McNulty

When Tracy McNulty read “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” at age 10, about a psychotic, the book had a profound impact: After college, McNulty went to France to study psychoanalysis and later trained with experts in psychosis treatment. With degrees in French and comparative literature and training in clinical psychoanalysis, McNulty is known for combining these interests in her scholarship.

McNulty, chair of comparative literature and professor of French and comparative literature, teaches interdisciplinary courses on such questions as the origins of language, myth and symbolic thought, eroticism and perversion, and philosophical and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity. Last semester, her class Social Contract and Its Discontents examined political will, among other topics.

“In my own teaching, I’m always coming back to clinical examples. Freud is not just an important theoretical reference to know,” says McNulty. “I like teaching undergraduates because they really want to understand their own unconscious, and that’s a lot of fun.”

Her most recent book, “Wrestling With the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life,” is one of her interdisciplinary endeavors. In it, she addresses the function of formal and written constraints in psychoanalysis, political theory and aesthetics.

“The book as a whole is concerned with the enabling function of limits, laws, barriers, constraints,” explains McNulty. “We often think about freedom as freedom from constraints, obstacles, barriers – but what do we give up when we embrace that idea of freedom?”

 

In music, says McNulty, “creativity is something that comes from your own spin you put on the standards of the music’s form. What would it mean if we think about the law not simply as a kind of stop sign telling you what to do, but rather think of laws as also enabling freedom?”

As an example, McNulty cites the U.S. Constitution, a set of constraints that lawmakers must struggle with to reach a decision. The document doesn’t offer simple answers, but serves as an instrument through which lawmakers can reach a better decision.

The book is concerned broadly with the legacy of Jewish law, as the first major instance of the written law in Western tradition, and how that legacy is overturned in Medieval Europe by “political theology.” McNulty explains this is predicated on Jesus having suspended the written law, replacing it with what he calls the new law of the spirit. Medieval politicians used this new “law” as theological justification for their approach to sovereignty: The sovereign embodies the state and can, therefore, suspend the laws.

“Wrestling With Angels” is also concerned with the practice of the symbolic in psychoanalysis and how that should be understood, using the figure of Moses and Mosaic law to explore the concept of the primal father and how Jewish law created a space between God and the people in which they could be free.

McNulty’s current project takes an entirely new direction. Tentatively titled “Libertine Mathematics: Perversions of the Linguistic Turn,” the project examines the interest in mathematical formalization and its championing as a kind of perfect language and vehicle of true transmission by many contemporary French philosophers. She looks, too, at how libertine authors like the Marquis de Sade and Pauline Réage – as well as Freud – used mathematics to represent human drives.

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.