On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives

233 Pages·2018·1.927 MB·English

by  Vanessa Sinclair, Manya Steinkoler

ON PSYCHOANALYSIS
AND VIOLENCE
Psychoanalysis has not examined violence as such since it is a sociological and
criminological concept; psychoanalysis is concerned with speech. On Psychoanalysis
and Violence brings together noted Lacanian psychoanalysts and scholars to fill an
important gap in psychoanalytic scholarship that addresses what the contributors
term the “angwash” of our current time.
Today, violence is everywhere. We are inundated with it, exhausted by it,
bombarded by images and reports of it on a daily, even hourly basis. This book
examines how psychoanalysis can account for the many manifestations of violence
in contemporary society. Drawing on a broadly Lacanian perspective, the authors
explore violence in war, terrorism, how the media portrays violence, violent video
games, questions of identity, difference and the “other”; violence narratives and
violence and DSM, and explain how to account for the way violence arises
and the effect it has on us on both an individual and social level. These are just
some of the daily social realities of the present, whose aggression is felt by everyone,
which horrifies us and which we often feel powerless to change. The contributors
have therefore coined a term for this cultural malaise: “angwash”, arguing that we
are awash in angoisse, or anxiety, in a constant panic regarding the impossible and
contradictory demands of a “civilization” in crisis.
On Psychoanalysis and Violencewill be of great interest to Lacanian psychoanalysts
and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
Vanessa Sinclair, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst based in New York City, USA, and
Stockholm, Sweden, author of Switching Mirrors(Trapart, 2016) and the upcoming
Scansion in Psychoa nalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation(Routledge, 2019) and editor
of Rendering Unconscious (Trapart, 2018).
Manya Steinkoler, Ph.D. is an English Professor at Borough of Manhattan College
CUNY and a psychoanalyst in New York City, USA. She is co-editor with
Patricia Gherovici of Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t(Routledge, 2015),
Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and forth-
coming Psychoanalysis and Sexuality: From Feminism to Trans(Cambridge University
Press, 2019).

ON
PSYCHOANALYSIS
AND VIOLENCE
Contemporary Lacanian
Perspectives
Edited by
Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sinclair, Vanessa, editor. | Steinkoler, Manya, editor.
Title: On psychoanalysis and violence : contemporary Lacanian perspectives /
edited by Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018030350 (print) | LCCN 2018033049 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780429437342 (Master) | ISBN 9780429793769 (Web PDF) |
ISBN 9780429793752 (ePub) | ISBN 9780429793745 (Mobipocket/Kindle) |
ISBN 9781138346307 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138346338 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Violence—Psychological aspects. | Agressiveness. |
Psychoanalysis. | Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981.
Classification: LCC BF575.A3 (ebook) | LCC BF575.A3 O52 2019 (print) |
DDC 155.2/32—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030350
ISBN: 978-1-138-34630-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-34633-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43734-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
Dedicated to Franz Kaltenbeck (1944–2018)

CONTENTS
Notes on contributors ix
Foreword: Is the American youth rebelling against America?
by Gérard Pommier xv
Introduction 1
Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler
1 Bodies and the object-death 15
Jean-Jacques Moscovitz
2 Political philosophy in Freud: the death drive and the
critical faculty 21
Judith Butler
3 The end(s) of violence 33
Juliet Flower MacCannell
4 The sex in their violence: eroticizing biopower 47
Todd McGowan
5 Lone wolf terrorists: howling in the eye of the wind –
the case of Adam Lanza 61
Manya Steinkoler
6 The tortured child 77
Franz Kaltenbeck
viii Contents
7 Click and destroy: the clinic of video games 91
Vincent Le Corre
8 Violence in repetition 109
Martine Fourré
9 The violence of psychiatric diagnosis 121
Patrick Landman
10 How to measure what: notes on universals and particulars 127
Todd Dean
11 From violence to aggressiveness 137
Guy Dana
12 Why the zombies ate my neighbors: whither ambivalence? 149
Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales
13 Susan stern: Sham 165
Geneviève Morel
14 Breaking the spell of the slave revolt in morality: from the
subreption of identity-in-difference to the repetition of
the paraconsistent 183
Alireza Taheri
15 Terror and the unconscious: psychoanalysis in Argentina,
1976–1983 199
Patricia Gherovici
Index 207
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative
Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California,
Berkeley. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France(1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity(1990),
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of
Power: Theories of Subjection(1997), Excitable Speech(1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship
Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning
(2004), Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics,
Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
(2009) and Is Critique Secular? (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown and
Saba Mahmood, 2009) and Sois Mon Corps (2011), co-authored with Catherine
Malabou. Her most recent books include: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique
of Zionism (2012), Dispossessions: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with
Athena Athanasiou, 2013), Senses of the Subject(2015) and Notes Toward a Performative
Theory of Assembly (2015).
Guy Dana is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and current President of the Cercle
Freudien in Paris. He was clinical director of a sector in France that included the
Hospital of Barthelemy Durand, an outpatient clinic, crisis center, and therapeutic
house, and ran a private psychoanalytic practice for over 40 years. He has lectured
on the institutional treatment of psychosis around the world. Dana did his clinical
internships with Jacques Lacan. He is the author of Quel Politique Pour La Folie?:
Le suspense de Freud(2011), as well as hundreds of articles on psychoanalysis, both
theoretical and clinical.
Todd Dean is a psychiatrist and training and supervising psychoanalyst in St. Louis,
Missouri. He is a senior editor of Division/Review and an adjunct instructor of
psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine.