Gila Ashtor, "Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia" (Fordham UP, 2021)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books in Psychoanalysis
Episode: Gila Ashtor, "Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia" (Fordham UP, 2021)
Host: Britt Eadlen
Guest: Gila Ashtor, Critical Theorist, Psychoanalyst, Columbia University
Date: November 22, 2021

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Overview: Exploring Queer Theory’s Erotic Blind Spots

In this episode, host Britt Eadlen and psychoanalyst/critical theorist Gila Ashtor discuss Ashtor’s book "Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia." The conversation delves into the historical and philosophical relationships between queer theory and psychoanalysis, centers the ongoing debate around sexuality’s place in subject formation, and unpacks the pervasive but subtle erotophobia in queer theoretical and psychoanalytic discourses. With a focus on Jean Laplanche’s work, the discussion pushes against reactionary rejections of psychoanalysis and advocates for a deeper engagement with sexuality, otherness, and relationality.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins of "Homo Psyche": Revising Queer Theory's Foundations

[03:01]

• Ashtor describes her academic background: M.A. with Lauren Berlant, Ph.D. with Lee Edelman.
• Despite admiration for these foundational thinkers, she found “severe limitations” in their approaches and a recurring sense “something was really missing.”
• The book aims to “figure out what is that thing that’s missing” in queer theory, identifying areas where its provocative claims about sexuality run up against their own conceptual limits.
• She positions her work as simultaneously an homage and a critique: “I try to sort of embrace that because I do believe that’s sort of the spirit of queer theory anyway.”
  Notable quote [03:01–04:49]:

“The book is really an attempt to figure out what is that thing that's missing, what is absent from some of these really stunning formulations.” —Gila Ashtor

2. Queer Theory’s History and Internal Debate

[04:49–06:46]

• Eadlen and Ashtor discuss the self-critical, internally divided nature of queer theory as a discipline.
• The field, although dynamic and eclectic, tends to become “wedded to some of its more popular formulations about itself,” leading to routine anti-normativity.

3. The Significance of the Title "Homopsyche"

[06:46–09:10]

• The title is an intentional play on "homo sapiens," signaling an alternative:
  • It asserts the necessity of the psyche in queerness: “We need the psyche for queerness, we're not getting rid of it.”
  • Insists that “the psyche is sexual…at its fundamental core,” with Laplanche as a decisive influence.
• Pushes back against queer theoretical strands that hope for the “end of subjectivity” or go “beyond the human, beyond consciousness.”

4. Defining Erotophobia and Its Subtle Mechanisms in Queer Theory

[09:10–11:34]

• Erotophobia: Defined not simply as direct aversion to sexuality, but as the denial of sexuality’s intrusive and fundamentally relational character.
• Importance of redefining sexuality: “Sexuality as intrusive, intersubjective and exogenous.”
• Erotophobia is not “in any obvious way” but is tied to a widespread misunderstanding or subtle suppression of sexuality’s full force in theory and practice.

5. Jean Laplanche vs. Freud and Lacan: The Sexual as Other to Itself

[13:12–16:43]

• Laplanche, initially faithful to Freud and Lacan, broke away after critiquing the limits of their sexual theories.
• He critiques Freud for reducing sexuality to instinct and Lacan for reducing it to language, emphasizing instead sexuality’s emergence from encounters with a sexual other.
• Laplanche frames both psychoanalysis and queer theory as disciplines which, despite starting from an impulse to analyze sexuality, continuously “lose their way.”

Notable quote [16:37]:

“Queer theory is not alone in sort of going…starting out with a wish to talk about sexuality…but there's a way that this keeps getting lost.” —Gila Ashtor

6. Queer Theory’s Estrangement from Psychoanalysis

[17:27–22:06]

• Contemporary students and scholars often have an “allergic reaction” to psychoanalysis, viewing it as passé or tainted.
• Ashtor questions what alternative frameworks can offer the same depth for thinking about subjectivity, if psychoanalysis is set aside.

7. Fatigue and Rigidity in Psychoanalytic Readings

[22:06–24:43]

• Overly familiar or rigid Lacanian applications have made psychoanalysis seem rote or sterile.
• Psychoanalysis, however, can and should offer creative and surprising approaches to texts and subjects.

Notable quote [24:43]:

“Psychoanalysis is a way of giving us a language to look for different things and allow us to be surprised by a text.” —Britt Eadlen

8. Is Resistance to Psychoanalysis a Defense Against Sexuality?

[24:43–27:41]

• There is a hypothesis that discomfort with psychoanalysis may actually be a defense against dealing with sexuality and its unsettling dimensions.
• Both psychoanalysis and queer theory, even at their most radical, often slide back into safer, more abstract, or politically palatable formulations that avoid confronting sexuality’s unruliness.

9. Laplanche and the Primacy of the Other in Sexuality

[30:39–36:18]

• Laplanche’s theory: sexuality is not innate but emerges from the infant’s encounter with the sexuality of caregiving adults.
• Both Freud (instinct) and Lacan (language) abstract sexuality; Laplanche insists on its interpersonal, traumatic, and exogenous origins.
• The avoidance of this insight represents “erotophobia” in theory—a retreat to autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Notable quote [36:18]:

“Sexuality leads us away from the familiar illusions about our own independence and toward the discovery of the other in us…he is not even the primary source of his own sexuality.” —Gila Ashtor, reading from her book [36:18]

10. Dependency, Relationality, and the Ethics of Queer Theory

[39:15–45:08]

• True maturity involves avowing our dependence on others, and this relationality is not just social but constitutive of self and sexuality.
• Attempts to escape this (e.g., by appealing to pure “bodies and pleasures” or surface relations) are symptomatic of a denial of psychic complexity and the anxiety aroused by otherness.

11. Critique of Butler and "Psychology as Ideology"

[49:21–51:54]

• Ashtor’s chapter critiques Judith Butler’s transformation of sexual subjectivity into a theory of ideology, losing the specificity of psychological life.
• Butler is deeply engaged with psychoanalysis, but reduces the psyche to the “empty vessel for the deposits of sociality,” missing “how a psychology would actually work.”

12. Meta-psychology: Beyond Simple Application

[52:26–56:50]

• Ashtor distinguishes between mere application of “the psyche” (often just Freud or Lacan) and meta-psychology: theory about theory.
• Advocates for an analytic method where psychoanalytic tools themselves are open to critique, revision, or replacement as needed for richer interpretation.

13. Queerness as Hermeneutic: Reading, Otherness, and the Erotic

[59:03–66:57]

• Both psychoanalysis and queer theory are “projects of reading”—ways of interpreting and engaging with the world and texts.
• Reading itself is inherently relational and erotic: “Reading is always this opening onto an other…” —Britt Eadlen [62:43]
• The erotic anxiety of reading lies in the unpredictable encounter with the Other, where the subject is unsettled and transformed.

