Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, and specifically the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924–2012), Judith Butler challenges the popular Nietzschean account of how responsibility originates by offering a counterhistory of subject formation. I take up the book’s reformulation of the process through which responsibility develops in order to assess its underlying psychological assumptions. I argue that whereas Butler interprets the scene of infant-adult address in terms of relationality, empathy, and responsiveness, my own reading suggests that this interpretation risks obscuring the signal importance of “seduction” in Laplanche’s thought and, in doing so, misses the powerful dynamics of sexuality in the formation of consciousness.
Drink Responsibly: On Morality and Perversion
gila ashtor is an assistant professor of clinical psychoanalysis at Columbia University as well as a faculty member of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and at iptar. She is the author of three books, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (Fordham University Press, 2021), Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (Routledge, 2021) and Aural History (Punctum, 2020). Her primary areas of academic and clinical expertise include identity, trauma, and sexuality. She is in private practice in New York City.
Gila Ashtor; Drink Responsibly: On Morality and Perversion. differences 1 December 2024; 35 (3): 117–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-11525322
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