Argentina and Its Discontents: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Limits of Redescription

Abstract

This dissertation explores the political effects of the widespread diffusion of psychoanalysis outside the clinic in Argentina, specifically in Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, a world capital of psychoanalysis, is especially noted for how the clinic has spread from the divan into popular culture. I examine the idea of a psychoanalytic culture critically and locate it within a range of discourses and practices, both historical and contemporary, that share a family resemblance. I argue that psychoanalysis is productively viewed as restaging problematics that predate it, reinterpreting them in a new vocabulary. My research points to the adaptability of the paradigm and its performative effects, decentering its self-representations as a stable and autonomous field. I also show, however, that beyond the use of psychoanalysis to reproduce the status quo—adaptive or complacent logics—it may be used to redescribe the terms of political debate in a way that opens a horizon of discourse. In this regard, I present a case study in which feminist activists use a psychoanalytic concept of desire to make a critical intervention in a fight over the legalization of abortion. This is not a spontaneous effect of widespread psychoanalytic knowledge, but the result of a strategic campaign intervention; its popular uptake nonetheless depends on the way that psychoanalysis is sedimented as common sense in a broad public. At the same time, its success also depends on a preexisting form that the psychoanalytic claim recapitulates, a form with a long trajectory in Argentina’s human rights tradition. Drawing on 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation contributes to a body of scholarship about the historical relationship of psychoanalysis and politics, of which there are few empirical studies in contemporary societies. In addition, this work presents a case study of what is often confined to theoretical speculation, the possibility of a politics of desire, following what happens when it is taken to the streets in a major political campaign.