14. Current and Future Work: Critical Theory, Cruel Optimism, and Psychoanalysis

[67:10–71:13]

• Ashtor is currently researching intersections of queer theory and critical theory (Frankfurt School), particularly interrogating concepts like “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant).
• She observes a renewed interest in the psychoanalytic dimension within contemporary critical theory, paralleling some of the debates already present in queer theory.

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Memorable Quotes

• "We need the psyche for queerness, we’re not getting rid of it… I think it’s an attempt to insist… that the psyche is sexual."
  – Gila Ashtor [07:47]
• "Erotophobia… doesn’t mean…an obvious repression of sexuality. It’s a denial of sexuality as intrusive, intersubjective, and exogenous."
  – Gila Ashtor [09:47]
• "Sexuality cannot be dissociated from otherness and from the actual other person."
  – Gila Ashtor [30:39]
• "We are always interpreting things and…trying to explain why something is happening and what it means… but we should only count as metapsychology the theories that check out based on the standards of theory-building."
  – Gila Ashtor [56:50]
• "Reading is always this opening onto an other… inherent within reading is this kind of erotic mingling with the other."
  – Britt Eadlen [62:43]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:01 – Gila Ashtor’s intellectual background & motivation for “Homo Psyche”
• 06:46 – Discussion of the book title and its dual gesture
• 09:10 – Defining erotophobia and its theoretical implications
• 13:12 – Laplanche’s break with Freud and Lacan, critique of psychoanalysis’ limits
• 17:27–22:06 – The current generational skepticism toward psychoanalysis in the academy
• 24:43 – Is aversion to psychoanalysis a defense against sexuality?
• 30:39 – Laplanche’s theory: sexuality and the necessity of the sexual other
• 36:18 – Reading from the book: sexuality’s ‘decentering’ effect
• 49:21 – Critique of Butler; psychology vs. ideology in gender theory
• 52:26 – Meta-psychology: critiquing and evolving psychoanalytic reading
• 59:03 – Queerness as hermeneutic: reading as an erotic encounter
• 67:10 – Ashtor’s current research on critical theory, cruel optimism, and psychoanalysis

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Conclusion

This episode offers a rich, nuanced conversation about the necessity of thinking both sexuality and subjectivity within and against the grain of queer theory and psychoanalysis. Gila Ashtor, drawing on Laplanche, presses listeners to grapple with the uncomfortable truth of relational, intrusive sexuality, and the subtle ways even radical discourses may evade its force. For scholars, students, and anyone interested in queer theory, psychoanalysis, or the evolving politics of the psyche, this dialogue provides both a deep critique and an invitation to creative, open-ended theoretical work.

Transcript

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[Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Britt Eadlen]

Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Britt Eadlen and today I am joined by by Gila Ashtore. Hello Gila. So today we are talking about Gila Ashtore and her new book and I'll introduce her. So Gila is a critical theorist, psychoanalyst and writer and teacher at Columbia University and today we're going to be talking about her new book, Homops on Queer Theory and Erotophobia. It was a great read, super interesting, brings up a lot of really intense questions and so I'm really excited to talk about it with you today. So welcome to the show and I'm so excited to talk to you. So my first question for you is a little bit of personal background and so I just want to ask, you know, how did you come to how did you come to thinking about this and thinking in general. And how did this book come about?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, thank you, first of all, Britt, for having me. I've listened to many of your interviews and find them always very interesting. So thanks for including me. How did I come to this? You know, as I mentioned in the book, you know, I studied. I did my master's degree with Lauren Berlin and my PhD with Lee Edelman and learned a lot firsthand. Felt like I had a front row seat to a lot of these theories and how some of whom I think of as some of the best thinkers of some of this work have thought things through. And I adored them and was fascinated by the work they were doing. And it also, for all that, though, left me feeling like there were severe limitations to some of these ideas and. And that they sounded good or they were very appealing, but something was really missing. And I think that the book is really an attempt to figure out what is that thing that's missing, what is not, what is absent from some of these really stunning formulations. And so I think it's in some sense a work of real admiration for a lot of the thinkers that I engage with, but also a lot of conflict. And I try not to shy away from that. I try to sort of embrace that because I do believe that's sort of the spirit of queer theory anyway. And I wanted to push the field to, you know, push the field with me to wonder about what. What might be missing and how could we make things work differently, have new thoughts.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah. I think one of the things that I really appreciated about your book is the kind of cursory, obviously history of queer theory that you give, especially because it shows how I think internally divided and critical. Queer theory always has been and always will be almost as like a constitutive part of what it is, because I don't know. So I'm like, I'm an English literature person and reading queer theory like queer theory as a discipline is just made of so many different people from so many different backgrounds. So it's really such an interesting and dynamic space to think in. And so I. Your interventions are, you know, you're making an intervention, but that's part of queer theory. Yeah.

[Gila Ashtore]

I think it's interesting you say that about the history. I think that one of the effects of being, as I said, about my own history, of being a student of it is you sort of don't have a concept of the history of the field when you're sort of studying it. You're like, this is just the Field. This is just the world. There is no history. It's just always been like this and it will always be like this. And I think part of what I find very encouraging is more recent work, really, in the past 10 years, to try to take a. To take a little perspective on the field and wonder about, like, is it. Does it need to be this way? What can we do that will still keep a queer theory, but that can not be so wedded to some of its more popular formulations about itself? You know, I think that article indifferences that I cite a lot about antinormativity and the sort of frustration with how routine that's become is one major emblem of that kind of wish to push the field a little bit while still keeping it queer theory. But I think that's part of the question.

[Britt Eadlen]

So I think before we get into a deeper discussion, in all of my podcast episodes, I think I like to start with the title because, you know, the title is something that's so important. So when I first read it, homopsyche, I'm wondering how you read it or how you would propose to read it, because on the one hand, you can think of it as like the psyche of the homo. And that's obviously something that you're doing and thinking about the psychology, the psychoanalytic dimension. But I'm also. I also read it immediately as kind of this alternative to homo sapiens. So there is this kind of, I think, a bridge that you're building between kind of a question of subjectivity that psychoanalysis is trying to always get at, as well as something specifically queer or homo about all of these issues. Maybe. Can you just say what. How you're thinking of it?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I think you said it perfectly. I think that's exactly right. I think, you know, partly, I think there's a. It's trying to do two things at once. The title, I think there's an. An internal division in the field between those who want queerness to represent the sort of end of subjectivity in some sense. And it's like beyond the human, beyond subjectivity, even beyond consciousness. So partly it's repudiation of that and it's saying, no, like you're. No, we need the psyche for queerness. We're not getting rid of it. That doesn't work. It's just. It's not going to check out in some of the ways I try to show. But I think secondly, and more importantly, it is to what you're saying. I think it's an attempt to insist on my part that the psyche is sexual. That the psych, you know, at its fundamental core, the way it's constructed, is sexual. And that's where Laplanche comes in for me, as I see him intervening in psychoanalysis to try to really make that argument that even psychoanalysis does not really take that far enough. Does not. It's not like there's a field that's doing it and queer theory is behind. It's actually a genuinely difficult thing to keep in one's head in a certain sense. And so I think that's the nature, what I'm trying to say.

