Continental Psychoanalysis, Misc

This paper contains my attempt to pastiche the Lacanian philosopher and social theorist Renata Salecl. The pastiche focuses on the effects of coronavirus on liberal societies, the invasion of Ukraine, and offers a definition which I think is of interest to analytic philosophy.

Martin Heidegger has been one of the most influential but also criticized philosophers of the XX century. With Being and Time (1927) he sets apart his existential analytic from psychology as well as from anthropology and from the other human sciences that deny the ontological foundation, overcoming the Cartesian dualism in search of the ontological unit of an articulated multiplicity, as human being is. Heidegger’s Dasein Analytic defines the fundamental structures of Dasein such as being-in-the-world, a unitary structure that discloses (...) the worldhood of the world; the modes of being (Seinsweisen), such as fear (Furcht) and anxiety (Angst); and the relationship between existence and time. In his existential analytic, anxiety is one of the fundamental moods (Grundbefindlichkeit) and it plays a pivotal role in the relationship of Dasein with time and world. The paper firstly focuses on the modes of being, underling the importance of anxiety for the constitution of human being; secondly, it is shown the relationship between anxiety and world, and anxiety and time: rejecting both the Aristotelian description of time, as a sequence of moments that informs our common understanding of time, and the Augustine’s mental account of inner time, Heidegger considers temporality under a transcendental point of view. Temporality is ek-static, it is a process through which human being comes toward and back to itself, letting itself encounter the world and the entities. The transcendental interpretation of time provided by Heidegger may give its important contribution in psychopathology. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to unearth the cultural conditionals that silently buttress the recurrence of one of the most violent crimes of our times, namely mass shootings. These conditionals are rooted in a religious discourse that thrives on the notions of sacred and sacrifice as a violent act par excellence, yet of inaugural value for the constitution of a community and its symbolic order. The offered analysis draws on Kristeva’s semanalytic perspective, in an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociological strands.

Sport poses a number of important and no less significant questions, which, on the face of it, may not necessarily seem very important or significant to begin with – a peculiarity that we believe to be integral to sport itself. This article introduces, explores and outlines the psychoanalytic significance of this peculiarity. It explores how the emotions stirred by sport are intertwined with a realm of fiction and fantasy. Despite its lack of practical utility, sport carries an undeniable gravity, encapsulating (...) the aspirations of communities, nations and continents. As a result, psychoanalysis can be used to critically reflect on the purpose and meaning of sport: that is, why do we need sport, and why, for large sections of the world’s population, do we rely on it? Ultimately, while psychoanalysis maintains a unique relation to a variety of unexpected fields of study – including art, culture and neuroscience – we seek to add to this expanding list of inquiry by including sport in this critical domain. By utilising sport as a platform to elucidate psychoanalytic concepts, it is recognised that sport can also prompt questions for psychoanalysis. In so doing, theoretical discussions on the social, cultural and political dimensions of sport through psychoanalytic theory are introduced and applied. (shrink)

The following paper attempts to articulate a distinctly materialist notion of emergence and the formation of patterns by way of re-visiting two texts that have been considered oddities, if not embarrassments, by the subsequent developments of their respective disciplines: Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Engels’s Dialectic of Nature. Both texts are strikingly similar in their speculative engagement with the natural sciences and in their potential to inform a renewed engagement with the question of the relation between technology and (...) life. In the concept of “path-breaking” [Bahnung] Freud understands perceptions as inscribing themselves in the structure of the very perceiving apparatus through repetition of what one could call a “material trace” (Sybille Krämer). This notion of the “material trace” can be connected to the key thrust of Engels’s “objective dialectics” in that it “concerns a model of structural emergence”(Hartmut Winkler). I want to propose that these texts can potentially enrich our understanding of how mental formations such as memory take shape and how subjectivity is constituted in material processes. That is, once Freud and Engels are read through recent philosophical thinking on technology (Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou) and the concept of recursivity (Yuk Hui). This approach can also supply resources for a Marxist notion of ideology—namely by performing a turn from a critique that is primarily concerned with the question of how we can penetrate false appearances towards a materialist account of how (“false”) appearances, something like “real abstractions” (Alfred Sohn-Rethel), can emerge out of the “flat plane” of matter. (shrink)

