The Practice of Love

Front matter

TERESALDE LAUR ET FS

PERVERSE DESIRE

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PART THREE 6. Perverse Desire 257 Toward

7. Sexual Structuring and Habit a Theory

Changes 298 of Lesbian Sexuality Works Cited 313 Films Cited 326 General Index 327 Index of Films Cited 331 de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Acknowledgments

This book has been some years in the making, has traveled and grown wiser with me in several countries, and owes much to many: —first and foremost to Kirstie McClure and Jansje Roepman, much more than I can say. Then,

—to Valie Export for its title, which has haunted me since I saw her film Die Praxis der Liebe; —to the friends who read parts of the manuscript at various stages, giving suggestions, criticisms, and encouragement: Tania Modleski, Sue-Ellen Case, Liana Borghi, Annette Foerster, Giovanna Grignaffini, Earl Jackson, Jr., Elizabeth Grosz, Nancy Stoller, Donna Haraway, and Carol Miller; —to the students in my Spring 1992 History of Consciousness writing seminar for their comments on early drafts of chapter 5 and for the inspiration their own work has given me throughout the writing of this book: Julia Creet, Julia Erhart, Catri6na Rueda Esquibel, Yvonne Keller, Ekua Omosupe, Carla Scott, Vicky Smith, and Jeanne Vaughn; —to all the participants of the seminar on “Psychoanalysis, Fantasy, and Lesbian Sexuality” I held as Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam in Spring 1990, organized by Dorelies Kraakman for the Homo- en Lesbische Studies program, where I presented the first, rough sketch of my project and received an enthusiastic response; —to participants of subsequent seminars and colloquia where I presented this work at various stages of its progress: at the English Institute at Harvard (1990), the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine (1990), the School for Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth (1991), the Humanities Institutes at the University of Michigan and SUNY, Stony Brook, the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands as Belle van Zuylen Visiting Professor of de Lauretis, Tere Women $ Studies.(b99 bythe. University of North Carolina, Chapel

E-book, Bloomi ngton IN USA: ng a University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePraeticeofLov Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution viii ΠAcknowledgments

Hill (1992), the Centro di documentazione delle donne/University of Bologna and the independent cultural association LAmandorla in Florence, Italy (1992), the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany (1992), Syracuse University as Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities (1993), and the Graduiertenkolleg “Theorie der Literatur” at the University of Konstanz, Germany (1993);

—to Esther Newton, Patricia White, Richard Dellamora, Geertje Mak, Rosi Braidotti, Anneke Smelik, Renate Lachmann, Sigrid Weigel, and others who have offered helpful comments on published versions of chapters 1, 3, and 5;

—to the Bibliotheek van de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychoanalyse (Dutch Psychoanalytic Association) in Amsterdam, as close to an ideal home library as one could wish for;

—to my colleagues in the Board of Studies in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for approving my request for leave from my teaching responsibilities in 1992-93; to Gary Lease, Dean of Humanities, for granting that leave and generously supporting my research in other ways as well; and to Billie Harris and Sheila Peuse, Administrative Assistants, for making my absence more productive and my heart yet fonder. Last but hardly least,

—to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, without whose Fellowships in 1992-93 this book might never have been completed, and —to Joan Catapano, Senior Sponsoring Editor at Indiana University Press, to whom I have entrusted it well before its completion.

* * *

I wish to dedicate this book to the memory of Lisa Summa, the youngest of my students, who wanted to get her Ph.D. in History of Consciousness before entering training to become a psychoanalyst.

de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perve! rse Desir re. E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Acknowledgments W ix

A shorter version of chapter 1 was published in Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 111-30, and in Discourses of Sexuality from Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 216-34.

Different portions of chapter 3, in earlier versions, were published as “Film and the Visible,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 223-76, and as “Il fantasma del cinema. Sulla funzione spettatoriale come rapporto di produzione fantasmatico-sociale,” Cinema & cinema 18 (settembre/dicembre 1991): 3-18.

A very condensed and early version of chapter 5 appeared as “Perverse Desire: The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian,” Australian Feminist Studies 13 (Autumn 1991): 15-26, and in Dutch translation as “De verwonding en het litteken: Narcisme, fetisjisme en lesbische fantasie,” Lover, literatuuroverzicht voor de vrouwenbeweging 18.2 (June 1991); 72-79.