[Britt Eadlen]

So we'll definitely get to the sexual. I think that's kind of the big question of the text. And before we do that, I want to move to the. The subtitle of the book, maybe to give us a little more of a context for listeners. So it's on Queer Theory and erotophobia. Can you kind of sketch out maybe when you say queer theory, what does this mean and how should we think about it as a. As a discipline or as an institutional body? And then what is erotophobia?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I think of, you know, queer theory is many different things to many different people. And it's. I certainly would. Am not interested in, like, this is the one true queer theory versus the others. But definitely the tradition that I'm working in, the tradition within queer theory is much more the version of it that's interested in sexuality as it pertains to subjectivity and to consciousness. I would say, you know, I think of that as really being traced to Sedgwick. Maybe most powerfully, she's maybe the figure for me that I think is most interested in these. In molding queer theory in this way. So I would say. I would say that's the version of it that the book is engaged in. And I think, you know, erotophobia, I'm defining as kind of denial of sexuality as. And here I'm defining what I mean by sexuality as sexuality, as intrusive, intersubjective and exogenous. And so I think that how I'm defining sexuality is very important to the word erotophobia because it doesn't mean that it's a certain redefinition of sexuality that I'm trying to get at in order to then explain why. I think a lot of the field's formulations are erotophobic, but I don't think it's in any obvious way. And I think that's why two things need to happen. I think, first, sexuality needs to be redefined. That's where Laplace comes in for me. And once sexuality is redefined, then we can see where our thinking about it is.

[Britt Eadlen]

Erotophobic. What?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, yeah.

[Britt Eadlen]

So the erotophobic thesis, I think, was something that was so interesting because it was so non intuitive in the sense that when we think of queer theory, we're thinking of, like a very sexual or like really interrogating the sexual and what place it has in the subject, in the individual as well as in societies. And I think, like, that's how we want to think about it. But you've shown so much through this book that there are ways that this thinking is not actually what is happening or that your definition of erotophobic is what is coming out in a lot of these theories. And we'll talk about that later. But you've brought up La Planche a few times now, and I think that is the grounding, the grounding figure, your primary interlocutor. So can you, just, as another contextualizing gesture, maybe explain a little bit about Laplanche and his thinking, especially in relation to psychoanalysis, in how, like, when someone says psychoanalysis, you're going to think of Freud, but a lot of other people are going to think of Lacan as well. How does La Planche come into a constellation with those two as kind of disrupting this normative view of psychoanalysis?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I think, you know, just for some very basic history, you know, La Planche was a student of Lacan's and also an analysis of Lacan, and he really, at the beginning of his career, was very much devoted himself to a very close reading of Freud. He didn't really criticize Freud that much, and he didn't criticize Lacan that much. And there was a very well known conference at Bonneval in 1959, I believe, when Laplace and Leclerc really challenged Lacan in a very important way, Lacan was furious. He stormed out. And that was sort of maybe the beginning of this break. And afterwards, later, more like 60s, 70s and even more so increasingly Laplanche, you know, 70s, 80s and afterward, up until, you know, the 90s, he died in 2012, really became increasingly critical both of Freud and of Lacan. He didn't formulate his criticism of Lacan in a very comprehensive way. It's more embedded in some of these texts. And he uses a lot of Lacan while at the same time challenging him. And in terms of his relationship to Freud, you know, Laplanche very much considers himself both faithful and unfaithful to Freud. He really believes that Freud. Freud had an intuition about sexuality, which was correct. But then Freud and many analysts after him, sort of. He uses the term going astray. They lost their way. They thought they were. They set out to analyze sexuality, they set out to grasp sexuality, but lo and behold, instead, they turned it into an instinct, or they turned it into the environment, or they ended up going down all these paths because it's actually very hard to grasp sexuality in its form. And so he's a very unique figure. There's no school of Laplacians. He also writes very little about the clinical domain. He doesn't really write about patients. He's much more a philosopher by training and an analyst. I think he sees himself much more as a. A critic that is trying to correct a lot of these mistakes that psychoanalysis keeps making. And so, first of all, with respect to queer theory, that's a long way of saying that, you know, queer theory is not alone in sort of going. Starting out with a wish to talk about sexuality or be the discipline that is most interested in interrogating it. Psychoanalysis sees itself that way, too, in many ways, and certainly sees itself as being very brave in some of its formulations about the psyche. And yet, I think, according to Laplanche, about psychoanalysis, and for me, a similar thing with queer theory, that there's a way that this keeps getting lost. There's a way that the impulse to really understand this keeps going astray.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah.

[Gila Ashtore]

For both fields, queer theory and psychoanalysis. But this book is really about how queer theory does that.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah. And I mean, maybe you can say a little more now to kind of go back to an earlier point, and something that you bring up throughout the book is this relation between queer theory and psychoanalysis. Because I think. I mean, there was a huge boom of thinking about it, but then it kind of seems like people want to distance themselves from psychoanalysis as a way of thinking about the queer subject. Like, how do you see this history and what's the gesture to bring it back? And why? In a specifically Laplancian mode.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, it's interesting. I was on a panel last month with Elizabeth Wilson, and she was complaining that graduate students these days are just so anti. Psychoanalytic. They come in and they're like, ugh, we're done. We, like, don't care anymore. It's already. We don't need it. It's irrelevant. And they have these ideas about what psychoanalytic. And she's like, like, I spent the whole semester trying to get them to, like, interrogate their aversion to it or understand where this came from. And it feels kind of hopeless because they're just so settled in their, you know, distance from psychoanalysis. I mean, I guess one question I have even before answering that is I wonder if that resonates with you. Is that something you see? Like, I'd be curious to hear your experience of it, actually.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, I can kind of completely agree with that. So I am. I mean, I'm a graduate student doing psychoanalysis and I feel like a lot of my colleagues are kind of. I mean, I think part of it is due to this whole post critical turn and this idea that, you know, psychoanalysis is kind of this dead subject and it doesn't. It's been done and we have new things to say. But I do think a lot of people come at it not actually having ever read Freud or Lacan or even. Or definitely not La Planche or even other psychoanalytic thinkers. So there's a whole, like, I don't know, once you get told once by some, I don't know, some professor that Freud was a misogynist or whatever. I feel like there's this allergic reaction to psychoanalysis when, you know, psychoanalysis is so huge. Like there's so many different ways to go into it. It's not just Freudian, it's not just the canyon. You can. There's so much to do. And I think. I think a lot of people just don't have that or don't know. So that's my experience.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Elizabeth Wilson was talking about Tompkins. You know, she just wrote a book on Tompkins. She was talking about affect and Tompkins and saying, like, here's another way to do psychoanalysis. Like there are so many ways. And Tompkins had his own very contentious relationship to Freud and to Freudian psychoanalysis. So the fact that they would be in the same category is itself interesting. But yes, I mean, I think in some sense my question always for. For this disregard of psychoanalysis is what do you use otherwise? Like, you know, Laplanche is such a critic of Freud. I mean, he's unrelenting about what Freud gets wrong. So I don't know who. I guess I'm not in particular like sympathetic to people that are trying to bring back Freud in some originary form. I don't even know what that would look like. I'm not even sure what version of psychoanalysis is defensible. You know, in its earliest formulations, it's all been so critiqued and overturned anyway that we're sort of on very different ground than we were, you know, in the 1920s. So I'm, you know, but. But I'm not sure. I always wonder for the people that don't want psychoanalysis because they're tired of thinking about the psyche or the subject in a certain way. Well, then what. Like, what do we use to think about these?

