Emergent Subjectivity: The Parallel Temporalities of Psychoanalysis and Social Theory

Kirsten Lentz uses Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2013) as an occasion to explore the rivalry between psychoanalysis and social theory in their attempts to account for human subjectivity. Although a commonsense view holds that the 2 fields have completely different relationships to temporality—psychoanalysts fix their gaze to the past, whereas social theorists imagine radical futures—the distinction is more complex than it appears. The analyst does not lead the patient toward the past but holds and guards the place of futurity so that new experiences of subjectivity eventually become available. Like “theory,” then, psychoanalysis tries to make room for “emergent subjectivity,” for ways of being in the world that have not yet been imagined or formulated, that have not yet been born in the mind of culture. Lentz thus insists that the radical critique of gender can and should be understood as fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis.