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Esther Rashkin State University of New York Press, Albany, 2008, 260 pp., $26.95, ISBN-13: 978-0791475348
Esther Rashkin’s book dedicates itself to the exciting project of founding a new cultural studies based upon techniques of psychoanalytic close reading, informed by the revisionist Freudian work of Torok and Abraham. Rashkin begins by criticizing practitioners of cultural studies for their precipitate rush away from close reading of texts towards the critique of (what is an often all too predictable and over-generalized) ideology, for which the text (allegedly) provides a vehicle. Specifically Rashkin criticizes cultural studies for, as she puts it, “leap-frogging” over a text’s internal semantics in order “to reach the text’s ‘elsewheres’ of social and political significance” (p. 201)—“elsewheres” that, she argues, turn all too easily into an all too familiar “everywhere” (such as “global capitalism”). In place of such leap-frogging she recommends what, in his 1963 essay “The Two Criticisms,” Barthes calls “immanent analysis,” which he puts forward not as a replacement for, but rather as a necessary preliminary to, “ideology critique.” Barthes describes this immanent form of analysis as “criticism that establishes itself within the work and posits the work’s relation to the world only after having entirely described it from the interior” (cited in Rashkin, note 1, p. 207, italics mine). Again identifying herself with Barthes, Rashkin looks to psychoanalysis as the means of conducting this immanent critique/close reading. Through “close psychoanalytic reading” she claims, cultural studies “can be enhanced, empowered, renewed, and ultimately redefined” (p. 206).
Rashkin’s identification with Barthes on the importance o