“When we have to change an opinion about anyone, we charge heavily to their account the inconvenience they thereby cause us.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”
In lieu of amplifying that denunciation of biography that history’s venerated figures tend to be its unacknowledged criminals, this issue of Politics and Culture is compelled by the techniques, theories, and traditions available for its interpretation. The study of biographical forms, which radiate out today beyond discrete expressions in books to montage biopics and multi-media museum retrospectives, renews inquiries many of us have concerning how someone is lionized and how such an ascent carries with it presumptions we affix to identities of acclaim, expertise, and power. An identity that attracts attention is distinct from a life that receives it or one that is impelled by it, which is not to say these are always exclusive. Telling the difference requires patient research poised to interpret the details of a life in addition to reckoning with the claims identity make upon it. So, similar to the way documentarians are instructed to give their subjects an added uncomfortable minute to speak, in anticipation the interviewee will talk offhandedly and ditch the formalities of the conversation, attentiveness to intellectual biography is an invitation for unexpectedly revealing ideas to emerge from a relatively familiar voice.
An archive is where most intellectual biographies begin and where they gain plausibility. But these materials and contacts are rarely if ever given or donated directly by the person studied. A thornier trespassing often occurs and many a well intentioned project is spurned. Of the biographers whose recent work is reviewed here, from Detlev Claussen and Sheila Rowbotham to Gavin Hopps and Andrea Weiss, most characterize their research as unlikely, in pursuit of details indirectly, under duress, and culminating in a narrated life disseminated unto an unpredictable public. Relevance of an entire project is regularly dismissed without a second opinion. In a manner allegorical of the episodic quandaries of identity, one could say the biographical subject must be found, represented, and legitimated anew. Scarcely audible are theories that inform this undertaking and a brief consideration of intellectual biography’s contingent qualities is essential for countering the form’s quiet integration into a mere commodity.
“Corpus” is the concept used by Jean-Luc Nancy to denote a notional representational space analogous to the body of a person examined. Primary for his conceptualization are the temporal trajectories of these bodies and their interrelation. Nancy’s oeuvre is a meditation on the difficulty of locating the subject’s body per se. Not because of its physical movement, spiritual ineffability, or affective elusiveness despite their respective importance, but because a body is a locus of contradiction and action par excellence. He writes, “[e]ither it is by the body and through it that signification occurs, and then signification falls within its boundaries and is worth only what a shadow is worth in a cave, or it is from the body and on it that signification takes shape and is deposited, and signification never stops reaching toward this proper locus where it should endlessly curl up into itself.” [1] Nancy’s philosophy focuses on acts that problematize the category of “act” itself, aligning him with other artists and critics who are indebted equally to anti-metaphysical thought and the cultural study of everyday life. Sleeping, listening, reading, and care giving (to name a few) are acts assumed to have a habitual, passive, or reactive bodily valance that nevertheless signify and are traceable well after their immediate conduct.
How these acts register among the tattered missives, photos, awards, and footage of archives is open to debate. For example, what effect does one’s sleep have on the way one is potentially catalogued? What of the sentences read or mouths fed? What of sounds savored or unheard? These questions are raised by Nancy to make a simple point: historical figures tend to be evaluated in a preordained way that evaluates acts for their ability to reproduce or suspend previously intelligible circumstances. When an act defies the rationale by which it may be interpreted, one enters a realm where new vocabularies and strategies are needed for its understanding. But is it not naive or misguided to assume new terminologies or concepts always follow and correspond to an unprecedented set of historical situations? In this sense “corpus” is not an ideal for new intellectual biographies. It is a cautionary concept skeptical of the belief the dead are necessarily “updated” with each retelling of their life.