The emphasis Malabou places on both the erasure and possible reappropriation of the clitoris, which she requalifies as an “organ of thought” (13), warrants considering broader questions concerning negativity, relationality, and power. We raise two related questions, which we further explore at the end of this review. First, what does Malabou's analysis of the negative and its relationship to thought and femininity imply about the ontological category of relationality in toto? If the relation between negativity and the feminine is central (...) to thought, as Malabou seems to suggest, then this implies that negativity also has a prominent role in structuring relations in general. Second, how can the clitoris be disassociated from the negative without being turned into a new “positive,” or into a symbol grounded on a too familiar logic of othering? Arguably, this is the most pressing question for feminist philosophy in an age when gender and sexuality are under constant scrutiny inside and outside of the academe. (shrink)

The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society. Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from (...) politics and popular culture--such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar--critical attention is given to introducing as well as explicating on several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided. The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities. (shrink)

In 2021, the men’s English national football team reached their first final at a major international tournament since winning the World Cup in 1966. This success followed their previous achievement of reaching the semi-finals (knocked-out by Croatia) at the 2018 World Cup. True to form, the defeats proved unfalteringly English; with the 2021 final echoing previous tournament defeats, as England lost to Italy on penalties. However, what resonated with the predictability of an English defeat, was the accompanying chant, ‘it’s coming (...) home’. A ubiquitous presence throughout the course of both tournaments—while chanted at England football matches, it was also repeated across social media, the press and commercial advertising—the chant originates from the 1996 single, Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home), performed by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds. In what follows critical attention will be given to examining how the song offers what will be argued is a melancholic outlook. By re-approaching examples of English nostalgia and hubris, this chapter will expose how illustrations of English melancholy offer the potential for promoting collective forms of expression, which, when contextualized alongside England’s lack of footballing success (for the men’s team, at least), can be offset against a melancholic mediation that is cognizant of the centrality of loss—both for the subject and our collective sporting endeavours. (shrink)

It is this very contention that sits at the heart of Matthew Flisfeder’s, Algorithmic Desire: Towards a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (2021). In spite of the accusation that, today, our social media is in fact hampering democracy and subjecting us to increasing forms of online and offline surveillance, for Flisfeder (2021: 3), ‘[s]ocial media remains the correct concept for reconciling ourselves with the structural contradictions of our media, our culture, and our society’. With almost every aspect of our (...) contemporary lives now mediated through the digital, the significance of the algorithm maintains a pertinent importance in making sense of the social and psychic investments that our interactions on social media, as well as other forms of digital media, rely upon and encourage. The socio-political tensions and contradictions that such interaction prescribes remains a reoccurring theme throughout Algorithmic Desire, with Flisfeder masterfully navigating the problems and pitfalls of a burgeoning digital infrastructure that is redefining our lives as social beings. What becomes apparent from Flisfeder’s account is how debates and discussions regarding the algorithm can be couched in a number of pressing concerns, including the proliferation of online misinformation and the contradictions inherent to our freedom and security. While these debates are drawn together through the prism of the algorithm, it is mostly with regards to the medium of social media that Flisfeder examines how our desire and enjoyment are algorithmically organized. This focus is expertly followed throughout the book’s eight chapters, producing a critically engaging inquiry that continually considers the socio-political tensions and ambiguities that frame and sustain our digital media interactions. Ultimately, it is this contention that lends further support to Flisfeder’s assertion that algorithms play a key role in reading our desire. In the discussion that follows, this reading will be critically considered by tracing and outlining a number of key significances underpinning Flisfeder’s approach. Most notably, this will require a discussion of the Lacanian conception of desire; the effects of disavowal and cynical perversion; the importance of ‘maintaining appearances’; and, finally, the significance of the social media metaphor. (shrink)