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, I have. I'm like.

[Gila Ashtore]

I'm open. Like, I'm listen.

[Britt Eadlen]

Listening.

[Gila Ashtore]

Like what? I think it's a question. I don't know what you find in.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, I mean, I have that same question. I think a lot of it is. I find something, especially in literary studies is people who are really critical of psychoanalysis want to view texts, like, completely divorced from a subject and are very into that mode of reading that. That is like, I just want to look at the aesthetic object and, like, what does it say? But I. I think. I think, you know, an aesthetic object, not, like, always comes out of some kind of person or like a subject or something with a consciousness and an unconsciousness. And I think that's always a question that you have to ask. And I just. I don't know. I mean, I. I always am wondering, like, where do you. How does this ever relate back to the fact that this was. This is a written text? It's. It didn't just, like, come out of the. The ocean or, like, land on the earth.

[Gila Ashtore]

Right.

[Britt Eadlen]

And so that's my. I have the same question as you do.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, exactly. And I think. I think, you know, I think. I think what would be interesting is to sort of really push psychoanalysis to be more attuned to the complexity of the subject. I think there is a certain fatigue with. I certainly felt it with a kind of, like, rote, applied Lacanian reading of things. It's like you already know what you're looking for in advance. And there is something that can be very tiring about that if it's done in. That are unoriginal, perhaps. But there are so many arguments about what Lacan means anyway and how to use Lacan. And these are not really settled debates. It's such an alive and dynamic field that it feels like there's so much more room to think about the subject in more challenging ways. And I think even within post critique or some of. You know, I know, you know, there are ways that psychoanalysis is seen as utterly complicit in this suspicious mode of reading, but I think. I think there are. I think I'm thinking of, like, someone like Amanda Anderson who, you know, is Then turning to Winnicott or Michael Snedeker, who's tuning to Winnicott.

[Britt Eadlen]

I love his work.

[Gila Ashtore]

And, you know, I think there's a lot of room. I think, you know, someone like Amy Allen, who writes more in critical theory as opposed to queer theory, is really interested in Melanie Pine. I mean, I think people are really newly sort of getting interested in psychoanalysis, but from other directions, you know, because I think there is a felt need for some new material.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah. And I think also I. Exactly what you were saying. I think with. I feel a lot of people think psychoanalysis is, is, has become a really rote method, especially in, like, this pop cultural way of thinking. Like when you read a text, who is the father and who is the son? And he just wants to. And it's. I think, I mean, certainly you can look for those things, but I, I mean, I, I'm the same. I, I, that's, I find that so boring. I think there's something else that you want to be looking for. And I think psychoanalysis is a way of giving us a language to look for different things and allow us to be surprised by attacks.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And I think we could think of, like, what you and I are saying as a kind of sort of more historical explanation or, you know, contextual explanation. But I think you could also, Analytically, I'm sure people would say, maybe Laplanche himself would say that it's a defense against sexuality, that in fact, people are tired of dealing with psychoanalysis because they're just tired of hearing about the queerness as having anything to do with sexuality. And I, you know, I'm of two minds about that. I think we haven't always been talking about sexuality in a certain way way, so I'm not sure we could be defending against him. But, you know, like, that's part of my critique. But I do think there, there did get to be something very. Even the way psychoanalysis was used, even by people who were trying to really reinvent the field. And, you know, I think of Lee Edelman here. I think of Bersani. I think of even Cedric herself, who, you know, I, I adore all of these thinkers, but I think there's a way that the things get away from us. I think there's a way that these ideas about sexuality and about the psyche have a way of turning into very, into concepts that are either very abstract and very far away from the erotic dimension of it. And I think maybe because it's actually very hard to think about those things or focus on these things. Or as literary theorists, we don't want to do it all the time either. Like maybe it's just, I think in some sense, you know, queer theory also has a very political dimension. It's also interested in social change. It's also interested in formulating versions of the subject that can be seen as emancipatory. That means that you kind of want. You want a theory that lends itself to those ideas, you know, leaves use of, of. Lacan is really so much tied up with the political purpose. He wants his own political agenda for queer theory and what he wants it to represent. And naturally, I feel like that's at the origin of the field. It's always been that. But I think that means that that could also constrain us in our thinking if we're constantly trying to think about the only kind of psychoanalysis that will translate well into certain kind of political project. So I try to focus a lot more on just the theory of subjectivity, the theory of mind that we're developing. Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy. Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid Ivy's new energy multiplier.

