Inheritance in Psychoanalysis

Description

In contrast to the way inheritance is understood in scientific discourse and culture more broadly, inheritance in psychoanalysis is a paradox. Although it's impossible, strictly speaking, for the unconscious to be inherited, this volume demonstrates how the concept of inheritance can occasion a rich reassessment and reinvention of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The collection enacts a critical traversal of inheritance for psychoanalysis: from the most basic assumptions of natural or biological inheritance, such as innateness, heredity, evolution, and ontogenesis, to analysis of the ways cultural traditions can be challenged and transformed, and finally to the reinvention of psychoanalytic practice, in which the ethics of inheritance is fully realized as the individual's responsibility to transform the social bond. Featuring strong interdisciplinary analysis rooted in both psychoanalysis and philosophy, this volume further engages science, politics, and cultural studies, and addresses contemporary political challenges such as autism and transgenderism.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Inheritance in Psychoanalysis
James A. Godley

NATURAL INHERITANCE

1. Against Heredity: The Question of Causality in Psychoanalysis
Samo Tomšič

2. Lacan with Evo- Devo?
Lorenzo Chiesa

3. The Late Innate: Jean Laplanche, Jaak Panksepp, and the Distinction between Sexual Drives and Instincts
Adrian Johnston

4. Hegel’s Mother
Frank Ruda

5. Biopower in Lacan’s Inheritance; or, From Foucault to Freud, via Deleuze, and Back to Marx
A. Kiarina Kordela

CULTURAL INHERITANCE

6. Drug Is the Love: Literature, Psychopharmacology, Psychoanalysis
Justin Clemens

7. Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin)
Rebecca Comay

8. “We” and “They”: Animals behind Our Back
Oxana Timofeeva

9. F. O. Matthiessen: Heir to (American) Jouissance
Donald E. Pease

10. A Mortimer Trap: The Passing of Death in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Sigi Jottkandt

11. Freud Fainted; or, “It All Started 1000s of Years Ago in Egypt . . .”
Lydia R. Kerr

THE INHERITANCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

12. Freud’s Lamarckian Clinic
Daniel Wilson

13. Freud against Oedipus?
Philippe Van Haute

14. Plastic Sex? The Beauty of It!
Patricia Gherovici

15. The Autistic Body and Its Objects
Eric Laurent

16. The Insistence of Jouissance: On Inheritance and Psychoanalysis
Joan Copjec with James A. Godley

About the Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Lycée
• Philosophie
• Philosophie
• Philosophie du langage
• Philosophie de la langue
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438467894
• Langue: English

Extrait

Inheritance in Psychoanalysis
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Charles Shepherdson, editor
INHERITANCE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

EDITED BY
Joel Goldbach
and James A. Godley
Cover image: Salvador Dalí, “Morphology of Skull of Sigmund Freud” © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldbach, Joel, editor. | Godley, James A., editor.
Title: Inheritance in psychoanalysis / edited by Joel Goldbach and James A. Godley.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004237 (print) | LCCN 2017012794 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467894 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438467870 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis.
Classification: LCC BF173 (ebook) | LCC BF173 .I464 2018 (print) | DDC 150.19/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004237
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Inheritance in Psychoanalysis
James A. Godley
NATURAL INHERITANCE
1. Against Heredity: The Question of Causality in Psychoanalysis
Samo Tomšič
2. Lacan with Evo-Devo?
Lorenzo Chiesa
3. The Late Innate: Jean Laplanche, Jaak Panksepp, and the Distinction between Sexual Drives and Instincts
Adrian Johnston
4. Hegel’s Mother
Frank Ruda
5. Biopower in Lacan’s Inheritance; or, From Foucault to Freud, via Deleuze, and Back to Marx
A. Kiarina Kordela
CULTURAL INHERITANCE
6. Drug Is the Love: Literature, Psychopharmacology, Psychoanalysis
Justin Clemens
7. Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin)
Rebecca Comay
8. “We” and “They”: Animals behind Our Back
Oxana Timofeeva
9. F. O. Matthiessen: Heir to (American) Jouissance
Donald E. Pease
10. A Mortimer Trap: The Passing of Death in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Sigi Jöttkandt
11. Freud Fainted; or, “It All Started 1000s of Years Ago in Egypt …”
Lydia R. Kerr
THE INHERITANCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
12. Freud’s Lamarckian Clinic
Daniel Wilson
13. Freud against Oedipus?
Philippe Van Haute
14. Plastic Sex? The Beauty of It!
Patricia Gherovici
15. The Autistic Body and Its Objects
Éric Laurent
16. The Insistence of Jouissance: On Inheritance and Psychoanalysis
Joan Copjec with James A. Godley
About the Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
This project was a collaborative effort on the part of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture (CSPC) at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). It would not have been possible without the assistance of both its faculty and graduate students. In particular, the editors would like to thank Tim Dean, who, in his tenure as director of the CSPC, encouraged and advised us during the early stages of the project; Steven Miller and Ewa Ziarek, the current director and executive director of the CSPC, respectively, whose support and guidance has been indispensable; Bridget O’Neill, whose input helped orient this project from the beginning; and each of the following graduate students, who assisted us during the production of the manuscript: Chris Bomba, Jen Braun, Woody Brown, Arian Cato, Josh Dawson, Zia Dickson, Adam Drury, Angela Facundo, Martin Goffeney, Elsa Gudrunel, Daae Jung, Min Young Godley, Nicole Lowman, Amanda McLaughlin, Ajitpaul Mangat, Keiko Ogata, Morgan Pulver, Daniel Schweitzer, Kellie Jean Sharp, Doruk Tatar, Eric Vanlieshout, and Kezia Whiting.
We are also immensely grateful to Charles Shepherdson and Andrew Kenyon for their enthusiasm and keen interest in this volume.
Finally, the editors would like to thank the contributors for their inspiring work, kindness, and generosity throughout this process. Above all, we would like to thank Joan Copjec, whose unswerving commitment to this project cannot be overstated. This volume is dedicated to the legacy she bequeaths—a legacy true to the spirit of inheritance in psychoanalysis.
INTRODUCTION