The following publishers have generously given permission to use quotations from copyrighted works:

From “The Weather-Cock Points South,” by Amy Lowell, Pictures of the Floating World, The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Co., renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Co., Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D’Andelot Belin, Esquire. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.

From Giving Up the Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts, by Cherrfe Moraga. Reprinted by permission of West End Press.

From “Transcendental Etude,” by Adrienne Rich, from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, by Adrienne Rich. Reprinted by permission of the author and W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. Copyright 1978 by W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.

From Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. Copyright 1983 by Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Monthly Review Foundation.

rse Desire. tps://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Introduction

“For the ‘non-specialist,’ sexuality is indeed the essential contribution of psychoanalysis to contemporary thought,” wrote Jean Laplanche in 1970 (Life and Death in Psychoanalysis 27). A forthcoming essay by a young film scholar rejoins: “Homosexual subjects are governed by the psychic processes that affect ‘everyone else’— there can be no argument but that homosexuality is indeed within psychoanalysis, each having contributed to the other's very invention” (White, “Governing Lesbian Desire”). I frame this introduction to my study of lesbian sexuality and perverse desire within two claims that, besides foregrounding the thematic and methodological concerns of this book, also delineate the historical and personal trajectory of my theoretical work—from the beginning of my critical engagement with structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis around 1970, for which Laplanche’s work has proved invaluable, to my current pedagogical activity in the doctoral program in History of Consciousness, of whose rewards the essay by Patricia White, a graduate of that program, is representative.

Between 1970 and now, in conjunction with earlier and contemporaneous social movements, feminism and poststructuralism have made way for the rise of minority discourse and gay and lesbian studies as fields of scholarly and theoretical research. Conceived from the vantage point of the latter, this book returns to Freudian psychoanalysis and semiotics, to the questions of representation, subjectivity, desire, and their relations to social signification and material reality that I broached in Alice Doesn't (1984) and La sintassi del desiderio (1976), but now refocused through what I call Freud's negative theory of sexuality—sexuality as perversion. For in his work from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) to the unfinished, posthumously published papers of 1938, the notions

Eb Sok Blome OF fanormal-sexnalit yy anomal psych nosexual development, even a xii W Introduction normal sexual act derive from the detailed consideration of the aberrant, deviant, or perverse manifestations and components of the sexual instinct or drive (Trieb). On the one hand, then, perversion appears as the negative or nether side of sexuality, what so-called sexual normality contains and overcomes. On the other hand, however, Freud’s entire theory of the human psyche, in which the instincts, their objects, and their vicissitudes are overdetermined by fantasies at once social and subjective, owes its foundations and development to his clinical study of the psychoneuroses; that is to say, those cases in which the mental apparatus and instinctual drives reveal themselves in their processes and mechanisms, which are “normally” hidden or unremarkable otherwise. In this respect, the “normal” is conceived only by approximation, is more a projection than an actual state of being, while perversion and neurosis (the repressed form of perversion) are the actual forms and contents of sexuality.

Rereading Freud in this perspective, against the dominant interpretations that have extracted from his writings a model of positive, “normal,” heterosexual, and reproductive sexuality, I am looking for a model of perverse desire that may account for the representation of lesbianism in texts of fiction, film, poetry, and drama, as well as in the interactions and conversations of many years of my own life. What is the advantage of such a project to a lesbian theorist? Lesbian scholarship has not had much use for psychoanalysis. Developing in the political and intellectual context of feminism over the past two decades, in the Eurowestern “First World,” lesbian critical writing has typically rejected Freud as the enemy of women and consequently kept clear of neo-Freudian theories of sexuality. Certainly, the feminist mistrust of psychoanalysis as both a male-controlled clinical practice and a popularized social discourse on the natural inferiority of women has excellent, and historically proven, practical reasons. Nevertheless, some feminists have persistently argued that there are also very good theoretical reasons for reading and rereading Freud himself. All the more so for lesbians, I suggest, whose self-definition, self-representation, and personal and political identity are not only grounded in the sphere of the sexual, but actually constituted in relation to a sexual difference from socially dominant, institutionalized, heterosexual forms.