Others draw an elegiac point from the sense that a corpus is what is called upon to mediate a more definitive contradiction of community:
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.” [2]
Mindful of the complexities of a corpus, at least two conceits – the inadequacy of the historiographic form and the inconsistency of its subject – loom between the sentences of numerous intellectual biographies. The reviews in this issue cite this dual difficulty and they are aware of the trouble that arises with the form’s breadth and investigative tenor. Here the corpus is removed from a supposedly “proper place” by the archivist and biographer. Thus, integral to biography are problems of historicity, or existential time, in a period where Being and Nothingness have been subsumed from all angles and are not available to one another today as coordinates of an ontological problem. If only historicity were a topic biographers, curators, directors, and philosophers could claim as their exclusive jurisdiction!
To describe the impetus behind this issue, “On Intellectual Biography,” enumeration of a few key tropes of biographical narration limns the form as it struggles against its generic expression. As with most cultural products, intellectual biography is beholden to the fads and fashions of the intermediating interests of publishing houses, the print media, universities, and prize systems. Institutions claim the symbolic and monetary values whose accumulative consequences exceed and undoubtedly standardize the conditions for assessing an identity’s authenticity or a work’s veracity. Diagrams of social differentiation akin to those imagined by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1979 magnum opus Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste should be redrawn to map those of us prone to have details of our life dramatized and reconstructed. Yet another diagram could be etched to analyze the milieus and dispositions of readers and writers reproducing the republic of biographical letters in and against the “aesthetic of necessity” ritualized by selfhood, addressed by neon signage, made predictably goofy in commercials about office workers, and all serialized looping through a time span of syndication. A visit to the library or museum reveals an entire apparatus of endorsement, called “consecration” by Bourdieu, prefacing the books, providing walk-through commentaries of the exhibitions on headphones, and all effusive of artifacts supposedly more unique than bare utility.
“Intellectual” biography might therefore sound patrician and subsequently denied inclusion into the annals of social or popular history. Such a hypothetical exclusion is unfounded for reasons that need more thought. For one, the possessive individualism of political culture, borrowing from C.B. Macpherson’s genealogy from the nineteenth century forth, having undercut long-standing social affiliations and political solidarity, has veered intensively into the so-called “disinterested” realms of thought and foreclosed viable means for imagining social life in all genres (see Minard’s review of a recent biography of Ayn Rand). [3] Where most intellectual biographies circulate, the divisions between intellectual and rudimentary are configured by an international division of labor, vast material processing and monocrop yields, which go unidentified (indeed negated from the realm of “acts” by many historians) and are presumed to persist endlessly. What better way to challenge the ordinary possessive imaginary adopted by subjects along with their damaging effects than to counter directly the growing corpus and narratives fertilizing and recycling “great men” myths?
A last point. The adjective “intellectual” also marks a temporal buffer between archive, author, subject narrated, text, and reader. Contemporaries of, say, Thelonious Monk or Simone de Beauvoir were readily able to hear “I Surrender Dear” at Washington D.C.’s Bohemian Cavern in the late 1950s or witness the scene at Cafe de Flore in the 1960s, but familiarity has always included a deafness or a way of precluding interpretation of Monk’s place in the soundscape of jazz piano and de Beauvoir’s contribution to generations of feminist struggle and philosophy. Contemporaries make for limited biographers. A period of gestation is required between an intimacy with the person and the reception of how their acts translate back in the form of acclaim. The historical loop that encircles biographers invites them to double as chroniclers of narrated historicity, sift through its details scattered like gravel, and locate how and where historicity trades and travels.
The conditions generative of and degrading a life, as well as the material elements conducive for its reprise, show intellectual biography and its analogous expressions take shape among unorthodox issues of identity. For the purpose of further provocation and inquiry in opposition to biographies of possessive individualism and recapitulations of the lives of heroic men, one might investigate how biography is conceptualized through ideas of daily mimetic play with others, amid collectives, the Unconscious, and in acknowledgment of vanquished lives. A note below offers cursory speculations for a few of these categories. [4]
[2] John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. Vintage, 1992. p. 101.
