Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach

Description

Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian approach presents a startling new way to consider psychoanalytic dilemmas of sexual difference and gender through the meeting of arts and the clinic. Informed by a Lacanian perspective that locates transsexuality in the intermediate space between the clinic and culture, Oren Gozlan joins current conversations around the question of sexual difference with the insistence that identity never fully expresses sexuality and, as such, cannot be replaced by gender. The book goes beyond the idea of gender as an experience that gives rise to multiple identities and instead considers identity as split from the outset. This view transforms transsexuality into a particular psychic position, able to encounter the paradoxes of transitional experience and the valence of phantasy and affect that accompany aesthetic conflicts over the nature of beauty and being. Gozlan brings readers into the enigmatic qualities of representation as desire for completion and transformation through notions of tension, difference and aesthetics through examining the artwork of Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois and the role played by confusion in the aesthetics of transformation in literature and memoir. Each chapter of the book presents a productive take on understanding the psychoanalytic demand to sustain and consider the dilemma that the unconscious presents to the knowledge and recognition of gender. Fundamentally, this work understands transsexuality as a creative act, rich with desire and danger, in which thinking of the transsexual body as both an analytic and a subjective object helps us to reveal the creativity of sexuality. Ideal for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers as well as students of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, literature studies and philosophy, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning offers a unique insight into psychoanalytic approaches to transsexuality and the question of assuming a position in gender. Cover......Page 1 Half Title......Page 2 Title Page......Page 4 Copyright Page......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Table of Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 10 Introduction......Page 12 1 Transsexuality as a state of mind: questions of learning and indeterminacy......Page 18 Transsexuality of everyday life......Page 20 Embodied apprehension......Page 21 Aesthetic crisis in psychoanalysis......Page 24 2 The aesthetics of transitioning......Page 32 Primal encounters......Page 35 Transsexuality as psychic space......Page 38 Sublimation, perversion and death......Page 40 The art of sublimation......Page 43 3 Narrating transsexuality: transition from memoir to literature......Page 47 Truth or dare: adolescent stories of origin......Page 48 Adolescent belief......Page 54 Reading and writing the body......Page 55 The act of re-writing......Page 57 Phantom writer......Page 60 4 Transsexual surgery: a novel reminder and a navel remainder......Page 64 Identification and the body’s excess......Page 65 Transsexuality as sinthome......Page 66 Identification with the act: a clinical fragment......Page 69 Transsexuality, sexual difference and novel beginning......Page 71 5 The “real” time of gender......Page 75 Cross identification......Page 77 Movement and time in the primary......Page 79 Re-conceptualizing “femininity”......Page 82 Hysteria, femininity and jouissance......Page 83 Matricide and creativity: a question of time......Page 85 Psychoanalysis and the feminine position......Page 86 6 Re-writing the screen......Page 90 Absence and temporality......Page 91 Ground zero......Page 93 Fantasmatic art of disappearance......Page 95 Between burial and survival......Page 96 Sexual difference as dream......Page 98 The transsexual dream interpretation......Page 100 A return to art......Page 102 The trans-sexuality of thinking and memory......Page 103 The transsexual future of an illusion......Page 105 Conclusion: afterwordness......Page 107 Scintillation between two deaths......Page 112 References......Page 114 Index......Page 118