Cassandra B Seltman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Cassandra B Seltman

The Object of Comedy, 2019

In this performative exchange, psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman and attorney/artist Vanessa Place ... more In this performative exchange, psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman and attorney/artist Vanessa Place enact the classic comedy double act, playing straight man and comic to confound not just the idea of a proper response, but the impossibility of a proper question. Executed in the form of a quasi-academic dialogue, the two circle the concept of comedy as performance in the inevitability of performance as inherently comic. The interview is a consultation between two professions bound to a code of ethics and toward an imaginary telos, with an unruly cartoonish third—“getting” both the law and its joke. If the artist’s performance is a mimesis without a truth, the analyst’s performance is that the truth is mimetic. The point is never to clarify or resolve, but to keep the ongoing contronymic appointment.

Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018

ABSTRACT With appropriated objections by Cassandra Seltman, Vanessa Place cross-examines the #MeT... more ABSTRACT With appropriated objections by Cassandra Seltman, Vanessa Place cross-examines the #MeToo movement.

Public Seminar, 2020

How do we feel free in a body with limits? How do we withstand psychical states of excruciating a... more How do we feel free in a body with limits? How do we withstand psychical states of excruciating ambivalence? How can we depend on others, when what we depend on is disappointing, desirous, and unpredictable?

These are the questions brought into the consulting room of a psychoanalyst. Often these questions are posed first as symptoms—dizziness, unbearable longing, emotional numbness, stomach pain, addiction, crushing fatigue. These symptoms continue to repeat until they have been spoken within the analytic relationship. As our technological and sexual landscape changes, our original questions of meaning, dependency, and pleasure still insist—yet the mode of reply is transformed by our material conditions, ushering waves of new and usual symptoms into the psychoanalyst’s (now virtual) office.

Danielle Knafo, psychoanalyst and writer, suggests that twenty-first century psychoanalysis must continue to interrogate these questions, not by “updating” its practices, but by returning to the fundamental concerns of psychoanalysis—sex, aggression, and the unconscious mind. The field of psychoanalysis concerns itself with observing the presence of meaning, wherever it may be placed. “Sex is not simply what we do; it is what we mean,” Knafo writes.

I spoke with Knafo about her new book, The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis, which is constituted much like a landscape painting, surveying with panoramic scope the ‘ins and outs’ of contemporary trends in technology, sex and gender from a psychoanalytic perspective. Her book bridges our disparate thinking on the sexual and technological instinct—we fashion machines in an attempt to transcend limitation. Just like sex, “we use technology to cope with threat, lack, and mortality itself, and to provide us with stimulation, novelty, and pleasure.”

Readers of this book need not be psychoanalysts: it reads more like a sociological study than a psychoanalytic textbook, presenting phenomena simply and directly through pop culture, statistical data, and clinical illustrations. Knafo surveys the technological paraphernalia of our sex lives, from the steam-powered vibrator of the Victorian era to the 10,000 dollar RealDoll available today. Her writing looks toward the future, and gives us an idea of what she believes we should expect—for instance, the prediction that marriage to robots will be legal by the middle of the century.

Modern Psychoanalysis , 2019

Twenty-first century psychoanalysis, Thomas Svolos. London: Karnac, 2017. 294 pp. In Twenty-First... more Twenty-first century psychoanalysis, Thomas Svolos. London: Karnac, 2017. 294 pp. In Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis Thomas Svolos presents a collection of his work from the early 2000s, essays and lectures broadly covering issues of diagnosis, countertransference, medication , addiction, the body, psychosis, fantasy, and of course what brings us to treatment-the symptom. Svolos denies psychoanalysis as a system, and therefore the book is not systematic. He opens with the wager that if a form of psychoanalysis is to survive in the twenty-first century, it will be a Lacanian psychoanalysis. Svolos examines how the encounter of psychoanalysis with post-modernity in the 1960s changed the relationship of theory to the symptom. Should the symptom be read? Perhaps celebrated and enjoyed, as Deleuze suggests? At this time the culture industry is diagnosed, labeled "late capitalism," the term popularized by Marxist and activist Ernest Mandel, and picked up by twentieth-century critical theorists belonging to the Frankfurt school, Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson. Late capitalism, although like all broad labels varying in meaning and connotation , generally suggests a movement away from any possibility of socialism and a reinforcement of the domination of the economy over our bodies and minds. The phrase has seen renewed interest in the past decade, picked up more broadly outside of neo-Marxists and critical theorists.

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019

Writer and psychotherapist Cassandra Seltman spoke with Webster about her new book, Conversion Di... more Writer and psychotherapist Cassandra Seltman spoke with Webster about her new book, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis in which she offers radical new ways of understanding the psychosoma. Never shying from the personal, Webster offers a brave investigation of the many pains and pleasures of a body in analysis.

