New Encounter with the Hysteric’s Desire

Abstract

When we view hysteria as the site where desire’s function demonstrates its perplex yet imminent perturbations, we can create a more demanding level of theorizing than merely viewing hysteria as being an outcome of heteronormative oppression. This perspective exposes how there is something exclusively female, writ large, that structurally defines contemporaneity. In this article, I suggest that having subjected the study of the feminine to the activist agenda’s immediate and often shortsighted objectives, feminist writings have sidelined research into existing phenomena crucial for the understanding of femininity. In doing so, I demonstrate a specific discontinuity between the objectives of feminist activism and the desire underlying it. At the same time, accentuating the nuances of a desirefunctioning psychoanalytic approach has necessary theoretical instruments to more accurately contour female desire. Pursuing Jacques Lacan’s logic of jouissance as the main discursive operator, Alexander Smulyanskiy’s psychoanalytic theoretical apparatus offers fresh and unorthodox solutions to the question of femininity and its crucial importance as the constitutive element of modernity.