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I am writing in response to Nomi Maya Stolzenberg's recent book essay, “Law, Gender, and the Liberal Project in American Psychoanalytic Thought” (JAPA 68/3), in which she considers my book, Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (with Michael Macrone; Gentile 2016), along with two other books that, in her words, “yoke law and psychoanalysis to generate new understandings of the modern subject and the modern state” (p. 503).
Though I dispute, or at least quibble with and wish to qualify, Stolzenberg's conclusions with respect to Feminine Law (she argues that it offers a vision of liberal hope contra “the fundamentally illiberal world of Lacan”), that is not what compels this letter. Sadly, her thoughtful and complex essay—which, in the main, is generous toward and appreciative of my book's scope and aims—misrepresents key aspects of its argument and so misleads the reader. And because of the complexity of both her essay and my book, to address these misreadings requires a bit of unpacking. Hence the length of this letter.
Promisingly, Stolzenberg, quoting my preface, tells the reader that my work “finds its home in some space among Freud and Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Julia Kristeva, Heinz Kohut, Thomas Ogden, and Jessica Benjamin, among many others” (Gentile 2016, p. xx). Stozenberg suggests that I am subjecting political or democratic speech to a “Lacanian analysis” (p. 508), that my understanding of desire is situated in Lacanian thought (p. 512), and that “there is a fundamental mismatch between [my] Lacanian vocabulary and [my] political conclusions and aspirations for the betterment of society …” (p. 516). Stolzenberg seems to forget that my aim is to situate my text in a space between theories. Though I appreciate Lacan's contributions on language and desire, my understanding of desire emanates instead from the intersubjectivity of Winnicott, Benjamin, and Ogden, a point on which I've elaborated at length in my own synthesis