Destroying the “Human” for the Survival of the World: A Proposal for a Temporally Dense Psychoanalytic Subject

ABSTRACT

Despite the pandemic upending in-person clinical treatments, psychoanalysis struggles to conceptualize a frame that is truly open to a world beyond the singular, human only dyad. This article challenges psychoanalysis to blowup the frame of practice by destroying the very subject of the work – the human. Integrating key concepts from anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author contends that the category of the human is inherently and irreparably violent; the undergirding onto-epistemological system for the formation of white settler colonial, heteropatriarchal subjectivity and its co-created violences of enslavement, dispossession, genocide, mass extinctions, and ecological destruction. Because psychoanalysis has evolved around this Enlightenment subject that renders certain people “human,” and all others disposable, its frame and focus is designed to uphold, not resist, biopolitical and ecological violence. Thus, psychoanalysis is onto-epistemologically unfit and unable to effectively address social violences and the climate crisis while emanating from this exceptionalist “human.” Integrating anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author, using examples from clinical work online, proposes a different form of subjectivity, one that is co-emergent with “dense temporalities” of the more-than-human. Only through such a temporally dense, transcorporeal subject can psychoanalysis hope to subvert the world of human destruction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ As I’ve written elsewhere, settling on a term to identify all those objects, beings, and systems within “our” environments is complicated and typically still linguistically human-centric. Options include nonhuman, other-than-human, beyond human, etc. I am using the more-than-human to indicate dynamic assemblages, as will be described. I hope this conveys a sense of everything, all beings, objects, systems and more, beyond the enlightenment subject, even as it uses this subject as a base referent. I fear such a reference is needed at this point in time.

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Notes on contributors

Katie Gentile

Katie Gentile, Ph.D., is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. She is the author of Creating bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival and the 2017 Gradiva Award winning The business of being made: The temporalities of reproductive technologies, in psychoanalysis and cultures. She is editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, on the faculties of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy, and the Psychoanalysis and the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center.