Proceeding from the conviction that the future of feminist, queer sexuality studies lies in an enhanced ability to identify across rather than solely along the vectors of gender and sexuality, the historiography I’ve practiced here is both retrospective and prospective; it recognizes, on the one hand, that “the past exists in a state of infinite regress” and, on the other hand, that “the past is always coming at us.”91 We are the pivot between past and future, their point of vital and vitalizing connection. What is at stake in this perception is a certain way of critically inhabiting a relation to a distant “other” (who can in various ways seem a lot like the self). Most especially, this practice includes not only recognition of the “blind spots in our current understanding,”92 as is often suggested, but an injunction to explore how blind spots condition the very possibility of thought. For this reason, for all my interest in defamiliarizing the present, the historiography I advocate doesn’t so much put all its “faith in exposure”93 as presume that deconstructive disclosure must be accompanied by recognition of those impasses that resist being thought.
The Questions of Psychoanalysis
So conceived, historiography, like sex, names a knowledge relation. It also bears a certain relationship to psychoanalytic thought. To approach identification and disidentification as psychic fuel in the project of making sexual knowledge suggests the utility of psychoanalysis for historiography. Psychoanalysis takes many forms and has a century-long, multifarious, and contentious history of its own. It names, simultaneously, a theory of how things work (e.g., the drives and its affects), a set of analytic concepts (e.g., the unconscious, repression, displacement), and a program of action (e.g., therapy, hermeneutics). It is the second of these—psychoanalysis as a set of concepts—that is most relevant to my project, as I occasionally take recourse in the analytical resources offered by specific concepts regarding the mechanisms of psychic process (particularly identification, transference, and displacement). I approach psychoanalytic concepts and techniques as themselves historical phenomena and thus part of an evolving and internally self-critical method.94 Far from being the explicit framework of the analysis contained herein (or assuming a total congruence between psychoanalytic methods and the history of sexuality),95 psychoanalysis provides this book with a certain disposition toward knowledge.96
The largest departure of this book from most psychoanalytic work is that its focus is not the desiring subject; its greatest debt is to the idea that knowledge is opaque and recalcitrant.97 Knowledge, in psychoanalysis, is believed to develop through anxiety, resistance, refusal, dependence, disavowal, hate, frustration, and abjection, as well as through identification, desire, attachment, gratitude, fantasy, pleasure, and love. One might opine that the idea of sex as inscrutable and resistant to understanding is merely the mythology of psychoanalysis itself: sex resists understanding so that we can mobilize more techniques to know it. Shifting from the attempt to discover the truth of the subject to exploring how we practice sex-as-knowledge-relation, however, enables us to scrutinize and to think more carefully about the specific forms that resistance and attachment take.
When approached as a mode of knowledge relation, psychoanalysis can be employed not for its prepositional contents (the Oedipal complex, the mirror stage), but for its propositional syntax. This syntax is valuable to the extent that it elicits a questioning attitude not only toward the “incognito of the unconscious”98 but toward processes of knowing and making knowledge. Indeed, a propositional syntax directs attention to the kinds of psychic and social work involved in making sex mean, whether in the past or in the present. If there is one thing this emphasis on labor entails, it is recognition that sexual knowledge is elusive, that it requires us to slow down to catch its peculiar tempo, and that, far from functioning as “the sinecure of self presence,”99 sex is just as likely to disrupt such certitude.
One premise of this book is that the psychoanalytic concept of transference—that dynamic exchange of energies (affective, erotic, and cognitive) between any two interlocutors—as well as the related concept of “working through” can be leveraged for the purposes of historiographic practice. The concepts of transference and countertransference offer a structural understanding of some of the strategies and stakes of one’s engagement with the past. Whether transferential energies exist between analyst and analysand, reader and text, or historian and event, whether they are construed as erotically charged or not, they compose a dynamic and tensile knowledge relation.100 Reversing classic psychoanalytic treatments of “history,” it is helpful to think of the past in the position of the analyst, the historian/critic in that of the analysand. The analysand’s desires, identifications, and unconscious wishes may be foregrounded in the analytic encounter, as the analysand may “identify with, repeat, or performatively reenact forces active in it,”101 but they are understood to be only one aspect of the complex negotiation between “pastness” and the scholar. And yet, certain aspects of the traditional position of analyst to history-as-analysand remain relevant to this encounter. To the extent that the historiographic impulse is an orientation toward a distant and inscrutable “other” (whether construed as similar to or different from oneself), it can adopt an attitude akin to that of psychoanalysis in its listening mode: actively attending to what is and is not spoken, by whom, and in what context. A psychoanalytic orientation to the past, then, entails scholars taking up the position of both the analyst (who listens, who inquires, who is conscious of countertransference) and the analysand (who desires, who identifies with, who engages in transference).
If, as psychoanalytic thinkers are apt to aver, the process of analysis involves closeness and distance, “extreme intimacy and extreme impersonality,”102 this spatialized tension nicely captures the posture toward the past that the following chapters attempt to enact: attentive to the “working through” of issues within early modern texts alongside the “working through” of problems extant between those texts and the present moment. Such a working through does not lead to closure, but to the examination of ongoing forms of relationality and perceptual, psychic, and political processes. Within this intimate yet not-personal encounter, it is not just that the unconscious desire of the observer changes the object of study but that analysis of such desire can produce knowledge about both the observer and the past as an object—including what it is impossible to know.103 This feedback loop, in short, involves and depends upon the transferential historicity of knowledge relations.104
Faithful attention to the past, one might counter, is the aim of all rigorous historical and historicist scholarship. So much is true. But there is one important distinction that underlies my yoking of historiography with a psychoanalytic disposition: when pursued as a method of open-ended interpretation rather than of pinning down meaning; when pausing over the tensions between knowing and not knowing; when lingering with the implications of the limits of knowledge—history making can be seen to perform psychoanalysis in a different key. What draws these strategies into paratactic relation is a process of thinking with. Strolling alongside and pausing along the way, this stance encourages a critical aptitude attentive to the caesuras, the gaps and false starts, the moments of inarticulacy, that structure and punctuate narratives, methods, and analyses of sex.105
Psychoanalysis, Early Modernity, Queer Studies
My emphasis on psychic work and on thinking sex transferentially aligns Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns with certain tendencies within both early modern studies and queer studies. Early modern critics whose interests in desire and its vicissitudes are frankly epistemological provide the closest cognate to my own.106 For instance, I share with Ben Saunders a wish to understand “the relation of desire to understanding”107 and recognize with him that this relation is caught up in the unknowable “wild card” of our own desires.108 The subject’s failure to know likewise motivates Graham Hammill’s observation that “while Freud and Lacan are both very sure of what sexuality is not, neither is very sure at all of what it is. What makes psychoanalysis of great interest to the study of sexuality is this uncertainty.”109 Furthermore, “the difficulty that psychoanalytic thought has with sexuality is symptomatic of sexuality itself as an object of critical knowledge and historical analysis.”110