In this essay, I try to go through the questions and analysis that Judith Butler puts on Althusser’s work—reading fundamentally and almost exclusively the essay on the “Ideological State Apparatus” from 1970, and the relationship she maintains in her reading with the Freud’s concept of repression and the Lacanian “symbolic order”. My central hypothesis is that it is the Foucauldian reading of Freud and Lacan, begun early in 1990 with Gender Trouble, that guides Butler in his interpretation of the Althusserian (...) concept of interpellation understood almost exclusively from the perspective of the “hailing” example that Althusser provides in his essay from 1970. This leads Butler to a reading that I characterize here as biographical—for its obscene reliance on a particular episode in Althusser’s life: the murder of Helène Rytman—and anti-Cartesian, insofar as it attempts reading the ideological readiness of the subject as something beyond the split of the cogito, and materially effected by an ontological repetition. The problem with Judith Butler's concept of repression is its unappealable juridical nature—which is paradoxical for an erudite reader of Michel Foucault—insofar as the agent of repression appears as analogous to the State and therefore it results assimilable with rebellions “melancholic” subjectivity. This conflation of the psychological and the social is conducive to some mass psychologism, which forgets Althusser’s debt to Lacan when elaborating his theory of ideology. I proceed to investigate the origins of this theory in the text “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses” (1968) and in the recently published Que faire (2018). My tentative conclusion is that there is an idea of supplementary violence (in the Lacanian sense of plus-de-jouir) constitutive of the unconscious in Althusserian theory of ideology that cannot be overlooked, and that is linked to his reading of Freud. (shrink)

In exploring the intra-active, relational and material connections between humans and non- humans, proponents of posthumanism advocate a questioning of the ‘human’ beyond its traditional anthropocentric conceptualization. By referring specifically to controversial developments in mHealth applications, this paper critically diverges from posthuman accounts of human/non-human assemblages. Indeed, we argue that, rather than ‘dissolving’ the human subject, the power of assemblages lie in their capacity to highlight the antagonisms and contradictions that inherently affirm the importance of the subject. In outlining this (...) claim, we propose a turn from the posthuman to the inhuman as a way of understanding the contemporary landscape of (digital) health. (shrink)

In ‘The Genesis of a False Dichotomy: A Critique of Conceptual Alienation’, I locate the origin of the conceptualist-realist debate in the medieval debate between nominalists, realists, and conceptualists; subsequently, I trace the development of realism and conceptualism through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s critique of the Kantian concept in his Logic, but conclude – alongside Sohn-Rethel – that the Hegelian concept failed to capture that all things, including concepts, appear dichotomous under capitalism. Next, I detail the ways (...) in which the division of word and thing mimics the mutual exclusivity of exchange and use. Finally, I claim that Marxist Psychoanalysis has the unique capacity to expose the connection between the concept, the objective world, and the individual; and in turn, reveal our subjective participation in the creation of the objective ‘terms’ of our lives. (shrink)

What is the concept of sense developed by Deleuze in his 1969 Logic of Sense? This paper attempts to answer this question analysing the three dimensions of language that Deleuze isolates: the primary order of noises and intensities ; the secondary order of sense ; and the tertiary organisation of propositions. What renders language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies and organises them into propositions, freeing them for the expressive function. Deleuze argues that it is the dimension of (...) sense that brings about this genesis of language, and he analyses in detail the three syntheses that bring about the production of this surface of sense. Yet Deleuze also distinguishes between two types of non-sense: the nonsense of Lewis Carroll's portmanteau words, which remain ensconced in the dimension of sense, and the more profound nonsense of Antonin Artaud's psychotic scream-breaths, which penetrate the almost unbearable world of the primary order of noise and intensities. In the end, the focus of Logic of Sense is less the surface domain of sense than the primary depth of corporeal intensities. What Deleuze calls a ‘minor’ use of language is nothing other than an intensive use of language that constitutes a principle of metamorphosis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will offer some examples of the effectiveness of Adorno’s concept of mimesis for an analysis of extreme violence and for a defence of democratic institutions against possible regressions into authoritarian regimes. I will start by reading the concept of mimesis through the lens of the interlacement between the concepts of play and power. My aim is twofold: first, I wish to further the analysis of Adorno’s concept of mimesis by showing that it can be interpreted (...) as a form of play, which either empowers subjectivity or becomes a means of domination; second, I will use these speculations to highlight the relevance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s explanation of anti-Semitic violence when seen through the lens of the concept mimesis. Before concluding, I will briefly highlight Adorno’s ideas about what makes democracy vulnerable to potential regressions into extreme violence, and examine what can be done practically – from an Adornian perspective – to avoid regression: defending democratic institutions, and working towards a removal of those barriers that obstruct genuine mimetic experience and self-reflection. (shrink)

