ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback that I received on an earlier messier version of this essay from the members of the NEH Summer Seminar on Punishment, Politics and Culture held at Amherst College in the Summer of 2004.

NOTES

1. There is in the substantial secondary literature on Beloved a lack of consensus on what it is the ghost is supposed to signify Most obviously the ghost is associated with the spirit of the murdered child but as the novel unfolds it also evokes among other things the experience of the Middle Passage Above all perhaps it is always quite specifically a female ghost, a daughter a sister a mother When Paul D asks Denver late in the novel, if she believes the ghost was her sister Denver replies ‘‘At times At times I think she was - more” (1988, p. 166) See e.g. House (1990); Henderson (1991); Bhabha (1994); Radamanovic (1999).

2. In an interview Morrison underlined the differing fates of her fictional heroine and the historical woman Margaret Garner on whom Sethe is loosely based. Garner's case became a headline-maker and ‘‘a cause celebre for abolitionists” in 1856, Morrison notes; but unlike Sethe Garner was tried for stolen property and returned to her original owner who eventually sold her While pro-slavery forces saw in the Garner case an illustration of why Africans with their near-animal capacities needed the patronage of the white man abolitionists sought to have Garner tried for murder on the argument that she must have legal responsibility to the state for her actions In the year before the Dred Scott decision this argument was not effective. This case like that of Sandford v. Scott, demonstrates the complex and ambivalent legal status afforded to slaves See Weisenberger (1998)

3 S_ee Zizek, 1989a, 1989b.

4 Perhaps it is needless to call attention here to the fact that Zizek's particular Hollywood examples add fuel to the critique that identifies ‘the act' with an assertion of individual freedom from social norms His ‘‘heroes'' here are not only all men - the third in the series is Mel Gibson playing a multimillionaire whose child is kidnapped in Ransom - a fact that Zizek acknowledges But they are also all film heroes who operate within the conventions of what we might call ‘‘Hollywood masculinity '' representing a common pop culture fantasy of the man who by definition attains his masculinity through the flaunting of social norms and bonds Masculinity in this narrative is identified with a kind of free individual subject who is restrained by no social codes who is either criminal (Kayser Soze of The Usual Suspects) or an upholder of the law who needs to break the law in order to demonstrate how fully he and he alone upholds it (the Keanu Reeves character in Speed) or who embodies all these different registers of power through his sheer wealth (Mel Gibson in Ransom) In other words by virtue of these examples Zizek appears to be running perilously close to precisely that which he seems to want to contest - the privileging of a political and cultural individuality specific to late capitalism

5.

6. For a compelling ‘genealogy’ of understandings of rape in U.S culture from the late 18th to the 20th centuries see Sielke (2002) Sielke makes some extremely acute, to my mind linkages between the ‘‘rhetoric of rape’’ in antebellum culture and that of the 1980s and 1990s: see especially pp. 12-34.

7. For a discussion that is nearly contemporary with Lacan’s Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and famously develops this point in terms of a discussion Kantian ethics in its uncanny connections to Sadeian violence see Lacan’s ‘‘Kant avec Sade.’’ For a further analysis of what is at stake in Lacanian ethics see Zupancic (2000) See also Pender (2003).

8 Agamben is speaking of a very different context, the concentration camps, when he evokes the figure of those called “musulmanner,” individuals so psychically destroyed by the camps that they lost all will to try to survive Halle’s ultimate fate remains unresolved in the novel; his closest friends last see him smearing himself with butter that he has been assigned to churn: ‘‘Nobody knows what happened Except for the churn that was the last anybody saw of Halle’’ ('Morrison 1988, p. 224). While Sethe Paul D and the rest of the black community in Cincinnati live on with the trauma of slavery we might say that Halle represents those for whom the brutality of what they witnessed decimated their subjectivity For a now-classic analysis of how the Middle Passage effected a traumatic de-gendering of the body of the slave see Spillers (2003)

9.

10 Wyatt (1993) develops at length an argument similar to this.

REFERENCES

Agamben G. (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive. Cambridge MA: Zone Books.

Bhabhy H. (1994) The location of culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Boothby R. (1991) Death and desire: Psychoanalytic theory in Lacans return to Freud. New York and London: Routledge

Breger, C. (2001) The leader's two bodies: Slavoj Zizek's postmodern political theology. Diacritics, 31(1) 73-90.

Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Copjec, J. (1996) Radical evil. London and New York: Verso.

Freud S. (1913) Totem and taboo In: J. Strachey et ah (Eds) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Vol· 13 (pp 1-161) London: Hogarth Press (1958).

Freud S. 1923. The ego and the id (Standard Ed.) (vol· 19) (19) pp 1-66.

Freud S. (1930) Civilization and its discontents. In: Strachey J., (Edited and Translated by), Civilization, society and religion. The Penguin Freud Library: Vol· 12 (General Ed., Dickson A.) Harmondsworth: Penguin (1991).

Gilman S. (1993) The case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and identity at the Fin-de-Siecle. New York: Columbia University Press

Henderson M. G. (1991) Toni Morrison’s beloved: Remembering the body as historical text. In: S. Hortense (Ed.) Comparative American identities: Race, sex, and nationality in the modern text New York: Routledge

Higgins L., & Silver B.

House E. (1990) Toni Morrison’s ghosts: The beloved who is not beloved Studies in American fiction, 18, 17-26.

Krips H. (2004) Couching politics: Zizek’s rules for radicals Psychoanalysis, Culture and S_oci_et_y, 9, 126-141.

Lacan J (1992) In: J A Miller (Ed) D Poster (Trans) The ethics of psychoanalysis: The seminar of Jacques Lacan book VII. New York: Norton.

Morrison T. (1988) Beloved. New York: Plume.

Morrison T (1988a) Unspeakable things unspoken: The Afro-American presence in American literature. The tanner lectures in human values. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Morrison T. (1998) The site of memory In: S. Zinsser (Ed.) Inventing the truth: The art and craft of Memoir (pp 183-199) Boston: Mariner.

Pendep S. (2003) The act and the law: An ethics of the radical good The Journal of Lacanian Studies 1(1) 66-84

Radamanovic P (1999) Forgetting futures Lanham and New York: Lexington Books

Shepherdson C. (2000) Vital signs: Nature, culture, psychoanalyis. New York and London: Routledge

Sielke S (2002) Reading rape: The rhetoric of sexual violence in American literature and culture 1790-1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Spillers H. (2003) Papa's Baby, Mama's Maybe.... Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor-Guthrie D. (Ed.) (1994) Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi

Weisenberger S. (1998) Modern Medea: A family story of slavery and child-murder in the old South. New York: Hill and Wang.

Wyatt, J. (1993) Giving body to the word: The maternal symbolic in Toni Morrison’s PMLA, 108(3) 474-486

Zizck. S. (1989) The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.

Zizck. S. (1989a) The plague of fantasies. London: Verso.

Zizek S (2000) The fragile absolute London: Verso

Zupanciy A. (2000) Ethics of the real. London: Verso.