Perverse implantations: Cinema, seduction and the Foucaultian imaginary

Re-examines Michel Foucault's ambivalent relationship to psychoanalysis, and in particular, his efforts to overturn the "repressive hypothesis" in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Teresa de Lauretis and Jean Laplanche, the author argues that, though usually read as Foucault's most pointed critique of psychoanalysis, in fact The History of Sexuality owes a profound conceptual debt to Freud's legacy. The author traces this conceptual debt to the notion of the death drive as formulated in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She correlates the swings of Foucault's thought with respect to psychoanalysis to the alternating priority of the categories of trauma (with which the death drive is associated) and fantasy within the Freudian corpus. In turn, the author takes up Laplanche's concepts of "seduction" and "implantation" in order to forge a theoretical axis of articulation between Foucault's and Freud's usually dichotomized theories of sexuality. She puts this synthetic model of sexuality to work in the close analysis of a selection of narrative films drawn from classical and contemporary Hollywood, as well as a body of experimental film, video and televisual works produced by queer visual practitioners in the last two decades. All of these visual works stage scenes of seduction or "perverse implantation" within the institutional settings that constitute the major topoi of Foucault's genealogies, or what the author refers to as the "Foucaultian imaginary": the prison, the school, etc. Several of the visual works considered by the author in addition enact or illustrate a mode of spectatorship that she identifies as "retrospectatorship," a concept coined by Patricia White in Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Building upon White's work, the author seeks to contribute to the intersecting fields of trauma and cinema studies a model of spectatorship based on the biphasic structure of psychic temporality associated with trauma---what Freud called "Nachtraglichkeit " or "deferred action."...