Psychoanalysis and politics Juliet Mitchell then and now

Lynne Segal

ʻWell, Iʼll think about women thenʼ, Juliet Mitchell on, where that entrenchment could be undermined proposed in 1963, suggesting a topic to research as and eroded in some way.ʼ4 Today, it is Mitchell herself she sat, the lone woman, on the editorial board of New who worries that psychoanalysis, and in particular Left Review – alongside her husband, Perry Anderson, feminismʼs embrace of it, may have served to displace the freshly minted editor of the journal. The inevitable politics. ʻDoes [psychoanalysisʼs] self-described, non- response greeted Mitchellʼs startling proposal in such political discourse draw all potentially radical use of circles at that time: ʻthere was silenceʼ.1 A decade later it into the apolitical?ʼ, she recently queried. Or con- and Mitchellʼs next move seemed just as eccentric, at versely, and perhaps more surprisingly, she wonders: least to many of the women who had by then raced ʻdoes the recurrent demise of feminism … turn a in to erase that earlier embarrassed silence on the radical investigatory mode which is psychoanalysis ʻsecondʼ sex once and for all – during the passion- into an apolitical discourse?ʼ5 Good questions. Her ate early years of Womenʼs Liberation. She turned, worries are just the ones we need to address if we increasingly, towards psychoanalysis for assistance want to ponder the conjunction of psychoanalysis and with her political task. The challenge, obviously, was feminism over the last three decades. The first ques- not just the serene sovereignty of male domination, tion, at least, expresses some of my own misgivings. sexism and misogyny, which had reigned over every Yet, oddly, while regularly fielding the right ques- domain in the 1960s, but the infeasibility of disclosing tions, Mitchellʼs replies are equivocal and puzzling. its elemental presence using the prevailing political Her theoretical and professional engagement in languages of the Left: of class, colonialism, or impe- psychoanalysis, although critical and creative, does rial aggression. not itself direct us to any particular social, let alone Juliet Mitchell would appear to be the ideal author- historical, circumstances which she seeks either to ity to turn to if one wants to discuss the fraught issue erode, or only to change, in order to further her of psychoanalysis and politics. This is not only because feminist goal of increasing the cultural power, agency her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism was seminal and personal happiness of women. On the contrary, for so many women radicals in the 1970s, busy attend- she has consistently dismissed ʻthe sociologizing of ing their Marx and Freud reading groups.2 It is also psychoanalysisʼ by theorists like Nancy Chodorow because she has consistently insisted that she remains and Jessica Benjamin, who stress the impact of the steadfastly attached to being political – even in these particularities of culture – especially the shifting very different times, when many have discarded their dynamics of parenting – in the psychological domain.6 former ideals as yesterdayʼs folly. Psychoanalysis and Mitchellʼs own resolute, now less than fashionable, Feminism, she has recalled, ʻwas asking if we could universalizing of psychoanalytic explanations of the use psychoanalysis to bring feminism into the socialist structural/symbolic origins of sexual difference seem project. That project has to take off from there.ʼ3 Or, as more symptomatic of what many have seen as the she put it elsewhere: ʻThe question for me in that book obstinacy of a psychoanalysis which works to fix or was that if patriarchy is so entrenched, there must be naturalize, rather than to diminish, coercive sexual historical circumstances which a politics could work and gender binaries. Psychoanalytic insights, in my

12 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) view, can be used – often must be used – to help us Gender and Sexuality.9 They all emphasize that sexed grasp aspects of the political moment and, especially, identity is never internalized as a single entity (posi- the belligerence and dread so often greeting change tively or a negatively), but operates subjectively within in the personal and sexual arena. Yet, as Freudʼs an array of always conflictual mental representations most compelling feminist, Foucauldian and newly born and self-perceptions. These are sedimented out of Deleuzean critics all insist, its traditional dilemma the unique identifications each child makes with its is that in practice psychoanalysis has routinely been own parents, siblings and significant others, however deployed, and often still serves, to reinforce a coercive much these interactions are always already permeated normalizing of heterosexual, reproductive sexuality with the polarizing effects of symbolic phallocentrism and identity, rather