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Review: Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political? Author(S): Elizabeth J. Bellamy Source: Diacritics, Vol. 23, No

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Review: Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political? Author(S): Elizabeth J. Bellamy Source: Diacritics, Vol. 23, No Review: Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political? Author(s): Elizabeth J. Bellamy Source: Diacritics, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 23-38 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465244 . Accessed: 26/01/2011 21:31 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Diacritics. http://www.jstor.org DISCOURSES OF IMPOSSIBILITY: CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS BE POLITICAL? ELIZABETHJ. BELLAMY Jean-Joseph Goux. SYMBOLIC ECONOMIES: AFTER MARX AND FREUD. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. HEGEMONYAND SOCIALISTSTRATEGY: TOWARDS A RADICAL DEMOCRATICPOLITICS. London: Verso, 1985. Slavoj Zizek. THE SUBLIME OBJECTOF IDEOLOGY. London: Verso, 1989. "The historyof psychoanalysisis not finished,"writes CorneliusCastoriadis, "although it is possible that it may finish sooner thanwe think"[103]. Or should we insteadheed the warningof Jean Laplanche:"Reports of the demise of psychoanalysisare merelythe obverse of an unquenchablethirst for novelties at any cost. Psychoanalysisis expected to be a constantsource ... of new thrills"[2]. Pace Castoriadis,psychoanalysis is not likely to die out "soonerthan we think,"but it is my contentionthat psychoanalysis must abandonits compulsion, to echo Laplanche,to be a "constantsource of new thrills"in favor of more subtle mediations of the intersectionbetween psyche and history. Put anotherway, it is time, now that Lacan (as its most recent"strong father") is gone, for psychoanalysis to utilize what it has learned about the intersubjectivenature of the Lacanianunconscious and consider its relationshipto the sociopolitical.1 One could arguethat it is still to be determinedwhether the Lacanian"moment" has been liberating or restrictive for psychoanalysis. At the very least, the spectacular phenomenonof Lacanianismhas demonstratedthat the establishingof "cult"leaders (and its syndrome of discipleship and Oedipal filiations) continues to be the characteristic repetitioncompulsion of psychoanalysis,what Fran:ois Roustang,in Dire Mastery,has summarizedas a destin si funeste. It may be time for psychoanalysis to abandonits allegiance to "theauthority of the master,"a move whose consequenceswould also entail the relinquishing of its endless fascination with and theorizing of the concept of transference(which never seems very far removed from the question of "mastery")and I wish to thankDominickLaCapraandArtemis Leontis for their valuablecomments on this essay. 1. SherryTurkle's Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution provides a historyof the commitmentof psychoanalysis to formulate a "psychoanalyticideology," specifically the impulses behind the May 1968 revolutionarymovement in France, which, in its best moments, sought to theorizethe way in which the subject is interpellatedinto a Lacanian Symbolic. But, as Turklepoints out, this attemptfailed as the French radical left's appropriation of Lacanian discourse became stiflingly de rigueur, and the socially revolutionarypotential of the "French Freud" movementdegenerated into mere "radical chic" [87]. 24 diacritics 23.1: 24-38 Li I? :i :i-ii of a clinical treatmentthat fails to considerthe analysand'sintersection with not only the analyst but history itself.2 But how can psychoanalysisenter into a meaningful exchange with politics? How can we forge a dynamicand provocativereciprocity between psychoanalysisand politics thatwould also respectthe dual autonomiesof the "psychic"and the "political"?I would arguethat the majorobstacle to articulatingthe relationshipbetween psychoanalysisand politics is, ironically,the inherentlypsychoanalytic concept of transference,what Freud describedas that"universal phenomenon of the humanmind" [80]-the very concept in which psychoanalysisitself is so thoroughlyimplicated. In Freud'sconception, transfer- ence is a process of "actingout" as a kind of extended repetitioncompulsion that resists a salutary"working through." Thus, in orderfor psychoanalysisto enterinto a meaningful