L'état c'est moi — Except When I Am Not: Commentary on Paper by Orna Guranlik and Daphne Simeon

Abstract

In this discussion, I situate Guralnik and Simeon's argument about depersonalization and interpellation among ways that different psychoanalytic theorists have understood the interaction of the psychic and social domains. I elaborate on what Guralnik and Simeon mean when they refer to the role of “the State” in dissociation, interpellation, and depersonalization. Upon showing how self-states simultaneously incorporate and resist the State, Guralnik and Simeon provide a clinical rationale to confront interpellation's “discursive instructions.” This leads me to explore the curious status of the term state in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Notes

¹I think of interpellation, literally inter-naming, as a variety of projective identification. In this regard, Guralnik and I use the term somewhat more broadly than Althusser (1971) to include evacuated, split-off qualities of the social's state. Non-normative aspects of the collective are named “nonhuman,” purged, and tagged on to Others who are named less-than human, for example, Faggot (Corbett, 2001).

²To this end, I am grateful to Lingiardi (in press), with whom I have an interesting dialogue about how psychic retreats may, counterintuitively, be expansive.

³If one has any doubt about the power that a culture's panic has to regulate personhood, one need look no further than contemporary, post-Apartheid, “liberal” South African Jews' demonization of Richard Goldstone. As author of a U.N. report on war crimes committed during the recent occupation of Gaza, Goldstone documented Israeli human rights violations. In retribution for Goldstone's treason, he has been barred from attending his grandson's Bar Mitzvah, a ceremony that will mark his progeny as a man.