Nazomi says, some of your writing is heavily informed by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,

but plenty of people on the left reject psychoanalysis, seeing it as playing into bourgeois individualism,

or being a practice that habituates people to capitalism rather than radicalising them.

And of course, many would say that Freud and Lacan's account of sexuality,

and in particular female sexuality, is outmoded.

What's your view of those kinds of objections?

I would say that this, I mean, the first part of the critique about bourgeois individualism

is derivative of 50 Stalinism, which, I mean, in a complex way, both misunderstood

what psychoanalysis was and latched on to real developments within particularly American

ego psychology. But, you know, I mean, you know, just to say the Bolsheviks were very

pro-psychoanalysis. at the time of the Russian Revolution and

the immediate aftermath, the psychoanalysis conceived itself as a radical phenomenon, a kind

of a cultural movement that was trying to change how people lived and related to one another

for the better by basically encouraging a set of attitudes towards sexuality that basically did not reduce to calling the police.

Parenthetically, you know, it's interesting to me that we're often required to condemn, you know,

things and figures whom revolutionaries have admired. So, you know, things and figures whom revolutionaries have admired.

So, you know, the idea that we should condemn psychoanalysis when, you know, the Bolsheviks were very pro-psychoanalysis.

Trotsky was a big fan of Celine's novel, Journey to the End of the Night.

I don't think anybody on the left would admit to reading Celine these days, except for me because I have read Journey to the End of the Night. I don't think anybody on the left would admit to reading Celine these days, except for

me because I have read Journey to the End of the Night.

It's on my shelves, I haven't read it.

So maybe that suggests some ambivalence on my part.

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