exchange with politics, or vice versa, what must occur is a disavowal of transference, wherebyone discourseor the otherends up dominatingand demanding allegiance to "the authority of the master."3 If this transference is not disavowed, a "psychoanalytic politics," or a "political psychoanalysis," will fail to be a dynamic articulation,or "workingthrough," of two disparatediscourses, but ratherwill become an unexamined "actingout" of psychoanalysiswithin politics. In recent years, there have been encouragingsigns of an increasingwillingness to renew the relevance of psychoanalysis for ideology critique. In particular,Jean-Joseph Goux, Slavoj Zizek, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe all deserve credit for attempting,to one degreeor another,to contextualizepsychoanalysis within the ideologi- cal. In this essay I wish to examine the difficulties these otherwise ambitious contextualizationshave encounteredin their attempts to conceive of a psychoanalytic politics andto reflecton what moreneeds to be done. I wish to emphasizefrom the outset thatmy critiqueof these authorsis motivatednot so much by what they argueas by what they don't argue: that is, they neglect to articulateprecisely what the irreducibilityof psychoanalysisfor ideology critiqueis. Despite the brillianceof these works, in the final analysis all threebeg the question of why we need psychoanalysisfor ideology critique: what, in otherwords, does psychoanalysisadd thatgives us a betterunderstanding of the operationsof ideology andpolitics? To repeatmy earlierclaim, the resultof this question begging constitutes an "acting out" (that is, a superficial forging of psychoanalytic analogies), instead of a "workingthrough" to genuine (psycho-)politicalsolutions. In order for psychoanalysis to become a truly sociopolitical discourse, it must "remember"its (often repressed) history in the FrankfurtSchool's commitment to historicizingpsychoanalysis through a nuancingof the enigmatic links among neurosis, culture, and history. One of the more recent attemptsat the elusive synthesis between Marx and Freud is Jean-JosephGoux's Symbolic Economies, a brilliant synthesis of psyche and socioeconomy that nonetheless does not take on the task of offering a truly 2. As Castoriadishas observed,surely one of themore perverse effects of Lacanianismhas been the recentattention devoted to a theorizingof the "desireof the analyst"as a new and importantfocus of psychoanalyticdiscourse-an indicationthat psychoanalysis may simply be uninclined,for thetime being, to relinquish its "fataldestiny " tofetishize the "master ": "Formany yearsnow, France has beenfull of chatabout the 'desireof theanalyst.' But about the 'desireof the analyst' nobodycares" [84]. In their introductionto a recentcollection of essays on psychoanalysis,Richard Feldstein and Henry Sussman call for a kindof "post-psychoanalysis," a kindof "hybridform ofpsychoanalysis [that] could become decontextualizedfrom the mirror of clinicalrelations that has customarilysupported its claims"[1]. 3. For the definitivediscussion of how transferenceoperates within the disciplineof historiography(that is, howhistorians transfer onto thepast and howhistory seeks to disavow transference),see DominickLaCapra 's essay "Historyand Psychoanalysis. " I am indebtedto LaCaprafor my analysisof how transferenceis an obstaclein constitutinga psychoanalytic politics. diacritics / spring 1993 25 political agenda. The reasonsfor this shortcomingare worth examining in some detailfor their illuminationof the difficulties of formulatinga genuinely psychoanalyticpolitics. Goux's concept of "theoretical numismatics" is an attempt to forge analogies between Marx and Freudthrough an articulationof the genesis of value form. Marx declaredthat in a bourgeoiseconomy, a commoditycannot establish its own value;rather this value can be established(that is, structured)only througha transcendental"general equivalent"(that is, gold as an absolutecommodity). In otherwords, the exchangevalue of a capitalistcommodity is a nonempirical,purely transcendent process of signification. We can at this point discern the influence on Goux of a Lacanian discourse of "phallocentrism": like (the concept of) gold, the "dead" (murdered)father is also a transcendentsymbol of a "purelysyntactic moment"that creates the generalequivalent as the
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