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Introduction @ xiii should be no need to say it) to reduce lesbian subjectivity to a mere matter of sexual behavior or sexual acts, as if these could be isolated from all other aspects, qualities, affects, social determinations, and achievements that make up each human being as a complex individual and a unique contributor to her or his culture. Nor is it, therefore, intended to elide or diminish the symbolic and material effects of other cultural, and most significantly racial, differences in the constitution of the social subject; on the contrary, it underscores the central role that sexuality plays both in subjectivity, in the ways one understands and lives one’s life, and in all sociosymbolic forms, especially the construction of “race” as well as gender.

What has psychoanalysis to offer a theory of lesbian sexuality? For one thing, in the perspective of Freud’s theory of sexuality as perversion, lesbianism would no longer have to be explained by Freud’s own concept of the masculinity complex. This amazingly enduring notion, which recasts homosexuality in the mold of a normative heterosexuality, has consistently precluded the conceptualization of a female sexuality autonomous from the male. Moreover, with regard to lesbianism, the masculinity complex has little or no explanatory power, for it fails to account for the non-masculine lesbian, that particular figure that since the nineteenth century has baffled sexologists and psychoanalysts, and that Havelock Ellis named “the womanly woman,” the feminine invert. Secondly, if perversion is understood with Freud outside the moralistic, religious, or medical frames of reference, as a deviation of the sexual drive from the path leading to the reproductive object—that is to say, if homosexuality is merely another path taken by the drive in its cathexis or choice of object, rather than a pathology (although, like every other aspects of sexuality, it may involve pathogenic elements)—then Freud's theory contains or implies, if by negation and ambiguity, a notion of perverse desire, where perverse means not pathological but rather non-heterosexual or non-normatively heterosexual.

This book is an eccentric reading of Freud, through Laplanche and the Lacanian and feminist revisions, for the purpose of articulating a formal model of perverse desire. While my theoretical argument proceeds from the analysis of literary and filmic texts, and attends to the psychic and social modalities of lesbian sexuality, I

y Le lude. thay perverse desire 1 m right be usefully considered xiv E Introduction in relation to male homosexuality or even to forms of sexuality that appear to be heterosexual but are not so in the normative or reproductive way. Having stated that my goal is the articulation of a formal model, I hasten to add that formal does not mean infinitely generalizable or valid for anyone at any time, in short, a theoretical model with universal pretensions. As the authors of one of my epigraphs say of Freud’s theories of desire, the only guarantee any theory can give about itself is to expose itself as a passionate fiction (Bersani and Dutoit). I shall endeavor to remind the reader, as discreetly as it can be done without offense to critical and stylistic conventions, that my theoretical speculations and my reading of the texts follow the yellow brick road of my own fantasies, the less-thanroyal road of my personal or experiential history.

Thus, if I return to the authority of Freud, it is in part because his work is exemplary of the mode of theorizing that exposes itself as a passionate fiction and a self-analyzing practice; but it is also because, although based on his own experience as a male-sexed and -gendered, racially marked, bourgeois subject in turn-of-the-century Vienna, his passionate fictions resonate in my life, for better or for worse, as they do in the lives of other women of my culture and generation. What I shall try to articulate is how the signification and a certain working of desire that can be read in Freud's theory of sexuality may be recast in relation to what he could not imagine but others can—a lesbian subjectivity. Therefore, I shall also look at other passionate fictions and scenarios of desire that, in representing lesbian sexuality, not only resonate with my own but much more closely approximate them.