[3] C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford U.P., 1962
[4] (a) One’s double: figural representation of the double or doppelganger dramatizes a tension between one’s mimetic play with others and the compulsive desire for a singular, coherent personhood. Any empirical contention with likeness confounds clear and distinct notions of what composes a subject but the points of identification for this tension are inconsistent. Biographical writing does not employ the dialogic sentences and recurrent episodes of resemblance primary in Dostoevsky’s writing. Dialogue (not primary in biography) is particularly suited to dramatize the aural and face-to-face engagement of neighborhood coexistence. Encountering one’s double arises by happenstance and by following one’s nose through the gamut of impressions, turns of phrase, rapidly edited screens, and scenarios of similarity. Two examples complicate Dostoevsky’s immediate encounters and push this idea further into the realm of media. Orhan Pamuk’s Kara Kitap (1990, translated as The Black Book) alternates between chapters written by the protagonist Galip and the writer Celal who Galip suspects has become reacquainted with his current lover Ruya. A jealous fan of Celal’s reportage, Galip soon reads himself into Celal’s writings to the degree that the reader has trouble determining which character has written what. Jose Saramago’s O Homem Duplicado (2001, translated as The Double) also recreates the uncanny appearance of one’s self, but in this case, the divorced insomniac Tertuliano Maximo Afonso sees a man identical to himself in a rented VHS film. Seeking out the identical looking actor, Alfonso becomes embroiled in lives he otherwise would ignore. All three narratives are allegories of male protagonists struggling against their and others’ narcissism. The difficulty of recreating the tension experienced by a subject with its doubles, no matter how consistently they turn the corner and glimpse uncanny commonality, is brought to a banal resolution with the fetishism of avatars. Replacing mimetic play and the upset of the norm that “everyone’s different” is the insistence of cute dictums such as “I am other” or forms of representation (especially film and online gaming) that invite a replication of the ego. Biographies rarely narrate with dialogue as regularly as novels the explicit tension between their subject and her doubles. This problem underlies the quandaries its subjects face, whether startlingly reminiscent or pre-packaged. (b) Collectives: I offer few ideas where to go here, but a quote from Paolo Virno may be where to begin. He reminds us in A Grammar of the Multitude that “[u]nity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather it is taken for granted, as background or necessary condition precondition. The many must be thought of as the individualization of the universal, of the generic, of the shared experience.” This quote grasps the way representations of collectives oscillate between individualizations (“Obama’s America”, “Lula’s Brazil”, etc.) and notional concepts (i.e., “the common”, “the multitude”, “the public”) that ring true to the ear but have inadequate narratives and institutions sustaining them. Biographies also do not tend to broach collectivity as such, but millions of people populate and contest those who personify them; (c) The Unconscious: Julia Kristeva concludes her intellectual biographies of Melanie Klein, Hannah Arendt, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (a troika on the topic of feminine genius) by taking an account of the way “each of them, against that background of common condition, modulated an original and unprecedented advance” (Colette, p.425). Emblematic of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature, Kristeva narrates each biography as a critique of ideation, a process often misidentified as the medium or product of psychical life. If it’s true the Surrealists tried their hand at writing an unconscious intellectual biography, it has yet to lay siege to the form. Kristeva’s work draws inspiration from Sigmund Freud’s brief biographical essay on Leonardo DaVinci from 1910 and extends its scope and viability in these works. For Kristeva and Freud the subject’s psyche is misunderstood but not as a result of their obscurity of self-expression. Rather, the subjects of Kristeva’s biographies are made synonymous with their ideas. We readily recognize Klein’s “paranoid-schizoid position,” Arendt’s “banality of evil” adage and Colette’s narration of desire. But more importantly, Kristeva’s biographies diverge from the usual way the ideas of a thinker are said to emanate from her life story. Ideas are illusory historical markers of a life. Or, put differently, they are products of neither the “intention” nor the “context” of the intellect. The Unconscious is used by Kristeva to conceive how these forces interact in the ideas of these women. Questions concerning intention and context will undoubtedly direct many biographical innovations in the future and they will benefit from interpreting the psychoanalytic corpus without simply reproducing its traits.