than calling them into question. and the still prevailing – though increasingly diverse This is most apparent in the arena where it is routinely and disputed – social and familial patterns of male invoked, in sexual and gender politics, as I think we dominance. can see in the work of Juliet Mitchell. A somewhat different account, although not dis- similar in its consequences for the psychic formation Sexual binarism or gender ambiguity? of sexual difference, comes from those influenced by In talks and interviews delivered in the 1990s, Mitchell the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (promoted suggests that the depoliticizing of both feminism and most comprehensively in Britain by John Fletcher).10 psychoanalysis in recent decades has something to do Laplanche explains the inevitable installation of the with the increasing academic interest in sexuality and unconscious in the child as not so much the effect representation at the expense of kinship, ideology and of the childʼs identifications as, from the outside, the the reproduction of society around sexual difference. implantation of an always unique bundle of enigmatic The former, she suggests, attempts to valorize mother- signifiers or untranslatable messages coming from the hood and the pre-Oedipal as an alternative female and unconscious desires of the mother, or other significant feminine sphere. In contrast, she argues, it is only adults – via what he terms ʻseductionʼ. attention to kinship and ideology which can explain Either way, it can be argued that while the child how and why women and men are positioned differ- is imbued with unconscious sexual desires through its ently in ʻpatriarchalʼ kinship structures.7 Despite her interactions with the seductive and desired attention clinical training in psychoanalytic object-relations and and ministration of adult others, there is no primordial the Independent School, which followed her theoreti- sexual binarism in the unconscious. Indeed, this is cal schooling in Freud and Lacan, Mitchell seems to precisely why gendered and sexual identifications are remain, by and large, faithful to the claim she made so confusing, and so chronically in danger of col- in the early 1980s, following Lacan (and along with lapsing under the weight of their own contradictions. Jacqueline Rose), that ʻthe strengthʼ which psycho- From this perspective, the psychoanalytic message analysis brings to feminism resides in its claim that the and goal of treatment is not so much the achieve- category ʻwomenʼ is an empty one: women are ʻdefined ment of an appropriate gendered or sexual identity, exactly as – and only as – their difference from menʼ. as the ability ʻto tolerate the ambiguity and insta- There is no positive content to be given to women, bility of gender categoriesʼ.11 Here, the acceptance or to femininity. Only from here, Mitchell suggested of gender ambiguity and instability signals mental then, can we begin to think psychoanalytically, can health. These more recent psychoanalytic trajectories we begin to see ʻhow gender is constructed and how rethinking gender and sexual difference often express sexual differences are livedʼ.8 the Foucauldian and Derridean influences authorizing Mitchell is well aware that any such emphasis on queer theoryʼs account of the inevitable instability and structural determinants, like kinship, and the ineluct- fluidity of identities and desire, with Judith Butler and able hold of the classic Oedipal narrative, is pre- Eve Sedgwick still its reigning – if at times reluctant cisely not the direction taken by those – non-Lacanian – theoreticians.12 – feminist clinicians who have been most engaged in Mitchell obviously knows, as well as Freud, Lacan critically using psychoanalysis as a tool for reworking or any other reflective clinician, that ʻmasculinityʼ notions of gender. I am thinking, in particular, of the and ʻfemininityʼ have no clear or certain content. New York analysts (not one of whom is mentioned She is all too aware of what the Lacanian Mous- in Mitchellʼs latest book) such as Jessica Benjamin, tafa Safouan sums up as ʻsimply the state of affairs Muriel Dimen, Virginia Goldner and Arlene Harris, confirmed by all analysisʼ: ʻthat the energy with which who in 1996 helped found the journal Gender and the subject declares himself [sic] man or woman is Psychoanalysis, relaunched this year as Studies in proportional to that with which the reverse is stated in

