I'm the author of Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (Pluto, 2014), The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference (SUNY Press, 2012), and The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire (SUNY Press, 2006). My main interests are: Lacan, comparative literature and cinema, and contemporary cultural theory.
... Aisha Karim and Svetlana Mintcheva helped me cope with life in an institution which, to my p... more ... Aisha Karim and Svetlana Mintcheva helped me cope with life in an institution which, to my provincial Western Canadian ... The relatively recent, predominantly Anglo-American phenomenon of queer theory has only underscored how after centuries of legitimately oppressive ...
James Penney’s The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference considers one of ... more James Penney’s The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference considers one of the key concepts of psychoanalysis, transference, to think through social phenomena. The book makes a convincing case that those interested in thinking about culture, politics, and aesthetics need to take the unconscious quite seriously. By conceptualizing transference as the filter through which all social relations and culture are produced, Penney makes an important intervention not only to Cultural Studies but also to psychoanalysis itself. Few have been so lucid at articulating the implications the unconscious has for the social and political. From a Lacanian point of view and in conversation with Alain Badiou, Penney explores the relevance of transference in chapters devoted to Plato, Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud. Though Freud wrote about transference principally in terms of the clinical context, where the analyst is the new text through which the analysand projects the unconscious past of primary love objects, transference has been extended to undergird all forms of our relational world, including history, culture and aesthetics. This is Penney’s purpose as I see it: to demonstrate how unconscious demands touch everything. In transference, a complex system of wishes, expectations, anxieties, and conflicts is brought to bear on all new objects and settings. However, Penney is not interested so much in examining the compulsion to repeat the past in new social and political formations as he is in arguing that all social relations are encounters of love. In other words, what is transferentially repeated is the structure of the human psyche. Love, he explains, defines and inflects the wider social world in resistance to unconscious desire. He challenges post-structural theory that imagines the social world as an all-pervasive discourse beholden to the fabrications of power, where nothing is left unconstructed. Leaving no room for non-knowledge, poststructural theory cannot imagine truth or social change beyond discourse. Psychoanalysis sees knowledge itself as being resisted so as to protect us from desires that could otherwise destroy our relationship to our self-concept. Indeed, love itself fortifies resistance. In the clinical context, transference, writes Penney, “is the patient’s last stand, her last desperate plea to the analyst to protect her from the traumatic emergence of enjoyment, which promises to bring her most cherished idea of herself to ruin” (2012, p. 47). But this is also true, beyond the clinic, of our relationship to the outside world. Love looks pleadingly to the other – be it a lover, community, or nation – for wholeness and recognition. We want the other, Penney elucidates, to reflect a flattering version of ourselves. This was themistake made by Diotema, Socrates’s teacher: she believed in pregnant beauty, a divine region in the soul that can be sought and captured in its absolute form. Desire, however, threatens to destroy such idealized love, and I would add, our constitutive dependency on it, for identity, security, and, more generally, our place in the world. Penney’s understanding of transference love as a failed desire for wholeness is helpful in clearing up some of the confusion and misapprehensions that have haunted psychoanalysis. While many dismiss Freud for being essentialist Book Reviews
Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion, 2023
Though both thinkers produced an ever-shifting and sometimes severely autocritical body of work, ... more Though both thinkers produced an ever-shifting and sometimes severely autocritical body of work, Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan share one unwavering conviction, one that rightly merits the epithet ontological: the discursive representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic not only on the level of their problematic link to sense and meaning, but also, and more fundamentally, as regards the robustness and reliability of their existence, of their very being’s power of self-actualization. Words and images are at once the direct manifestation of, and the necessarily failed attempt to conceal, the underlying inconsistency of being. It is not merely signification that remains irremediably unconsummated, unfulfilled; reality itself is disfigured by a misfire, as if prematurely removed from the ontological oven, disappointingly underbaked. Like Lacan’s psychoanalytic act of interpretation, Genet’s poetic image functions to 1 expose these fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates, altering in the process the collective relation to our symptomatically repressed experiences of enjoyment. This introduction positions the book’s project against both Sartre’s and Derrida’s monumental readings as well as the contemporary resurgence in ontological inquiry. It describes Genet’s creative project as specifically feminine in the proper psychoanalytic sense, and argues for the importance of his complicated political affiliations in the age of resurgent homophobia and racism as well as the enduring Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
... View all references; O'Connor & Ryan, 19938. O'Connor, N. and Ryan,... more ... View all references; O'Connor & Ryan, 19938. O'Connor, N. and Ryan, J. 1993. Wild desires and mistaken identities, lesbianism and psychoanalysis , London: Virago & Karnac. View all references). In his own work Penney does not refer to texts produced from outside America ...
Freud evidently had a thing for Moses. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), the founder of psychoanaly... more Freud evidently had a thing for Moses. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), the founder of psychoanalysis famously pulls the rug out from under the exodus myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition by positing an Egyptian origin for the eponymous Old Testament hero, all the while affirming the indelibility of his attachment, however critical or distanced, to the Judaic tradition or, less problematically, to a sense of his own Jewishness.
