Totalization as critique: a review of Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology|David Pavón-Cuéllar

Abstract

Breakthroughs in thinking are usually made by rendering certain differences less different. Works of art, political mots d'ordre, scientific creations – as well as psychoanalytic interpretations - are capable of novelty precisely because, through these creations, we have access to a standpoint from which what has come before suddenly emerges as a field of variations contained within certain historical restrictions. New artistic experiments reveal the formal commitments of previous artistic sequences, new political affirmations can "subtract" us from ideologically overdetermined political conflicts, scientific abstraction can determine invariances which turn previous general claims into regional ones, just as surprising love encounters can lead us to reassess a life of repetitions and insisting idealizations. Such seems to also be the proper way of evaluating the merit of David Pavón-Cuéllar's new book, Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology? (Routledge, 2017), for it introduces a certain productive indifference into the otherwise disparate and conflicting attempts to bind Marx and Freud together. In doing so, Pavón-Cuéllar has both shone a light on the internal organization of this research program and opened up interesting lines of inquiry which cut across any particular stance one might take regarding this important intellectual project