This article argues that we can construct a complex interpretation of the nature of time by linking Aciman’s gnostic thread to aspects of twentieth century theory, from philosophy and psychoanalysis. In brief, it attempts to demonstrate the roles of dislocation, deferral, and Otherness in constituting human temporality. The essay begins by surmising the conceptual history of time, touching on key ideas put forward by Augustine and Bergson. The second section takes a psychoanalytic turn after exploring Homo Irrealis to describe the (...) significance of desire and fantasy. Thirdly, we develop a unique and temporal application of difference and deferral, building off of Deleuze and Derrida. The fourth section will consider how the psychoanalytic concept of the Other is inhered within time. We conclude that an Acimanic analysis of time is the means by which we can understand existence not as a series of moments, but a rich progression of dissimilitude and Otherness defined moreso by its lack of cohesion and directness of being than by a unified and self-identifying subject. (shrink)

In his book, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture (2014), Robert Pfaller argued that our relationship to sport is one grounded in “illusion”. Simply put, our interest in and enjoyment of sport occurs through a process of “knowing better”. Here, one’s knowledge of the unimportance of sport is achieved by associating the illusion of sport with a naïve observer – i.e. someone who does believe in sport’s importance. In the wake of the global pandemic, COVID-19, it would seem that Pfaller’s (...) remarks have taken on an added significance. With major sporting events and domestic competitions being indefinitely postponed or canceled, Liverpool manager, Jurgen Klopp, commented that football was “the most important of the least important things”. In light of these remarks, this paper will critically locate sport’s sudden unimportance in relation to Pfaller’s contention that sport reflects an “illusion without owner”. (shrink)

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. -/- By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it (...) engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. -/- Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film. (shrink)

Jung’s Red Book, finally published only in 2009, is a highly ambiguous text describing a succession of extraordinary visions, together with Jung’s interpretation of them. This book offers a new interpretation of Jung’s Red Book, in terms of the Middle Way, as a universal principle and embodied ethic, paralleled both in the Buddha’s teachings and elsewhere. Jung explicitly discusses the Middle Way in the Red Book (although this has been largely ignored by scholars so far) as well as offering lots (...) of material that can be understood in its terms. This book interprets the Red Book in relation to the archetypes met in its visions – the hero, the feminine, the Shadow, God and Christ, and follows Jung’s process of integrating these different internal figures. To do this Jung needs to find the Middle Way between absolutes at every point, in a way similar to the Buddha. (shrink)

This article reflects on the nuances and insinuations of a conceptualisation of “lament” as an inability to appropriate any object, or to turn the lost object into a fetish. While mourning, melancholia, and fetishism ultimately remain entangled with the ego (i.e., within a narcissistic configuration), lament goes beyond that, hinting at a loss of ego, a disintegration of the autonomous self. As a sonic expression of the failure of language, lament is a manifestation of the negativity or void at the (...) core of language. However, in lament this negativity is radicalised. This extreme obstruction, which impedes all connection, imparts to lament abstractive powers, ultimately qualifying lament as a political force. The last part of the article argues that the social imaginary of Iran, steeped in numerous failed attempts to rise above domination and subjection (as evident in myriad revolts and two revolutions in the twentieth century), could serve as promising material for the concretisation of such a theory of lament. (shrink)

