“the name ‘resistance’ is given to everything in the words and actions o f
the analysand that obstructs his gaining access to his u n c o n s c i o u s . I n
The Interpretation o f Dreams, the work that sets forth what Freud always
regarded as his greatest discovery— about the meaning o f dreams and the
functioning o f the dreamwork— the opening example is Freud’s analysis
of one o f his own dreams, which has come to be known as the Dream o f
Irmas Injection. In describing how he analyzes the dream by looking for
what he associates with its various elements when running over the day’s
residues and seeing how these apparently nonsensical elements actually do
fit together and make sense, Freud reaches the conclusion that the dream
was the expression o f a wish, in this case the wish not to be held respon
sible for the failure o f his patient Irma to get better, the wish for the fault
to lie elsewhere.
Lacan, in reanalyzing the dream and Freud’s account o f it, notes that
this wish that Freud uncovers is scarcely an unconscious one: Freud tells us
that he had spent the evening before the dream writing out an account o f
Irma’s case in an attempt at self-justification. What Freud’s interpretation
of his own dream is resisting are aspects o f the dreamwork that exceed and
disrupt the narcissistic economy o f the ego. Freud gives a semantic rather
than syntactic interpretation o f the dream; Lacan focuses on transferential
relationships and on the most enigmatic moment o f the dream, the chemi
cal formula for trimethylamine, which Freud says appeared before him in
bold type and which Lacan interprets as telling us that the essence o f the
dream is a formal structure. Insofar as Lacan focuses on the linguistic ele
ments o f the dream— in particular its inclusion o f a chemical formula—
his approach to the dream is no longer based on “non-linguistic consider
ations,” to quote de Man. Freud’s dream tells us about the nature o f the
unconscious, which, in a famous formulation o f Lacan’s, is structured like
a language.
12. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language o f Psycho-Analysis,
trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 394.
13. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation o f Dreams (1900), in The Standard
Edition o f the Complete Psychobgical Works o f Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 4:106-21.
14. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique o f Psycho
analysis (1954-55; repr.. New York: Norton, 1988), 158-59.
8 4
T H E O R Y
The theory o f dreams developed in this chapter o f The Interpretation
o f Dreams (that the dream is the expression o f a wish), and thus Freud’s at
tempt to describe the workings o f the unconscious, can be read as a case of
resistance to the workings o f the unconscious that theory seeks to describe,
in fact as a characteristic defense o f the ego that brings everything back to
the desire o f the subject, repressing the impersonal structures and processes
in which it is caught up. The theory o f the unconscious is resistance to the
truth o f the unconscious that it unwittingly exposes.
The example may help us understand how it could be that theory it
self is a resistance to theory (thought o f still as reflection on meaning as a
problem rather than a given). The very attempt at understanding is a re
sistance to that which may not give rise to understanding— although these
moments or elements can only be identified by the kind of attention we
are calling theory— attention to meaning as a problem. In the case o f lit
erature, theory adequate to its linguistic object involves rhetorical read
ing— reading attentive to the functioning o f tropes and figures and to the
ways in which interpretation entails the imposition o f meaning— but op
erations o f theorization inexorably become a resistance to reading in this
sense, transforming textual difficulties into examples o f certain kinds of
meaning, for instance.
One might, then, consider some o f de Man’s own work in the light o f
this problem or, rather, ask whether what is especially valuable or produc
tive in his work for the future o f literary criticism and theory may not be
linked to this problem o f resisting theory. We think o f de Man as a literary
theorist and so would be tempted to assume that his contribution must be
a body o f theory, but it may be that we should look, rather, to aspects o f his
resistance to theory (though for that, theory will still be the telling word).
One might identijfy five areas in which de Man made important con
tributions: the theorization o f allegory, the revaluation o f romanticism, his
account o f the relation between blindness and insight, his exploration of
the relation between constative and performative dimensions o f language,
and his critique o f the aesthetic ideology.
15.
There are excellent articles discussing various aspects of de Man’s work
in Lindsay Waters, ed., Reading de Man Reading {}Æmr\e3Ço\is‘. University of Min
nesota Press, 1989); and Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej
Warminski, eds.. Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife o f Theory (Minne
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
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