malcolmquinn.com

Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn suggest that it is in this in between-ness - the recognition that the terms of knowledge are precisely what stands in the way of knowledge - that is the distinctive characteristic of psychoanalytic knowledge . . . If we apply this way of thinking about knowledge to the use of psychoanalysis in social research, or to the nature of academic practice more generally, we might ask : what kinds of ignorance are hidden within our methodologies and our edifices of knowledge? What are the unknown dimensions of this knowledge?

There is no getting around it: This is the most useful guide to so-called applied psychoanalysis that I have ever read. Not because it codifies a methodology for applying psychoanalytic insights. Far from it: Nobus and Quinn make clear that psychoanalysis has no universal method. It has no specific knowledge that can illuminate the disciplines that apply it . . . Applied psychoanalysis names nothing more than the realization that one’s disciplinary knowledge is “built on the foundations of ignorance.” The idea of a “fall of knowledge” might be familiar to readers of Samuel Beckett. On the first page of Worstward Ho (1983) the narrating persona comments on the novella’s opening three paragraphs: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. There is usually a powerful temptation to construe “better” as “closer to success.” “I may fail again, but there will be less of failure”, one imagines Beckett’s narrator hoping. But a few pages later we find such complaints as “What room for worse! How almost true they almost ring! How wanting in inanity! . . . Something there badly not wrong”. At this point, we have to relinquish all thoughts of success and attend to what Beckett actually says about desiring a ‘worsening [of] words”. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have described this desire for the worse as not “the end of art” but rather “the necessary conditions for what Beckett describes as a break with the compromises of art in the past. They are, in other words, formulas for starting again . . . I suspect that Nobus and Quinn would agree with Beckett: “best worse no farther. Nohow less.