Abstract
Introducing the edited volume, Re(con)figuring Psychoanalysis, Aydan Gülerce conjures a world in crisis, a state she proposes as the persistence of older crises over the failures of “grand narratives” (p. 5), but also a “borderline” (p. 5) condition—“borderline” intended in the most overdetermined sense—that exceeds these older crises, even as it incorporates their logic and binds older anxieties. Psychoanalysis, for Gülerce, has been instrumental in diagnosing the old crises; it has been a part of Europe’s auto-critique of its Universalist dreams of progress, an auto-critique that was, as some have argued, coextensive with, internal to, the dream’s very elaboration. Thus, there is “no better conceptual resource than (‘good old’) psychoanalysis” (p. 5) with which to attend to contemporary “borderline” conditions. Psychoanalysis, however, has also been a part of what has been called into question. Thus, in framing each chapter, Gülerce plots a series of intellectual itineraries in which, on the one hand, psychoanalysis has been “re(con)figured,” marking the directions in which feminist, postcolonial, structuralist and poststructuralist, Marxist, queer, and anti-psychiatry interlocutors have taken Freudian theory, and, on the other, she discerns the philosophical and scientific traditions within and against which Freud worked, allowing one to read psychoanalysis as having been, from the start, a “re(con)figuration,” calling its own conditions of possibility into question.
Before turning to the individual chapters, it is worth dwelling on the title of the volume. To “figure,” to shape after a pattern; “(con),” together, in community, or, perhaps, linked together, concatenated; “re,” again, in repetition. Thus, to “re(con)figure,” to fashion, again, in community, the essays concatenated but also bracketed, sealed off within the volume, an enclosure that finds its analogue, in Gülerce’s words, in a “gallery,” the chapters “exhibited” (pp. 10–11). Art, perhaps, on display, or a museum housing artifacts—two enclosures that bring different temporal flows into play: the former elevating the works as the most progressive reinscriptions of psychoanalysis, the latter relegating even contemporary psychoanalytic interventions to a museologized past, archaicizing. But the “re(con)figuration” of the title puts this progressional time, this telos, into question: psychoanalytic discourse, as analysand, subject to its own thought, its own time of Nachträglichkeit, marking the deferred arrival of the past psychoanalysis will have had as it is “re(con)figured” to be adequate to the demands of a world, once more, in crisis. And then, of course, there is “(con)” as bluff, as swindle, as act(ing out), as so much talk of change that is mere repetition, a transferential repetition that is both, as Freud had it, an obstacle to, and a means of, reconfiguring, of working through, which is here bracketed off, sealed, as a transferential space: psychoanalytic discourse itself on the couch, traversing its revolutionary fantasies, the couch in the museum.
In the first chapter, Ian Parker offers a reading of Freud wherein the psychic is always already social, cultural, economic; psychic interiority imbricated by the world of which a given subject is part, requiring attention to the histories and myths, literary tropes and sociopolitical and socioeconomic frames that constitute subjectivity. But because, as Parker puts it, “psychoanalysis is so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture” (p. 59), the narratives analysts hear from analysands are frequently already interpreted psychoanalytically: that is, psychoanalysis is itself a part of the unconscious structures it names and theorizes, its language circuited through the transference. In a resonant chapter, Stephen Frosh charts what he calls the “institutional acting out” (p. 70) at play between two International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) meetings held in Germany since the Second World War, the Hamburg Congress in 1985 and the Berlin Congress in 2007. A slightly different figuring of psychoanalysis reading itself, Frosh gives an account of the failures of psychoanalysis, or at least the IPA as an institution, to have worked through its own histories of anti-Semitism. “Analysis interminable, indeed” (p. 74), as Frosh concludes.
Predictably, many of the chapters have a Lacanian bent and, rather than doing any reconfiguring of their own, they bear witness to, and clarify, Lacan’s important “re(con)figuration” of psychoanalysis. Kareen Malone and Shannon Kelly review various feminist critiques of science to affirm the role of psychoanalysis, specifically Jacques-Alain Miller’s rendering of extimacy, in adequately according desire a place in scientific knowledge production. Calum Neill offers an astute reading of the injunction to love thy neighbor as oneself. Following the drift of, and taking seriously, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological formulation of Einfühlung—what would be translated in the early 20th century as empathy—Neill demonstrates how psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian theory, makes this an impossible act, an impossibility that allows the possibility of an ethics to emerge. Stijn Vanheule and Abe Geldof offer a succinct and masterful illustration of Lacan’s seminars on knotting, focusing initially on the way Lacan critiqued phenomenology in his earlier work, and then later reformulated his own work in the 1970s, particularly through a reading of James Joyce. They then offer their own reading of the photography of David Nebreda. Ultimately affirming a Lacanian notion of the sinthome, the artful knotting of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real in Nebreda’s images, here, as in other chapters, it is the “usefulness” of Lacan, the “social and political implications of Lacan’s later theory” (p. 114) that is the focus of attention, their reading demonstrating this.
