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Jöttkandt, Sigi. Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic. Albany: State University of New York Press (SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture), 2005. xvii + 177 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0–7914–6557–8, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 4, October 2007, Page 475, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm088
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Extract
This study presents detailed psychoanalytic readings of three of James's texts: The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove and the short story “The Altar of the Dead”. Little direct reference is made to Lacanian psychoanalytic theories other than in the Preface, but Lacan's concept of “the act” (defined as an ethical action, specifically a creative solution to the limits of representation) is fundamental to these readings. Jöttkandt's aims are twofold: to “symptomatize”, or give body to, Lacanian ethics through James's work, and to demonstrate the inseparability of aesthetics from Lacanian ethics. The study arises from a declared desire to redress the elision of “the aesthetic dimension of psychoanalytic ethical subjectivity”. The chapters examine three acts by three of James's heroines: Isabel's return to Ormond in Portrait is read as a form of synecdoche; Milly's illness in Wings is examined as a hysterical episode, illustrating the affinities between hysteria and aesthetics; chapter three, on “The Altar”, posits similarities between the De Manian deconstructive project and hysterical discourse. Asserting that James's oeuvre is centrally concerned with the limits of representation, this study investigates Kantian aesthetics, the reconciliatory aesthetic of the Bildungsroman, and the vexed relation between universality and ethical action.