Animal Unconscious: Three Questions

ABSTRACT

“Animal Unconscious” begins with Freud’s claim, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1965), that psychoanalysis proposes “nothing animal is alien to us.” By drawing on recent scholarship in feminist, queer, new materialist, and posthumanist theory, the essay posits that the unconscious is something “animal,” not something uniquely human in order to inquire what this postulate would mean for thinking about 3 problems: the place of animality in institutions of analysis and (higher) learning, the animality of language, and the invention of new modes of kinship. Throughout, the essay speculates on what it means to recast “human” psychoanalysis as an animal practice while simultaneously opening it toward including nonhuman animals in its purview.

Notes

¹ As Sara Ahmed (2008) pointed out in “Imaginary Prohibitions,” work in “new” materialisms often disavows the exceptions to this general trend.

² This was part of the larger “linguistic” or “cultural” turn but, for interesting historical reasons, it primarily critiqued “essentialisms” that located sex or gender in the body and biology. See Fuss (1989).

³ See Émile Benveniste’s (1966) “Communication animale et langage humain” [Animal Communication and Human Language] in Problèmes de linguistique générale [Problems of General Linguistics], 1, which opens with the sentence, “Appliquée au monde animal, la notion de langage n’a cours que par un abus de termes [Applied to the animal world, the notion of language cannot be used except as an abuse of terms]” (p. 56; my translation).

⁴ I borrow the word “intra-act” from Karen Barad (2007), who uses it to foreground how “objects are not already there; they emerge through specific practices” (p. 157).

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Notes on contributors

Nathan Snaza

Nathan Snaza, Ph.D., teaches modern English literature, cultural theory, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Animating Literacies (Duke University Press, under contract) and co-editor of Posthumanism and Educational Research (Routledge, 2014) and Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (Peter Lang, 2016). His essays have appeared in journals such as Symploke, Angelaki, Parallax, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Educational Philosophy and Theory.