Critical Theory and Its Challenge to Psychoanalysis: Response to Katie Gentile’s “Kittens in the Clinical Space: Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies Transcorporeal Becoming”

ABSTRACT

In my response to Katie Gentile’s “Kittens in the Clinical Space,” (this issue) I address the early twenty-first century critical theory and the works of indigenous knowledge that Gentile references in the challenge she puts to psychoanalysts to think beyond human privilege, its relationship to racio-specieism, colonialism, and settler-colonialism. She suggests that psychoanalysts instead consider what she calls the human-more-than-human assemblage. In doing so, Gentile not only argues for the inseparability of the human from the more-than-human; she also argues that the clinical space be understood in the terms of this assemblage. In further expanding Gentile’s argument, I introduce the technoecological. A technoecological perspective is necessary, I argue, in order to recognize the other-than-human agencies or capacities of the animal but also those of the environmental and the technological. As the technoecological contributes to a refashioning of the social, it also needs to inform psychoanalytic thinking and practice—a welcoming of Gentile’s intervention.

This article refers to:

Kittens in the Clinical Space: Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies Transcorporeal Becoming

View responses to this article:

Prefiguring Ontological Theory and Method beyond “The Human”: A Response to Clough’s Discussion of “Kittens in the Clinical Space”

Notes

¹ Pointing to the entanglement of technology with organic and nonorganic life, the technoecological is implicated in a historicity of regulation, control and capitalization; its potentialities, however, also are given within this historicity. While, therefore, no mere return to nature, if ever that was possible, the technoecological also differs with what is termed the “Anthropocene,” or the claim of a new epoch in which humans are recognized as a geological force on the planet, and in many ways a destructive one. Although this is an important recognition, the Anthropocene, in contrast to the technoecological, usually does not address the entanglement of technology with organic and nonorganic life, once again privileging human agency and usually without specificity about the geopolitical center of carbon emissions.

² By “not fully determined” I mean to refer to the totality of all relationships as always becoming or indeterminate. It follows that the relationality of things is a speculative proposition and one that not surprisingly is debated. Object-oriented philosophers, such as Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman have argued that relations have to be explained and not presumed and objects are defined accordingly (2011). Process philosophers such Gilles Deleuze or Alfred North Whitehead in different ways argued for presuming the relationality of all things; objects are never defined outside their relationships (see Shaviro, 2011).

³ Pointing to body parts in situations where maiming and the delimiting of life, rather than outright killing, are part of policing and occupation strategies, what counts as evidencing hits are body parts as such, not parts of a body. Of course from a phenomenological perspective, the maimed person’s experience is of his/her/their body but from the perspective of counting on behalf of occupation or policing strategies, it is a nonphenomenological matter (Puar, 2017; see also Livingston and Puar, 2011).

⁴ Pugliese makes a similar argument pointing to Frantz Fanon (1994) who in Black Skins/White Masks uses zoological terms to refer to animalization and the dehumanization of the colonized (pp. 61–63).

⁵ The question of the body in the context of the human-more-than-human is an especially demanding question for psychoanalysts. For instance, in relationship to digital media such as social media and the internet (now also Zoom), psychoanalysts often refer to disembodiment rather than a different embodiment, such as the human-more-than-human embodiment. In his work on social media, Andre Brock recently has argued that the disembodiment criticism fits white bodies usually thought in individual terms of privacy and visibility, whereas Black bodies are neither private nor individual and are always already visible and invisible, embodied and not. In these terms, Brock proposes that rather than a disembodiment, there is a double consciousness about bodies for Black users of social media and the internet: a consciousness of Black online communities and the consciousness of white communities (Brock, 2020).

⁶ Recently, an important discussion was published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues about racism and environment—the environment of the consulting room and beyond. The concept of human-more-than-human assemblage would fit well with this discussion (See: Hartman, 2020; Knoblauch, 2020; Sheehi, 2020. See also: Butler, 2019; Gonzalez, 2019).

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Patricia Ticineto Clough

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ph.D., L.P., is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College (CUNY). Clough is author of The User Unconscious, On Affect, Media and Measure (2018); Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography (1992/1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, (2007), and with Craig Willse, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011) She is Faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy where she also serves on the Training Committee and the Task Force on Diversity. She is in private practice in NYC.