Psychoanalysis after Affect Theory: The Repetitions of Courtly Love in Chaucer

For a time, if one wanted to capture the emotional landscape of late medieval literature, psychoanalysis appeared to be the most acute and persuasive analytic tool. From the subjectivity of courtly love to the identification with a suffering God to the defenses against the pleasures of others and neighbors, psychoanalysis offered illuminating frameworks in startling sympathy with medieval texts. With the ascendance of affect theory and its associated (if varied) attention to the non-discursive, the biological or natural, and the conscious or self-understood, the role of psychoanalysis has become less clear. My essay explores the productive intersections between psychoanalysis and affect theory, and especially Lauren Berlant’s suggestion that we think again about sex and sexual desire as possible sites of individual and cultural transformation. The phenomenon of repetition is a focus shared by psychoanalysis and affect theory, and I propose the reiterative conventions of courtly love as a place where the tensions between the two approaches may provide a window into medieval meditations on sex, love, and cultural change.