Inheritance in Psychoanalysis
James A. Godley
The etymology of inheritance reveals a problematic concerning the fundamental ambiguity of the subject that inherits. To inherit—coming from the Latin inhereditare , “appoint as heir,” by way of the Middle English enherite , “receive as a right,” and the Old French enheriter— originally meant “to bequeath,” as in the phrase “I inherit you.” In a complete reversal of what it means today, the word was used in the sense of deliberately ceding an object to another, rather than passively receiving something as an heir. To inherit, in this first sense, is thus not unlike bestowing a gift—or, as becomes especially legible in the sense of the pathological, a curse . What to make of this curious etymological slippage of the word inherit, as though either its source or its heir is not quite in place?
While it may seem odd to think that psychoanalysis and inheritance belong together, since inheritance, as such, rarely appears in discussions of psychoanalytic theory and practice, it is nonetheless everywhere implied at the heart of an experience marked by repetitions, returns, and après-coups . In psychoanalysis, inheritance takes on a special significance when it is approached from the side of the indeterminacy of the subject that inherits, where the heir of an inheritance is determined retroactively through the pathways of the unconscious “it” that “speaks.” In the experience of analysis, what I inherit is often felt to be almost autonomous, like an invention without an inventor. Although the subject of the unconscious is itself substanceless—lacking, as Sigmund Freud claims, any relation to time 1 (and, hence, without a substantive past or future)—it is nonetheless what structures the experience of the “I” in terms of a narrative destiny that can, in principle, be reinvented. Hence, the “it speaks” ( ça parle ) of the unconscious could also be read as “it inherits”—or, better, “it invents,” as in Freud’s aphorism, “Where it was, there I shall become” ( Wo Es war, soll Ich werden ). 2 That is, understood in the sense of a bequeathing in which the heir returns to the source, inheritance in psychoanalysis doubles as the potential for an act that would transform inheritance.
Here, the past and the future, in a sense, trade places: What has come before is the potentiality of an act that would change one’s heredity. At its most radical level, such a reinvention of one’s inheritance would signify a change, not only in one’s self (as in the limited sense of self-invention) but also to oneself, that is, to the way that one is attached to the social reality in which one takes part. In light of psychoanalysis, then, what is inherited is not exactly given or received, according to a specific biological or cultural order, so much as it is reinvented and openly bestowed, in turn, upon the world of discourse in which the subject is imbricated. The mask of selfhood falls, revealing the depersonalized subject at stake in the discursive movements of symbolic tradition and the seeming paradox that in order to change who “I” am I must change the coordinates of what determines my place in the chain of the “world.” By acting in accordance with my unconscious desire, I take responsibility for the singular meaning and effects of an inheritance that I both receive and bequeath.
Herein, an unheard-of task falls to the one who would take responsibility for this act of inheritance: to change both one’s self and the world on behalf of something that is not a part of either, the lost object of desire. Inheritance thereby poses an ethical question in psychoanalysis, which could equally well be asked of psychoanalysis: How can an individual assume responsibility for an act whereby he or she is radically transformed, in which his or her heredity—constituting the given objects of inheritance (symbolically, biologically, structurally)—is reinvented?
It is not hard to find examples today of instances in which the meaning and effects of (trans)individual inheritance are not sufficiently attended to. In February 2016, the United Kingdom passed a law approving the manipulation of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene sequences in experiments that would alter the genetic composition of the human germ line. CRISPR, a naturally occurring biological defense mechanism found in bacteria and certain viruses, has already demonstrated a wide applicability to the human genome through a technology that enables the “cutting” of undesirable genetic strands and their replacement with altered gene sequences. The CRISPR gene-editing technique has recently proven to have heritable effects and to effectively change the epigenome responsible for gene activation and expression. 3 Hence, this historic legislative act enables the existence of programs that would alter, edit, and even reinvent genetic inheritance. Much of the controversy that surrounds the new biogenetic research has tended to circulate around the excitement generated by the possibility of reinventing the biological makeup of the individual human body—including the possibility of eliminating certain heritable diseases, like HIV and sickle-cell anemia—that co