Journal Article

The Transference in Culture

Rothenberg, Molly Anne

2013

Overview

The Transference In Culture Molly Anne Rothenberg James Penney, The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference, Albany, NY, SUNY Press, 2012, 246 pp; $24.95 paperback James Penney belongs to the valiant band of theorists who reach out to their cultural studies colleagues to explain why certain of their cherished assumptions derived from Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze, among others, demand interrogation and to show how psychoanalytic theory, properly understood, would benefit them. [...]the subject experiences that opacity not as evidence of the Other's inherent inability to offer up the subject's meaning (for the subject is thoroughly invested in locating its own meaning in the Other) but rather as the spur to create an unconscious fantasy of how best to provoke the Other into disclosing that meaning. In the course of this discussion, Penney takes up the standard arguments charging Freud with androcentrism, heterosexism, and bourgeois ideological biases not in order to refute them per se but rather to show, in a series of linked readings, how the places in Freud's texts that warrant these charges disclose the structure of the transference as a double and paradoxical representation, 'an edifying but troublingly inaccessible ideal and a degraded partial object that must remain outside at all costs', each of which corresponds to a different idea of love (p34). Illuminating as this chapter is, the most important contributions to cultural studies appear in the subsequent four chapters. Because Penney is so careful to present his arguments in detail, with all of their warrants, it is impossible to summarize his achievements in each.

• Publisher: Lawrence & Wishart
• Subject: Freud, Lucian