Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan

Introduction

xi Introduction ‫ﱡﱣﱢﱡ‬ Shannon Lundeen The essays in this collection are a tribute to the significance of the work of Teresa Brennan. Although the body that she so gracefully and vivaciously inhabited is gone, Teresa Brennan’s intellect, spirit, and energy are very much present in her scholarly work and the engagements with that work in this volume. Throughout her work, from her first book The Interpretation of the Flesh to her most recent, The Transmission of Affect, Teresa develops an original and revolutionary notion of energetics that she applies to some of the most pressing social issues of our time: relations between men and women, our relation to the environment and pollution, contemporary diseases , and globalization. Like her life, her work is not traditional or ordinary . It shakes things up and gives us new insights into our most profound relationships with each other, to time and space, and to global capital. Her work has transformed feminist psychoanalytic theory, economic theory, and the way that we conceive of the relationship between psychoanalysis and social theory. The essays in this volume demonstrate the importance and creativity of Teresa Brennan’s life and thought and the gravity and significance of our loss. Alice Jardine opens the volume with an essay that traces the development of Brennan’s thought from her first book, The Interpretation of the Flesh (1992), to her last, The Transmission of Affect (2004). Although a constant interlocutor, collaborator, colleague, and dear friend of Teresa’s, Jardine had not read one of Brennan’s books until after her death in February of 2003. As Brennan’s thoughts turned from the individual psyche and its interpersonal relations to a social psyche and its global implications, Jardine turns from the Teresa she knew in private and personal exchanges to the public and scholarly Brennan revealed in her publications. Jardine notes that in their personal exchanges, Brennan had always been plagued by the question “What is to be done now?” (p. 2) and she finds that the development of Brennan’s thought over the course of her oeuvre was driven by this same question. For those unfamiliar with the extent and breadth of Teresa Brennan’s thought and scholarship, “A Surplus of Living Attention,” provides an astute and comprehensive introduction to Brennan’s work. In her first book, The Interpretation of the Flesh (1992), Brennan lays the groundwork for what she calls the “foundational fantasy” and in her chapter , “Living A Tension,” Kelly Oliver examines the conceptual and theoretical trajectories of this fantasy throughout Brennan’s subsequent texts. The foundational fantasy begins with an infant’s hallucination that it is both self-contained and in control of its primary caregiver. As an illusion of selfcontainment , the foundational fantasy grounds the myths of the ego’s boundedness , of women’s tractability and corresponding notion of femininity, and of the inexhaustibility of the earth’s resources. It may seem, based on her analysis of the foundational fantasy, that Brennan advocates strategies of mobility over and against strategies of containment. However, Oliver points to those places in Brennan’s work where her assessments of attempts to bind and contain things, energies, people, resources, etcetera become ambivalent. Oliver examines and critiques Brennan’s simultaneous calls for economic self-containment , on the one hand, and personal mobility, circulation, and exchange of psychic energies and affects, on the other. It is the latter, the intersubjective exchange of energies and affects upon which Brennan’s theory of the drives is based, that Oliver hails as “revolutionary” in Brennan’s work. One particular phenomenon that Brennan focuses on throughout the development of her drive-theory is the projection and exchange of negative affect. According to Brennan, negative affects, which always come from outside rather than from within, have dire and dangerous consequences for the world at large: their constant projection and escalating circulation accounts for the depletive nature of global capitalism as well as the historical development of an exhausted and exploited feminine position. Although she notes that Brennan’s theory of the transmission of affect is radically significant for psychoanalytic theory, feminism, and economics, Oliver challenges and unsettles Brennan’s associations of negative affect with what is outside and positive affect with what is inside in light of Brennan’s own critique of psychical , physical, and energetic containment in psychoanalytic theory. Oliver argues that in the face of all-consuming forces of globalization and the normalization of the “feminine position” for women, Brennan seems only to offer us...