James Penney – författare

Is queer theory dead? Through its increasing entanglement with capitalism, James Penney, controversially argues that queer theory has run its course. However, the 'end of queer' should not signal the death of liberatory sexual politics; rather, it presents the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics.The book makes a critical return to Marxism and psychoanalysis, via Freud and Lacan, and conducts a critical examination of queer theory's most famous proponents, including Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In doing so, Penney insists that the way to implant sexuality in the field of political antagonism is - paradoxically - to abandon the exhausted premise of a politicised sexuality. He argues that by wresting sexuality from the dead end of identity politics, it can be opened up to a universal emancipatory struggle beyond the reach of capitalism's powers of commodification.

An original critique of queer theory, from a psychoanalytic perspective.In The World of Perversion, James Penney argues that antihomophobic criticism has nothing to lose-and indeed everything to gain-by reclaiming the psychoanalytic concept of perversion as psychic structure. Analyzing the antagonism between psychoanalytic approaches to perversion and those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Penney explores how different assumptions about sexuality have determined the development of contemporary queer theory, and how the universalizing approach to homosexuality in psychoanalysis actually leads to more useful political strategies for nonheterosexual subjects. Having established this theoretical context, Penney focuses on works by Georges Bataille, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, and Jacques Lacan, tracing the implications of various sexual and moral understandings of the term perversion, and illustrating how a psychoanalytic approach to the question of perversion enables politicized readings that are foreclosed by a Foucauldian methodology.

An original critique of queer theory, from a psychoanalytic perspective.In The World of Perversion, James Penney argues that antihomophobic criticism has nothing to lose-and indeed everything to gain-by reclaiming the psychoanalytic concept of perversion as psychic structure. Analyzing the antagonism between psychoanalytic approaches to perversion and those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Penney explores how different assumptions about sexuality have determined the development of contemporary queer theory, and how the universalizing approach to homosexuality in psychoanalysis actually leads to more useful political strategies for nonheterosexual subjects. Having established this theoretical context, Penney focuses on works by Georges Bataille, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, and Jacques Lacan, tracing the implications of various sexual and moral understandings of the term perversion, and illustrating how a psychoanalytic approach to the question of perversion enables politicized readings that are foreclosed by a Foucauldian methodology.

Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney examines the overlooked similarities between Genet’s literary oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their shared ontology of fragility and incompletion.This book exposes the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that the representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence. According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked.Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as Lacan’s psychoanalytic act, Genet’s acts of poetry further seek to expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates.Moving away from scholarship that considers Genet’s plays, novels, sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span of Genet’s work, from his early novels to the posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet, Lacan and our wanting being.

Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney examines the overlooked similarities between Genet’s literary oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their shared ontology of fragility and incompletion.This book exposes the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that the representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence. According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked.Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as Lacan’s psychoanalytic act, Genet’s acts of poetry further seek to expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates.Moving away from scholarship that considers Genet’s plays, novels, sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span of Genet’s work, from his early novels to the posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet, Lacan and our wanting being.

Reframes the terms of cultural analysis with a fresh take on transference theory in Freud and Lacan and a critical engagement with the philosophy of Alain Badiou.Both Freud and Lacan defined the transference as the ego's last stand-its final desperate attempt to keep the truth of the unconscious at bay. Both also viewed the transference as a social phenomenon.In The Structures of Love James Penney argues that transference is the concept with which psychoanalysis thinks through the unconscious demands that circumscribe and can sabotage our creative initiatives in the arts and politics. Penney suggests a method of cultural analysis that enables us to identity the transformative potential of genuine artistic and political acts. He stages a dialogue between Lacan's psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Alain Badiou; includes chapters on Frantz Fanon and Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud; and explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical consequences of the transference idea, pushing it into exciting new territory.