Refusing Choosing

This contribution to the “La/La Showdown” was composed on the day after the US presidential election. It may be worth the reader's knowing that what follows was written under conditions of political trauma.

Will this be a debate in which both sides declare victory the moment it's over? What would it mean to “win” a psychoanalytic debate? You can win an intellectual debate or a political debate (even if you can't win the election), but I'm less sure that it is possible, or even desirable, to win a psychoanalytic debate. The nature of psychoanalytic exchange remains foreign to the discursive structure of debate, with its position-taking, its repression of competing viewpoints, its zero-sum commitment to vanquishing the other. When intersubjective exchange takes on the coloring of debate, psychoanalysis vanishes.

In the seemingly interminable run-up to the recent presidential election—a period that is starting to look positively prelapsarian by comparison to the political situation in which we find ourselves—voters who fell into the category of the “undecided” were regarded with disbelief, even contempt. Given what has been made public about Donald Trump, you still can't decide? The election gave the undecided a bad name. Nevertheless, here I must declare myself undecided in this debate. When Elissa Marder wrote to ask if I'd be willing to serve on Team Laplanche, I replied that I'd be happy to serve on either team, to swing either way. (As my father often said, I used to be undecided, but now I'm not so sure.) Elsewhere I have elaborated a psychoanalytic defense of intellectual promiscuity as a positive virtue.1 The position I'm articulating here may not serve the interests of Team Laplanche, but it represents my sense of what psychoanalysis is and what it can do. The claim I wish to make concerns the specificity of psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking, rather than the specificity of any individual thinker.

My reluctance to choose sides in this debate stems partly from t