“Creatively bringing together the Founding fathers and the father of
psychoanalysis, Jill Gentile begins with the foundational ideas of free
speech in democracy and free association on the couch. She then opens up
a fascinating unexplored space that illuminates the magic of language
and the paradoxes, limits, and complexities at the heart of desire. This
is an erudite, bravura performance that makes good on a long deferred
hope, the hope that psychoanalysis can bring deeper understanding to our
political confusions.”
— George Makari, M.D.,
author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind
and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
“Jill Gentile has written a passionate love letter to psychoanalysis and
democracy, to free association and free speech. Both are endangered
species, eroded by internal degradations as much as by external
detractors. Yet both persist and manage to inspire insofar as they are
able to cultivate a space of desire, of speech aimed at the Other. This
space, Gentile proposes, is governed by Feminine Law. Reaching beyond
the phallocentrism of earlier psychoanalytic thought, Gentile
reconfigures feminine ‘lack’ as a generative space of potentiality that
is indispensible for the attainment of both personal and political
agency. In this manner, Gentile revolutionizes Freudian theory at the
same time as she deftly pays homage to what was revolutionary—ground-breaking
and forward-looking—about it in the first place.
The effect of Gentile’s stunningly erudite and original
interpretation is akin to what Alain Badiou calls a ‘truth-event’: it
shatters conventional mythologies regarding femininity and its (lack of)
social status, revealing a whole new universe of (feminine) possibility.”
— Mari Ruti, Ph.D.,
Professor of Critical Theory, University of Toronto,
and author of Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics
“Feminine Law is amazing in its erudition and in the ways it uses a
seemingly simple analogy between Freedom of Speech and Free Association
to explore vast areas of political life. The further analogy between
analyst and government uncovers and illuminates
the relationship between negative liberty (as free speech is often
understood by courts) and the positive liberty to encourage and
facilitate speech (which courts have usually resisted). Gentile
gestures towards a particular theory of democracy—call it emancipatory
democracy—that restates psychoanalysis’s core mission but in the public
sphere. Its project would be first of all to liberate oppressed
or ignored or invisible people. But it would also emancipate the
‘people’ themselves as a collective actor with an interior life (filled
with desires and needs and an imperfect capacity to confront or name
them).”
— John Ferejohn, Ph.D.,
Samuel Tilden Professor at New York University Law School
“This is perhaps the most unusual psychoanalytic book I have ever read.
It is also the most unusual essay on the nature of democracy. And it is
a striking meditation on the role of sexuality, gender and the body on
the psyche and the way humans encounter and create the social world. It
is moreover a particularly American book. It assumes the inherent
naturalness, the ‘rights’ of human desire and it frames something
essential about the American experiment in claiming our desires. Freedom
of thought, freedom of speech, and the freedom to desire are essential
elements in this ambitious discussion. That Jill Gentile has been able
to accomplish this in one book, while bringing the reader into a shared
fascination with what is common in these disparate ideas, is a
monumental accomplishment.”
— Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D., ABPP,
former president, Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American
Psychological Association; Clinical Instructor, Dept. of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
“
The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological
fact, a part of the great riddle of sex. So stated Freud in the closing
paragraph of ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable.’ Jill Gentile takes
this assumption of the impassable bedrock of the psyche as instead an
invitation to go beyond, in this rich and expansive exploration of the
possibility of naming the feminine:
Feminine Law. Ranging across
semiotics, political theory, and the panoply of contemporary
psychoanalysis, Gentile makes this exploration an occasion to renew both
clinical theory and democratic philosophy. Playful and incisive, this
work opens new spaces for contemplation.”
— David Lichtenstein, Ph.D.,
editor of DIVISION/Review