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 13 the unconscious.ʼ13 Indeed, Mitchell would add, that is of infancy, is the man or woman who has been unable the whole point of psychoanalysis: to understand how to find his or her place within a future where they are ʻmasculinityʼ and ʻfemininityʼ become ʻdifferentiated positioned differently in relation to procreation. Thus out from samenessʼ. But, she goes on, when feminist we learn: ʻwhat the hysteric unconsciously cannot psychoanalysts see only gender ambiguity and uncer- face is sexual reproduction as opposed to partheno- tainty, ʻthey forget the problem of engenderingʼ.14 It is genetic procreationʼ.18 Mitchell now wants to add a this which, for Mitchell, as for Freud, binds sexuality new universal prohibition, which she calls ʻThe Law and sexual difference to a reproductive, heterosexual of the Motherʼ, to sit beside the more orthodox ʻLaw teleology: ʻfor generation there has to be a categori- of the Fatherʼ. The Law of the Mother decrees: ʻyou cal differenceʼ. And from this assertion, she swiftly [the child] cannot be a mother now, but you, a girl, can legitimizes all the ingredients of the normative Oedipal grow up to be one, and you, a boy, cannot.ʼ The Law developmental narrative. Thus Mitchell explains: ʻThe of the Father refers to the role of ʻthe Fatherʼs Phallusʼ infant must come to acknowledge that it was born of in defining the object of the motherʼs desire: neither two parents in their sexual desire. Sexuality is the the boy nor the girl can possess the phallus, but you, a process that enables one to find the gendered other as boy, can align yourself with the position of the father, different from oneself so that she or he can be used with the fantasy of having the phallus, but you, a girl, as other for the purposes of engendering.ʼ15 What is cannot! The old law, of course, installs the castration surely most striking here is that Mitchell falls back complex. The new law, the maternal prohibition, if on the very reproductive biologism she once turned successfully surmounted, will allow the girl, but forbid to Lacan to avoid. the boy, to grow up to be ʻin the position of the mother (in whatever way – actual or symbolic – she may use Hysteria: the Law of the Mother it)ʼ.19 The hysteric is the person – male or female – who This reading of the Oedipal narrative underpins Mitch- refuses this Law of the Mother. ellʼs latest account of hysteria, although – to be sure – it With her accounts of parthenogenetic fantasies is augmented by an expanded and compelling analysis – often triggered by the birth of a sibling – keeping of the potentially catastrophic effect of sibling envy and the male as well as the female child perpetually displacement within the more familiar drama. Overall, allied to the mother, Mitchell provides many sug- her description of hysteria is, as usual, innovative gestive vignettes of hysterical symptoms, especially and subtle. She tellingly emphasizes the ideological in men. But I am not convinced by her obedience slippage that falsely collapses into the ʻfeminineʼ the to a psychoanalytic imagination and an explanatory dreaded passivity and helplessness of infancy, the framework which can only lock identity and sexuality consuming envy, the ceaseless longing and the feelings into normative reproductive discourses, assumptions of emptiness or non-existence that are symptomatic of and prescriptions. Indeed, her examples do not seem to the hysterical condition: ʻit would appear that women me to justify any such conclusion. We can look at one and hysteria are found synonymously unattractive, so of the first and fullest she offers, of a woman suffering a hysterical man is “feminine”ʼ.16 In her reclaiming from multiple hysterical and suicidal symptoms drawn of hysteria, Mitchell is at her most persuasive in from Enid Balintʼs case study of Sarah, ʻOn Being the charting of the process which turns hysteria into Empty of Oneselfʼ, reported in 1963. Sarah is empty ʻfemininityʼ. Freudʼs mistake, she explains, was to of herself because ʻher mother has never recognized see as a universal repudiation of femininity what he herʼ, refusing ʻall the messages her daughter sent should have seen as a repudiation of the hysterical out for recognitionʼ. Furthermore, at six or seven, condition. She is equally convincing as she explores Sarahʼs older brother began having sexual intercourse the banishing or dissolving of hysteria (in her view, with her, a practice which continued for the next an inevitable feature of the human condition) into its five years. Sarahʼs father is reported to be a violent component categories – whether of anorexia or other man, ʻwithout any self controlʼ. As a child Sarah ʻhad conversion symptoms. My misgivings all arise from lain awake at nights terrified of death, too scared her theoretical denouement on the origins of hysteria. to call out, imagining that something was going to It is there that we learn, in line with reproductive crash on her headʼ.20 Sarahʼs ʻrampantʼ adult sexual normativities, that the pathology of hysteria always experiences were bisexual. Reflecting upon this case returns us to the rejection of sexual polarity: ʻHysteria history, Mitchell rightly criticized Enid Balintʼs work … is essentially bisexual.ʼ17 for (in line with that of Donald Winnicott and other The hysteric, who, when faced with unbearable psychoanalytic mentors of her day) locating Sarahʼs fears of self-annihilation, regresses to the helplessness mental illness solely with the mother, rather than

