Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter

Deluzian Affect

20.Lacanian psychoanalysis is particularly useful in analyzing IR – the lack is a structural factor of international ‘subjects’ as such

This approach to pulsations of wholeness and lack has some affinities to other contemporary approaches to affect, such as Deleuzian-inspired theories. Massumi (2002: 35-36), for example, discusses affect in terms of “vitality” and “intensity” and how such qualities often escape confinement within individual bodies only to be “captured” later as emotion. Applying a Deleuzian approach, William E. Connolly (2008: 66) has explored the politics of the American Right by conceptualizing affect in terms of “patterns of rhythm, resonance, dissonance, and reverberation” that “not only play a role within cultural life, but . . . also forge sub-discursive modes of communication be- tween us and other parts of nature."25 As part of a subject’s pulsations between conjectural wholeness and lack, then, such variations (or rhythms) can be expressed or felt as different modalities of intensity, or dissonance between the promises and frustrations of subjectivity. Moreover, precisely this aspect both distinguishes a Lacanian approach from Deleuzian approaches and perhaps lends it a theoretical advantage in examining the politics of subjectivity. Lacanian theory conceptualizes desire and enjoyment as inescapable dimensions of constructing a subject. Constructing a (collective or national) subject, in turn, is often what is most at stake in political discourses. Politics is often articulated (at least implicitly) in terms of unfulfilled demands or desires—or more specifically, in terms of subjects (“the Nation,” “us,” “we,” and so on) that are constructed as lacking. In this sense, political contestation is often about frustrations of desire. In contrast, Deleuzian approaches argue that identity “is formed in the context of overwhelming abundance and multiplicity, potential, and pluralism. Any particular identity emerges as a given crystallization out of the unending flow of possibilities” (Leonard Williams 2007: 115; see also Saurette 2000). Thus, while Deleuzian perspectives may be useful for analyzing generalized flows or circulations of desire and affect, Lacanian theory may more effectively analyze the frustrations and blockages of desire—precisely the way in which collective political subjects are often constructed as lacking (Alcorn 2002: 66).

Desire and enjoyment thus contribute some fresh perspectives on how many in IR approach affect and emotion. For example, Crawford (2000: 125) defines emotions as “subjective experiences that also have physiological, intersubjective, and cultural components.” Although emotions are “internally experienced,” they become meaningful when “cognitively and culturally construed and constructed,” or, when meaningful signifiers are attached to them (125). The idea of emotion as somewhat closer to conscious cognition is also related to recent work on emotions and beliefs. For Jonathan Mercer (2010: 2), an emotional belief is “one where emotion constitutes and strengthens a belief and which makes possible a generalization about an ac- tor that involves certainty beyond evidence.” In other words, “beliefs are where cognition and emotion meet.” Widmaier (2010: I 31) argues that emotional influences “prefigure both cognitively oriented paradigmatic debates and interpretations of material incentives” during economic crises. While illuminating, many of these treatments often downplay precisely what the approach here emphasizes. Lacan’s main point here is that desire and enjoyment are the key sparks prompting the construction of a subject. By conceptualizing the construction of subjectivity as a complex dynamic of identification and frustration, of desire and enjoyment, this approach offers a more comprehensive model of the subject to complement those currently used by most IR scholars.

In practice, then, instead of examining the role of specific emotional representations, this approach to subjectivity combines a theoretical understanding of desire and enjoyment with the need to account for the place of lack orienting any discourse, along with the split subjectivity that depends on master signifiers for its healing. Rather than studying, for example, how the overt representations of humiliation (Saurette 2006) or shame (Danchev 2006) play out in specific political contexts, the approach here offers a lens through which to think about and empirically analyze the ways in which subject formation is bound to the dynamics of desire and enjoyment. Every discourse that attempts to construct a subject is driven by something that is absent from it. Analyzing the place of lack in political discourses points to the fantasy that every discourse deploys to cover its lack. This, in turn, allows us to see how the discourse shapes desire toward the promise of enjoyment or wholeness.