Psychoanalysis is often accused of being mere repetition of old jargon, Oedipal reductions, and t... more Psychoanalysis is often accused of being mere repetition of old jargon, Oedipal reductions, and the discursive rules of Freud and Lacan. The session becomes a repetition of theory, and theory a repetition of the session. In Stein’s 1934 lecture, “Portraits I have Written and What I think of Repetition, Whether it Exists or No,” Stein remarks, “is there repetition or is there insistence. I’m inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition” (228). Something of this question (that characteristically lacks a question mark) resonates in the work of Lacan. Insistence is the point of entry for Lacan in his “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,”

Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism (Wiederholangszwang) finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the signifying chain. We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-sistence (or: eccentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we are to take Freud's discovery seriously (11).

Lacan reads Edgar Alan Poe’s story as an illumination of Freud’s repetition compulsion. The insistence here has to do with what is beyond the pleasure principle. If we return to Stein, that is all to say, repetition must bring with it difference. Perhaps this is why we have the old Latin saying, “repetition is the mother of all learning” (and it’s less precise modern platitude, “practice makes perfect”). A psychoanalysis is contingent on this truth.

ALENKA ZUPANČIČ is professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School and at the University ... more ALENKA ZUPANČIČ is professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School and at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia. She is a preeminent scholar in the Ljubljana School of psychoanalysis, founded in the late 1970s by Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and others, which draws together Marxism, German idealism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to facilitate — much like an analyst — a mode of “listening” to sociocultural phenomena. Members of the school deploy linguistic theory to cast light (and shadows) on history, politics, art, literature, and cinema.
In her early work, such as her 2000 book Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, Zupančič sought to link trends in continental philosophy with the insights of contemporary psychoanalysis. In 2008, she published The Odd One In: On Comedy, which applies philosophical and psychoanalytic insights to the processes at work in the practice of comedy. She also draws together Kant, comedy, and psychoanalysis in her ambitious book Why Psychoanalysis?: Three Interventions (2008). Her critical project explores the relations between the sexual and the ontological, the comedic and the unconscious, the ethical and the political.
I spoke with Zupančič about her new book, What IS Sex? (2017), in which she argues that sex is the place of meeting between epistemology and ontology, the messy net that spans the gap between knowing and being. (Her colleague Žižek’s own 2017 volume, Incontinence of the Void, is a response to her book.) What IS Sex? models for us a way to glimpse — and draw into the light — that hidden, obscure, and mysterious entity, the unconscious.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

PATRICIA GHEROVICI is a Lacanian psychoanalyst practicing in Philadelphia whose work seeks to bri... more PATRICIA GHEROVICI is a Lacanian psychoanalyst practicing in Philadelphia whose work
seeks to bridge several key divides: between psychoanalysis and activism, and between the complex language of theory and the needs of a broad readership. Gherovici’s work shows how psychoanalysis can have relevance in a trans discourse that has become simplified by pop culture journalism.Writer and student of psychoanalysis

Cassandra B. Seltman spoke with Gherovici about her book Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), in which she proposes new and depathologizing approaches to our understanding of transgenderism. Her upcoming book Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change:

Lacanian Approaches to Sexual and Social Difference will be published by Routledge in 2016.

Logos Verlag Berlin, 2017

Katharina: In dance therapy we explore how our behavior is reflected in our movements. T he danc ... more Katharina: In dance therapy we explore how our behavior is reflected in our movements. T he danc e therapist is trained to see these physical and emotional patterns in movement through the s ys tem of Laban Movement Analysis. Yet this information is often not s hared with the client bec ause it s eems to be too c omplex to be understood without training. The information is kept as the professional language that is shared by and w ith professionals. T he dance therapis t does interventions; the client usually is not ge tting the full pic ture. But w hat if w e w ork with people that are experienced in personal process, movement and/or therapy? Could we find a w ay to offer the us e of Laban Analysis as a method to s elf -development and growth? How c ould w e c reate a model that offers w ays for c lients to c reate their own interventions? T hese were the questions J oanna and I w ere as king when we began to form Moving Our Selves.

Public Seminar, 2018

Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called “The ontology of t... more Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called “The ontology of the rape joke,” organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, “Rape joke.” The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with a reprint of Patricia Lockwood’s arresting poem, “Rape Joke.” The panel sought to examine the roles rape jokes play for the cultural body. This issue went to press just as the allegations against Harvey Weinstein hit the headlines. As the powerful white men tumbled and #MeToo ramped up, the panelists decided they wanted to expand their analyses and rethink these forms of sexual violence. Katie Gentile’s “Give a woman an inch, she’ll take a penis” was published here in January, followed by Virginia Goldner’s “Sexual harassment: Seeking the pleasures of ‘consent’ under duress.”

