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PARTISAN REVIEW
the experience of nullity. Ann Beattie's minimalist art is a particularly
striking and yet representative case in its bleak tone and will–
lessness. The high hopes, the exhilarations of the sixties, have pro–
duced a kind of "hangover." What she gives us in her first novel ,
The
Chilly Scenes of Winter
(1976), is an artful style of desultoriness . The
life of a character in Ann Beattie's fiction is represented through
uneventful external details:
Charles goes back to bed. He sees that Sam is already in bed in
his room . He pulls the covers up over himself and falls asleep.
He wakes up at five o'clock when the alarm goes off. He gets up ,
pushes in the button, and goes back
to
bed ....
Nothing happens, but the very fact that Beattie tells her story in the
mode of realistic narrative in which events follow one another in a
logical consecutive manner preserves a sense of expectation and
even promise: something might happen. But it never does.
In associating Foucault with Kohut I am in effect altering
Foucault's argument - or at least suggesting a different implication
from the one that he seems to intend. Where Foucault speaks of the
tyranny of sexual desire, Kohut implies its enervation. Is this a con–
tradiction? I think not. It is precisely the elevation of sexual desire,
indeed of desire as a supreme value, that entails as one of its conse–
quences its enervation. What keeps desire alive is the sense of resis–
tance, of the play of other values, energies, faculties. This is precisely
the force of Foucault's linkage of desire and power. But the effect of a
conscious discursive view of uncensored desire is to generate im–
possible and self-defeating expectations which produce the ex–
perience of despair.
Without sharing Foucault's poststructuralist assumptions
about discourse, I think
The History of Sexuality
possesses a powerful
insight about the tyranny of desire, which does not depend upon
those assumptions. The protest of someone like Bersani (and he is
only the latest in a string of writers whom we have considered), that
desire in its fragmentary , discontinuous condition, its "natural" con–
dition, so to speak, has been and continues to be repressed, masks
the cultural fact that the revolution of desire has in fact succeeded.
What does it mean for the revolution of desire to have suc–
ceeded? Does it mean that the reconstruction of the Dionysian ego
that Brown advocated has indeed taken place? Or that life has been
made over by the sensuousness of art? Or that "surplus repression" is
