The Desire of Psychoanalysis

281 Pages·2021·4.23 MB·English

by  Gabriel Tupinambá

THE DESIRE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Series Editors
Slavoj Žižek
Adrian Johnston
Todd McGowan
diaeresis
T H E D E S I R E O F
P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S
Exercises in Lacanian Thinking
Gabriel Tupinambá
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www .nupress .northwestern .edu
Copyright © 2021 by Northwestern University Press.
Published 2021. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Tupinambá, Gabriel, author. | Žižek, Slavoj, writer of foreword.
Title: The desire of psychoanalysis : exercises in Lacanian thinking / Gabriel
Tupinambá ; [foreword by Slavoj Žižek].
Other titles: Diaeresis.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2021. | Series:
Diaeresis | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036848 | ISBN 9780810142817 (paperback) | 
ISBN 9780810142824 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810142831 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lacan, Jacques, 1901– 1981. | Psychoanalysis.
Classification: LCC BF173 .T843 2021 | DDC 150.195— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036848
To Luisa:
“. . . only there may the signification of an infinite love emerge”

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword
For Lacan, against Lacanian Ideology, by Slavoj Žižek xi
Introduction 3
1 Psychoanalysis and Politics after 2017 9
2 The Basis of Lacanian Ideology 25
3 The History of an Impasse in Lacanian Thinking 58
4 The Generic Perspective in Psychoanalysis 75
5 The Political Economy of Clinical Practice 96
6 The Form of the Other and Its Institutional Enclosure 120
7 Groundwork for a Metapsychology of Ideas 139
8 The Idea of the Passe 176
Conclusion 219
Notes 229
Works Cited 249
Index 259

Acknowledgments
I cannot say that the ideas in this book are really mine: they gradually
formed and sedimented while I was entertained having long discussions
with friends, usually about other things. To thank all of these generous
interlocutors would be impossible, so I would like to name just a few of
them, in the hope that everyone else with whom I share similar bonds
might feel equally recognized: Clara Tupinambá, Yuan Yao, Srdjan
Cvjeticanin, Agon Hamza, Cindy Zeiher, Daniel Tutt, Jeniffer Bello,
Rodrigo Gonsalves, Jean-P ierre Caron, and Reza Naderi. At the same
time, I would never have realized the importance of what emerged
in our conversations if it were not for some insistent problems that
troubled me for years, and which endowed these ideas with their rele-
vance. These are impasses that I learned to face and endure, rather than
merely avoid, only because I was not alone. For this, I would like to thank
those who sought analysis with me—and those with whom I sought my
own analysis—as well as my comrades in the Circle of Studies of Idea
and Ideology—among them, my dear and departed friend Fernando
Fagundes Ribeiro. I would also like to thank Slavoj Žižek and Alenka
Zupančič, both of whom paved the way for much of what is written here.
Finally, without the support of my family—and, especially, without Luisa
in my life—I would never have had the courage to engage with this am-
bitious project, much less the serenity to recognize how little of it I can
actually take credit for.
ix