The Structures of Love

James Penney

Description

Both Freud and Lacan defined the transference as the ego's last stand—its final desperate attempt to keep the truth of the unconscious at bay. Both also viewed the transference as a social phenomenon.

In The Structures of Love James Penney argues that transference is the concept with which psychoanalysis thinks through the unconscious demands that circumscribe and can sabotage our creative initiatives in the arts and politics. Penney suggests a method of cultural analysis that enables us to identity the transformative potential of genuine artistic and political acts. He stages a dialogue between Lacan's psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Alain Badiou; includes chapters on Frantz Fanon and Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud; and explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical consequences of the transference idea, pushing it into exciting new territory.
List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

1. The Refusal of Love

Love in the Social
The Technique of Love
Resisting the Transference
Woman and the Riff-Raff
The Fall of the Other
From Partial Love to Anxiety

2. Socrates, Analyst

An Original Transference
Of Love Spheres and Stranded Vessels
A Pregnant Beauty
The Part of Love
Love, Ménage à Trois

3. Like a Pack of Rats

Will the Real Frantz Fanon Please Stand Up?
A Gift of Quinine
The Metropolitan View
The Pack of Rats

4. Loving the Terrorist

Massacre and Subjectivation
A Century of Violence
A Begging Bowl Made of Flesh
Of Grey Hair and Treachery

5. For the Love of Cinema

Imaginary Signifiers?
Species of Identification
Beyond the Phenomenon of Cinema
Proustian Obsession and the Failure of Spectatorship

6. Naked Love

Bodies of Theory
Painting in Nature
Nude and Naked
Tableau and Screen
Shameful Nudes
The Object of Art

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Película fotográfica
• Philosophy
• Visual culture
• History of film
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438439747
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor

The Structures of Love
Art and Politics beyond the Transference
James Penney

Cover photograph courtesy of David G. Mills.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Penney, James, 1971–
The structures of love : art and politics beyond the transference / James Penney.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3973-0 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis—Philosophy. 2. Love. I. Title.
BF175.P4157 2012
150.19'5—dc22                                                                                                                                               2011009759
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Graph of desire; translated and adapted from Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVI. D'un autre à l'autre , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 87. Figure 1.2 Classical inverted vase experiment. Figure 1.3 Lacan's apparatus; Guillaume Paumier, Madeleine Price Ball, and Mariana Ruiz Villareal (Wikimedia, free licence). Figure 5.1 Chantal Akerman, La Captive , opening sequence (©2000 Gemini Films and ©2004 Kimstim, Inc.). Figure 5.2 Chantal Akerman, La Captive (2000), closing sequence (©2000 Gemini Films and ©2004 Kimstim, Inc.). Figure 6.1 The field of vision; adapted from Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1998), 91, 106. Figure 6.2 Lucian Freud, Hotel Bedroom (1954); courtesy of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and Lucian Freud. Figure 6.3 Lucian Freud, Naked Girl Asleep II (1968); courtesy of the Lucian Freud Archive and Lucian Freud.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “Passing into the Universal: Fanon, Sartre and the Colonial Dialectic,” Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory 27, no. 3 (2004): 49–67; reprinted with permission of Edinburgh University Press. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Genet among the Palestinians: Sex, Betrayal, and the Incomparable Real,” in Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures , ed. Jarrod Hayes, Margaret R. Higonnet, and William J. Spurlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 193–213. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as “The Failure of Spectatorship,” Communication Theory 17, no. 1 (February 2007): 43–60; reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Diagrams from Lacan's seminar are from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan, translated by Alan Sheridan. Copyright © 1973 by Editions du Seuil. English translation copyright © 1977 by Alan Sheridan. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
A Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided the resources necessary to complete this project. Special thanks to Beaverbrook Art Gallery and Lucian Freud for permission to feature reproductions of his stunning work. My research assistants Susanna Ashley and Jacob Potempski provided invaluable help. Trent University students too numerous to name expressed views that contributed to my thinking about the transference and forced me to invent new ways of talking about psychoanalysis and Lacan. Finally: hello Ian and Violet! And thanks, Dave, who likely wouldn't want me to go on.
Preface
The premise of this book is that transference is the concept with which psychoanalysis thinks through the unconscious demands that circumscribe and can sabotage our creative initiatives in the arts and politics. I aim to demonstrate that transference theory, derived from Freudian clinical experience, allows the critic of literature and culture to radicalize the disappointing poststructuralist understandings of agency as, on the one hand, performativity and resignification (Judith Butler, Derrida) and, on the other, the redirection of existing relations or vectors of power or force (Foucault, Deleuze). The method of analysis that transference theory suggests allows us to recognize the transformative potentialities of genuine artistic and political acts .
The transference's interpretation divulges our collective subjective capacity to unfurl the invigorating consequences of such events in specific social, historical, and cultural circumstances. By interpreting the transference we can remain faithful to the work of singular artists and thinkers who take up the challenge of moving beyond the ego's claims to social recognition, and therefore beyond the treasonous ambivalences and compromises that arise when we fail to pursue desire beyond the limits policed by fear and anxiety. Though no form of artistic or political practice can precisely reproduce the course of analytic treatment, the texts of culture leave discernible traces of a sort of psychical work that runs strikingly parallel to the analyst's work of interpretation. The chapters that follow aim to discern these traces, formulating in precise but accessible terms the philosophical, literary, cinematic, and painterly stratagems that have allowed the creators of concern to accomplish their challenging and inspiring innovations.
Specifically, The Structures of Love explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical ramifications of the transference idea through detailed analyses of five objects of culture from an eclectic, and no doubt idiosyncratic, range of genres and media: Plato's Symposium (via Jacques Lacan's reading), Frantz Fanon's body of work, Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love and political essays, Chantal Akerman's cinematic Proust adaptation The Captive , and the nudes of Lucian Freud in painting. The seemingly haphazard quality of this group of objects is not the result of mere whimsy. It is intended, rather, to help liberate literary and cultural studies from the moribund historicisms and contextualisms that have gained ascendancy during the last couple decades or so.
I don't think as a rule that it's the author's business to tell readers how to read his book. Given its eclecticism, however, a brief introductory comment may be in order. Chapter 1 offers a thoroughgoing analysis of the development of the transference concept in Freud and Lacan, focusing on how Lacan's teaching suggests a fresh reading of Freud's technical writings that foregrounds the improperly acknowledged social and political implications of psychoanalysis. Not infrequently, the remaining chapters make reference to this theoretical discussion, aiming to specify exactly how transference theory can be put into practice in the arena of cultural interpretation. Yet these chapters are written in such a way that they can be read independently of chapter 1 . The critic of postcolonial culture, for instance, may want to focus on chapters 3 and 4 (on Fanon and Genet respectively), which together aim to suggest a reformulation of the tenets of postcolonial theory. Alternatively, the student of visual culture may decide to proceed directly to chapters 5 and 6 , curious about what there could possibly be left to say about psychoanalysis and film theory, or else about Lacan's sweeping and neglected pronouncements on the function of art. Though I tried consistently to make the connection between the theoretical and cultural aspects of the project as explicit as possible, links which I have not foreseen can and no doubt will be made. This, surely, is one of the things that readers are for.
I
The Refusal of Love

Love in the Social
It's not too much to claim that the entire project of psychoanalysis was set in motion by Freud's remarkable discovery at the outset of his investigations that the patient never fails to fall in love during treatment. Baptizing this phenomenon transference love, Freud argues that such a love cannot not occur in analysis; that the rules of the game—patient lying on the couch, analyst seated behind, law of free association imposed—guarantee that it will occur without fail. The event of love revealed in the transference is the underlying condition of possibility of psyc