Reflecting “Psyche”: A Protocol for Colonial Readers

Abstract

Near the end of Jean-Luc Nancy's Birth to Presence, Psyche is nearly inhumed in a coffin that the French philosopher leaves slightly open. This one-page scene retraces how an imagined colonial tradition can reduce Psyche to soul, Eros's lover, Aristotle's principle of animal life, and Freud's psychical apparatus. Aspects of Psyche as a gendered colonial projection, an invented other, and a refracted mirror are at once reflected and recalled in various scenes from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Hélène Cixous's “Albertine disparue,” and Heinrich von Kleist's “The Puppet Theatre.” While Nancy's text “Psyche” gestures towards an interment of the colonial canon as it knows itself, a reading protocol can be gleamed from Cixous, Proust, and Kleist, whose works call on readers to confront their own violent obsession with knowing and transfixing their many invented “others.”