The New German Cinema "ss2.12"

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INTROJECTION AND INCORPORATION

Critics have compared Freud's notion of mourning to Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham's concept of introjection. Introjection copes with loss by extending autoerotic cathexes outward towards it, thereby extending the self as well. (Like Freud, Torok and Abraham deploy the rhetoric of conquest—claiming that the self "advances, takes over, assimilates" the object.) Introjection includes the instincts and desires attached to the object—the emotions, relations with it, not just the object or loss itself—an observation one might equally make about melodrama, whose worlds are inhabited by so many over-invested, overwrought "things, not people."^[60]

Opposed to that is incorporation, a process construed as a sort of failed introjection, just as Freud established melancholia as unsuccessful mourning. Here, in trying to identify with the object, the self internalizes it, seals it off, and disguises it—encrypting it, as Torok and Abraham put it. Jacques Derrida discusses this inauthenticity as follows: "I pretend to keep the dead alive, saved inside me … but it is only in order to refuse … to love the dead as a living part of me."^[61] The ego splits, burying the object alive, refusing to mourn it through this psychic mummification. Thus while incorporation may go through the motions of introjection and adopt its superficial signs, as Torok and Abraham describe it, it is not the real thing because it cannot extend outwards. Important here are the means by which it "adopts" "superficial signs," a description that suggests that there is no direct recourse to "the real thing," just artifice and attempts. Clinically speaking, melancholia shares that pathological status, particularly in terms of its inability to distinguish borders (sealing, encryptment) of the self; it also shares its psychic and emotional intensity, its stylized articulation ("superficial signs") and presentations of such attachments, its uncontrolled diversions from "reality"—again, recalling aspects of melodramatic representation. Yet the way that melancholia (and melodrama) depend upon embodiment suggests to me that the encryptment of introjection does not fully explain the process. Interestingly, melancholia (and melodrama) elaborates some of the incorporative processes of extending attachments outwards into discursive situations.

Rather than completely externalize the object (as in classical mourning and introjection) or incorporate it, the melancholic representation I am considering restages the oscillation between the two. It externalizes that which the subject has tried to incorporate by placing it into exhibitionistic cycles, requiring someone to be there to see or hear it. Put into the realm of historical representation, the stakes in the process are high. Objects become the means by which a past/lost object/absence is invoked (along with

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the affect these things might generate) and presented to another. The cinema's closeness to this historical and psychic process is made clear in Derrida's description of incorporation as "fantasmatic, unmediated, instantaneous, magical, sometimes hallucinatory."^[62] This new form of melancholia avoids the depth models that point back to generative causes, as hysteria does, suggesting instead a complex relay of past and present events and their restagings. (In Merchant, for instance, scenes with Hans's mother are interspersed with flashbacks of her scolding him; scenes with his wife are interrupted by idealized visions of his lost lover; flashbacks appear of Hans being erotically whipped by a man of color during his service abroad.) What this underscores is that even the most profound losses are at one remove, displaced or replaced through representation and style. The process of symbolizing grief and acting it out—in the pretense of its conquest, or performing a new identity—is constantly being staged in Fassbinder's melodramas. Consider the pop music diegetically "put on" in Holy Whore, a film that makes clear that no subjectivity is motivating the choice of records. As we shall see, even the cameos of Peer Raben are important in this game of referential interplays (his name is to a degree also "put on"—Raben's birth name is Wilhelm Rabenbauer and he is known to his friends as Willi).

Because melancholia presents itself as an ongoing process and not a solution to loss, Freud's characterization of mourning as a conscious act and melancholia as an unconscious, narcissistic one becomes difficult to sustain. Santner writes of the conscious, "lucid melancholy" of postwar intellectuals who have adopted its elegiac tone,^[63] and I have stressed the illusory nature of the closure promised by mourning work. Interestingly, Freud repeatedly asserts that his study "Mourning and Melancholia" is itself incomplete, and "call[s] to a halt" and "postpone[s] any further explanation … til the outcome of some other enquiry can come to its assistance" (258). By concluding his essay on these words, Freud proves that mourning work defies the clear-cut closure upon which he otherwise insists.

It is not my intention to celebrate melodramatic representation, nor to argue that it is fundamentally more effective than other forms at presenting stories of history and loss. The point is rather to question the received notion that melodrama is by default too cheap, reductive, American, or inappropriate to tackle historically charged issues. (Anglo-American film scholars in the 1980s may have dispensed with that bias only to construct melodrama at the other extreme, as a "subversive" piece of mass culture.) When all is said and done, the claims for melodrama seem about as ambivalent as the emotional push and pull of its stories. Clearly the Young

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German Cinema's early condemnation of the genre—and directors' subsequent embrace of it—was not altogether different from Freud's pathologization of melancholia. Melodrama and melancholia were too excessive, too feminine, too "cheap," too formulaic, and too disrespectful of (a masculinized) reality—recall Freud's reference to the realness of the mourner's losses and that "normally, respect for reality wins the day" (244). Suspicious of codes of verisimilitude and the veracity of cinematic sound or image, directors of the New German Cinema also distrusted the sense of a normative reality "that wins the day." In the same way, melodrama and melancholia's eschewal of realism is not a disregard for social or historical contingencies so much as proof of their inability to capture them. As Peggy Phelan puts it, "[A] believable image is the product of a negotiation with an unverifiable real," and as such, it can never reproduce the totality of any particular reality.^[64]