Memento Mori: The Book as a Cut

ABSTRACT

Despite Testo Junkie’s overt criticisms of psychoanalysis, this essay attempts to read the formal aspect of the work—as a process of mourning, a body-essay, an experimental protocol of intoxication—through the lens of the everyday practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Looking at the way soma erupts in the consulting room, the conundrums of agency and identity, Preciado’s (2013) work on the biopolitics of the psychopharamacopornographic era is shown to be critical to any unraveling of a symptom. On a more personal scale, Preciado’s own stated intention that the writing of the book should function as a cut, as a Memento Mori, is read in this essay as a depiction of the extreme limits one must traverse to locate an experience of desire, beneath or beyond the apparatuses of the state—something that Preciado shows as penetrating further into our lives and bodies than many of us are prepared to acknowledge.

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Jamieson Webster

Jamieson Webster, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in New York City and a graduate of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She teaches at Eugene Lang College at The New School and supervises doctoral students at The City University of New York. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and co-author (with Simon Critchley) of Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Random House, 2012). She has published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Cabinet Magazine, Apology, and Playboy as well as having written clinical and scholarly articles and book chapters in many psychoanalytic publications.