Directrice de l’Institut Humanités Sciences et Sociétés, Psychanalyste, and Professeure at l’Université Paris Cité
Why should we still read Michel Foucault when practicing psychoanalysis?
Why read Michel Foucault when practicing psychoanalysis? Is there still a “relevant Michel Foucault” for psychoanalysts in 2024? Is reading – or rereading – Michel Foucault still productive? Based on an encounter between queer authors, Freud, Lacan and Allouch, I will analyze the conditions of possibility for rethinking the sexual, sexuality, and gendered identity in the field of psychoanalysis. For Foucault, the apparatus of sexuality can be considered a genealogy of psychoanalysis. With and after Foucault, what would psychoanalysis be without discourse on the heterosexual family, without Oedipus or “beyond Oedipus,” without discourse on sexuality, without sexual etiology, without infantile sexuality? By putting a new erotology into perspective through gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, and queer studies, reading Foucault allows us to better consider the multiplicity, diversity, and possibilities for the seemingly irrelevant.
Laurie Laufer is a psychoanalyst and Professor in the Psychoanalytic Studies Department of the Institut des Humanités Sciences et Sociétés (IHSS) at Université Paris Cité, where she is also Director of the UFR IHSS. Author of numerous articles on questions of norms, psychoanalysis and gender, and psychoanalysis and literature, she has co-edited Foucault et la psychanalyse (Hermann, 2015) with Amos Squverer, Qu’est-ce que le genre ? (Payot 2014, translated into Spanish, Italian) with Florence Rochefort, Lettres à Lacan (Thierry Marchaisse 2018 translated into Spanish), and Après les Aveux de la chair: Généalogie du sujet chez Michel Foucault (EPEL, 2020) with Sandra Boehringer. Laufer is the author of Murmures de l’art à la psychanalyse (Hermann 2021), Vers une psychanalyse émancipée: Renouer avec la subversion (La Découverte 2022, translated into Spanish and Turkish) and Questions de genre (Ithaque, 2022) with Serge Hefez. With Sandra Boehringer, Laufer is co-directing the translation of Gay Shame (dir. David Halperin & Valerie Traub) which will be published by Epel in 2024.