Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Denise Riley is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. Her books include The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony; "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History; and War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, as well as many collections of poetry.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Denise Riley writes a poet's prose, and her theoretical originality more than matches the engaging quality of her writing. She breathes life into the claim that the 'I' is an effect of language and draws her reader in both for the sake of her brilliant unpacking of existential idioms and for her renewal of the theoretical questions of where and how language locates us and how and with what effect we can relocate ourselves."--Ellen Rooney, Brown University

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

IMPERSONAL PASSION

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................viiIntroduction.......................................................................1ONE Malediction....................................................................9TWO "What I Want Back Is What I Was": Consolation's Retrospect.....................29THREE The Right to Be Lonely.......................................................49FOUR Some whys and why mes.........................................................59FIVE Linguistic Inhibition as a Cause of Pregnancy.................................71SIX "Lying" When You Aren't........................................................85SEVEN All Mouth and No Trousers: Linguistic Embarrassments.........................97EIGHT "But Then I Wouldn't Be Here"................................................105NINE Your Name Which Isn't Yours...................................................115Notes..............................................................................129

Chapter One

The worst words revivify themselves within us, vampirically. Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed: the bad word, splinterlike, pierces to lodge. In its violently emotional materiality, the word is indeed made flesh and dwells amongst us-often long outstaying its welcome. Old word-scars embody a "knowing it by heart," as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ. But their resonances are not amorous. Where amnesia would help us, we can't forget.

This sonorous and indwelling aspect of vindictive words might help to characterize how, say, racist speech works on and in its targets. But wouldn't such a speculation risk simply advocating a systematic cultivation of deafness on the part of those liable to get hurt-or worse, be a criticism of their linguistic vulnerability; "They just shouldn't be so linguistically sensitive"? There's much to be said, certainly, in favor of studiously practicing indifference. But the old playground chant of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" was always notoriously untrue. The success of a tactics of indifference to harsh speech will also depend on the vicissitudes of those words' fate in the world, and that lies beyond my control. I change too. The thing upon which malevolent accusation falls, I am still malleable, while the words themselves will undergo their own alterations in time, and so their import for me will weaken or intensify accordingly. On occasion the impact of violent speech may even be recuperable through its own incantation; the repetition of abusive language may be occasionally saved through the irony of iteration, which may drain the venom out of the original insult, and neutralize it by displaying its idiocy. Yet angry interpellation's very failure to always work as intended (since at particular historical moments, I maybe able to parody, to weaken by adopting, to corrode its aim) is also exactly what, at other times, works for it. In any event, interpellation operates with a deep indifference as to where the side of the good may lie. And we can't realistically build an optimistic theory of the eventual recuperability of linguistic harm. For here there's no guaranteed rational progress-nor, though, any inescapable irrationality. Repetition will breed its own confident mishearing, but its volatile alterations lean neither toward automatic amelioration nor inevitable worsening.

This observation, though, leaves us with the still largely uninvestigated forensics of spoken injury. Pragmatic studies of swearing certainly exist, but swear words as such are not the topic I have in mind. Nor is "righteous" anger. My preoccupation here is far darker, and restricted to the extreme: some sustained hostility of unremitting verbal violence, like the linguistic voodoo which can induce the fading away of its target, a phenomenon which can't be dismissed as an archaism. The curse does work. Verbal attacks, in the moment they happen, resemble stoning. Then isn't it too labored to ask how they do damage: isn't the answer plain, that they hurt just as stones hurt? At the instant of their impact, so they do. Yet the peculiarity of violent words, as distinct from lumps of rock, is their power to resonate within their target for decades after the occasion on which they were weapons. Perhaps an urge to privacy about being so maliciously named may perpetuate the words' remorseless afterlife: I keep what I was told I was to myself, out of reserve, shame, a wish not to seem mawkish and other not-too-creditable reasons; yet even if I manage to relinquish my fatal stance of nursing my injury, it may well refuse to let go of me. Why, though, should even the most irrational of verbal onslaughts lodge in us as if it were the voice of justice; and why should it stubbornly resist ejection, and defy its own fading? For an accusation to inhere, must its human target already be burdened with her own prehistory of vulnerability, her psychic susceptibility; must it even depend on her anticipating readiness to accept, even embrace, the accusation that also horrifies her? Maybe, then, there's some fatal attraction from the aggression uttered in the present toward earlier-established reverberations within us-so that to grasp its lure, we would have to leave a linguistic account to turn instead to a prelinguistic psychic account. Yet here the standard contrast between the linguistic and the psychic, in which we are usually forced to plump for either the unconscious or language, is especially unhelpful. There's nothing beyond interpellation, if by that beyond is meant a plunge into an ether of the psyche as soon as we topple off the ledge of the historical and linguistic. For refusing these thoroughly synthetic alternatives needn't commit us to a belief in an instantaneous, ahistorical impact of the bad word-or to assume some primal word of injury which laid us open subsequently to verbal assault, as if the chronology of harm must always unfold in a straight line of descent.

The impact of violence in the present may indeed revive far older associations in its target. An accusation will always fall onto some kind of linguistic soil, be it fertile or poor; and here a well-prepared loam is no doubt commoner than a thin veneer on bare rock. Should we, though, necessarily call such a variation in anger's reception its "psychic" dimension, in a tone which implies a clear separation from the domain of words? There has, undoubtedly, to be something very strong at work to explain why we can't readily shake off some outworn verbal injury. The nature of this strong thing, though, might better be envisaged as a seepage or bleeding between the usual categorizations; it need not be allocated wholesale to an unconscious considered as lying beyond the verbal, or else to a sphere of language considered as narrowly functional. For the deepest intimacy joins the supposedly linguistic to the supposedly psychic; these realms, distinct by discursive convention, are scarcely separable. Then instead of this distinction, an idea of affective words as they indwell might be more useful-and this is a broadly linguistic conception not contrasted to, or opposed to, the psychic. So, for instance, my amateur philology may be a quiet vengeance: my fury may...