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James Penney SUNY Press, Albany, 2012, 258pp., $24.95, ISBN: 13-978-1-4384-3973-0 (paperback)
James Penney’s The Structures of Love: Art and Politics Beyond the Transference considers one of the key concepts of psychoanalysis, transference, to think through social phenomena. The book makes a convincing case that those interested in thinking about culture, politics, and aesthetics need to take the unconscious quite seriously. By conceptualizing transference as the filter through which all social relations and culture are produced, Penney makes an important intervention not only to Cultural Studies but also to psychoanalysis itself. Few have been so lucid at articulating the implications the unconscious has for the social and political. From a Lacanian point of view and in conversation with Alain Badiou, Penney explores the relevance of transference in chapters devoted to Plato, Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud.
Though Freud wrote about transference principally in terms of the clinical context, where the analyst is the new text through which the analysand projects the unconscious past of primary love objects, transference has been extended to undergird all forms of our relational world, including history, culture and aesthetics. This is Penney’s purpose as I see it: to demonstrate how unconscious demands touch everything. In transference, a complex system of wishes, expectations, anxieties, and conflicts is brought to bear on all new objects and settings. However, Penney is not interested so much in examining the compulsion to repeat the past in new social and political formations as he is in arguing that all social relations are encounters of love. In other words, what is transferentially repeated is