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words into ideas, Phillips is very much a writer who cherishes the pithy
insight over the protracted argument. In a review of Jonathan Lear's
Open-Minded,
Phillips says that "Lear is often at his best when his alle–
giances are slightly ruffled," and the same could be said of the author of
Promises, Promises.
There's a tension in Phillips's work between play–
fulness, strong opinion, and a desire to avoid being what he calls "the
knowing knower." He prefers "the unknowing knowing knower,"
which he also refers to as "the Dreamer"-a sort of thief of the night
whose allegiances are, at best, mystifying. And a typical Phillips essay is
often structured like a dream-that is, mostly unstructured, densely
plotted, meandering and somehow, simultaneously, always getting to
the point. Because Phillips isn't much interested in answers, his essays
often reach their pitch in their middles, where his questions flourish and
tease.
There are also moments where Phillips is, along with his reader, per–
haps too widely awake-that is, where his emphasis on the lack of
answers whips into a kind of aesthetic broth. Unfortunately, he's at his
least interesting when he's summing up or attempting to state things
straightforwardly. When he argues in the preface that his version of psy–
choanalysis would "favor a theory as much because it sounded good, as
because it might work," or when he says in an essay about Lacan that
psychoanalytic theorists should "stop trying to have new theories and
aim instead just to write interesting sentences," he sounds a little facile.
In "Promises, Promises," the final essay, he begins with the following dis–
claimer: "I want to offer a disarray of reflections on this subject because
I cannot come to any interesting conclusions about it." And while this
statement isn't quite true, it isn't as false as a reader might hope.
At other times, though-and especially for a reader interested in con–
necting the dots-Phillips uses his own marvelous sentences to further
an intriguing set of psychoanalytic concepts. In "Poetry and Psycho–
analysis," for instance, he argues against "the refusal to historicize the
unconscious"-a provocative idea, and one that shows the extent to
which he's interested in stripping away the universalist claims that have
often gotten psychoanalysis into hot water. Clearly Phillips wishes to
expand the role of history and culture-"materialism," as he refers to
it, citing Raymond Williams-into our deepest psychological structures,
but what exactly is a "historical unconscious"?
If
Phillips doesn't imme–
diately answer that question, he does smartly follow up with "Bombs
Away," an essay that tells how one theory based on the unconscious–
British object-relations theory, with its emphasis on the negative ideal of
mothering-was influenced by Londoners' experience of World War II.
