Penney - The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference

SUNY series, Insinuations:
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor

The Structures of Love

Art and Politics beyond the Transference

James Penney

Cover photograph courtesy of David G. Mills.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2012 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Penney, James, 1971

The structures of love : art and politics beyond the transference / James Penney.

p. cm. (SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-3973-0 (hbk. : alk. paper)

1. PsychoanalysisPhilosophy. 2. Love. I. Title.

BF175.P4157 2012

150.19'5dc22 2011009759

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of was published as The Failure of Spectatorship, Communication Theory 17, no. 1 (February 2007): 4360; reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Diagrams from Lacan's seminar are from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan, translated by Alan Sheridan. Copyright 1973 by Editions du Seuil. English translation copyright 1977 by Alan Sheridan. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

A Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided the resources necessary to complete this project. Special thanks to Beaverbrook Art Gallery and Lucian Freud for permission to feature reproductions of his stunning work. My research assistants Susanna Ashley and Jacob Potempski provided invaluable help. Trent University students too numerous to name expressed views that contributed to my thinking about the transference and forced me to invent new ways of talking about psychoanalysis and Lacan. Finally: hello Ian and Violet! And thanks, Dave, who likely wouldn't want me to go on.

Preface

The premise of this book is that transference is the concept with which psychoanalysis thinks through the unconscious demands that circumscribe and can sabotage our creative initiatives in the arts and politics. I aim to demonstrate that transference theory, derived from Freudian clinical experience, allows the critic of literature and culture to radicalize the disappointing poststructuralist understandings of agency as, on the one hand, performativity and resignification (Judith Butler, Derrida) and, on the other, the redirection of existing relations or vectors of power or force (Foucault, Deleuze). The method of analysis that transference theory suggests allows us to recognize the transformative potentialities of genuine artistic and political acts.

The transference's interpretation divulges our collective subjective capacity to unfurl the invigorating consequences of such events in specific social, historical, and cultural circumstances. By interpreting the transference we can remain faithful to the work of singular artists and thinkers who take up the challenge of moving beyond the ego's claims to social recognition, and therefore beyond the treasonous ambivalences and compromises that arise when we fail to pursue desire beyond the limits policed by fear and anxiety. Though no form of artistic or political practice can precisely reproduce the course of analytic treatment, the texts of culture leave discernible traces of a sort of psychical work that runs strikingly parallel to the analyst's work of interpretation. The chapters that follow aim to discern these traces, formulating in precise but accessible terms the philosophical, literary, cinematic, and painterly stratagems that have allowed the creators of concern to accomplish their challenging and inspiring innovations.

Specifically, The Structures of Love explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical ramifications of the transference idea through detailed analyses of five objects of culture from an eclectic, and no doubt idiosyncratic, range of genres and media: Plato's Symposium (via Jacques Lacan's reading), Frantz Fanon's body of work, Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love and political essays, Chantal Akerman's cinematic Proust adaptation The Captive, and the nudes of Lucian Freud in painting. The seemingly haphazard quality of this group of objects is not the result of mere whimsy. It is intended, rather, to help liberate literary and cultural studies from the moribund historicisms and contextualisms that have gained ascendancy during the last couple decades or so.

I don't think as a rule that it's the author's business to tell readers how to read his book. Given its eclecticism, however, a brief introductory comment may be in order. , curious about what there could possibly be left to say about psychoanalysis and film theory, or else about Lacan's sweeping and neglected pronouncements on the function of art. Though I tried consistently to make the connection between the theoretical and cultural aspects of the project as explicit as possible, links which I have not foreseen can and no doubt will be made. This, surely, is one of the things that readers are for.

I

The Refusal of Love