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 But having torqued the framework away from desire-as-subjectivity to sex-as-knowledge-relation, my synthesis of psychoanalysis with historiography attempts a balancing act unconsidered by these critics. If psychoanalysis urges us to stay with contradictions and to mind the epistemological gap, not by stepping over it but by stepping into it,111 an appreciation of historical contingency reminds us that there might be some good reasons on occasion to climb out in order to reach firmer ground. The method I strive to enact greets the charisma of answers with charitable interest but also generous skepticism; it greets naïveté with patience and warm regard; and by taking time to dwell in impossibility, it tries as long as possible to keep multiple options available—while also recognizing when it is necessary to take a stand.
Such stands feel especially urgent in queer studies right now. In my effort to explore the psychic work entailed by thinking sex in and as history, this book pushes against a governing, if underarticulated, assumption in queer studies: that erotic desires and practices are best characterized as pleasure. And here, both Foucault’s separation of pleasure from desire,112 and psychoanalysis, whose concept of jouissance often serves as a touchstone, have a lot to answer for. I have two objections to the queer uptake of jouissance. First, in psychoanalytic thought, jouissance is a far more complex, self-contradictory concept than its anodyne translation as “enjoyment,” “pleasure,” or even “orgasm” (jouir is the French term for orgasm) would suggest. As L. O. Aranye Fradenburg writes: “The concept of jouissance has little in common with the notion of satisfaction. It is libidinal rapture at or beyond the limit of our endurance—most obviously orgasm, but by extension, any ecstasy that depends in some way on the exacerbation of sensuous experience. Jouissance is not pleasure, because it involves unpleasurable excesses of sensation…. Nor does it satisfy ‘me’: ‘I’ lose ‘myself’ in it. ‘I’ am even, all too often, averse to it, because ‘I’ do not want to lose myself in it.”113 As a radical divestiture of the self, jouissance is opposed to the kinds of ego- and identity-affirming gestures that, despite its anti-identitarian polemics, underwrite much queer scholarship.
More important, the queer celebration of jouissance often seems intent on promoting the counterfactual notions that erotic desire inevitably will be experienced in ways that stimulate ascending excitation (either as a continuous arc, movement from plateau to plateau, or through ebbs and flows) and lead, indispensably and inexorably, to a climax of bodily and mental arousal and satisfaction.114 Even Leo Bersani—whose influential analysis of erotic self-shattering “which disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries”115 is framed by the crucial insight that “there is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”116—implies that sex is fundamentally, essentially, about pleasure.117 When presuming enjoyment and gratification as the sine qua non of sex, queer studies might be said to enforce its own it-goes-without-saying: after all, if it weren’t for pleasure, why would we be queer?118 Needless to say, this presumption is based on a convenient forgetting of another psychoanalytic premise upon which much queer theory was founded: that desire, psychically emerging out of the experience and management of loss, as well as negotiations of the boundaries between self and other, repeatedly entails significant evasions of satisfaction. (Queer studies scholars tend to accept this as a tenet of the formation of subjectivity but forget its implications for bodily experience.) Yet, rather than ontologize the notion that desire is always in excess of the capacity to satisfy it, as queer Lacanians are apt to do, I translate this insight into a methodological compass, one that directs our orientation toward obstacles and limits.
To be prosaic about it, the taking for granted of orgasmic “achievement” and sexual “satisfaction” fails to confront the force of compulsions and aversions that animate, direct, and constrain people’s erotic lives—whether these constraints are felt in terms of object choice (including unconscious predilections for certain gendered, raced, and classed bodies), particular body parts or prosthetics (dildos, nipple or cock rings), explicit corporeal activities (looking, sucking, rubbing, penetration), or sites and social contexts (bedroom, bathhouse, hotel, public toilet, park). For every affirmative experience of desire (“I want that”), there implicitly are posed other desires (“I don’t want that), which may be more or less inflexible or aversive (“I might like that with this person or that object, but not here, not now”). For all the thought that has been expended on the cultural penchant for classifying people according to the gender of their erotic partners (and these preferences are now, for good reasons, generally understood to be not born of antipathy), with the exception of psychological and therapeutic discourses, relatively little serious attention has gone into understanding the function of displeasure—not to mention dissatisfaction, disappointment, making do, boredom, and privation—that exist as an undercurrent of many people’s erotic lives.119 Sex for many is a matter of perennial trial and considerable error, not only in respect to attaining “good enough” sex with particular partners, but in terms of preferred bodily acts. Indeed, as Sedgwick noted on behalf of erotic difference,