Résumé:Trop souvent mal décrites comme étant des œuvres de réalisme social, les films d'Ousma... more Résumé:Trop souvent mal décrites comme étant des œuvres de réalisme social, les films d'Ousmane Sembène accordent une attention particulière à l'impact politique des choix esthétiques. Dans Ceddo (1976), Sembène a très largement recours à des plans zoomés et des travellings en profondeur afin de permettre à ses téléspectateurs d'être en phase avec la relation résolument dialectique qui existe entre une scène donnée et chacun de ses éléments; de manière plus générale, entre ces éléments et le vaste contexte sociohistorique qu'ils cherchent à représenter. Un aperçu des controverses qui animent l'héritage du Troisième cinéma peut permettre de mettre en lumière les éléments esthétiques délaissés de la tradition et situer le style de caméra de Sembène en lien avec la dite tradition. Un retour à un film comme Ceddo fournit non seulement une perspective critique à partir de laquelle les développements récents dans le cinéma mondial et les études des médias postcoloniaux peuvent être évalués. Bien plus, il peut également permettre de réaffirmer de façon authentiquement émancipatoire le fossé qui sépare les représentations cinématographiques du réel imprévisible des changements historiques.
This essay explores how the image of the Chief of Police dressed as a giant phallus is the often ... more This essay explores how the image of the Chief of Police dressed as a giant phallus is the often overlooked and misconstrued key to the interpretation of Jean Genet's canonical play The Balcony (1956). Drawing on, but also moving beyond, the invaluable readings of Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan in their respective seminars, it argues that the motif of the Chief's costume condenses the play's insightful, and more relevant than ever, examination of the functioning of ideology in the visible world. Genet's play is a theatrical allegory for ideology's workings at a historical juncture when spontaneous identification with, and therefore allegiance to, traditional authority figures is no longer possible as it presumably once was. A proper appreciation of the comedic moment of the play sheds ironic light on its final vision of conservative restoration, generating precious insights about the workings of contemporary power and the renaissance of authoritarianism at the tw...
... Aisha Karim and Svetlana Mintcheva helped me cope with life in an institution which, to my p... more ... Aisha Karim and Svetlana Mintcheva helped me cope with life in an institution which, to my provincial Western Canadian ... The relatively recent, predominantly Anglo-American phenomenon of queer theory has only underscored how after centuries of legitimately oppressive ...
James Penney’s The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference considers one of ... more James Penney’s The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference considers one of the key concepts of psychoanalysis, transference, to think through social phenomena. The book makes a convincing case that those interested in thinking about culture, politics, and aesthetics need to take the unconscious quite seriously. By conceptualizing transference as the filter through which all social relations and culture are produced, Penney makes an important intervention not only to Cultural Studies but also to psychoanalysis itself. Few have been so lucid at articulating the implications the unconscious has for the social and political. From a Lacanian point of view and in conversation with Alain Badiou, Penney explores the relevance of transference in chapters devoted to Plato, Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud. Though Freud wrote about transference principally in terms of the clinical context, where the analyst is the new text through which the analysand projects the unconscious past of primary love objects, transference has been extended to undergird all forms of our relational world, including history, culture and aesthetics. This is Penney’s purpose as I see it: to demonstrate how unconscious demands touch everything. In transference, a complex system of wishes, expectations, anxieties, and conflicts is brought to bear on all new objects and settings. However, Penney is not interested so much in examining the compulsion to repeat the past in new social and political formations as he is in arguing that all social relations are encounters of love. In other words, what is transferentially repeated is the structure of the human psyche. Love, he explains, defines and inflects the wider social world in resistance to unconscious desire. He challenges post-structural theory that imagines the social world as an all-pervasive discourse beholden to the fabrications of power, where nothing is left unconstructed. Leaving no room for non-knowledge, poststructural theory cannot imagine truth or social change beyond discourse. Psychoanalysis sees knowledge itself as being resisted so as to protect us from desires that could otherwise destroy our relationship to our self-concept. Indeed, love itself fortifies resistance. In the clinical context, transference, writes Penney, “is the patient’s last stand, her last desperate plea to the analyst to protect her from the traumatic emergence of enjoyment, which promises to bring her most cherished idea of herself to ruin” (2012, p. 47). But this is also true, beyond the clinic, of our relationship to the outside world. Love looks pleadingly to the other – be it a lover, community, or nation – for wholeness and recognition. We want the other, Penney elucidates, to reflect a flattering version of ourselves. This was themistake made by Diotema, Socrates’s teacher: she believed in pregnant beauty, a divine region in the soul that can be sought and captured in its absolute form. Desire, however, threatens to destroy such idealized love, and I would add, our constitutive dependency on it, for identity, security, and, more generally, our place in the world. Penney’s understanding of transference love as a failed desire for wholeness is helpful in clearing up some of the confusion and misapprehensions that have haunted psychoanalysis. While many dismiss Freud for being essentialist Book Reviews
Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion, 2023
