From turn to affect to return to Freud

Šumah, Lidija (author)

While philosophy is often depicted as a succession of conceptual turns, psychoanalysis resists such periodization. If psychoanalysis constitutes a turn at all, it is the radical decentering inaugurated by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, famously condensed in the claim that the ego is not master in its own house. This article argues, following Lacan, that psychoanalysis advances not through new turns but through a return to Freud. Lacan’s return to Freud functions both as a methodological project and a polemical intervention against postwar ego psychology. Central to this project is the concept of extimacy (extimité), introduced by Lacan to name a structure of subjectivity in which the most intimate core of the subject is irreducibly external. Far from an idiosyncratic neologism, extimacy condenses Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s theory of the unconscious as neither inside nor outside the subject but lodged at its core as Other – hence Lacan’s claim that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” The article proposes Lacan’s theory of the symbolic and the notion of extimacy as a conceptual response to the dilemmas of contemporary affect theory, preserving Freud’s decentering of the subject while translating it into a structural and linguistic framework. The analysis underscores that any engagement between affect and language must account for the non-representational, symbolic, or structural dimensions of the sign, rather than treating it as a transparent conduit for meaning and intention. As such, the analysis challenges contemporary dominant accounts of affect (Jameson, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, Massumi) and unsettles the presumed divide between modernism and postmodernism.

• Language: English
• Keywords: psychoanalysis, affect theory, language, poststructuralism
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 01.01.2025
• Year: 2025
• Number of pages: Str. 103-123, 290
• Numbering: Letn. 63, št. 11/12
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-182182
• UDC: 159.964.26:159.942.6
• ISSN on article: 0555-2419
• COBISS.SI-ID: 275561475
• Publication date in RUL: 29.04.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Problemi : revija za kulturo in družbena vprašanja
• Shortened title: Problemi
• Publisher: Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo
• ISSN: 0555-2419
• COBISS.SI-ID: 13608448

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: psihoanaliza, teorija afekta, jezik, poststrukturalizem

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: J6-4625-2022
• Name: Imena na konici nosu: imenovanje, voh in resnica