by Alejandra Josiowicz
“In the act of writing, and, why not, of reading, there was a world that came near, and there was a belonging that was at stake.”
Denilson Lopes, O homem que amava rapazes o outros ensaios. 2002.
Why study psychoanalysis and how to use it as a critical tool? What is to be queer here and now? What are the possible connections between teaching, writing, reading and our sexed selves? If the identity categories control our eroticism, what practices of reading, teaching and writing should we use? How should we defer ourselves (Butler 1996) in order not to be captivated in our own voice, writing, work?
How can we remain opaque, in an age in which all ethics –democratic, professional, commercial, technical- are associated with transparency and public disclosure? Is there a particular performance of dignity in the practice of opacity, like Eric Laurent said recently about the paradoxical figure of authority in his clinic practice (“Psychoanalysis & our time” Laurent, Eric. Barnard College, NY, 29th Sept 2011)?
In a multicultural age where emerging agents so much as developing countries seek to occupy a new real and imaginary space in a public sphere in crisis, what should be the role of experimental, critical, gender and psychoanalytic theory? Should it theorize its paradoxes, take part or critically weigh the facts and figures of a possible new beginning? What kind of gender & social performances should we allow and choose for ourselves? How much painful social and gender indefiniteness can our bodies and minds endure? How should we speak about the risky frontiers of our identity and to whom? Students? Professors? Therapists? Friends? Is there a possibility to remain silent, enabling the psychic excess of the real to act for itself?
What do we do with the genders we want to have, the genders we lost, the mimicking and rejections we constantly enact? Do we disguise them in drag? Do we repeat them endlessly searching for a secure place, for an identification? Which appearances, which glitters and surfaces, which powerful disguises will deploy not so much the stigmatization of an other but the uncertainties and negotiations of our own pleasures and desires? Which transvestites’ souls? Which masquerades? Transwritings, transimages, transquotidean, androgynies, ambiguities, identities as becoming, baroque spectacles, all gathered in a practice of writing that escapes the purely academic posture of the critic and involves itself in criticism as an act of pleasure (Lopes 2002).
If, according to Lacan, the unconscious is structured as a language -more than the Freudian reservoir of affective impulses- semiological research after Pierce and Saussure had to deal with this renovation. The lacanian concept of language – as mother tongue- is a powerful tool to block and, more importantly, unblock inhibition, symptom and depression. The semiotic, precocious pre- linguistic relations, minimum particles of language that the child shares with his mother, carry the most archaic register of the unconscious. Childish babble carries the inscription of primitive traumas, joyful as well as painful experiences (Kristeva 2011). Therefore, to recover that primitive oral body is to go beyond the banal body of the globalized media towards artistic practice as experience and radical language. That is why, according to Kristeva, psychoanalytic practice and literature constitute one and the same psychic dynamic, because they are mystical transformative experience of our subjectivity.
Works cited
-Butler, Judith, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Women, Knowledge and Reality. Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996.
-Kristeva, Julia, “Psicoanálisis y literatura son la misma cosa” entrevista por Mauro Libertella en Clarín, Revistaenie, 11- Noviembre-2011.
-Laurent, Eric, “Psychoanalysis & our time” in The First Paris USA Lacan Seminar in New York City. Lacan´s Legacy: Thirty Years in the Lacanian Orientation, Barnard College , NY, 29th Sept 2011.
-Lopes, Denilson, O homem que amava rapazes e outros ensaios. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2002.
Chase Dimock
Diego Costa
The Qouch
Thanks for writing all this. I see there is surely lots of meat in this text, but I am unable to understand it. This is very frustrating. I guess I am not educated enough. Would it be awful if I asked the author to maybe write a simplified version, one with fuller explanations of what the referenced sources are, and of what the central ideas are? :-P
Some concrete questions, whose answers I would really appreciate:
1. What does ‘deferring oneself’ mean?
2. In the phrase “In a multicultural age where emerging agents so much as developing countries seek to occupy a new real and imaginary space in a public sphere in crisis, what should be the role of experimental, critical, gender and psychoanalytic theory?”, what does the word ‘agent’ mean, and what is the ‘imaginary space’? What is the crisis of the public sphere? What is ‘experimental […] psychoanalistic theory’? (Is that an oxymoron?)
3. Why is social and gender indefiniteness assumed to be painful?
4. What is ‘drag’?
5. I don’t understand the question “Which appearances, which glitters and surfaces, which powerful disguises will deploy not so much the stigmatization of an other but the uncertainties and negotiations of our own pleasures and desires?” because I do not understand what ‘deploy’ would mean here. How are ‘stigmatization’, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘negotiation’ deployed? Deployed in which space?
6. Is this an answer to the question in 4? How so? “Transwritings, transimages, transquotidean, androgynies, ambiguities, identities as becoming, baroque spectacles, all gathered in a practice of writing that escapes the purely academic posture of the critic and involves itself in criticism as an act of pleasure (Lopes 2002).”
7. What is the ‘renovation’ referred in the next paragraph?
8. In the phrase “[…] unblock inhibition, symptom and depression,” what does ‘symptom’ mean?
9. In which way is the ‘body of the globalized media’ banal? In which way can ‘artistic practice’ work as ‘experience and radical language’? What does ‘radical language’ mean? ‘Language from the root’, ‘original language’? Is it then being contrasted with ‘experience language’ in this phrase, where ‘experience language’ would then mean ‘the language formed after birth’?
10. In which way do psychoanalytic practice and literature constitute a ‘dynamic’? Is the word dynamic meant to mean ‘a kind of mental process’, ‘a kind of experience’? Would it be possible to include other mystical experiences that also transform our subjectivity (such as religious rituals or the preparation for a big sports competition) in the same category or ‘dynamic’? Does psychoanalytic literature always transform our subjectivity? Or is it necessary to give it a special highly-believing (as opposed to skeptical) reading? Which psychoanalytic literature does this? I would like to give it a try.
11. Is the point of the last paragraph that in order to get in contact with our subconscious and release ourselves from inhibition we must practice art? What exactly is the connection with the previous paragraph? Is the main idea of the whole piece that in order to remain ‘opaque’ and uninhibited we need to practice art and undergo psychoanalysis, and from the result of our art, we should produce our ‘veil’ of ‘opacity’? (I am really sorry if I got this completely wrong! I am confused.)
12. In my experience, ‘remaining opaque’ makes everything more difficult. I would go as far as to say, in terms that will seem a little ‘economic’, that freedom can only happen if everyone in the system has full information about what others want to do. (One would have to discuss this purely speculative statement much further.) Why is ‘opacity’ so important?
Thank you!!
I think last time with E. Laurent. The article is pretty good … when I go to talk to you?