Emergent Subjectivity: The Parallel Temporalities of Psychoanalysis and Social Theory

ABSTRACT

Kirsten Lentz uses Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2013) as an occasion to explore the rivalry between psychoanalysis and social theory in their attempts to account for human subjectivity. Although a commonsense view holds that the 2 fields have completely different relationships to temporality—psychoanalysts fix their gaze to the past, whereas social theorists imagine radical futures—the distinction is more complex than it appears. The analyst does not lead the patient toward the past but holds and guards the place of futurity so that new experiences of subjectivity eventually become available. Like “theory,” then, psychoanalysis tries to make room for “emergent subjectivity,” for ways of being in the world that have not yet been imagined or formulated, that have not yet been born in the mind of culture. Lentz thus insists that the radical critique of gender can and should be understood as fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis.

Notes

¹ For Lacan, the analysand attributes knowledge to the analyst, who in this way becomes the “subject supposed to know.” This supposition must occur for transference to take place. For Lacan, then, this knowledge is not embodied by the analyst; it is fantasied, a projection of the analysand. As Lacan envisions things, the analyst is aware that there is a discontinuity between her knowledge and the knowledge attributed to her. See especially Lacan’s The Seminar: Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964 (1977, pp. 232–253).

² Because the narrator in the book does not adopt either male or female pronouns, I have followed suit here.

³ There has been a proliferation of work in the area of queer theory on the subject of temporality in recent years. In addition to Muñoz’s (2009) work, see the work of Elizabeth Freeman (2010), Judith Halberstam (2005), Lee Edelman (2004), and Carolyn Dinshaw (2012), to name but a few.

⁴ For a complex and nuanced discussion of this function of the analyst, see Avgi Saketopoulou’s (2011) “Queer Children, New Objects: The Place of Futurity in Loewald’s Thinking” (pp. 38–39).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirsten Lentz

Kirsten Lentz, Ph.D., LCSW, practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York City. She is an advanced candidate at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Lentz studied social theory, feminist and queer theory, and film at Brown University and clinical social work at New York University. She is interested in the way culture and power bear on the clinical situation.