14 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) considering either the role of the violent father (who her as a particularly successful child and sister). She had wanted only sons) or the older sibling (who had had only contempt for her own mother. In line with drawn her into premature incestuous sex). It seems the intensely patriarchal repudiations of femininity of to me, however, that of the many overdeterminations her day, Xʼs mother could find worth only in men and of Sarahʼs adult pathologies, the argument that she ʻmasculinityʼ. X, identified with and receiving all her has refused fully to accept the normative, procreative motherʼs repudiations of femininity, will always have position is somewhat superfluous. problems with her own self-worth as a woman, despite In my view, the imposition of such an overarching being heterosexual, procreative and all too aware of blueprint, or any set of laws mandating the production her own feminine identity. of healthy human development, is not only superfluous, The point is this: while Mitchell is nowadays but can operate to diminish the potential of psycho- willing and able to provide telling descriptions of analytic thought for embracing psychic complexity. psychic experience, she often seems to have little In line with its predominantly conservative history, interest in social context, other than to posit struc- it also serves to suppress the potential subversiveness tural determinants of a very normative kind. Thus of psychoanalysis in the sexual and gender domain. she cannot address her own queries on how psycho- Let us imagine another vignette, based on a person I analysis (with its account of the life-long significance have studied particularly closely for many long years. of intra-familial dynamics and generational haunting) This woman (call her X) has all her life closely might serve as any sort of feminist or radical political identified with, and always worked hard to impress, tool for combating the still pervasive denigration of her mother. Her father seemed to have little direct women, whether as hags, whores or hysterics. For this impact on her emotional life, as a chronically child- she would need to do more than merely inform us, as like, endlessly demanding, habitually angry, promiscu- she does, that there is a ʻtension that haunts feminism ous adulterer – whom her mother appeared to regard even now between wanting to be equal to men and only with embittered contempt. X has never had the different from menʼ.21 Of course there is. But what least difficulty in identifying herself as ʻfeminineʼ, one might hope is that Mitchell would have more to in successfully pursuing heterosexual relationships say on how women might best continue, even now, and giving birth to a son. Has X therefore come to to work to ensure that the awareness we have of our terms with herself as a woman, and avoided neu- difference from men would no longer tie us to images rotic feelings of worthlessness through acceptance of which are socially repudiated, to something which is the normative procreative position? Not at all. The already marked as inferior. Yet in the 350 pages of mother with whom X identified was, in contrast to her Mad Men and Medusas, she abstains from any such daughter, completely invested in her own father and reflection. Her own tale of the necessary acceptance older brother (both of whom strongly identified with of sexual difference in terms of gender-differentiating

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 15 laws of procreation significantly contracts the diverse mother, and hence remaining unconscious. The notion ways in which we live our embodiments as women of the reproductive Oedipal triangle is too simple to or men, to one particular form of hitherto patriarchal encompass the possible permutations of parental or kinship structure: the very structure many feminists other adult libidinal investments in the child, and have for some time been calling into question, not vice versa.24 attempting to shore up. With characteristic, but on this occasion far from Moreover, Mitchell is reinforcing reproductive, foolish, exuberance, Leo Bersani lays out ten permu- heterosexual normativities precisely at a time when tations of possible desiring positions for the child one would have thought there are many other options which may occur within the classic Oedipal triad. The open to her. The point of the Oedipal triad (of the basic psychoanalytic account of the Oedipus Complex child recognizing that it cannot have babies), like the (including bisexuality, incestuous and murderous point of symbolic castration, is that this little creature impulses), he suggests, distorts ʻa more consequential must