Feminine Desire: Honoring the Life and Work of Anne Dufourmantelle and Mari Ruti

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Keynote Speakers: Noëlle McAfee and Ana Houine

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Call for Papers

The LaConference 2025 will explore and honor the work of two remarkable and prolific psychoanalytic thinkers who left us too early: Anne Dufourmantelle (1964 – 2017) and Mari Ruti (1964 – 2023). Duformantelle and Ruti marked our zeitgeist with intellectual and emotional rigor, courageously posing questions that over-spilled the rigid, phallic order. Both shared an intimate relationship with the Lacan Salon as keynote speakers in the LaConference 2016, On Love.

Ruti and Dufourmantelle thematized secrecy, vulnerability, and sympathy. They explored the subjective experience of the Real as a limit of the self. In particular, Ruti reflected on the transformative potential of vulnerability while Dufourmantelle celebrated risk and tenderness as necessary conditions for the possibility of subjectivation. Dufourmantelle and Ruti embraced risk and shattered the narcissistic fantasies that constrain subjective renewal. 

Does their work speak to a novel approach to feminine desire? Traditionally, psychoanalysis addressed femininity from the perspective of jouissance rather than desire. For example, Freud approached femininity from the perspective of the hysteric patient while post-Freudians such as Lacan circumscribed it within a structural binary, such as in the theory of “sexuation,” to elucidate two main forms of desire and enjoyment, devoid of anatomical base. Famously, Lacan identifies “woman” as the “not-all” (pas toute), situating her beyond the phallic fantasy of the “one” who is not-castrated. Feminine desire intimates an ontological enigma that defies our theories of sex and gender as irreducibly social or biological. 

The LaConference 2025 will stake a claim on feminine desire beyond jouissance. Our question is: How can feminine desire manifest its constructive––and destructive––potentiality beyond the death drive, that is, beyond that ‘dark continent’ neither Freud nor Lacan dared tread? We will explore this crucial question through Ruti and Dufourmantelle’s insightful works. Questions we invite participants to address include but are not limited to:

• How can we rethink the necessity of risk, tenderness, and vulnerability? Can we understand vulnerability without risk, and is that even desirable?
  
• How does psychoanalysis instruct us to live our lives and what does this behoove in terms of one’s drive and desire? 
  
• According to Dufourmantelle, “To become a psychoanalyst is to cross over to the secret’s side. It is to choose the shadows, the clandestine voyage, a certain silence—to be a migrant forever.” How might we understand secrecy in today’s exhibitionistic and ‘post-truth’ social discourse?
  
• What is to become of a culture that can no longer think about risk except as a heroic act, pure madness, or deviant conduct?
  
• Dufourmantelle proposes that “gentleness shares with childhood a kind of natural community but also a power.” Must we recover childhood levity to overcome the profound anxiety of our time?
  
• How do Ruti and Dufourmantelle problematize Freudian and post-Freudian understandings of the feminine, her jouissance and desire? 
  
• Why has feminine desire proven to be such an enigma for psychoanalysis and does écriture féminine mark a threshold in its social, political and clinical figuration? 

Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes. The selection committee invites submissions comprised of a 500-word abstract with three keywords and a title, short biography of the author, and contact information. Submission review will begin on 15 June 2025 and notifications delivered in July. Please email submissions to: laconference2025@gmail.com 

Image by Richard Alan Kent. Six Elements and a Woman in a Bathtub. Mixed Media/Canvas. 26” x 40”. Vancouver.