the schizoanalytic protest

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

James Penney Assistant Professor Cultural Studies Program Trent University Peterborough Ontario K9J 7B8 Canada E‐mail: [email protected]

This is not to say that Hocquenghem's text has had a deep impact on sexuality theory in France; indeed, it has long since been out of print in the original French.

By “poststructuralist queer theory” we refer to the dominant stream of contemporary sexuality theory in the English‐speaking world as elaborated by such figures as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and David Halperin. Though this discourse is, of course, far from monolithic, in our view it does feature a number of common assumptions, the most important of which is surely that sexuality is a construction of discourse and/or power. We will explore in detail how Hocquenghem's view contrasts with this one in the paragraphs which follow.

Among the few but notable exceptions to this rule are Teresa Ebert, Donald Morton, and Mario Mieli. See also the materials collected in Mitchell and Thorstad.

Gary Genosko usefully elucidates the impact of anti‐psychiatry on Guattari's writing and therapeutic practice in his introduction to The Guattari Reader.

Russell Jacoby's classic study provides an invaluable overview of the politically problematic reading of Freud in the various strands of revisionism.

See my “The Sameness of Sexual Difference and the Difference of Same‐Sex Desire.”

In the transcript of an intervention made at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969 before an audience composed largely of raucous neo‐Maoist students, Lacan gave the following warning apropos the desire for “revolution” in the air at the time: “That to which you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You'll get one” (Lacan SXVII: 239; my translation). Lacan's point is that underneath the apparently “subversive” desire to question the regimes of knowledge supposedly embodied in institutions and authority is the hysterical accusation that authority does not in fact know what it's supposed to know. This desire is therefore not effectively a desire for radical social change but rather for an “authentic” instance of social authority which would be equal to its pretensions to knowledge.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

james penney

James Penney Assistant Professor Cultural Studies Program Trent University Peterborough Ontario K9J 7B8 Canada E‐mail: [email protected]