From the reading of psychoanalytic narratives and other fictional and critical texts, my argument will develop more in the form of a dialogue or dialogic meditation than as a straightforward exposition. Its progress will be interrupted by detours, deviations, and side arguments in the effort to address questions that each text brings up, requiring temporary shifts in focus and direction. But the concerns of the book remain consistently in sight. In Part I, after the “perverse” reading of Freud in chapter 1, chapter 2 retraces the early psychoanalytic discourse on female homosexuality through the case studies written by Freud himself (“A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease” [1915] and

syehowenesis nfa paeafi Homosexuality in a Woman” [1920}),

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Introduction W xv

J. H. W. van Ophuijsen (1924), Ernest Jones (1927), Jeanne Lampl-de Groot (1928), and Helene Deutsch (1932). Whereas most of these papers have not received much feminist attention, Freud’s “Psychogenesis”—as a matter of fact, his only case history of a homosexual woman—has been discussed by both heterosexual and lesbian feminists, as has the widely known case history of “Dora” (“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” [1905]), perhaps on a clue by Lacan, who read the two cases together in his 1964 seminar. Somewhat abruptly, therefore, in a chapter concerned with the classic narrative of female homosexuality, I introduce some of the issues at stake in the contemporary feminist discourse on lesbianism, which will be discussed at length in chapter 4.

Part II introduces Laplanche and Pontalis’s pivotal analysis of the structuring role of fantasy in the constitution of the sexual. subject. “An instinctual stimulus does not arise from the external world but from within the organism itself,” writes Freud (SE 14: 118); although the distinctive character of an instinct is its having origin in the body, yet in mental life it can be known only by its representation or “psychical representative” (SE 14: 122). Such representations are the contents of fantasy, and the forms of fantasy, both conscious and unconscious, elaborate them into images and narratives—from the unconscious fantasies underlying dreams and symptoms to conscious daydreams, reveries, and erotic fantasies. These are the scenarios (scripts or stage settings) of the subject's desire. Initially shaped by the parental fantasies and subsequently refashioned with new material drawn in from the outside world, Laplanche and Pontalis argue, the contents and forms of fantasy make up and structure the individual’s psychic life. Thus fantasy, not nature or biology, is at the origin of sexuality as a social, as well as subjective, construction.

Of particular relevance are the original fantasies, which, like myths, “provide a representation of, and a solution to, the major enigmas which confront the child”: the primal scene, Freud’s Urszene, pictures the origin of the individual in parental coitus; seduction, the origin and upsurge of sexuality; and castration, the origin of the difference between the sexes (“Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” 19). The fantasies of origin are cultural myths that have a powerful hold in subjectivity. But they are not carriers of eternal truths;:for:they-are themselves. historically, structured, as well as

Univer ‘doi.org/10.29 f of Unknown Institution xvi W Introduction structuring of each subject's history: they lie “beyond the history of the subject but nevertheless in history” (18). In other words, even the original fantasies are passible of transformation along with historical change, and I will stress this dynamic character of fantasies and their capacity for transformation in relation to social practices and representations, or what I will call public fantasies.

Each of the three chapters in Part IT examines one of the original fantasies as they are inscribed, recast, or redeployed in various textual practices. Chapter 3 is wholly concerned with cinema. It begins with a reading of She Must Be Seeing Things (McLaughlin, 1987), a film that portrays a lesbian relationship foregrounding at once the interdependence of sexuality and fantasy in it (the film literally recasts the primal scene in lesbian terms) and the problem of its representation, how to represent lesbian desire through cinematic codes imbued with heterosexual presumption. The chapter further explores the difficulties involved in the visual representation of lesbianism—how films may represent “lesbians” and yet fail to represent lesbianism as a specific form of sexuality—and discusses critical writings that obscure or minimize that problem by taking too much for granted, or not enough. Then it goes on to address the wider issue of the relations between fantasy and representation, or between private and public forms of fantasy, in the context of the feminist theory of spectatorship and the pornography debate.

The fantasy of seduction is central to the theory and clinical practice of psychoanalysis. In the latter, a fantasy of mutual seduction sustains the process of transference and countertransference that is essential to the therapeutic contract between analysand and analyst, and one of its conditions of possibility. In the theory, it provides a fantasmatic explanation for the upsurge of sexuality: the fantasy of seduction is how the subject initially represents to herself the apperception of the internal pressure of the drives, by imagining it (some say) as coming from the outside in the form of seduction by another, or by responding (others say) to the mother's and other adults’ own fantasies as they handle or physically care for the child, be their stimulating gestures unintentional or deliberate (incestuous). Feminists have been as critical of this seduction theory as of the patriarchal prerogative written into the psychoanalytic contract. Yet the objections stand in contradiction with the interest increas- Sine And feminists.in.psychoanalysis as patients,

Introduction W xvii interlocutors, analysts, or theorists, from the time of Freud to today (feminism and psychoanalysis are of approximately the same age). I will propose in chapter 4 that the seductiveness of psychoanalysis for women owes to its acknowledging woman, the hysteric, as subject of desire and to the power it grants women in the transferential contract—the power of seducing and being seduced as sexed and desiring subjects.