Los Angeles Review of Books

FELIX BERNSTEIN’S debut essay collection, Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry, is not what you would ... more FELIX BERNSTEIN’S debut essay collection, Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry, is not what you would expect from a 23-year-old, Brooklyn-based writer and artist. This is not a book of cosmopolitan post-internet lyric poetry. Instead, Notes begins with a long essay (including an appendix and footnotes) that mockingly critiques the various trends in American experimental poetry since the 2000s, charting the Conceptual Poetry scene that has revolved around Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin, Vanessa Place, Caroline Bergvall, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rob Fitterman.

Born in 1992, Bernstein swerves in and out of the scenes he discusses, the millennial conditions he diagnoses, and the “new sincerity” he critiques. His own self-suspicion flippantly resists the notion of network building that his father, Charles Bernstein, so neatly perfected with his original publication of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the 1970s (and then later with his institutional curatorial projects — the Electronic Poetry Center and PennSound). His attitude puts him at odds with some of his peers. Bernstein takes to task those urbane poets who, in his view, attempt to update the New York School and pledge allegiance to coterie and art in the name of queerness and subversion. Yet he self-consciously makes these same moves himself.

Book Chapters by Cassandra B Seltman

The dyadic center of Caponegro’s novella, “Ill-Timed,” is heavy with puns and syntactic acrobatic... more The dyadic center of Caponegro’s novella, “Ill-Timed,” is heavy with puns and syntactic acrobatics. As a signature of Caponegro’s work, signifier sinks constantly into signified, all language is subject to associative play, disappearing only to emerge again on another psychical plane. Paula, our ghostly pale half of the dyad fantasizes about the inner monologues of a chorus of imagined onlookers, “Who knew that Ichabod Crane has a twin sister? Go back to tarrytown, and do not tarry, Ichabodess!” chant the spectators. Or should we say icky-body?” The rich psychological world of the characters combined with an attention to the phonic life of words makes this piece a ripe candidate for a Lacanian reading.

The Object of Comedy, Performance Philosophy, Chapter 15, 2020

In this performative exchange, psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman and artist Vanessa Place enact the... more In this performative exchange, psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman and artist Vanessa Place enact the classic comedy double act, playing straight man and comic to confound not just the idea of a proper response, but the impossibility of a proper question. Executed in the form of a quasi-academic dialogue, the two circle the concept of comedy as performance in the inevitability of performance as inherently comic. Seltman, a practicing analyst, enjoins Place, a practicing criminal defense attorney, by way of the prop––the slip of the tongue that is fundamental to “getting” both the law and its joke. Place argues that her use of voice and language casts ideology into a set of sculptures, capable of consideration. Seltman dissents, counseling that things are not as different as they may seem. Seltman evidences a skepticism toward the liberties assumed by Place and the potential echoing of violent repetition. Place refuses the impact of her violence by cartoonishly surviving its consequences. The interview is effectively a consultation between two professions bound to a code of ethics and toward a more imaginary telos, with an unruly third. The fundamental ethical mandate of the psychoanalyst is to outwit the censor in order for the patient to confess freely, while the fundamental obligation of the lawyer is to serve as a mouthpiece so the client can keep their mouth shut. The artist suspends language as a rhetorical intervention into its functional production and obscene assimilation, rendering audible that which is otherwise absorbed without friction. For Place, context is consent; for Seltman, consent may be contingent on content. If the artist’s performance is a mimesis without a truth, the analyst’s performance is that the truth is mimetic. The point is never to clarify or resolve, but to keep the ongoing contronymic appointment.

Book Reviews by Cassandra B Seltman

European Journal of Psychoanalysis , 2021

Lacan is often criticized by American practitioners for not being “clinical” enough—too theoretic... more Lacan is often criticized by American practitioners for not being “clinical” enough—too theoretical and involved in his elaborate cosmology to share any practical expertise. Nonetheless, he has significantly influenced clinical norms in France, Italy, Argentina, and Mexico, among other European and Latin countries (Svolos, 2017, p. 63). In the United States, Lacanian psychoanalysis has not seen the same “success” in the clinical domain. Selections of Lacan’s major works have been translated into English by Alan Sheridan in 1977, and in full by Bruce Fink in 2006. While his concepts have been readily adopted in English-speaking academia by fields such as critical theory, film theory, and linguistics, American clinicians have struggled to translate the theory into practice. “I’ve tried but I just don’t get it” are words commonly exchanged when his name surfaces at the proverbial water cooler. While Lacan considered himself a Freudian, many contemporary psychoanalysts fail to find the clinical Freud in Lacan’s teachings. Thus, there have been a handful of significant efforts in English to take on the project of making Lacanian praxis and theory less esoteric to the English-speaking practitioner.