Absence, perversion and the ethics of psychoanalysis revisited

a reading of Henry James's "The beast in the jungle"

pp. 123-160

in: Ben Ware, Modernism, ethics and the political imagination, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

In this chapter, I suggest a way of reading Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" which treats as central to its ethical and political import the absence which resides at its centre. This void or hole is, I will argue, not only the cause of the narrative and that which confers meaning and structure upon the lives of its characters, but also a dialectical empty space which opens up new ways of thinking about the concept of negativity. In the second part of the chapter, I take a different, but not an entirely unrelated, turn. First, I examine the dynamic between the two protagonists in James's tale – John Marcher and May Bartram – in relation to the economy of perversion sketched out by Lacan in a number of his Seminars; second, I look at the structural congruence between perversion and the discourse of the analyst which Lacan constructs in his Seminar XVII. By taking this approach, I aim to bring the reader to an entirely new understanding of James's short masterpiece: the story is not "about" a missed romantic encounter between two isolated individuals; rather, it dramatizes the relationship between an analyst and an analysand, a relationship that brings to the fore a complex range of ethical and political questions which lead the reader well beyond the confines of the psychoanalytic clinic.