Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis by Ned LukacherReview by: William SchweikerThe Journal of Religion, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), p. 163Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202304 .

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Book Reviews

LUKACHER, NED. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. 368 pp. $24.95 (cloth).

Ned Lukacher's Primal Scenes is a complex journey into literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In the "Preface" he notes that the book is "about the sever- ing of the locks of Memory, and about the shadow of mourning and error that characterizes the efforts of modern writers from Hegel to Derrida to think and to write in the wake of Memory's disfiguration" (p. 12). Wanting to be thoroughly postmodern, Luckacher challenges transcendentally grounded subjective memory and announces textual memory that substitutes for the human subject "a series of intertextual constructions" (p. 12). Thus Lukacher joins deconstructionism and its attack on the perceived bad faith of"presence" and human subjectivity.

Lukacher's central contention is that we are faced with a dual imperative of "always deconstruct" and "always historicize" "for we are bound to both by a necessity that is at once linguistic and historical" (p. 338). His argument hangs on the contention that the image of the primal scene helps us fulfill this demand. The primal scene allows us to understand that the subject of history is not the human subject. "Whether defined as an individual, a class, or a species-but rather the intertextual process itself" (p. 13).

Lukacher's task is to sort out what he means by primal scene, an image taken from Freud. His own argument about the primal scene emerges from a deconstructive reading of central philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary thinkers, a threefold interpretive journey that structures the book as a whole. More specifically, he explores Heidegger's destruction of metaphysics that itself must be deconstructed to grasp temporal difference. Next, Lukacher offers an analysis of Freud on the Wolf-Man and discourse about the primal scene. And he concludes with a look at Dickens's novels and the culture of psychoanalysis. In each case Lukacher offers the reader a rich and subtle inter- pretation of the texts and a novel tracing of the connections between these modes of discourse.

Lukacher ends with a "Postscript" where he tells us that the primal scene that he has constructed in the book "describes neither the contents of con- sciousness nor the reality of history" (p. 337). What he has offered us is "an interpretive construction that is the result of history's resistance to language" (p. 337). What this means is that neither the human mind nor empirical reality is primal any longer. "What is primal is the sign and the necessity operating through it that binds interpretation to the zone of difference and to the interplay of memory and phantasy" (p. 338). And so it is necessity, historical and linguistic, that is the master of this text. Such claims provoke reflection. One can only wonder if Lukacher's announcement of necessity, and others like it, might not awaken someone from her or his dogmatic slumber to proclaim anew the possibility and demands of freedom. WILLIAM SCHWEIKER, University of Iowa.

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