The Ideology of Transference: Laplanche and Affect Theory

ABSTRACT

The growing interest in the work of Laplanche testifies to the many ways contemporary clinicians and theoreticians are attempting to circumvent some of psychoanalysis’ most abstract, rigid, and conservative formulations. An exemplary occasion of this effort, Avgi Saketopoulou’s essay, “To Suffer Pleasure: The Shattering of the Ego as the Psychic Labor of Perverse Sexuality” (2014) attempts to rethink “perversion” by offering a timely critique of psychoanalytic doxa. In my engagement with Saketopoulou’s essay, I focus on the use of Laplanche as indicative of the ways Laplanche’s radical challenge to traditional psychoanalysis can be recuperated by psychoanalytic conventions without forcing the critique that Laplanche enabled. My introduction of Affect Theory to Laplanche’s radical paradigm works to establish the foundations for a less erotophobic psychoanalysis and demonstrates why rereading Laplanche through cutting-edge theorizations of Affect Theory goes some way toward sustaining the “exigency” of Laplanche’s radical project.

Notes

¹ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/formation Web.

² See also, John Mullarkey’s landmark “Post-continental philosophy” (2006) and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s, “New Materialisms” (2010).

³ As my use of Laplanche and “textuality” will show, affect does not invalidate the grip of language on the formation of subjectivity and sociality but alerts us to the need to put what we know about signification in relation to other things we know about affective transmission, nonhuman lifeworlds, brain synapses, etc.

⁴ Most thinkers of Affect Theory who are interested in ideology critique, feminism, queer theory and psychoanalysis do not adhere strictly to one group or another (for example, Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Elspeth Probyn, Kathleen Stewart).

⁵ Among Affect Theorists, Eve Sedgwick and Lauren Berlant have worked most extensively to map this discourse onto psychological questions and I have written about how this engagement plays out in Affect and Queer theory in my essay, “Two Girls²: Berlant + Sedgwick, Relational and Queer” (Ashtor, 2016).

⁶ I am thinking of Galit Atlas’ recent, The Enigma of Desire (2016); Adrienne Harris, Margery Kalb and Susan Klebanoff, Ghosts in the Consulting Room (2016).

⁷ Dominique Scarfone, Laplanche: An Introduction, p. 21. Laplanche further delineates a difference between “sexual instinct” and “sexual drive” to show that instinctive sexuality is not identical with drive sexuality.

⁸ Footnote, p. 1. Laplanche, (2011), Freud and the Sexual.

⁹ Within Queer Studies, Leo Bersani has made the most systematic use of Laplanche. Bersani (1986) develops his hugely influential idea of “shattering sex” from Laplanche’s early work and many of the limitations that I point in this article are evident in Bersani’s interpretations as well. I explore this in detail in my essay, The Genealogy of Sex: Bersani, Laplanche and Self-Shattering Sexuality (under review).

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Notes on contributors

Gila Ashtor

Gila Ashtor, Ph.D., is a candidate in the Adult and Child training program in psychoanalysis at the Institute of Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). She holds a Ph.D. in Literature, with a specialization in Queer Studies, Critical Theory, and Affect/Trauma Theory. She treats adults and children in New York.