The knotted subject: hysteria and its discontents

Bronfen's menacing "knot" is the perennial paradox of mind and body, health and illness, the corporal body and its representations, all of whose antinomies have been annexed to hysteria in our century. 'Hysteria and its discontents', as her Freudian subtitle suggests: the medical malady, human condition, and cultural discourse for which all categories established have been adjudged inadequate. More specifically for Bronfen, as it had been for the most astute heirs of Charcot and Freud, the "knot" is also the often indescribable gap between theory and practice, being and seeming, image and reflection, even the corporal body and the body of language. A "knot" construed in this grid is also an intellectual riddle, intellectual paradox, or set of incommensurabilities; and not all "knots" unravel (my word) or can be unravelled. Bronfen knows this and sensitively listens to these riddles while being attuned to our era's Theory Revolution, especially versions of its Franco-American Deconstruction. In this well-researched solid book she seeks to demonstrate that only by penetrating to the heart of the matter the "knot" will the "hysterical" text, body, language, representation, performance, unravel. She problematizes her "knots" by elevating their threshold of explanation and aiming to include the whole fabric of culture. She claims, in effect, that unless you capture hysteria in the fullness of its cultural constructions historical, medical, biographical, performative the "knot" will not unravel. Even more astutely, she proposes hysteria as the language of death, a dialect most of us cannot speak or read. In view of this ambitious agenda it is no surprise that she opposes monodisciplinary descriptions of any of hysteria's "histories" or "herstories". It is a tall order and produces an expansive argument amounting to a new totalizing discourse for hysteria because of the author's insistence on cultural synthesis through holism. Totalizing discourses are by definition interor trans-disciplinary. Bronfen's method of cultural exhaustiveness provides a new epistemology of hysteria that grants the moment of Freudian transformation a century ago while explicating performative "case histories" in poet Anne Sexton's "business of writing suicide", Alfred Hitchcock's hysterical case history in Marnie, Canadian author and film-maker David Cronenberg's wombobsessed films, and photographer Cindy Sherman's "private theatre of horror" these because what "hysterics broadcast" is as important as anything doctors write about them. Yet we never learn why these films are selected rather than the broad class, for example, of vulgar Freudian 1940s B movies and their methodinfluenced 1950s epigoni: Belle de jour, Polanski's Repulsion, the many versions of The devils of Loudon such as Kawalerowicz's Mother Joanna of the Angels and the fiercely hysterical "Elisabet" in Persona; or Tarkovsky's The sacrifice, Ingmar Bergman's hysterical female characters, Vivien Leigh in Tennessee Williams' Streetcar named Desire, or (if male hysteria counts) James Dean in his diverse post-pubescent roles and Fassbinder as himself in Germany in autumn. Nevertheless, Bronfen's four examples indicate her longue duree: the necessary glance back to the world of c. 1800, as well as hysteria's performative component in our