The chapter begins with a brief genealogy of psychoanalytic thinking in the broad area of religion. It first looks at Freud’s early modernist dismissal of religion, comparing this with Lacan’s valorisation of the ethical quests that both religion and psychoanalysis are said to share at the heart of their discourse. It then examines Lacan’s later pessimism in opposing the ‘triumph of religion’ in our times to an increasingly uncertain future for psychoanalysis. Moving from a conceptual discussion of these themes to (...) an applied analysis of contemporary challenges, the chapter highlights the contribution of psychoanalysis to an understanding of the aesthetics of violence informing the eschatology of Islamic terror within contemporary global jihadism. (shrink)

In the Confessions, Augustine speculates that before we are aware of language, we learn our mother tongue through our mother's touch. These early lessons in language are first taught through a gentle touch: the nipple of the mother in the mouth of the infant. Language is later reinforced by a violent touch: the schoolmaster's switch. Augustine suggests that any memory of a time before the touch of language is purely imaginary. Nevertheless, his autobiography attempts to return to a time before (...) the touch of the mother, which, for Augustine, is at once the touch of the mother tongue.1 Since our relationship to our own infancy is imaginary, our infancy neither properly belongs to our memory nor can it be properly... (shrink)

This is a draft of the the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation which reads Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King synoptically through the lens of Christian hermeneutics.

In what arrived belatedly as an announced, but delayed, preface to Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Jacques Lacan interrogates the relations Sade could be said to have had with, on the one hand, Sigmund Freud, and, on the other, Immanuel Kant.1 Despite the presuppositions at the time of its writing, the text was first published as “Kant avec Sade” in the journal Critique in 1963 and only later reappeared as the preface it had been conceived as: announcing the (...) dogma of de Sade as an introduction to one of his key works. What had happened in the meantime, Lacan cryptically suggests, is that his – Lacan’s – collection of lectures and essays, Écrits, had arrived with a certain acclaim on the French cultural scene, and what had at first appeared to the publisher as inconsequential ravings had morphed into a profound and potentially significant enframing of de Sade’s “philosophy.” -/- What is it we find here? It is stupid, says Lacan, to pronounce – as too many “literary types” do – that de Sade’s perversions prefigured Freud’s interrogation of sexual mores. True, they both have the appearance of schooling, and so serve to prepare, Lacan informs us, the way for a new science. To understand the difference between them we need to arrive at some conception of Freud’s ethics of pleasure. -/- With what is known as the pleasure principle – announced in 1911 – Freud ordained a mechanism whereby pleasure is maintained at the lowest possible level.2 Lacan elsewhere referred to this principle as a homeostatic device, since it seeks to secure the functioning of the organism with as little excitement as possible. -/- Freud’s principle is different from traditional ethics in that it doesn’t disallow some sexual practices that had hitherto been condemned as wrong. However, such a realization doesn’t relieve us from approaching the principle as ethical. To Lacan, Freud’s homeostatic device is what “preordains the creature to its good.” In other words, it is by indulging in just enough pleasure to avoid unpleasure, either by becoming abstinent or consumptive, that we maintain our experience of goodwill. -/- What is remarkable, Lacan notes in his foreword to de Sade, is that Freud did not find it necessary to explicitly refer to this principle as an ethical prerogative. The only reason we can find for this, Lacan claims, is the 19th century obsession with the theme of “happiness in evil.” -/- The “happiness in evil” – or, as we should say, happiness in the will – has its precursor in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which was published eight years prior to de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.3 To Lacan, de Sade subverts the Enlightenment directive inaugurated by Kant, and it is as such that it is possible to say that de Sade offers the truth of Kant’s Critique. -/- This “happiness in evil” becomes de Sade’s Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness. Recall that this is quite a different notion of perversion – of which the Marquis figures as the first and predominant example in Lacan – from that which reigned in the “literary” epoch, i.e., prior to Freud, as well as from Freud’s own inflection of the term. Perversion is no longer reducible to a catalogue of abominations – whipping, homosexuality, you name it – such as was the case prior to Freud, nor to a more select line of such – Freud famously excluded homosexual love from the list, while retaining sadomasochism. Lacan would draw the conclusion of Freud’s tentative first step by positing that perversion is a position, and specifically a location in relation to the phallus. -/- The novelty and force of this perspective should become clear to those who study the present volume. It is not a clinical attempt, nor the final word on a philosophy of mind without psychoanalysis. Rather, it should be regarded as situated in between these two domains, and with eyes to both. (shrink)