sooner or later – preferably sooner rather than dramaʼ in which the gender identities of the agents are later – detach itself from its earliest, most original extremely diverse. He also reminds us: object of desire: from the mother or her substitute(s). The major function Freud speaks of as the rival It must renounce the supposed plenitude of its fanta- father is not to be either a sexual rival or a parent, sized auto-erotic libidinal union with that original but rather to redirect the childʼs attention, to suggest primordial other. Fair enough. But from where do that there are other modes of extension in the world. these Oedipalized Laws arise which alone guarantee It doesnʼt matter if the agent doing that is a real father in the traditional nuclear family, or another the psychic separation of the child from the mother, woman, or indeed another man when the desired which ensure the childʼs awareness that it is not the adult is also a man or, finally, the several agents sole object of the m/otherʼs desire. Where is it writ that may compete for the childʼs interest, re-direct that the independent or (as it is usually called) ʻthirdʼ its curiosity, in the single-parent family. The crucial term which interrupts the libidinal dyad of mother thing is to get the child out of the family, although such a reading may appear to be forestalled by and child must be imagined as the biological Father? Freudʼs relegating of that function to the father.25 (Now with the addition of a specifically procreative prohibition from Mother.) The child must indeed be able to let go of its first It is not necessary to downplay the persistent, ines- objects of desire. Parents must too, of course; and in capable power of actual mothers and fathers in the particular the mother must let go of the child. But I can psychic life of the child, nor the immense symbolic see no Laws, other than strictly normative ones (that weight of Mother and Father in cultural narrative, is, rules), which insist that awareness of sameness and and the continuing purchase of contemporary nuclear difference, and hence true object-related – as distinct family ideology, to suggest that what turns the moth- from strictly narcissistic – sexual desire, can and must erʼs desire away from the child is not, of necessity, the derive from unconscious acceptance of the biological Fatherʼs Phallus. The actual mother, in practice, may narrative of procreation; and only from acceptance of desire and passionately invest herself in any manner of such a narrative. others, not just the threatening arrival or existence of Two Freuds, one Mitchell siblings. (Margaret Cook, in her autobiography, I seem to remember, sadly recalls her motherʼs perpetual, Given what we know of the near total collapse of loving gaze directed outwards at the cows.) Neither is strictly patriarchal kinship laws, as almost 50 per cent it necessary, as Jessica Benjamin does, to draw upon of marriages end in divorce, as more women choose more recent research in developmental psychology that (or are forced) to mother without a biological father, depicts the child as already an active, social, interper- or as some try to insist on menʼs equal involvement sonal creature from an early age, with capacities that in childcare, it seems somewhat perverse (in the non- 22 enable ʻan emergent awareness of self and othersʼ. As Freudian sense) nowadays for Mitchell to hold fast empirical research by child psychologists like Daniel to the symbolic and structural positioning of men 23 Stern suggests, this is no doubt the case. But here and women within traditional kinship structures and we are not talking of intrapsychic experiences of such reproductive ideology. Weirdly, Mitchell is again aware traumatic or emotional intensity that they overwhelm of the problem, even indicating to us some years ago the child, threatening its libidinal investment in the – as others already had – that there are two Freuds

16 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) struggling with each other. (More than two, I would Notes suggest!) One she calls the ʻEnlightenmentʼ Freud 1. Juliet Mitchell, ʻTwenty Years Onʼ, New Formations 26, (though some may feel this does scant justice to the Autumn 1995, p. 124. 2. See, illustratively, Margot Wadell, ʻBrief Reflectionsʼ, complexities of Enlightenment thinking), who wrote New Formations 26, Autumn, 1995, pp. 129–33. of the Oedipus and castration complexes: this is the 3. Toril Moi, ʻPsychoanalysis, Feminism and Politics: A one ʻwho was looking backwards, saying something Conversation with Juliet Mitchellʼ, Materialist Feminism Issue, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 94, no. 4, Fall 1994, about sexual difference as it has been establishedʼ. p. 133. Almost, she adds, in self-consciously Marxist mode, 4. Mitchell, ʻTwenty Years Onʼ, p. 125. ʻas if something feudal were still existing within capi- 5. Juliet Mitchell, ʻFeminism and Psychoanalysis at the Millenniumʼ, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 10, no. talism; something classical still existed in something 2, Summer 1999, p. 186. which was becoming deconstructed within modern 6. See Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, ʻFeminine Sexuality: Interview with Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline life, within late capitalismʼ. The other Freud, she Roseʼ, m/f 8, 1983, p. 5. reflects, used concepts like ʻdeferred actionʼ. He is the 7. See Mitchell, ʻFeminism and Psychoanalysis at the Mil- one who takes us nearer to deconstruction.26 lenniumʼ, pp. 190–91. 