Abstract
I read the clash between predictive psychoanalytic theories and destabilizing queer theories on the subject of desire as a disagreement over probability. I point psychoanalysts and queer theorists towards four relevant episodes in the history of science: the debate on statistics and thermodynamics within the Victorian intelligentsia, the Einstein-Bergson feud, discussions within the cybernetics movement, and recent critiques of automated cars. Considering our sexual aims and objects as information, our desires would be due to the way we retrieve them. Psychoanalysis explains how such information is stored and queer theory how it is reorganized. In cases where repression is not accountable for lack of desire toward an external stimulus, such absence would be due to information not retrieved quick enough, rather than a genuine incapacity to desire.
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Dabbous, R. Is desire a matter of probability?. Psychoanal Cult Soc 28, 447–459 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00366-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00366-1