“The sense of touch has always been relegated to the second rank by the philosophical and cultural tradition, lagging far behind the more elevated senses of vision and hearing. Tides have changed with the path-breaking work particularly by Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida and some others, but the proper 'haptic turn', in the echo of and in counterpoint to the decried 'linguistic turn', still has to be carried out and seen through. The present volume, bringing together the incisive and insightful research of (...) a group of young Slovene theorists (including some 'honorary Slovenes'), proposes a new and original take on one of the oldest questions: how do words touch things and how does touch inform and affect language? Haptolinguistics may well be the word that we will have to add to our vocabulary.” – Mladen Dolar, Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia -/- “An intriguing and thought-provoking collection of essays. These compelling and original reflections invite us to think about language and the vicissitudes of matter in new and startling ways.” – Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada. (shrink)

With more than 10 million views, the TED Talks of couples therapist and author Esther Perel strike a chord with the general public. How to sustain desire in a loving relationship? she asks, while giving glimpses into the discontents couples face when navigating tender love and erotic desire. This framework comes from clinical psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell (Can Love Last?) who returns to an often forgotten Freudian text in which the split between tenderness and sensuality is positioned at the core of (...) civilized and healthy adult sexuality. My paper complements these popular but insubstantial accounts on love and desire, recognizing their urgency, yet redressing their unexplored critical potential, by returning to the sex, gender and racial assumptions of Freud’s tender-sensual split. This paper suggests that at the heart of Freud’s work lays a crucial yet overlooked concept, tenderness. Simultaneously I claim that his theory of adult sexuality is built upon a taboo on adult erotic tenderness. I return to his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (Freud, 1905/1973c) and “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (Freud, 1912/1957) to expose and critique the implicit imperative that healthy civilized adult sexuality requires the repression of tenderness. Methodologically, I follow Laplanche’s method of historico-structural approach, combined with a feminist-queer critique of the phallic and teleological foundations of Freud’s theory of sexuality. I suggest that Mitchell and Perel’s clinical practice goes radically against Freud’s implicit taboo. Most significantly it urges us to rethink phallic sexuality and subjectivity as tender. (shrink)

Dans cet essai, j'analyse les présuppositions du récit dudit « retour du religieux », du point de vue de la psychanalyse (Freud) et de la déconstruction (Derrida). Après avoir mis à jour l'eurocentrisme et le colonialisme inhérents aux concepts de « magie », « animisme », « religion » et « croyance » chez Freud (avec une attention particulière portée à Totem et tabou), j’offre une lecture déconstructrice des discours politiques contemporains sur le sécularisme, la foi et le savoir.

This paper takes off from a growing preoccupation in Western political-social philosophy on the thinkability of the materiality of change, that became most pronounced in Alain Badiou's philosophy of the event. It traces the development of the discourse of radical change tied to a materialist theory of subjectivity beginning from Badiou, down to the strong criticism posed against it by Slavoj Žižek. This is then followed by the discussion of Bruno Bosteels' potent defense of Badiou's philosophy. Finally, the last part (...) takes off from this debate and highlights how this tension in Badiou's philosophy was possible in the first place. Using Adrian Johnston's key insight on pre-evental and post-evental time, this paper argues that Žižek and Bosteels respectively employ pre-evental and post-evental lenses in reading the relation of event to being. Furthermore, these two lenses are themselves the effect of the split readability of the event at the moment of its rupture: the parallax-effect that divides the event into two. This paper asserts that neither of the two is sufficient. Both are fundamental in outlining what sort of sustained disciplines are necessary before and after events take place. (shrink)

