552
LEO BERSANI
denounces, and of whi ch the parallel in litera ry history is realism or,
more fund amentall y, the aestheti c principle of mimesis.
But why should we reject tha t theoreti call y endless superimpos–
ing of languages upon languages which we now recognize as the ac–
tivity of interpreta ti on ? In psychoanalysis, the therapeutic process is
not necessaril y less therapeutic because the " beginnings" of neurosis
may never be uncovered . The prolifera ting na ture of interpretation •
is a source of discouragement only if we continue desiring to interpret
back
to supposed sources. But the interpreta ti on of the past can be–
come an exhila ra ting process of prepa ring future self-accretions, as
we should know from the example of Proust. As Derrida writes, total–
ization (or the definitive, global interpretation of experience ) is im–
possible not because there is already " too much, more than one can
say," but ra ther because, in the linguisti c fi eld of interpretation,
" . .. there is something missing ... : a center which a rrests and founds
the freepl ay of interpreta ti on ." Thus Derrida opposes what he calls a
joyous Ni etzschean affirmati on to the sad and persistent yearning for
" the absent origin" - " the joyous affirm ation of the freepl ay of the
world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active in–
terpretation. "
In literature, tha t active interpreta tion would certainly have very
little resembl ance to the enclosing, deadening systematizations which
the structuralists have until now preferred. Freud remarked that it's
possible to work back toward causes in analysis (although he also
recognized the p roblema ti c nature of supposed first causes) , but if
one goes from psychological causes to the present psychological reality
of an individual, one no longer has the impression of something
inevitable. " ... From a knowledge of the premises," he wrote in
1920, "we cou ld not have foretold the na ture of the result. " The
structuralists' a ttempt to formu late the nature of the laws which
ma ke lite ra ture possible - their interest in " la littera rite" rather than
in " la litterature" - imprisons them in an a rea of abstract generality
from which the specificity of litera ry acts is simply banished. There
is, to paraphrase Freud , such an immense di stance between " the na–
ture of the result" (litera ture itself ) and " a knowledge of the prem–
ises" (the laws of the litera ry fun ction ) tha t the formu la tion of the
premises seems ra ther useless. What litera ry work could be predicted
( and prediction interests the structuralists ) from the laws these writers