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[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, well, I think that's a really good segue into thinking into thinking this. And especially because I think in one way, I think a lot of the allergic reaction almost to psychoanalysis is because of the question of the sexual And I think a lot of people either don't want to argue for the. For this kind of primacy or really original status of the sexual. I think, you know, Heidegger has this question, like, we've forgotten the question of being. But I think we could also say, you know, we've forgotten the question of the sexual, and it always needs to be reinvigorated. And I think that's something that queer theory always does and says, like this. This is such a. This is a defining part of our lives. We have to keep thinking it. But I think it's all. There's also a big failure of people to see how the sexual can relate to things that are ostensibly not sexual, like the gathering of bodies in a political space or even just the political in general. So I'm. I'm wondering if you can say more about, like, what is Laplanche doing with the sexual? Because he has a very different view of this, of sex, sexuality, the sexual, et cetera. And maybe, like, how is this, his specific torque, able to help us think about the erotophobia and, like, how to move past that and how to kind of get beyond this phobic reaction we have to the erotic?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I think, you know, I think one of the major points, if not the major point that Laplanche repeats and repeats and repeats and that I tried to. To do in my own critique, is that sexuality cannot be dissociated from otherness and from the actual other person. And what he means by that is a very pointed critique of Lacan, I think, maybe. Well, Freud and Lacan maybe equally. But I think he's very aware and he's very in conversation with Lacan's discourse for obvious reasons. And, you know, I think there's a tendency within psychoanalysis that. There's a tendency within psychoanalysis, you know, that queer theory has, in turn, really replicated in its own formulations. And that tendency is to try to think about sexuality somehow divorced from the actual other person. In our early lives, and Laplanche is saying, guess what? We only get to be sexual beings because we were taken care of as infants by other sexual beings. We wouldn't be sexual otherwise. And we have. Since we have no way of developing without getting the help of caregivers, mothers, fathers, it doesn't really matter who. He says it could be a clone. But we simply biologically cannot take care of ourselves. We're born prematurely compared to every other species. We need someone to take care of us. The fact that we need someone to take care of us means that once a caregiver enters the scene, that caregiver has a sexuality as compared to us. We are kind of like flailing, helpless. We have instincts, we have needs, but we don't have. We're not born with a sexuality, but in the encounter with an actual other person who does have a sexuality, we have to sort of, like, very quickly, very frantically try to make sense of what is being thrown at us from this adult being. And that experience, that need to frantically make sense of things, is in itself what establishes a sexuality in us. So it's exactly that, precisely that move to make sense of the encounter of another person's sexuality that instantiates a sexuality in us. And so, lo and behold, like, we end up sexual and we end up with asexuality, and there's no way around that, but that. So that would be like a mini version of what Laplanche is saying. But he's also saying that Freud has a tendency to end up talking about sexuality as though it's some, like. As though it's something we're really born with by virtue of being humans. It's some id, like force. It is the unconscious. It's just there. It's phylogenetically transmitted. It's, you know, coming from our bodies. Laplanche is like, that's nonsense. That's instinct. You're talking about drive. Sexuality could not be automatic and inherent that way. Then he turns to Lacan and he says, you know, Lacan keeps saying that we are sort of. We have an unconscious by virtue of language. But for La Planche, language sounds very abstract. Language doesn't give us a sexuality. It's language spoken by another person who has a sexuality. It's not just language. And so what he's consistently trying to correct for is this very subtle tendency. I do think it's sort of subtle, but it ends up having quite big ramifications. Subtle tendency to sort of dissociate the emergence of sexuality from the actual other people it emerges from. And he's saying, if we keep closing those, like, openings, you know, those, like. It keeps happening, where sexuality, in essence, slips out of the equation. And that's because the other person gets lost in these formulations. And so if we keep bringing the other person back into it, we're going to. That's the way we're going to get closer to hanging on to what we mean by sexuality. And so I think, to go back to your point, your question about the social element of this, I think one thing we could say is that it's not Only difficult to, to talk about sexuality or to think about the ways that sexuality is everywhere, as you say, in sexual objects or not. But it's also very difficult to talk about and think about other people as really impacting our consciousness. I think that is very uncomfortable. You know, I think it's. I think we like to believe that we're more autonomous and self enclosed than we actually are. And I think that's one of the major things that sexuality presses against or, you know, pushes against, tries to overturn. So I think that's why La Planche would characterize the constant losing sight of sexuality as a recentering. We're back to being just our like, neat, enclosed self sufficient selves in a certain way. And I think that's what. That's the benefit of, of losing sexuality in the way that it keeps getting lost. I don't know if that kind of answers your question or trying to.

[Britt Eadlen]

So in the book on page 18, you have this formulation that I'll just read because I really liked it. Let's see if, however, sexuality can be enlarged beyond genitality and situated accordingly in the context of biopsychical development and relationality. Sexuality leads us away from the familiar illusions about our own independence and toward the discovery of the other in us. To wit, man is not only, not only, no longer at the center of his own universe, but he is not even the primary source of his own sexuality. And this made me think of, you know, Freud, his famous, like the blows to human narcissism when he talks about, you know, the Copernican revolution. We're not the center of the universe, the Darwinian revolution, we're not the center of like, life. And then his blow, which is like, we're not even the center of ourselves. And then, you know, La Planche gives us another blow that our sexuality, something so, something so central to the questions of psychoanalysis and being a subject is not like we are not even at the center of our own sexuality. And I think that that is an anxious, an anxiety producing idea. Like I. It's scary to think that you are so still independent or dependent upon other people.

[Gila Ashtore]

Right? Yeah.

[Britt Eadlen]

Even when you're grown up in your sexual relations.

[Gila Ashtore]

Right, exactly. Right. I think about, you know, my patients or I think about my own experience in analysis where, you know, you're, you know, I hear all the time for patients like, oh, come on, I can't still be affected by that. I'm like, you know, 30 something. And it's like, huh, yes. And like, why would you think you Wouldn't be. And it's like, you know, this frustration at feeling like even this thing which is most intimate, which is most feels like me, this thing that is my desire would somehow be informed or shaped or driven by other people, is. I think it's very frustrating and I.

[Britt Eadlen]

Think.

[Gila Ashtore]

Kind of really, as you said, a blow to our own narcissism, to our own grandiosity, to our own self sufficiency, to our. To imagine that we're like this. I mean, I think it would be interesting to think about queer theory's own relationship to sexuality in those terms. Like, is queer theory itself as much as, you know, I think you called it like an eroto skeptic or as much as it's trying to erotophilic. As much as queer theory is trying to put sexuality front and center, is it also defending itself against the notion that sexuality would not be something we have total control over? And why shouldn't it defend itself against that? Like, why would queer theory transcend those anxieties in some sense?

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, and, you know, I think this, this is very related to a question of queer theory and as well as psychoanalysis, social function or political function or maybe an ethical function as well, that there's this opening up to the other, that, that has to be kind of avowed. You have like, you have to say there are others. And that's actually where I derive some form of my. Whatever constitutes myself. I don't know, maybe if you have like thinking on that, because I think that is such an ethical force within the book that, you know, I don't know, I'm thinking like Sartre, hell is other people. But like, you have to, you have to do it because you can't just be a hermit. Like, you do have to see other people in, in so many different ways.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I think, I think that's right. And I think that's where, you know, Lapanche never tires of saying, like, you know, it does. Like, you literally, functionally, you cannot develop without the encounter with another person. And this is something that Laposh does not think about or talk about. But something very. That I'm interested in a sort of separate vein is, you know, something is coming out of affect theory and affect theory by affect theory, again, another big field that means like 10,000 different things to everyone. But I mean, you know, I'm thinking of affect theory in this vein specifically as it emerges in like, you know, neurobiology. And, you know, Adrian Johnston has written.

[Britt Eadlen]

I love.

