An Interview with Samir Gandesha

FA: How does psychoanalysis affect your scholarly ventures?

SG: My work has been deeply influenced by psychoanalysis. After having undergone something of a crisis though the 1980's and 1990's with both the growing influence of Michel Foucault's criticism of the “repressive hypothesis” in the volume one of the History of Sexuality, as well as the so-called “Freud Wars” instigated by figures such as Jeffrey Masson, Fredrick Crews and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and also being threatened in the clinical context by pharmacology and “quick fixes” such as cognitive behaviour therapy, psychoanalysis has lately experienced a comeback within social and political thought and analysis. This has largely been, though not exclusively, due to the renewal of interest in the work of Jacques Lacan that was itself sparked by the prodigious output of Slavoj Zizek and the so-called Slovenian School as well as brilliant practicing analysts such as Hilda Fernandez, who, like myself, is based in Vancouver.

FA: Funny, you don't look Lacanian to us.

SG: Haha, no. I'm also thinking of other non-Lacanian perspectives such as those of Russell Berman, Jay Frankel, Jonathan Sklar, Lene Auestad, and David Morgan among many others. I consider myself to be in dialogue with this latter group. Psychoanalysis, of course, distinguishes itself by positing the existence of unconscious processes that limits or undermines the notion of the subject as a rational and utility-maximizing agent. In other words, the figure of homo economicus. In opposition to this figure, psychoanalysis places greater emphasis on, as it were, a certain libidinal economy within the subject itself; it insists on the importance of individual and collective trauma and phenomena such as ego-weakness, repetition compulsion, sado-masochistic dynamics, the importance of aggression, the death-drive and so on. These, I believe, are indispensable in understanding the drift of politics in the post-Cold War era, particularly now in the midst of a glo