Zijn filosofen gek? Zo ja, waarom? En ligt dat dan aan de filosoof, aan de filosofie of aan de diagnostiek? Dat zijn de vragen die in 'Diagnose van de moderne filosoof' centraal staan. Nicole des Bouvrie neemt aan de hand van het diagnostische handboek van psychiaters en psychologen (de DSM-V) de situatie van de hedendaagse denker onder de loep. Autisme, psychoses, anorexia en andere aandoeningen passeren de revue, om aan de hand van een grondige anamnese van hedendaagse denkbeelden uit de (...) westerse filosofie een diagnose te stellen. ''Des Bouvrie laat als geen ander zien hoe filosofie en waanzin zich in elkaar kunnen verstrikken, maar ook hoe ze bij elkaar een zone van vrijheid vinden.'' Filosoof Wouter Kusters, winnaar Socratesbeker 2015. (shrink)

The principle of creativity constitutes a central point in the philosophical-anthropological as much as in the psychoanalytic work of the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. In Castoriadis’s thought the creative praxis of the human being is dependent on the innate imaginary force. The purpose of this article is to elaborate the way that subjectivity and the social field are constituted and interconnected through the unfolding of two fundamental concepts of Castoriadis, the radical imagination which applies to the psyche and the social (...) imaginary significations which applies to the social. The text aims to point out that Castoriadis’s intention was to make thinkable the content of autonomy in psychoanalytic terms of an “exchange” between the conscious and the unconscious that unleashes the creative potentiality of the psyche, and also becomes a precondition of political autonomy. (shrink)

Why did millions of people respond to the failures of neoliberal capitalism by voting in leaders that further undermine their existence? In this article, I combine the insights of the early Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Theodor W. Adorno) with the insights of psychoanalytic theory (Sigmund Freud) to show how economic factors interact with psychological factors in the rise of the far-right today. The propaganda techniques used by far-right leaders create conditions in masses that are akin to hypnoses. Such techniques induce (...) regressions in far-right followers in which the unconscious predominates, and far-right leaders use to manipulate the masses. To further detail the theoretical framework, I analyze a Trump rally and an interview with a Trump follower. (shrink)

Purpose – This paper furnishes an inaugural reading of abjective consumption by drawing on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection within the wider terrain of consumer cultural research. It offers a conceptual framework that rests on three pillars, viz. irrationality, meaninglessness, dissolution of selfhood. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative research design that adopts a documentary ethnographic approach, by drawing on a corpus of 50 documentary episodes from the TV series “My Strange Addiction” and “Freaky Eaters”. Findings – The findings from this analysis point (...) to different orders of mediatized discourse that are simultaneously operative in different actors’ frames (e.g. moralizing, medical), in Goffman’s terms, yet none of which attains to address the phenomenon of abjective consumption to its fullblown extent. Research limitations/implications – Although some degree of bias is bound to be inherent in the data because of their pre-recorded status, they are particularly useful not in the least because this is a “difficult sample” in qualitative methodological terms. Practical implications – The multi-order dimensionalization of abjective consumption opens up new vistas to marketers in terms of adding novel dimensions to the message structure of their communicative programs, in line with the three Lacanian orders. Social implications – The adoption of a consumer psychoanalytic perspective allows significant others to fully dimensionalize the behavior of abjective consumption subjects, by becoming sensitive to other than symbolic aspects that are endemic in consumer behavior. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the extant consumer cultural research literature by furnishing the novel conceptual framework of abjective consumption, as a further elaboration of my consumer psychoanalytic approach to jouissance consumption, as well as by contrasting this interpretive frame vis-à-vis dominant discursive regimes. (shrink)

Despite its psychoanalytic origins, the author situates the emergence of the therapeutic community within divergent traditions. He theorizes the therapeutic community as both a ‘place’ and a space at the centre of which is an absence (the un-conscious). This absence is the foundation of the Symbolic. The culture of each community is embodied in specific rituals and customs which represent the Law (Oedipus). And the position the subject adopts in relation to the rules and boundaries in the community always refers (...) us back to his or her singular history. It is here, for the subject of psychosis, that the spectre of the fragmented body emerges, within a psychic homelessness. In the therapeutic community, the boundary between the inside and the outside is inscribed not just in the spatial location but also by the relationships between members of the group. (shrink)