Tim Kaposy is the Managing Editor of Politics and Culture and an Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program at George Mason University
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On Intellectual Biography
On Intellectual Biography
“When we have to change an opinion about anyone, we charge heavily to their account the inconvenience they thereby cause us.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”
In lieu of amplifying that denunciation of biography that history’s venerated figures tend to be its unacknowledged criminals, this issue of Politics and Culture is compelled by the techniques, theories, and traditions available for its interpretation. The study of biographical forms, which radiate out today beyond discrete expressions in books to montage biopics and multi-media museum retrospectives, renews inquiries many of us have concerning how someone is lionized and how such an ascent carries with it presumptions we affix to identities of acclaim, expertise, and power. An identity that attracts attention is distinct from a life that receives it or one that is impelled by it, which is not to say these are always exclusive. Telling the difference requires patient research poised to interpret the details of a life in addition to reckoning with the claims identity make upon it. So, similar to the way documentarians are instructed to give their subjects an added uncomfortable minute to speak, in anticipation the interviewee will talk offhandedly and ditch the formalities of the conversation, attentiveness to intellectual biography is an invitation for unexpectedly revealing ideas to emerge from a relatively familiar voice.
An archive is where most intellectual biographies begin and where they gain plausibility. But these materials and contacts are rarely if ever given or donated directly by the person studied. A thornier trespassing often occurs and many a well intentioned project is spurned. Of the biographers whose recent work is reviewed here, from Detlev Claussen and Sheila Rowbotham to Gavin Hopps and Andrea Weiss, most characterize their research as unlikely, in pursuit of details indirectly, under duress, and culminating in a narrated life disseminated unto an unpredictable public. Relevance of an entire project is regularly dismissed without a second opinion. In a manner allegorical of the episodic quandaries of identity, one could say the biographical subject must be found, represented, and legitimated anew. Scarcely audible are theories that inform this undertaking and a brief consideration of intellectual biography’s contingent qualities is essential for countering the form’s quiet integration into a mere commodity.
“Corpus” is the concept used by Jean-Luc Nancy to denote a notional representational space analogous to the body of a person examined. Primary for his conceptualization are the temporal trajectories of these bodies and their interrelation. Nancy’s oeuvre is a meditation on the difficulty of locating the subject’s body per se. Not because of its physical movement, spiritual ineffability, or affective elusiveness despite their respective importance, but because a body is a locus of contradiction and action par excellence. He writes, “[e]ither it is by the body and through it that signification occurs, and then signification falls within its boundaries and is worth only what a shadow is worth in a cave, or it is from the body and on it that signification takes shape and is deposited, and signification never stops reaching toward this proper locus where it should endlessly curl up into itself.” [1] Nancy’s philosophy focuses on acts that problematize the category of “act” itself, aligning him with other artists and critics who are indebted equally to anti-metaphysical thought and the cultural study of everyday life. Sleeping, listening, reading, and care giving (to name a few) are acts assumed to have a habitual, passive, or reactive bodily valance that nevertheless signify and are traceable well after their immediate conduct.
How these acts register among the tattered missives, photos, awards, and footage of archives is open to debate. For example, what effect does one’s sleep have on the way one is potentially catalogued? What of the sentences read or mouths fed? What of sounds savored or unheard? These questions are raised by Nancy to make a simple point: historical figures tend to be evaluated in a preordained way that evaluates acts for their ability to reproduce or suspend previously intelligible circumstances. When an act defies the rationale by which it may be interpreted, one enters a realm where new vocabularies and strategies are needed for its understanding. But is it not naive or misguided to assume new terminologies or concepts always follow and correspond to an unprecedented set of historical situations? In this sense “corpus” is not an ideal for new intellectual biographies. It is a cautionary concept skeptical of the belief the dead are necessarily “updated” with each retelling of their life.
Others draw an elegiac point from the sense that a corpus is what is called upon to mediate a more definitive contradiction of community:
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.” [2]
Mindful of the complexities of a corpus, at least two conceits – the inadequacy of the historiographic form and the inconsistency of its subject – loom between the sentences of numerous intellectual biographies. The reviews in this issue cite this dual difficulty and they are aware of the trouble that arises with the form’s breadth and investigative tenor. Here the corpus is removed from a supposedly “proper place” by the archivist and biographer. Thus, integral to biography are problems of historicity, or existential time, in a period where Being and Nothingness have been subsumed from all angles and are not available to one another today as coordinates of an ontological problem. If only historicity were a topic biographers, curators, directors, and philosophers could claim as their exclusive jurisdiction!
