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Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Nandrea, Lorri G
In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze argues that Freud misunderstood repetition, and in doing so missed his chance accurately to describe the death drive and its relation to pleasure. Essentially, Freud believed that repetition happens beneath variations, under disguises. The Id desires to repeat a primary experience; the Ego prevents it from doing so except in masked forms: "disguised repetition is only the fruit of a secondary compromise between the opposed forces of the Ego and the Id" (17). This formulation is backwards, Deleuze argues: "there is no first term which is repeated.... [There is] nothing repeated which may be isolated or abstracted from the repetition in which it was formed, but in which it is also hidden. There is no bare repetition which may be abstracted or inferred from the disguise itself. The same thing is both disguising and disguised.... [The variations] express ... the differential mechanisms which belong to the essence and origin of that which is repeated" (17). In other words, desire is not attached to what is beneath the disguise, but to the disguise itself, or more accurately, to the process of differentiation involved in "disguising." As Deleuze puts it, "I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress, because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode of repetition.... Eros and Thanatos are distinguished in that Eros must be repeated, can be lived only through repetition, whereas Thanatos (as transcendental principle) is that which gives repetition to Eros, that which submits Eros to repetition" (18). What is desired by Eros, in short, is not repetition of the same but the experience of differing; what is expressed in the death drive is not the "tendency to return to the state of inanimate matter" (17), but the pure movement of repetition in the understanding that there is no return and nothing to return to, nothing beneath the masks except difference itself, no essence beneath appearances, no "truth divorced from phenomena" (Bersani 26). There are only the phenomena themselves, phenomena that are themselves, moreover, not identities with difference between them but the by-products of a movement of differentiation: singularities. In this analysis, desire-the process of difference and repetition-has no trajectory. It does not move in an are or a circle; not only does it not find closure, it does not seek closure. Instead, desire is oriented toward the process of production and transformation, specifically toward the transformations that occur in an encounter with the unassimilable.
In contrast to sympathetic dynamics and the literature that enacts and reinforces them, sensibility and its literary manifestations are structured by such a libidinal formation, using the realm of the aesthetic to occasion transformative encounters that differentiate selves and singularize senses. As I have begun to suggest above, Jane Eyre is in many respects a novel that stages the problem of the unassimilable in contexts that range from the sensory to the linguistic to the cultural to the temporal. In each case, the encounter is doubled, or perhaps tripled: while the written Jane is thrown into extreme states of trauma, the writing Jane produces a second set of disjunctive relations that are addressed, ultimately, to the reader.
