itself -- consubstantially -- without ever achieving closure. ¹ It is not only
the critics but Freud himself who saw that he could never get beyond
the series of passion plays in which he had cast himself and his patients.
At best, he might try to keep psychoanalysis to the far side of the lan-
guage of the passions, hiding his own body from their assault but not
without revealing his own passion for carnal knowledge, power, and
perversion, as shall be evident from several of the following essays.

I might have set each essay in alphabetical order. Roland Barthes has
argued that this is not a logical device but a psychological one, so to speak.
Because the alphabet represents no natural order, it liberates the reader to
pursue texts that operate their own seduction. It serves readers' pleasure
by allowing mood, purpose, curiosity, or use to engage them. For this
reason, any introduction can hardly look better than the wrapping on a
present, which in our culture we do not enjoy for itself (another primal
scene of sibling rivalry?) but tear off to get at our desire. Still, an introduc-
tion might serve the reader's forepleasure and so I have placed "first"
William Kerrigan's exploration of the Renaissance shift in the rate at
which we seek cultural (dis)content. This is the tradition of Bacon, Shake-
speare, and Milton and, of course, of Hobbes. All these thinkers under-
stood the restlessness and insecurity of the modern world as a self-
consuming artifact analogous to the mechanism of forepleasure operative
in poetry and philosophy, in science as in economics: "The competitive
drive for infinite glory or infamy is, as Milton and others saw, an infirmity
because it is like the drive for knowledge. You get a little fame. If you are
not going to get any more, if that is all the fame you will have, the grandi-
ose individual will feel his fixed amount of fame as an insufficience, an
injustice, a slight. Fame is little foreplay. When it is not increasing, it leads
to the unpleasure of frustration" (Chapter 1).

By the same trope of forepleasure, I risk challenging the reader to sus-
tain the seduction of the "following" essays until a climax is reached and is
repeated in Laurence Rickels's extraordinary reflections on how the twin
passions of love and hatred revolve around the maternal lost-object. So, to
repeat the question of the beginning: I then thought that having raised the
issue of a pleasurable start, I should play off the pleasure principle in Kerri-
gan's essay with Donald Carveth's essay on how Freud needed to find his
way from a biological to a culturological model of the conflict between
life and death that the passionate body lives from its first to last breath:

on the margins of his final ego psychological model in which the
subject's passions are ultimately reduced to sexual and aggressive
drives and drive-related affects and fantasies together with their

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