To describe the impetus behind this issue, “On Intellectual Biography,” enumeration of a few key tropes of biographical narration limns the form as it struggles against its generic expression. As with most cultural products, intellectual biography is beholden to the fads and fashions of the intermediating interests of publishing houses, the print media, universities, and prize systems. Institutions claim the symbolic and monetary values whose accumulative consequences exceed and undoubtedly standardize the conditions for assessing an identity’s authenticity or a work’s veracity. Diagrams of social differentiation akin to those imagined by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1979 magnum opus Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste should be redrawn to map those of us prone to have details of our life dramatized and reconstructed. Yet another diagram could be etched to analyze the milieus and dispositions of readers and writers reproducing the republic of biographical letters in and against the “aesthetic of necessity” ritualized by selfhood, addressed by neon signage, made predictably goofy in commercials about office workers, and all serialized looping through a time span of syndication. A visit to the library or museum reveals an entire apparatus of endorsement, called “consecration” by Bourdieu, prefacing the books, providing walk-through commentaries of the exhibitions on headphones, and all effusive of artifacts supposedly more unique than bare utility.
“Intellectual” biography might therefore sound patrician and subsequently denied inclusion into the annals of social or popular history. Such a hypothetical exclusion is unfounded for reasons that need more thought. For one, the possessive individualism of political culture, borrowing from C.B. Macpherson’s genealogy from the nineteenth century forth, having undercut long-standing social affiliations and political solidarity, has veered intensively into the so-called “disinterested” realms of thought and foreclosed viable means for imagining social life in all genres (see Minard’s review of a recent biography of Ayn Rand). [3] Where most intellectual biographies circulate, the divisions between intellectual and rudimentary are configured by an international division of labor, vast material processing and monocrop yields, which go unidentified (indeed negated from the realm of “acts” by many historians) and are presumed to persist endlessly. What better way to challenge the ordinary possessive imaginary adopted by subjects along with their damaging effects than to counter directly the growing corpus and narratives fertilizing and recycling “great men” myths?
A last point. The adjective “intellectual” also marks a temporal buffer between archive, author, subject narrated, text, and reader. Contemporaries of, say, Thelonious Monk or Simone de Beauvoir were readily able to hear “I Surrender Dear” at Washington D.C.’s Bohemian Cavern in the late 1950s or witness the scene at Cafe de Flore in the 1960s, but familiarity has always included a deafness or a way of precluding interpretation of Monk’s place in the soundscape of jazz piano and de Beauvoir’s contribution to generations of feminist struggle and philosophy. Contemporaries make for limited biographers. A period of gestation is required between an intimacy with the person and the reception of how their acts translate back in the form of acclaim. The historical loop that encircles biographers invites them to double as chroniclers of narrated historicity, sift through its details scattered like gravel, and locate how and where historicity trades and travels.
The conditions generative of and degrading a life, as well as the material elements conducive for its reprise, show intellectual biography and its analogous expressions take shape among unorthodox issues of identity. For the purpose of further provocation and inquiry in opposition to biographies of possessive individualism and recapitulations of the lives of heroic men, one might investigate how biography is conceptualized through ideas of daily mimetic play with others, amid collectives, the Unconscious, and in acknowledgment of vanquished lives. A note below offers cursory speculations for a few of these categories. [4]
Notes
[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus” in Thinking Bodies. Ed. Juliet MacCannell. Stanford U.P., 1994. p.20.
[2] John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. Vintage, 1992. p. 101.
[3] C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford U.P., 1962
[4] (a) One’s double: figural representation of the double or doppelganger dramatizes a tension between one’s mimetic play with others and the compulsive desire for a singular, coherent personhood. Any empirical contention with likeness confounds clear and distinct notions of what composes a subject but the points of identification for this tension are inconsistent. Biographical writing does not employ the dialogic sentences and recurrent episodes of resemblance primary in Dostoevsky’s writing. Dialogue (not primary in biography) is particularly suited to dramatize the aural and face-to-face engagement of neighborhood coexistence. Encountering one’s double arises by happenstance and by following one’s nose through the gamut of impressions, turns of phrase, rapidly edited screens, and scenarios of similarity. Two examples complicate Dostoevsky’s immediate encounters and push this idea further into the realm of media. Orhan Pamuk’s Kara Kitap (1990, translated as The Black Book) alternates between chapters written by the protagonist Galip and the writer Celal who Galip suspects has become reacquainted with his current lover Ruya. A jealous fan of Celal’s reportage, Galip soon reads himself into Celal’s writings to the degree that the reader has trouble determining which character has written what. Jose Saramago’s O Homem Duplicado (2001, translated as The Double) also recreates the uncanny appearance of one’s self, but in this case, the divorced insomniac Tertuliano Maximo Afonso sees a man identical to himself in a rented VHS film. Seeking out the identical looking actor, Alfonso becomes embroiled in lives he otherwise would ignore. All three narratives are allegories of male protagonists struggling against their and others’ narcissism. The difficulty of recreating the tension experienced by a subject with its doubles, no matter how consistently they turn the corner and glimpse uncanny commonality, is brought to a banal resolution with the fetishism of avatars. Replacing mimetic play and the upset of the norm that “everyone’s different” is the insistence of cute dictums such as “I am other” or forms of representation (especially film and online gaming) that invite a replication of the ego. Biographies rarely narrate with dialogue as regularly as novels the explicit tension between their subject and her doubles. This problem underlies the quandaries its subjects face, whether startlingly reminiscent or pre-packaged. (b) Collectives: I offer few ideas where to go here, but a quote from Paolo Virno may be where to begin. He reminds us in A Grammar of the Multitude that “[u]nity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather it is taken for granted, as background or necessary condition precondition. The many must be thought of as the individualization of the universal, of the generic, of the shared experience.” This quote grasps the way representations of collectives oscillate between individualizations (“Obama’s America”, “Lula’s Brazil”, etc.) and notional concepts (i.e., “the common”, “the multitude”, “the public”) that ring true to the ear but have inadequate narratives and institutions sustaining them. Biographies also do not tend to broach collectivity as such, but millions of people populate and contest those who personify them; (c) The Unconscious: Julia Kristeva concludes her intellectual biographies of Melanie Klein, Hannah Arendt, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (a troika on the topic of feminine genius) by taking an account of the way “each of them, against that background of common condition, modulated an original and unprecedented advance” (Colette, p.425). Emblematic of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature, Kristeva narrates each biography as a critique of ideation, a process often misidentified as the medium or product of psychical life. If it’s true the Surrealists tried their hand at writing an unconscious intellectual biography, it has yet to lay siege to the form. Kristeva’s work draws inspiration from Sigmund Freud’s brief biographical essay on Leonardo DaVinci from 1910 and extends its scope and viability in these works. For Kristeva and Freud the subject’s psyche is misunderstood but not as a result of their obscurity of self-expression. Rather, the subjects of Kristeva’s biographies are made synonymous with their ideas. We readily recognize Klein’s “paranoid-schizoid position,” Arendt’s “banality of evil” adage and Colette’s narration of desire. But more importantly, Kristeva’s biographies diverge from the usual way the ideas of a thinker are said to emanate from her life story. Ideas are illusory historical markers of a life. Or, put differently, they are products of neither the “intention” nor the “context” of the intellect. The Unconscious is used by Kristeva to conceive how these forces interact in the ideas of these women. Questions concerning intention and context will undoubtedly direct many biographical innovations in the future and they will benefit from interpreting the psychoanalytic corpus without simply reproducing its traits.
Tim Kaposy is the Managing Editor of Politics and Culture and an Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program at George Mason University