How to speak of the relation between psychoanalysis and deconstruction? Might the truth of the former be evinced by the very work of the latter, always already at work in the questioning of the subject in the former? Taking up the thought of Maurice Blanchot in confronting the truth of analysis (which Lacan links to myth), this paper aims to disclose this secret truth in its very default, (re)inscribing the fundamental myth of psychoanalysis not as that of Oedipus, but rather (...) that of Narcissus and Echo. In complicating the reflections of Lacan, Leclaire, and Legendre in contestation with themselves through the mirror of Blanchot’s writings, the absent and unspeakable truth of analysis is lured out by a linguistic, abyssal play of mirrors. Thus, perhaps, might the difference between deconstruction and psychoanalysis be seen as echoing or (re)doubling a difference internal to each itself. (shrink)

Reviewed: The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, State University of New York Press, 2009, 232pp., pb. $24.95. ISBN-13: 9781438428246. This review analyzes the extent to which The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, may contribute to recent treatments of sensibility and affect in critical thought. After first posing the question of why community appeared to recede from the critical attention (...) it received in the 1990s, my discussion then assesses the ways the volume’s essays argue collectively for a renewed engagement with community via the work of Bataille. I attempt to show how Mitchell’s and Winfree’s volume provides an important provocation to recover the exigency of community at a time when popular appeals to community remain no less spectacular, inflated, and cynical than they were at the height of its engagement by critical thought. The essay concludes with a suggestion of how Bataille’s work can intervene in what Fredric Jameson has called the post-09/11 manufacturing of affect. (shrink)