Similarly, I speculate, the seductiveness of lesbianism for feminism lies in the former’s figuration of a female desiring subjectivity to which all women may accede by virtue of their “homosexual” relation to the mother. This accounts for the maternal imaginary of feminism, an idealized or fantasmatic construct in which the mother, Oedipal or pre-Oedipal, stands for what all women have in common as women, socially and sexually, including a tendency toward bisexuality, a fluid or oscillating pattern of identifications and object-choices. Without denying for a moment that the relation to the mother has a fundamental influence on all forms of female subjectivity, I will argue that woman-identification and desire or object-choice do not form a continuum, as some feminist revisions of Freud would have it. The seduction of the homosexual-maternal metaphor derives from the erotic charge of a desire for women which, unlike masculine desire, affirms and enhances the female-sexed subject and represents her possibility of access to a sexuality autonomous from the male. But in the great majority of feminist psychoanalytic writings (Rose, Doane, Silverman, Sprengnether, Gallop, Jacobus, etc.), such access is paradoxically secured by erasing the actual sexual difference between lesbians and heterosexual women. This prevents the understanding of lesbianism not only as a specific form of female sexuality but also as a sociosymbolic form; that is to say, a form of psychosocial subjectivity that entails a different production of reference and meaning.

Chapter 5 analyzes the fantasy of bodily dispossession in two texts that, in all ways except their militant defiance, stand at great distance from each other, Radclyffe Hall's classic novel of female inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928), and Cherrie Moraga’s Chicana feminist play Giving Up the Ghost (1984). While stressing the many differences between the two texts, I suggest that the fantasy scenarios they inscribe are similarly structured by an original fan-

delaras Tetasy Of castrationrand-that-esch fantasy recurs in other lesbian self-

E-book, Bloomington N USA: Indiana Univers ity j Br 1994, https://dol.org/10 AS YES Ç ove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution xviii W Introduction representations. But a symptomatic reading of the texts, indebted to Bersani and Dutoit’s perverse reading of Freud, instigates a reconsideration of the meaning of castration in relation to the female body and of the role of the paternal phallus in the signification of desire. I conclude that the castration complex rewrites in the symbolic as lack of a penis what is a primary narcissistic loss of body-image, a lack of being that threatens the imaginary matrix of the body-ego. On the disavowal of this lack depend what I call perverse desire and the formation of a fetishlike object or sign that both lures and signifies the subject’s desire, at once displacing and resignifying the wished-for female body. My reading of The Well of Loneliness in light of Freud’s account of fetishism diverges sharply from Hall’s own views of sexuality (informed by Havelock Ellis) as it does from most contemporary feminist interpretations of the novel. And yet it is the reading of Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost, or rather, reading the two texts together, that enables a perverse reading of Hall (and of Freud). For it is only retroactively, from a moment in Western history when the symbolic is being altered by the production of the feminist, gay, and anti-racist discourse exemplified in Moraga’s work, that it is possible to see the trace of a perverse desire in the ideologically conservative novel of Radclyffe Hall and to follow that trace through the ambiguities in Freud’s work.

That I have tried to read Freud back into Moraga’s text may seem both inappropriate and something of an appropriation: inappropriate, in view of the widely voiced feminist objection to psychoanalysis as a Eurocentric theory of the white, middle-class, Western, and modernist subject, and therefore inadequate to account for non-white, postcolonial, and postmodern oppositional subjectivities (a notable exception to this view is Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse”). At the same time, it may seem an appropriation of the writings that inscribe those subjectivities to the end of rereading and rewriting, once again, the story of that white, middle-class, Western, and female subject. In reading Moraga with Hall and with Freud, however, I find that the subject of perverse desire is not a character of that story—her very perversion denies her citizenship in that “normal” world. She is part of another story not (yet) written, a subject overdetermined by fantasies that are, on the one hand, grounded in specific social histories but, on the other, open to the mobility of desire and to a multiplicity fidiscordant: discontses: practices, and representations.

