Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.
Freud insisted throughout his work on the organic life of his patients, but he also insisted that the symptoms which so commonly marked their bodies did not originate there. The drive, he affirmed, was the representative in the psyche of an instinct, and thus to be found ‘on the frontier between the mental and the physical’ (Freud 1977a: 83). 2
That instinct itself no longer exists as such in the speaking being, but its residue survives in the psyche to exert an influence on mind and body, or mind-and-body, since in this account the two interact in a way that renders them no longer so easily distinguishable. 37.
In consequence, the cultural script is never absolute. It plays a crucial role, of course: we cannot account for Anna O.’s behaviour without reference to the specificity of her cultural moment. At the same time, that cultural moment does not fully explain the ‘absences’ that made her unaware of her surroundings, the ‘bad self’ that threw cushions at her visitors and tore the buttons off her bedclothes, or the loss of her own culture in its inscription in her native language. For that we need to recognize what culture withholds, or the inability of the script to cover the lack that appears in culture itself. 37
The abolished particularity returns as resistance, marking the speaking being’s loss of the unnameable real, which is still there, but no longer there-for-a-subject. This resistance makes itself felt not only in individual experience, but also as incoherences in the apparent homogeneity of culture itself. A cultural criticism that takes this into account is able to acknowledge the silences that mark the inscriptions of culture, the complexity and the hesitations of the texts, as well as their noisier affirmations.