Rogelio Alfonso Scott Insua

ROGELIO SCOTT INSUA, then a graduate student at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “The Articulation of Psychoanalysis and Genomics: Neuromuscular Diseases, Epistemic Cultures, and Medical Modernities in Brazil,” supervised by Dr. Andrew Clinton Willford. This project examines the articulation of genomic medicine and Lacanian psychoanalysis to treat neuromuscular dystrophies at a Genomic Clinical Research Center in Brazil. While both psychoanalysts and genomic physicians advocate for this collaboration, they nonetheless deploy different arguments to explain it. Hence, psychoanalysis operates as a dissonant element within genomic discourse and practice, while the two disciplines pragmatically articulate, justify, and extend their partnership. Furthermore, patients with neuromuscular dystrophies traverse complex forms of experience, embodiment and meaning that challenge ordinary notions of healing, recovery and suffering. The findings of this research are distributed into five axes: 1) the contested meanings of life, a category traversed by technoscientific (and biological) definitions, as well as experience and biography; 2) the psychoanalytic destabilization of the biogenetic reduction of kinship to heredity, alongside the blatant insufficiency of psychoanalytic categories such as the Oedipus complex; 3) the opening of contingent futures in response to medicalized technologies of prognosis, life-expectancy, and resignation; 4) the introduction of a constant difference between the body and the organism, to prevent the former’s subsumption into the latter; and 5) local styles of scientific demarcation in which psychoanalysis can have a place of coevalness to genomics, despite their diverging epistemological genealogies.