Ann Pellegrini

The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis After the Animal Turn

ABSTRACT What would or could a psychoanalysis beyond the human be? And who—and how—might we who call ourselves human be or become in turn? In the “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Freud (1916–1917) famously declared psychoanalysis to be the third great blow to human self-love delivered at the hands of science. First, the Copernican revolution revealed that the earth was not the center of the universe “but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness.” Then Darwin and his contemporaries undermined the ground upon which “the human” had asserted a fundamental difference from “the animal.” And now, psychological research has tripled down, giving “human megalomania” its “third and most wounding blow.” “The ego,” Freud wrote, “is not even master in its own house.” In passages like this, we get a glimpse of a psychoanalysis beyond the human–animal boundary. Nevertheless, the force of anthropocentrism returns again and again in Freud’s body of work, as when he consigned human animality to a prehistoric past or linked it to the baser instincts that human civilization needs to overcome. But what if, instead of running away from the animal in us, we were to dwell with and alongside the nonhuman? Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and cultural theorist Nicholas Ray, this essay traces the sounds and scents of the nonhuman animal in and for psychoanalytic theory.

Introduction to Nonhuman Encounters: Animals, Objects, Affects, and the Place of Practice

ABSTRACT This essay is the introduction to the panel “Nonhuman Encounters: Animals, Objects, Affects, and the Place of Practice” featuring papers by Carla Freccero, Katie Gentile, Ann Pellegrini, Nathan Snaza, Donovan Schaefer, Nuar Alsadir, Francisco Gonzalez, Julietta Singh, Eleonora Fabião, Michelle Stephens, and Patricia Clough. Each essay responds to the question of these encounters in places of practice, including the clinical.

Danger Talk: Sexual Error and the Limits of Thought: An Introduction

ABSTRACT This article introduces a set of essays on the theme “Danger Talk: Sexual Error and the Limits of Thought.” To situate the essays, the author explains the original context for the essays: a 2016 forum at New York University (NYU) co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

Ever, Again: Psychoanalysis, Secular Time, and the Performance of Witness

The scene of war has changed dramatically since Sigmund Freud wrote the two essays that would become ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death ’ (1915). Freud was writing in the early months of World War I . Despite his initial enthusiasm for the war, Freud stepped back critically to interrogate our investment in war and the relationship between that investment and our attitude towards death. In this chapter, Pellegrini returns to Freud’s 1915 reflections to ask how they may help us negotiate and reimagine our contemporary moment of endless war and develop a different attitude towards life and death. To do so, Pellegrini underscores psychoanalysis ’s ambivalent status as a signal science of secular modernity and as a practice whose ways of telling and reshaping time potentially resist the disciplinary force of being secular.

Introducing Testo Junkie

ABSTRACT This article introduces the portfolio of essays on Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013). After briefly describing the project of that book, the essay explains the history of the public forum and, now, publication in which Preciado was in conversation with 3 clinicians: Kirsten Lentz, Carolyn Stack, and Jamieson Webster.

Preconceiving Life: Response to Gentile’s “Troubling Temporalities”

Drawing on the resources of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theories of temporality, this essay considers time as a key aspect of the neoliberal management of life. All subjects are not equal in time, and the author explores the crossing points—and points of no return—between the endlessly potentiating fetus, that vessel of pure futurity, and the dead time of imprisonment. How does time coat and code some bodies as life, for living, while remanding some others to the slow dying of life in prison?

Responsibilization, same-sex marriage, and the end of queer sex

Over the last decade, a paradox has emerged in U.S. law and society: the growing legalization and cultural acceptance of same-sex marriage, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, increasing legal restrictions and ongoing cultural ambivalence over abortion. This essay argues that the delinking of equal rights for LBG persons from reproductive freedom for women is no paradox at all, but is in fact predictable within the terms of highly moralized neoliberal conceptions of personal responsibility and sexual discipline.

Melancholy Hope and Other Psychic Remainders Afterthoughts on Love the Sin

In this essay the coauthors of Love the Sin consider connections between moral and psychic ambivalence around sex and sexual pleasures; what tolerance “feels” like; and melancholia as both block to and resource for democratic social relations. In the final section of their essay, they suggest rethinking tolerance as a kind of melancholic reaction, or defense, that protects the agents of tolerance from knowing just how far short that they have fallen from their own professed commitments to being fair and doing good.