[Gila Ashtore]

He's written a lovely book on affect theory. In relationship to Lacan, but early ethic theory, more like the Dimasio guys, things like this, that kind of affect theory for a moment. But, you know, affect theory is sort of at the forefront of recognizing the extent to which our development hinges, as our development of our minds and our bodies hinges on our interaction with our caregivers. So we literally will not develop in the way that we need to without those interactions. I mean, this is like a huge revolution. This is like saying it's, you know, talk about humbling. It's like you, you know, you don't just grow automatically. You don't just grow by yourself. You grow because someone is taking care of you badly. Well, consistently, all those things are sort of a different realm, but someone somewhere is taking care of you in some way or you would not develop. And I think that the fact of that, that I think, you know, sort of is emerging out of some of this affect stuff. And it was earlier sort of beginning to emerge out of attachment theory. But I think attachment theory really had its own problems. And so it couldn't fully develop in the way that it needed to. It couldn't develop this idea in the way that it needs. But now what we're seeing is increasingly clear that we do need other people and we need them to for our own development. And so, you know, even when you think you're being a hermit, even when you're saying, fuck the social, even when you're saying, like, I want nothing to do with it, okay, but to get here, you did engage with the social. Social. Like you, you can get out of. You can try to get out of it at some point, later, in some way maybe, but you can't escape the social that's already in you. You, you can't escape that. That got in there before you had a chance to do anything about it. I think that's the kind of cruelty of, of, of it, if there is one. You know what makes it kind of unbearable.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, I mean, I think especially so I. I used to be so obsessed with queer theory, and then I kind of lost it. But then maybe this is bringing me back. But I think one of the things that I really loved about queer theory when I was reading it as an undergrad was like, a lot of it was just talking about the fact that you are. You are always bound up with these relations that are weird, and it is weird to be with other people, but it's not something that you can ever get around or get beyond. And even if you do try to get beyond, it's because you, you hated it. So you have to have it. And it makes me think of this CA Conrad, a poet who has this quote in some poem or some book, I can't remember. But this idea that dying on your deathbed alone or I've had to do everything alone in my life is just some kind of romantic fantasy of the bildung of the individual. Because it's like, what the hell? You. Not only like you were you raised by people or like you had friends or whatever. Even if you are alone every day of your life, do you go to the store, do you go to wherever? Do you have like just the idea of other people kind of allows you to live. So there's. There's this huge interdependence and I'm one. Like it creates the sexual. So I'm wondering how like the sexual is part of our, like our normal life when we're not thinking about the sexual and how that. That can take us beyond kind of this. This like I don't want anything to do with it reaction.

[Gila Ashtore]

Well, I think. I'm not sure if when you're saying that part of what turned you off from those kinds of thoughts, I. It had to do with the determinism. Like was that partly what you're saying, that it just felt kind of deterministic in its own way, that if everything was already one is so interdependent and could do nothing about it, that as a result there was little freedom or little room for freedom? Is that hardly what you're saying?

[Britt Eadlen]

Oh, I was always, always about that. I just, I turned away from queer theory for other reasons. But one of the things that I. I think that has fundamentally shaped my, like my ethics and like looking at literature is how it was so insistent on these social relations and how there is no such thing as like a monad. And even in like, like a. Even if you do have like this quote unquote heterosexual pairing, like it is still always founded on how it relates to other people. Like this fantasy of just being able to be alone is exactly that. It's a fantasy and I think relating to like queer modalities of life or queer existence, it's just like this whole. Not just an avowal of it, but like a complete acceptance and like leaning into the fact that there are different relations and that you have relations and that you can't not.

[Gila Ashtore]

That's right. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that there's really an attempt in much of queer theory, sometimes deliberately to get away from that relational dimension of it. Or alternatively, I think of someone like Lynn Huffer of an attempt to, you know, follow what she thinks Foucault is insisting on, which is a kind of bodies and pleasures, as you know. And Bersani does this a little bit too. I mean, for what it's worth, I think Foucault is way more ambivalent about psychoanalysis than some people would like to think. I think he's all over the place in terms of really being committed to a new version of sexuality, a new version of consciousness and subjectivity, and sort of, you know, in constant debate about that. You know, Joel White Book has done, like, great critique of Foucault from a while back, which is very interesting in this regard. And I don't. And anyway, the point is, I don't think Foucault is nearly as. As consistent or single minded in his relationship to psychoanalysis as people make it sound. But there are people who use him to say that, wouldn't it be great if we could have, like, a mode of relationality that was, like, surface oriented and not too deep and not too engaging with unconscious forces and not too riven by sort of antagonisms and conflict, but was more just sensational or sensations or, you know, I don't. I don't know. Bodies and pleasures, you know, I don't think. But there's a real appeal to some of these ideas, I think, partly because they seem like an escape from a mode of relationality that is a lot messier and messier because it involves, like, psyches and bodies that are psychological. And I think there's a real wish to get away from that. I think we see that across the field. Yeah. Might go back to our earlier point about the field, but.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's. This whole idea, I think, is kind of part of your last chapter on queer relationality. And I want to turn to a different chapter, which was, I thought, a great one. I hope everybody who reads this thinks the same thing because it was very interesting and an intense read. It was the one on psychology as ideology Light Butler and the Trouble with Gender Theory. I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more because, like, what you're doing in this chapter, because I think what defines gender theory and sexuality theory, I think a lot of today is this Butlerian notion or like, everything that we know about Butler, even though I think, you know, also most people either haven't read butler in, like, 10 years and are talking about Butler, or, like, just have not read or only read Gender Trouble and then didn't actually read Undoing Gender to get the, what was actually happening. But what are you trying to make in this, in this section?

[Gila Ashtore]

I mean, I think that's really about this way that, you know, Butler, who, you know, in my reading is very interested in psychoanalysis and is sort of a, like always using psychoanalysis to think through the subject, in fact, had a well known debate with Laplanche when he was in the, in the US at some point in the early 2000s, I believe. And so, you know, she's definitely someone who wants to engage with this work. And I think her writing on gender is a good example of the way in which even without intending it or even with the best intentions in her formulations, sexuality turns into this just very familiar version of ideology through Althusser, through Foucault, where it's sort of been evacuated of its, of any sense of how of a psychology would actually work. And what she's meaning by psychology is just what is sort of like personal about you and not necessarily reducible to the state or to culture writ large. And I think partly what I'm trying to push on is, okay, that's a very impoverished view of the psyche that you're using. I mean, you're, you're essentially to Butler, you know, you're using a view of the psyche that doesn't have its own mode of functioning, that isn't driven in its own way. That's just a sort of like empty vessel for the deposits of, of sociality. And I think that's a kind of, I mean, frankly, that's a kind of supposed impoverished view of social as well. But it certainly doesn't work for how we would think about the psyche. And so I think that really gets lost in her work. And not that I think she's really trying to theorize in some sense the psyche, but I think, I think all these people are, frankly, I think that's why I chose them. To me, it would not be very interesting to sort of choose someone who is not interested in psychoanalysis. To me, these are the people that are the most interested in psychoanalysis, that are using it the best as far as I'm concerned. And yet, like, how does this happen? How does the psyche turn into kind of like an empty, an empty vessel, as it were.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, well, I want to ask the question because there is this like psychological view, but then, I mean, one term that psychoanalysis always is using is metapsychological. So, so can you kind of talk about what this difference is and how maybe these. This different topography that metapsychological or meta psychological analysis gives us to talk about things, because it is something that is so different than just a psychological analysis.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I think what I'm trying to. Meta psychology is a very contested term within psychoanalytic theory. You know, it doesn't really exist in the French. They kind of just do psychoanalytic theory. But in the US Especially, it's a lot more contested because you had really, in the late 80s, a bunch of theorists who said, there is no. This word has no meaning when we're analyzing. When we're using psychoanalysis, we're just always using Freudian psychoanalysis. And you had some other thinkers who were like, okay, but if that's how we're using it, then we never have a way of critiquing Freud. So, like, we need to have a realm of theory that is sort of separate from Freud, that is just the realm of psychoanalytic theory. And Laplace has something to say about this because I think he was, you know, very attuned to what the debates that were going on in the US at that time between the different movements of psychoanalysis. But to me, metapsychology is an indispensable term. I think you need to have a realm of analysis that allows you to decide what works and what doesn't work for psychoanalytic theory and to apply it for the purposes of close reading. I mean, I think what you. What you said earlier about, you know, everyone assumes psychoanalysis is Freud and Lacan. And I think partly because there's very little sense in our analyses that we're using a particular psychoanalytic template. Partly what I encounter a lot of. I felt this a lot in graduate school was just like, this is. I used to get into arguments with Lauren about this.