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The ways in which subjectivity, fantasy, desire, and the drives themselves are oriented, structured, and restructured by psychic and social images, by technologies of the self as well as by the technology of sex (in Foucault's words), are the topic of Part III. Gathering together the threads of an argument advanced somewhat discontinuously in the previous chapters, chapter 6 elaborates a model of desire that goes beyond the Oedipus complex and in its own way resolves it. Meandering through recent works on female fetishism (Schor, Apter, Grosz) and its relation to various forms of sociosexual masquerade (Riviere, Lacan, Case), the argument circles back to the suggestion I drew from Freud's Three Essays and Deutsch’s paper on female homosexuality in Part I—the notion of a sexuality of component instincts, which, unlike infantile polymorphous perversion, is inclusive of phallic and genital drives but, unlike “normal” sexuality, is not bound to a necessary phallic, genital, and heterosexual primacy. Reframed in the perspective of perverse desire, the picture of female homosexuality as a “return to the mother” appears to be rather an instinctual investment in the female body itself, whose loss or lack the fetish serves to disavow. This investment, I suggest, is both manifested and overdetermined by practices—practices of representation as well as specifically sexual practices—which inflect sexual identity or, as I prefer to say, sexual structuring.

Some women have “always” been lesbians. Others, like myself, have “become” one. As much a sociocultural construction as it is an effect of early childhood experiences, sexual identity is neither innate nor simply acquired, but dynamically (re)structured by forms of fantasy private and public, conscious and unconscious, which are culturally available and historically specific. The translation of public fantasy into private fantasy in sexuality, like the join of individual experience and social meanings in identity, I propose in chapter 7, rests on a process of mediation akin to what Peirce called habit, the term by which (in Alice Doesn't) I sought to identify the semiotic juncture of inner and outer worlds. In order to describe the process by which the social subject is produced as a sexual subject and a subjectivity, I consider sexuality as a particular instance of semiosis, the more general process joining subjectivity to social signification and material reality. Thus Peirce’s notions of interpretant and habitde Lauretis, Te cha The nge m nay, Serve, to articulate, Freud's privatized view of the inter-

E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Ins stitutior 1 xx @ Introduction nal world of the psyche with Foucault's eminently social view of sexuality, by providing an account of the manner in which the implantation of sexuality as perversion actually occurs in one subject, one body-ego.

Finally, in titling this book The Practice of Love, I want to emphasize the material, embodied component of desire as a psychic activity whose effects on the subject constitute a sort of habit or knowledge of the body, what the body “knows” or, better, has come to know about its instinctual aims. In resignifying the demand for love, the sexual and social practices of lesbianism can effectively (re)orient the drives by providing a (new) somatic and representational ground for the work of fantasy.

de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

PART ONE Psychoanalysis and Lesbian Sexuality

My tactic has always been to take an apparently classic theme in Freudian psychoanalysis, and to call it into question, challenge it, and problematize it.

—Jean Laplanche (New Foundations for Psychoanalysis 1)

de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. E-book, Bloomington IN USA: Indiana University Press, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2979/ThePracticeofLove. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Chapter 1 Freud, Sexuality, and Perversion

Freud's theories of desire perform a certain violence against the very order on which their exposition depends. And perhaps the only guarantees we have of their “authenticity” are the agitations, and doctrinal uncertainties and mobility by which they are irremediably exposed as passionate fictions.

—Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit (vii)

“One must remember that normal sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object,” wrote Sigmund Freud in one of his lesser-known case histories. “In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse, except that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted” (SE 18: 151). The observation that the “practical reasons” of psychoanalysis as a social (clinical) practice were, as they still are, often at odds with its purer theoretical reason is hardly new or, consequently, very interesting. On the other hand, to read Freud's theories as passionate fictions is far more interesting a project, but one riskier and inevitably contested. This is especially so if such a reading project is carried out in the context of feminist theory, and all the more so in the effort to articulate a theory of lesbian sexuality.