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Structures of Love, The

Art and Politics beyond the Transference

James Penney

Publication Year: 2012

Reframes the terms of cultural analysis with a fresh take on transference theory in Freud and Lacan and a critical engagement with the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Each in his own way both Freud and Lacan defined the transference as the ego’s last stand, its final desperate attempt to keep the truth of the unconscious at bay. Both also viewed the transference as a social phenomenon: though analysis makes it easier to isolate, the transference colors the dynamic of the social relation as such. The Structures of Love argues 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. It suggests a method of cultural analysis that enables us to identity the transformative potential of genuine artistic and political acts. Staging a dialogue between Lacan’s psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Alain Badiou, and with chapters on Frantz Fanon and Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud, Penney explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical consequences of the transference idea, pushing into exciting new territory the fertile encounter between psychoanalysis and culture.

Published by: State University of New York Press

Title Page, Copyright Page

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List of Illustrations

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pp. vii-

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Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-

An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “Passing into the Universal: Fanon, Sartre and the Colonial Dialectic,” Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory 27, no. 3 (2004): 49–67; reprinted with permission of Edinburgh...

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Preface

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pp. xi-xii

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...

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I. The Refusal of Love

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pp. 1-51

It’s not too much to claim that the entire project of psychoanalysis was set in motion by Freud’s remarkable discovery at the outset of his investigations that the patient never fails to fall in love during treatment. Baptizing this phenomenon transference love, Freud argues that such a love cannot...

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II. Socrates, Analyst

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pp. 53-89

Lacan bases his reading of Plato’s Symposium dialogue on the premise that the text pivots around what he calls “the first analytic transference” on record.1 This chapter’s relation to the preceding one is primarily illustrative: for the most part it treads the same theoretical ground, but through the lens of a radically different, decidedly pre-Freudian context. This...

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III. Like a Pack of Rats

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pp. 91-126

The editors of an important UK-published essay collection on Frantz Fanon, that paradigmatic theorist of colonial race relations and anticolonial struggle, identify five stages in the reception of his work over the half-century since its appearance.1 There was first a period of direct and pragmatic application...

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IV. Loving the Terrorist

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pp. 127-157

During a two-year period beginning in October 1970, at the invitation of Mahmoud el Hamchari, the Paris-based PLO leader whose 1972 assassination at the hands of the Israeli secret service Steven Spielberg depicts in his 2005 film...

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V. For the Love of Cinema

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pp. 159-191

Much of the lingering ambiguity surrounding Christian Metz’s influential, though now decidedly out of fashion, psychoanalytically inflected work can be traced to his question-begging coupling of the terms “imaginary” and “signifier.” To open this chapter...

VI. Naked Love

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pp. 193-228

Notes

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pp. 229-241

Index

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pp. 243-246

Back Cover

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E-ISBN-13: 9781438439747
E-ISBN-10: 1438439741
Print-ISBN-13: 9781438439730
Print-ISBN-10: 1438439733

Page Count: 240
Publication Year: 2012

Series Title: SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Series Editor Byline: Charles Shepherdson

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Subject Headings

  • Psychoanalysis -- Philosophy.
  • Love.
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