Bert Olivier’s chapter takes Lacan’s three registers as “quasi-universal,” becoming “(re)configured in new and different ways at various stages of social, economic and political development” (p. 185). It is these registers that he takes as a productive way to think through the violence of post-apartheid South African society. Two further chapters are concerned with psychoanalysis and South Africa. Derek Hook’s chapter is concerned more directly with “re(con)figurations” of racism than with psychoanalysis, though he takes his bearings from what he calls “Fanon’s experiment with the trope of phobia” (p. 167), advancing a swerve from an individualizing register of analysis that Fanon allows, proposing a focus on “the libidinal economy underlying specific discursive formations” (pp. 181–182). Similarly concerned with psychoanalysis and social theory, Grahame Hayes takes as his starting point the centrality of sexuality and death to both psychoanalytic theory and HIV/AIDS. What, Hayes asks, might psychoanalysis offer in thinking through and managing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa?
The questions these chapters raise, explicitly, entails what psychoanalysis can bring to bear on problems of scientific knowledge production, photography, violent crime, recalcitrant racism, and HIV/AIDS. More implicitly, they present questions concerning what it is about these scenes that might ask psychoanalysis to “re(con)figure” itself in becoming adequate to the task of thinking them through. If one of Freud’s most valuable contributions was to be guided by his hysterical analysands—and Lacan by Joyce—what does it mean to make the same move here? Certainly psychoanalysis would trouble notions of sexuality as a positive empirical object, as Hayes notes, sexuality being the irreducible thing against which our identities flounder, the enigmatic problem our knowledge persistently circles and always misses. But what can psychoanalysis learn from this South African scene and those who navigate it? Nebreda’s photographs, in Vanheule and Geldof’s chapter, push back against discourses on art, Lacan pushes back against psychiatric diagnoses that rely on the categories of “normal” and “sane,” but Nebreda leaves intact Lacanian theory, however masterfully illustrated. Indeed, in much the same way, one might ask of Branney et al.’s Kleinian reading of family violence policy in the context of “Aotearoa/New Zealand,” why such a context would leave Kleinian theory unmarked, simply applied, however well?
It is only because this does in fact occur in certain chapters that these questions are begged. Indeed, Lisa Baraitser does precisely this, meditating on the words “MOTHER” graffitied on an East London wall. With recourse to the work of Kristeva, Ettinger, and Edelman, Baraitser reads this inscription as a “maternal monument” (p. 231) that forces psychoanalysis to reconsider its own theorization of “maternal time” (p. 237). Likewise, Narcisa Paredes-Canilao’s chapter treats a Filipino proverb and its associative network as her analysand, tracing the history of a concept, kulo, that speaks of “individuals boiling or overflowing” (p. 77), as well as the way desire moves and operates metaphorically and metonymically within this “proverb turned handy expression” (p. 82). Affirming a Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired rereading of the agency of the letter or, rather, the proverb, Paredes-Canilao asks after the ways in which kulo shifts the ground of the unconscious in psychoanalytic theory.
Re(con)figuring Psychoanalysis will appeal to scholars, across disciplines, concerned with psychoanalytic theory and its movement out of the clinic. The individual essays will no doubt lead the reader to the book projects from which the chapters are, for the most part, drawn. And it is a rewarding read for the questions it asks explicitly as much as for those that emerge between the chapters that not only resonate, but productively contradict, even interrupt, each other. In concluding I quote from the Baraitser chapter: “Whether or not psychoanalysis has something to offer to a social analytics cannot be assumed, and what it may have to offer as its theoretical propositions evolve must be constantly critically assessed” (p. 223). Indeed, this may be, paradoxically, the most “properly” psychoanalytic attitude, and perhaps it is only this wager of its own existence that will “re(con)figure” psychoanalytic concepts rather than exhibit their evolution.