Psychoanalytic Bodies

The Body Concepts series is based on the principle of transdisciplinary encounters. The session begins with a lecture by Sophie Mendelsohn, followed by a dialogue with artist Anne Juren.

LECTURE BY SOPHIE MENDELSOHN: I've chosen the title Bodies that Alter for my lecture in reference to, and hijacking of, a 1993 book by Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, which explores the materiality of the body as a force of resistance to the forms of subjectivation and socialization imposed by the patriarchal and heterosexual regime. Yet one of the most frequent criticisms of psychoanalysis, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis, is its supposed neglect of the body - in favor of language. There's something very paradoxical about this criticism, if we compare it with the situation that precipitated the hypothesis of the unconscious, from which psychoanalysis took off...

At the end of the 19th century, women's bodies began to speak - and with sufficient insistence to be heard in the end - a language that could not be recognized, validated or legitimized by the social codes of the time. These speaking bodies thus altered their relationship to themselves, by highlighting the failure of anatomy to say what a body can do, and by making the pulsional body exist on another stage, that of fantasy, which gives it its existential flesh. But these speaking bodies also forced another alteration: thinking about the subjective condition with the body, starting from the body (and this is the very challenge of the psychoanalytic project), implies considering the subject as both constituted and divided by what escapes and alters it, by the drive force that sets it in motion and disintegrates it at the same time, by the way fantasy captures this force in a desiring form to make it conflictually livable.

If there is no body whose space is not structured by the trajectories of the drive, the fact remains that the way in which bodies are situated in social space alters their power to interpellate: women in Vienna - first and foremost Bertha Pappenheim, psychoanalysis's patient 0, if you like, the woman who caused the scandal of the dissociation between the anatomical body and the body of fantasy, and who went on to become a feminist activist - transformed their minoritized condition into the possibility of altering both collective representations and individual experiences of the female body. It is from a position of exclusion – which is becoming more and more explicit in public discourses - that racialized people today lead me to question the way in which psychoanalysis can deal with the political violence that befalls bodies that unwillingly carry a heterogeneity perceived as a threat to the social order.