[Britt Eadlen]

Like, it was.

[Gila Ashtore]

It was very much just, this is the psyche. And I'm like, okay, no, that's the Lacanian psyche. That's not the psyche. I don't know what the psyche is, but there surely are other ways. And, you know, there's a way that it has been. We are always using maybe Freud or Lacan without any. Without any distance or any way to critique those concepts. So I'm really just trying to introduce a method of analysis that allows us to critique it and by breaking it down in that way, to identify where things maybe go astray or. Oh, could we make a substitution there? Is it this Lacanian notion of misrecognition that's getting us. Okay, so then, like, what if we swap that out. Would this work better? Would this elucidate something more instead of it being sort of, to me, all together in a very incoherent way? I don't know. Does that make sense? I think that.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah. Yeah, it does. And I think that was something that. I don't know. As someone who hasn't read, I'm not as familiar with Laplange, but I think, you know, like Freud's using metapsychology, metasichologie in the German. It's like it does. It is its own thing. It's not just psychology. And he's. The idea that you're looking at the structure of the theory itself. And I think what's so interesting and something that you bring out is that you don't have to take what you are given. You are allowed to move out and find something else if. What. If it doesn't work for you. And I think that's something that, you know, when people think of psychoanalysis, I think they don't realize that you are allowed to. To think differently, especially given the idea that, you know, Lacan's big thing is return to Freud. That maybe, I mean, anytime you work with psychoanalysis, you. You, in a sense, you are returning to Freud. But that doesn't mean that the return has to be kind of this, like, faithful or loving return to the father. It can be like this critical, I'm coming home and I'm yelling at my dad kind of thing. Like, it can be something else you can overturn and maybe, like, this is the deconstructionist in me, but, like, you can go back and then completely change whatever you've been given, or you can substitute it and do something completely else. But I think the category of the metapsychological is helpful to understand that this is a theory, this is something that's constructed, and it doesn't have to be exactly this.

[Gila Ashtore]

I think that's. I think that's a lovely way of putting it. I think I would hope that, you know, someone reading this would feel encouraged to find the kind of theory that makes sense for them, and if they're frustrated with, you know, Lacan and Freud or the people that are using Lacan and Freud or the readings that are coming up with, like, you know, to sort of look into alternatives or critique those modes. These are, you know, Laplanche makes this lovely distinction between metapsychology and, like, the mythosymbolic order. And what he means by that is that we are always interpreting things and we're always coming up with. He Calls it the sexual theories of children, which I love. And we're always, as this originates in childhood, trying to explain why something is happening and what it means and so that we're doing all the time. But he says Freud makes the mistake of sometimes confusing that activity with metapsychology. So Freud thinks, oh, my God, I came up with the Oedipus complex. This is actual theory. And Laplace is like, no, Freud. That was just your way of explaining something you didn't understand. Like a. For effort, great job. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's right. And we should only count as metapsychology the theories that check out based on the standards of, like, theory building. And so we should be able to make some distinction between our own interpretations, which have their own function in our lives and our work, versus what we should count as sort of laws of. Of the psyche or principles of mental functioning. And I, I think that distinction is very liberating. I find it liber. I find, like, oh, thank God. Because some of these things are just. They're terrible. They're all. I don't want to. I don't want to have to be committed to some of these complexes. Like, you know, and I felt like I was ambivalent and am very ambivalent about so much of psychoanalysis. And so I need a way to navigate that ambivalence. I. You know, and I. I think I'm hoping this is one way to navigate that. Yeah.

[Britt Eadlen]

So you just bring up this idea of, like, we're constantly interpreting and like, you know, we're like, psychoanalysis, if anything, is a theory of reading. And I want to ask just because I. This was what. Something that I was really interested in was how, like this idea of queerness as a hermeneutic. I don't know. Can you open that up? Because I, I don't. I think like Sedgwick talking about, like, if you're not reading this, you're, like, not reading at all. And I think it is something that's like, psychoanalysis is a form of reading. And queer theory does so many different readings, not necessarily on literary texts always, but like a way of looking. And I think, how does queerness become this meaning making or reading, generating body or discipline? And what does it mean to read queerly or to do it. To do hermeneutics as an always queer gesture?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I mean, I'd be very interested in your sense of that as well. I mean, I'll. I'll answer that just briefly, but I would really love to hear sort of your own, where you go with that, I think, you know, it seems. And I think Sedgwick really comes kind of the closest in my personal canon. I think she. I have. You know, I'm just amazed constantly by her readings. And I think Cedric is such a good example of someone who wants to free hermeneutics of its, you know, authoritarian dimensions, of its attempt to fix meaning in a certain way, and of its. Of the tendency to foreclose possibilities. And I think one of the ways to. To read clearly, I think, would be to really open up texts to possibilities that really don't necessarily conform to our presuppositions of them, but to see them as, like, dynamic entities that might provoke us in ways that we don't anticipate. So maybe a mode of receptivity in some sense, I think. Yeah. I mean, I'm really curious. Where did you go with it? Or what were you thinking, Your interest in the question of hermeneutics. I know from other times. I've listened to your interviews.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, well, I. I mean, I was really interested in the. In Sedgwick's kind of. I mean, always. I. You're so paranoid. You probably think this essays about you, I think, is kind of like a fundamental text. And I think it's. It's great. And I. I was really interested in, you know, this idea of queerness or of maybe sexuality in general, of, like, being open to the other or like, always having to come from the other. And I think that that's what reading is like. You are never reading. I mean, as a person who reads literary texts, like, those are always coming from someone else. There's all. That's all. There's. So I think inherent within reading is kind of this erotic mingling with the other. But even I was thinking as I was reading this, like, what does it mean to read my own work and to see, you know, not only is my own work always informed by the other authors I have been reading at the time or whoever's class I'm in, or, like, even when I was an undergrad, like, I used to have professors tell me that my writing always just sounded like whoever I was writing about. So there was that trace of that stamp of the other on me. But even if I'm reading a paper that I wrote, which I. I just did, and I was. I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe I read that.

[Gila Ashtore]

But that's like someone else.

[Britt Eadlen]

That's like a different person. That's me two years ago. That's me a month ago. That's. Whatever. So reading is always this opening onto an other that. That kind of creates this. Oh my gosh, that creates some kind of relationship with otherness that you have to. You have to figure out. And it's always this kind of weird. I don't want to put it into like a martial metaphor. So it's. I wouldn't say it's like a battle. It's almost like a dance or something. It's this we. I have to constellate and figure out how I am in relation to you and where do I appear. And I think that's part of the fun of reading for me. Yeah. And.

[Gila Ashtore]

But the anxiety of it too. And I think, I think this is something that, you know, one way we can understand the kind of appeal of this like post critical moment. I mean, I think there's a real anxiety involved in reading because you can be surprised or you can be, you know, you have to have. You have to feel open or be open to read in a certain way. Otherwise it's very hard to take something in. You know, I can't read when I'm upset. You know, I'm like. I can't. You know, I'm like too taken up by being upset. So there's a. There's a certain way that you need to be receptive to the other. And I think that's very hard to sustain. And I think part of the way psychoanalysis has been mobilized against reading has been in the way that Marxism has been, you know, mobilized against it to sort of just function as we already know the outcome as a. Something, a unified theory that you can apply and move on. And you know, everything has a. Can be used that way. And I think psychoanalysis and certainly in its earlier iterations wanted to be used that way in some sense. So there's a lot to work against, I think, in terms of those tendencies.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, I mean, the whole. I was thinking about this for a paper last year, but like when you're reading a poem and. And you. And it has a really regular meter and then at some point just like switches and that terrifying moment of like, oh, fuck, I don't know how to read this. Like there's this idea that someone else is moving within you. And I. I don't know that there is this erotic dimension. There is this like we're moving in some kind of. In some kind of formation that I. I'm not totally sure what's happening because it breaks down this idea of me as like this autonomous reading subject who's holding a book and there's no one else here, when in reality there is someone else there. And I don't know, I'm thinking like the Lacanian. There is no sexual relationship. Like, what kind of relationship happens in reading?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah.

[Britt Eadlen]

Is there a sexual. That's what I was thinking of. Yeah.

[Gila Ashtore]

I think that's something related to something you were saying earlier, too, about the ways that, you know, a kind of anti humanist, anti subject reading wants to sort of almost believe that the book emerges, like you said, from the ocean or, like, falls from the sky. You know, like, it's sort of denial of that erotic element to it also, or where would it come from? You know, it's not a function of language in and of itself. It's a function of sexuality being transmitted. Communicated. Conveyed.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, yeah, It's. I don't know, It's. It is this. I mean, reading. I think people always just want it to be this really cerebral act, but it. It is bodies and pleasures or what it is. It has such a toll on you. I mean, I don't know, like there. I have. There's so many times when I've like, cried while reading for class just because it takes it. It's taking over you. And I think that is such a scary thing about reading. But that's part of its erotics. It's this. It's this kind of relinquishing of the self to the other.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah. And the voice of the text, too. Like how idiosyncratic every. Every voice is too. You know, we can't even talk about it without talking about these words that convey the sort of erotic dimension of it, it seems to me.

[Britt Eadlen]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I have one final question, which is, what are you thinking about now? What do you. Do you have anything you're working on specifically that you can, you know, talk about?

[Gila Ashtore]

Yeah, I'm sort of knee deep in thinking about the relationship. You know, that, like, stage in your thinking where you're just like, reading and you don't even know what you think anymore.

[Britt Eadlen]

That's.

[Gila Ashtore]

That's where I'm at. So I'm going to try to make some sense of it. But I have, you know, sort of.

[Britt Eadlen]

At the stage where.

[Gila Ashtore]

At that stage. But I'm thinking a lot about actually sort of a little bit the relationship between queer theory and critical theory. And by critical theory, I mean more like Frankfurt School type critical theory. And in some sense, you know, that is also the origin of a lot of queer theory. But it kind of split off into two, because queer theory took on, you know, like Adorno & Co. But then critical theory, especially in Germany, you know, followed more Habermas and became the second and third and fourth generation of critical theory. And those fields really don't talk to each other anymore. But I'm thinking a lot about, you know, Berlant's notion of cruel optimism in particular, which, you know, has. A lot of people have been posting a lot about it, especially this summer when she died. So people were talking about cruel optimism everywhere. And it sort of got me thinking a lot about, you know, how do we think about a concept like cruel optimism? How does. What is the. Like again to use metapsychology? Like, what is the psychological framework that undergirds a concept like cruel optimism? You know, it's using a lot of Lacan for sure, and Adorno. So trying to like, deconstruct a little bit what that formulation means. And if there are ways to challenge it a little bit, get some. Get some space to open up the phrase a little bit more, I think is something I'm thinking a lot about. So I would say, yeah, extending some of this work into maybe the domain of critical theory more broadly, in addition to queer theory. I'd like them to talk to each other maybe a little bit more because, you know, critical theory is having this moment now where it's like, oh, my God, we should. We should read more psychoanalysis. Like, you know, they have not been reading psychoanalysis for the past, like, you know, however many 40 years. Some people have, but mostly it's all been like Habermasian communication theory. And they're like, oh, this is not so bad. So it's having a kind of like, renaissance of psychoanalysis a little bit. And so I'm. But they're also running into some of the same debates if queer theory. So I sort of. Yeah, a long way of saying that's something I'm interested in now, I guess.

[Britt Eadlen]

Well, that sounds really interesting and I hope it turns into something and I can read it as soon as possible because that is. I don't know, that's something I once, once upon a time was really trying to think about. Especially I don't like the Frankfurt School and trying to think about their relationships with. With sexuality and psychoanalysis, especially because, you know, like, Marcuse was so interested in and all of these figures were so. They were right there like, I don't know, you think about Germany at that time. They were all thinking at the same time in the same place. And then I don't know, from 80 years away, it's much easier to distance them. But they were. They were all in the same place. Yeah.

[Gila Ashtore]

And asking so many similar questions, like, what's the vision of, like, an emancipatory subject? How do we do that? Where's the repression coming from? What transgression is possible? So many of these questions. But, yeah, I think that's partly how I got interested in it.

[Britt Eadlen]

Well, I. As I said, I'm excited to see that come out in whatever form it does. And thank you for talking to me. This is a wonderful conversation.

[Gila Ashtore]

Thank you so much, Britt. I really appreciate it. You're a really generous interlocutor.

[Britt Eadlen]

Thank you. So once again, I was talking to Gila Ashtore about her new book, Homopsyche on queer theory and erotophobia. It is out. Oh, my gosh. Who. Who published? Fordham University Press. It came out earlier this year. Thank you for talking. I'm Britt Eadlen for the New Books Network. Until next.

[Podcast Announcer]

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[Gila Ashtore]

Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?

[Podcast Announcer]

Cut the camera.

[Britt Eadlen]

They see us.

[Gila Ashtore]

Yes.

[Podcast Announcer]

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