Though both thinkers produced an ever-shifting and sometimes severely autocritical body of work, ... more Though both thinkers produced an ever-shifting and sometimes severely autocritical body of work, Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan share one unwavering conviction, one that rightly merits the epithet ontological: the discursive representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic not only on the level of their problematic link to sense and meaning, but also, and more fundamentally, as regards the robustness and reliability of their existence, of their very being’s power of self-actualization. Words and images are at once the direct manifestation of, and the necessarily failed attempt to conceal, the underlying inconsistency of being. It is not merely signification that remains irremediably unconsummated, unfulfilled; reality itself is disfigured by a misfire, as if prematurely removed from the ontological oven, disappointingly underbaked. Like Lacan’s psychoanalytic act of interpretation, Genet’s poetic image functions to 1 expose these fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates, altering in the process the collective relation to our symptomatically repressed experiences of enjoyment. This introduction positions the book’s project against both Sartre’s and Derrida’s monumental readings as well as the contemporary resurgence in ontological inquiry. It describes Genet’s creative project as specifically feminine in the proper psychoanalytic sense, and argues for the importance of his complicated political affiliations in the age of resurgent homophobia and racism as well as the enduring Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
... View all references; O'Connor & Ryan, 19938. O'Connor, N. and Ryan,... more ... View all references; O'Connor & Ryan, 19938. O'Connor, N. and Ryan, J. 1993. Wild desires and mistaken identities, lesbianism and psychoanalysis , London: Virago & Karnac. View all references). In his own work Penney does not refer to texts produced from outside America ...
Freud evidently had a thing for Moses. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), the founder of psychoanaly... more Freud evidently had a thing for Moses. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), the founder of psychoanalysis famously pulls the rug out from under the exodus myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition by positing an Egyptian origin for the eponymous Old Testament hero, all the while affirming the indelibility of his attachment, however critical or distanced, to the Judaic tradition or, less problematically, to a sense of his own Jewishness.
Résumé:Trop souvent mal décrites comme étant des œuvres de réalisme social, les films d'Ousma... more Résumé:Trop souvent mal décrites comme étant des œuvres de réalisme social, les films d'Ousmane Sembène accordent une attention particulière à l'impact politique des choix esthétiques. Dans Ceddo (1976), Sembène a très largement recours à des plans zoomés et des travellings en profondeur afin de permettre à ses téléspectateurs d'être en phase avec la relation résolument dialectique qui existe entre une scène donnée et chacun de ses éléments; de manière plus générale, entre ces éléments et le vaste contexte sociohistorique qu'ils cherchent à représenter. Un aperçu des controverses qui animent l'héritage du Troisième cinéma peut permettre de mettre en lumière les éléments esthétiques délaissés de la tradition et situer le style de caméra de Sembène en lien avec la dite tradition. Un retour à un film comme Ceddo fournit non seulement une perspective critique à partir de laquelle les développements récents dans le cinéma mondial et les études des médias postcoloniaux peuvent être évalués. Bien plus, il peut également permettre de réaffirmer de façon authentiquement émancipatoire le fossé qui sépare les représentations cinématographiques du réel imprévisible des changements historiques.
This essay explores how the image of the Chief of Police dressed as a giant phallus is the often ... more This essay explores how the image of the Chief of Police dressed as a giant phallus is the often overlooked and misconstrued key to the interpretation of Jean Genet's canonical play The Balcony (1956). Drawing on, but also moving beyond, the invaluable readings of Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan in their respective seminars, it argues that the motif of the Chief's costume condenses the play's insightful, and more relevant than ever, examination of the functioning of ideology in the visible world. Genet's play is a theatrical allegory for ideology's workings at a historical juncture when spontaneous identification with, and therefore allegiance to, traditional authority figures is no longer possible as it presumably once was. A proper appreciation of the comedic moment of the play sheds ironic light on its final vision of conservative restoration, generating precious insights about the workings of contemporary power and the renaissance of authoritarianism at the tw...
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expose these fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates, altering in the process the collective relation to our symptomatically repressed experiences of enjoyment. This introduction positions the book’s project against both Sartre’s and Derrida’s monumental readings as well as the contemporary resurgence in ontological inquiry. It describes Genet’s creative project as specifically feminine in the proper psychoanalytic sense, and argues for the importance of his complicated political affiliations in the age of resurgent homophobia and racism as well as the enduring Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
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expose these fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates, altering in the process the collective relation to our symptomatically repressed experiences of enjoyment. This introduction positions the book’s project against both Sartre’s and Derrida’s monumental readings as well as the contemporary resurgence in ontological inquiry. It describes Genet’s creative project as specifically feminine in the proper psychoanalytic sense, and argues for the importance of his complicated political affiliations in the age of resurgent homophobia and racism as well as the enduring Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.