Considering great interest psychoanalysis evokes in the West among both professional community and general academia, there has been little said about its fate in the post-Soviet space. The history of psychoanalysis during the twentieth and the twenty first centuries in Russia could be characterized as a protracted intermission superseded by a frantic surge of nearly epidemic interest. However, aside from this debatable history, right now it seems to be the place where lacanian psychoanalysis can get its second wind and overcome its current stagnation.
Pursuing lacanian logic of jouissance as the main discursive operator, psychoanalytic theoretical apparatus elaborated by Alexander Smulyanskiy offers unexpected solutions in what concerns the question of femininity and its crucial importance as a constitutive element of modernity. This article demonstrates the way queer studies diverge from the trajectory of following the fate of contemporary subject and marks a number of theoretic solutions that could allow us to analyze contemporary situation more accurately.
Smulyanskiy’s recent book deals with the most sensitive question within psychoanalysis as a clinical and theoretical discipline, namely – the desire of the analyst. "Paternal Metaphor and the Desire of the Analyst" - is his third book and it follows the major trajectory of his thought, set forth during 'Lacan-likbez' seminars and in two previous publications. The last book investigates perturbations of psychoanalysis as a discourse marked by a peculiar and non-analyzed element – namely, Freud’s original desire. Having provided a comprehensive commentary on contemporary psychoanalytical deadlocks invoked by a dubious position of analyst’s desire, the author manages to introduce several fresh, unorthodox concepts, which could provide a brand-new theoretical twist in the field.
The English translation of the interview, given by the prominent Russian theorist and psychoanalyst - Alexander Smulyanskiy. In this text Smulyanskiy presents some of his ingenious elaborations of lacanian psychoanalysis. Despite a widespread belief in the specific damage of contemporary subject, psychoanalytic approach does not reveal any radical transformations in the subject's structure, apart from the perturbations in what could be called the politics of jouissance. Smulyanskiy talks about the discursivity of jouissance beyond the leftist perspective, about the unknown aspects of the desire of the analyst, he introduces publicity as a new gedner and reading as a form of sexuation.