Nabokov, Cinemathomme

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov famously detested psychoanalysis. He loathed what he regarded as the crudeness of the psychoanalytic imagination and its seemingly universalizing narratives that would track everything back to a single Oedipal source. In Ada or Ardor, Nabokov's parody of the Joycean writer, Nabokov nevertheless offers a template for the future of psychoanalytic reading practices in a 21st century characterized by an all-pervasive Imaginary. In this reading, incest provides Nabokov with the conceptual figure for an enjoyment that did not submit to the paternal cut, which floods into the Symbolic through his hybrid literary-cinematic style. Creating a sinthome of an infinite book from the letters of his name, here Nabokov, as cinemathomme, offers himself pre-eminently as a thinker for what Jacques-Alain Miller has called today's "great disorder of the real".