8. Ibid., p. 186. Quite so. But there is only one Juliet Mitchell. And 9. See Virginia Goldner, ʻReading and Writing, Talking and she is the one who has trouble with the second Freud, Listening: Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexualityʼ, has trouble with any letting go of the primordial nature Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–7; ʻTowards a Critical Relational Theory of Genderʼ, of sexual difference and its fundamental role as origin Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 1, no. 3, 1991. of sexual desire. Remember her original questions. 10. See Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, edited with ʻDoes [psychoanalysisʼs] self-described, non-political an excellent introduction by John Fletcher, Routledge, London and New York, 1999; John Fletcher and Peter discourse draw all potentially radical use of it into the Osborne, ʻThe Other Within – Rethinking Psycho- apolitical?ʼ Not necessarily, but in her hands – as in analysis: An Interview with Jean Laplancheʼ, Radical those of most orthodox psychoanalysts – it often has Philosophy 102, July/August 2000, pp. 31–41. 11. Goldner, ʻTowards a Critical Relational Theory of Gen- a decidedly conservative ring. Is it the fault of ʻthe derʼ, p. 249. See also Muriel Dimen, ʻDeconstructing recurrent demise of feminismʼ? I think not. But one Difference: Gender, Splitting, and Transitional Spaceʼ, aspect of its continuing traditional message appears to Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 335–52. 12. See, for example, Diana Fuss, ed., Inside Out: Lesbian be assisted by some rather peculiar ways of deploying Theories, Gay Theories, Routledge, London, 1992; it in the service of feminism. Indeed, Mitchell herself ʻMore Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theo- ryʼ, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, might be thought to combine the most patriarchal Summer–Fall 1994. legacy of Lacan with the most matriarchal leanings 13. Moustafa Safouan, ʻIs the Oedipus Compex Universalʼ, in Klein; the worst of both worlds. But then, perhaps, Double Issue on Sexuality, m/f 5 and 6, 1981, p. 85. 14. Juliet Mitchell, ʻCommentary “Deconstructing Dif- Mitchell is no longer the thinker to turn to if we want ference: Gender, Splitting, and Transitional Space”ʼ, to use psychoanalytic insights to assist feminist or Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 1, no. 3, 1991, p. 357. other political goals. 15. Ibid. 16. Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming If we compare the contents of Feminism and Psycho- Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the analysis with that of Mad Men and Medusas, it is Human Condition, Allen Lane, London, 2000, p. 321. interesting to note that not only does the latter fail to 17. Ibid., p. 75, emphasis added. 18. Ibid., p. 323. carry through Mitchellʼs earlier interest in the vicis- 19. Ibid., p. 344. situdes of Marxism and capitalism and their critics, 20. Ibid., pp. 179, 180. but it also displays little interest in the vicissitudes 21. Ibid., p. 189. 22. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, of feminism, or the changing fate of women. What Feminism and the Problem of Domination, Virago, Lon- seems constant is an increasingly peculiar commitment don, 1990, pp. 29–30. 23. Daniel Stern, The First Relationship: A View from to the inevitability of formations of non-pathological Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, Basic subjectivities via acceptance of oneʼs place within trad- Books, New York, 1985. itional kinship structures and patriarchal ideology. Not 24. See Peter Osborne, ʻIn the Beginning Was the Bond: Jessica Benjamin or Jean Laplanche?ʼ, in The Politics of quite all one might have hoped from three decades of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, Verso, London and reflection on the place of psychoanalysis in politics by New York, 1995, pp. 98–104. one of British feminismʼs founding figures. 25. Leo Bersani, ʻAgainst Monogamyʼ, in ʻBeyond Redemp- tion: The Work of Leo Bersaniʼ, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 20, nos 1–2, pp. 13–14. 26. Juliet Mitchell, ʻTwenty Years Onʼ, p. 127.

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 17