediate post-war years, and who were to become associated both with the rejection of neoclassicism and with the espousal of the multiple serialism of the Darmstadt School. The reception of Adorno's critique by the two protagonists themselves was in some respects contrary to expectations. Schoenberg, who disliked Adorno, saw it primarily as an attack on himself, thus going directly against the general view, which regarded Adorno as the great advocate of the Second Viennese School. But at the same time Schoenberg also sprang to Stravinsky's defence, annoyed by Adorno's treatment of his old adversary. Stravinsky, on the other hand, remained silent – in public, at least – thus making it difficult to gauge the extent to which Adorno's critique of his music may have played any determining role in the composer's own spectacular change of direction in the early 1950s, when he himself abandoned neoclassicism and turned to serialism. This has, naturally enough, prompted speculation. Célestin Deliège, for instance, has argued: