Other Selves, Other Bodies‪.‬

THE FOLLOWING DIALOGUUE grew out of conversations we had about current methodologies in Renaissance studies. Our initial discussions explored the intersection between psychoanalysis and historicism. From those, specific questions emerged about where to go from here, particularly with respect to early modern experiences of embodiment. We would like to thank Cynthia Marshall for giving us the opportunity to investigate our shared concerns. LE: The longer I've thought about early modern subjectivity, the more I've understood how fundamental determinations of sameness and difference are to contemporary critical accounts of the period--and at the same time, how important it is to address the reasons for the choices we make, however intractable the theoretical and historical problem may be. Corollary questions about the power and limitations of genealogical explanation, moreover, become especially acute when critics pursue psychoanalytic modes of inquiry. With respect to the current turn toward emphasizing the strangeness of early modern literature and culture to our own--something of a reaction against earlier, Burckhardian recognitions of similarity between modern and early modern--I remain something of a skeptic. Both claims are plagued by a shared problem: these claims, whether about the early modern period's difference from our own or its resemblance, cannot but be influenced by what Lacan might call the "wandering shadow" of the observer's "own ego." (1) A crucial psychoanalytic premise is that with respect to the question of "the subject," no one occupies an uncompromised position of observation. This premise need not lead, however, to a dead end. It is accompanied by an equally important axiom: our entanglement in the stories of others can, in fact, be productive for both the observer and the observed. From this perspective, the work of historians like Dominick LaCapra and Joan Scott suggest that a crucial task for critics interrogating the experiences of subjects from other cultures and moments in history is to inquire into the transferential basis of their own investments in those stories. (2) And as Freud and Lacan were quite aware, the transference is not simply a critique of absolute claims to knowledge derived from the positivist tradition. It is also a revealing relationship--a mutual involvement of one in the other that constitutes the condition of the possibility of unexpected insight into both subjects at hand. New meanings, texts, and materials emerge from the pressure of our critical, theoretical, and historical inquiry; and these, in turn, stand the chance of altering, however slightly, the "early modern" frame through which many critics have tried to see our "modern" condition (whether in likeness or in difference). This, at any rate, is the ongoing dialogic movement that allows me to understand Lacan's cryptic but tantalizing observation that provides the epigram for LaCapra's essay, "History and Psychoanalysis": "[l]e transfert c'est le concept meme de l'analyse, parce que c'est le temps de l'analyse." (3)