Content area
Full Text
Abstract In some recent writing that draws on Lacanian ideas about the structure of psychoanalysL·, Shvoj Zizek opposes the common cultural visum of the analyst as confessor or priest. In this view, psychoanalysL· L· born out of the capitatist spirit of 'thrift', of hoarding and spending only with reluctance. Instead of the religious imagery of confession and forgiveness, or indeed a fantasy that psychoanalysL· might represent a 'cure by love', Zizek alights on an anti-semitic trope that starkly pronounces on psychoanalysL· as a mode of economic exchange. Miserliness L· the core ofthL· trope. Zizek writes (in The Parallax View), 'The link between psychoanalysL· and capitatism L· perhaps best exemplified by one of iL· great literary figures of the nineteenth-century novel, thejew^ moneylender, a shadowy figure to whom all the big figures of society come to borrow money, pleading with him and telling him all their dirty secrets and passions. '
This essay takes seriously the idea that, in centring on a miserly exchange mediated by money, psychoanalysis reveals the structuring power of the social order over encounters that are fantasised to be based on love or care. However, it ash why the trope has to be so explicitly anti-semitic in its formulation. It is argued that what breaks through in this and some other passages where Zizek overly exuberantly evokes anti-semitism is a continuing failure of psychoanalysis to deal with its own Jewish' investments.
Keywords psychoanalysis, Zizek, Jews, anti-semitism, money, miser
JEWISH HISTORY
It is an old quip that books on psychoanalysis might be catalogued by publishers under the title 'Jewish studies', and it is certainly the case that whilst the numerical domination of the psychoanalytic movement by Jews may have shifted significantly - and may never, since the very early years, have been as great as is often imagined - the symbolic resonance of psychoanalysis as in some ways 'Jewish' has never let up. This chapter takes this resonance seriously and places it in contact with discussions of psychoanalysis and money, specifically in relation to an intriguing reading of psychoanalysis as being based on the model of 'miserly exchange'. The general argument is diat psychoanalysis retains its association with Jewishness and that this has resulted in a legacy of unworked- through anti-Semitism, which...