Negativity in Psychoanalysis
Duane Rousselle and Mark Gerard Murphy frame their co-edited volume
Next month in The Portal will focus on the concept of Jouissance, and feature theologian Barry Taylor, philosopher
, and coach Pamela von Sabljar. Find out more at: The Portal.Last month I hosted sociological theorist Dr. Duane Rousselle and theologian Dr. Mark Gerard Murphy to discuss their co-edited volume Negativity in Psychoanalysis: Theory and Clinic. Throughout our discussion we think through negativity as a concept in order to put it back into the position of a philosophical question for psychoanalysis, as well as juxtapose it against the meaning of its opposite, positivity. The re-thinking of the relation between negativity and positivity in psychoanalysis is in large part to discuss the social implications of the “era of jouissance”, which is often described in the negative, but is in fact a being overwhelmed by positivity.
Duane Rousselle is an associate professor at Aga Khan University, and some of his recent publications include Post-Anarchism and Psychoanalysis (2023), Real Love (2021), as well as Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity (2020). Mark Gerard Murphy is a visiting lecturer at St. Mary’s University, convening courses on ethics, philosophy, mystical theology and spirituality. He has recently published his doctoral thesis, The Direction of Desire (2023).
Throughout this video we discuss:
Negativity/positivity as psychoanalytic concepts, the ossification of the concept of negativity, and the nature of death drive/jouissance as positive
The era of Jouissance as a positive density which is difficult to speak about or mediate, a ubiquitous positivity disintegrating social bonds
Our culture needs a new way to discuss our current era, specifically the issue of a of immediacy, a style of too late capitalism of over-saturation
Sinthome as a knotting into isolation of the symptom, it holds us together but at a strong cost: total disregard of love
Dreams as a dwelling place for enjoyment that we could not achieve in actual life/a space of failed mediation; a non-negativisable Jouissance
Non-negativisable jouissance spills out in dreams of society/culture (Freud recognised necessity of sociology), now are are drowning in toxic positivity
Christian spiritual direction cannot just be another positive object in a field of positive objects, must introduce negativity in contrast to positive experience
In failure of the Father as mediation of the dream (Name-of-the-Father no longer “wows”), we have something worse: comrades, peers, fraternities, siblings
Constitutive lack replaced by a refusal to relinquish jouissance, and jouissance as a principle as a cut from the world/cut from social bonds (isolated together)
Wrong to juxtapose Kantian duty bound subject with Deleuzian libidinal world of flux; Kantian categorical imperative now works in tyrannical Deleuzian form
Lacan as sociologist suggests social bond organised by School without a vertical link to the Name-of-the-Father, nor horizontal link by peers, but the symptom
“My School” = “My Symptom” as a founding act, the lonely act towards the confrontation with the cutting edge of analytic experience in the symptom
Cartel = space of temporary social formation, doesn’t have a Father but a “Plus One” who asks questions and produces a disruptive whirlwind of knowledge
Political discourse of “One by One” is incredibly difficult, radical nature, fragmented, without a total frame, perpetual question, doctrines of ignorance
From the One-All to the Non-All, opening to a mystical, Other jouissance; not-All is a cartel of +1, +1, +1 = increasingly difficult to mediate and speak
Type of knowledge that is produced is singular, opening the broad question of negativity, the place of negativity, in terms of how each person is relating
Threats of neo-Feudal political expressions, oscillations of pre/post-modernity, the call for a multi-polar world (Dugin); fragmentation to multi-polarity
Bubble worlds, singularities without universality, we are losing the dream of universality, the possibility of dialectical discursive mediation
Different psychoanalytic interpretations of religion and God: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism; all different relations to Oedipal structure
In Christianity: Son as a symptom of the Father; Jesus is a symptom of God? Christianity as fetishising the body (Jesus as a God-Man, God in Flesh)
Difference in Islam: God is not the Father, God is not Lacking; Humans are lacking and fail, but there is a Oneness to God (run into, not out of, the cave)
God in Hinduism: for psychoanalysis there is an incestuousness to the fusional One, reflected in intimate relations, theological structures
To find out more, check out the co-edited volume, as well as Dr. Rousselle and Dr. Murphy’s work below:
This conversation I thought framed better the political stakes at play today than the high majority of political and geopolitical debates and discussions I hear. It was a really great talk, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I was impressed both by Duane and Mark, very much..