Response to letter from Leo Bleger

I have felt very grateful to the North American Program Committee (led by Maureen Murphy) of the IPA Congress in Buenos Aires last summer for their invitation to speak about Intimacy. And I am grateful now to read Leo Bleger’s discussion and to have the opportunity to reflect on the questions he is raising, particularly in regard to binaries.

Leo Bleger’s letter expands on his discussion at that meeting. It was important to me then at the meeting, and now in this letter, that I felt and feel his welcoming a psychoanalytic conversation about the impact and insertion of history and power into every avenue of intimate life. This seems more crucial now, in the United States, in regard to racial division, racism, misogyny, and the place of sexuality in public life and in the contested sites of ambition and power for women.

Leo Bleger spoke in Spanish when he discussed my paper, making a serious link to his own early history in Argentina, to what had happened in the 1970s, and to the ongoing trauma of the Disappeared. As he notes, the very spot where the Congress was held is haunted by this history.

In this letter, he is pushing me (rightly) to think more critically and more deeply about binaries, particularly the binary of gender and of sexuality. As he notes, my clinical examples are loaded with intensely claimed and lived binaries. Of course, our theories and models of gender and sexual life will need to include a variety of polarized modes of subjectivity. But I would still argue our theories must expand beyond the binary. In my paper I was very committed to a model of theory making, taken from Deleuze (1994) and Braidotti (2011), from philosophy and feminism, respectively, where there is a strong commitment to what they call “nomadic theory.” That is, theory determined on freedom, on moving across disciplines, on creating sites of intersection and interdisciplinary. The binaries of gender have a place in our understanding, but not an overarching management of what is he