How does the theme of the other–-as person, experience or alternative conceptual scheme—allow us to reassess the role of the self in literary texts? This book employs phenomenology and semiotics to argue that modern literature is strongly concerned with the role of time in the construction of the self. Romantic poetry from Goethe to Shelley and the modern prose tradition from Flaubert to Butor constitute different traditions but also indicate, on a textual basis, how alterity performs a crucial role in (...) reading, thus encouraging us to interpret literary texts in terms of the related concerns of self, other and time. The author examines the phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas and Wolfgang Iser, as well as the cultural semiotics of Julia Kristeva, to argue that modern literature provides the occasion for a new understanding of the self in time and, in this way, addresses some of the pressing literary problems of our own period. (shrink)

Analisi della possibile influenza esercitata dalla lettura di Platone su Freud, e in particolare della teoria del sogno come via per conoscere dei desideri precedentemnte "repressi" esposta nella "Repubblica".

This reviewer had read Kristeva in October, 2016 in this Journal (and the review is freely available online and had garnered some small publicity). Over the last one year this reviewer has taken a very short view of her tautological work. Having read her carefully this reviewer has decided that she should be rejected as a psychoanalyst, notwithstanding her huge popularity as a feminist. But this reviewer through a nuanced critique of theoretical psychoanalysis find her and her ilk lacking caritas.

The relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been frequently debated; nonetheless, one rarely comes upon a thoroughgoing, in-depth treatment of this connection. The Capitalist Unconscious is therefore a belated but welcome inquiry into the points of intersection between the two, a project whose contours could be traced back to the works of Marx and Freud. It is in the work of Lacan, however, that this correlation between Marxism and Psychoanalysis becomes visible. This article explores Samo Tomšič’s analysis of the logical, (...) epistemological, and political continuity of Marx’s critique of political economy and Freud’s theory of libidinal economy, meanwhile appraising the possible emancipatory potential of this project. (shrink)

György Lukács’s Marxist phase is usually associated with his passage from neo-Kantianism to Hegelianism. Nonetheless, Nietzschean influences have been covertly present in Lukács’s philosophical development, particularly in his uncompromising distaste for the bourgeois society and the mediocrity of its quotidian values. A closer glance at Lukács’s corpus discloses that the influence of Nietzsche has been eclipsed by the Hegelian turn in his thought. Lukács hardly ever mentions the weight of Nietzsche on his early thinking, an influence that makes cameo appearances (...) throughout his lifetime writings. During the period of his adherence to a Stalinist approach to communism, his new subjectivity seems to be re-constituted through a disavowal of his earlier romantic anti-capitalism. Implicit in Lukács’s attack on Nietzsche in the Destruction of Reason (1952) is an acerbic reaction to the mute presence of the latter in his earlier thought. Apart from his ignorance of the unreliability of the collection of the Will to Power edited by Peter Gast and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, his battle against the anti-proletariat Nietzsche in the Destruction is waged on a metaphysical, non-historical plain. Lukács’s pre-Marxist works (Soul and Form, On Poverty of Spirit, and The Theory of the Novel) in a sense betray the instance of a writer who writes most of someone where he omits his name. Thus perceived, Lukács’s early corpus lends itself to a symptomatic reading. -/- This essay seeks to extract the Nietzschean undercurrents of Lukács’s work through a reflection on the romantic anti-capitalist tendencies that the young Lukács shared with Nietzsche. For although it may appear that Nietzsche lacked a clear politics, his criticism of the bourgeois ethos as a structure based on debt/guilt [Schuld], and his critique of modern value-system and nihilism paved the way for the emergence of Lukács’s theory of reification. Nietzsche’s category of 'transvaluation of values’ suggests a total transfiguration of reality, a radical rupture with the ordinary state of things, and as such carries within itself a revolutionary promise. Drawing a distinction between political romanticism and romantic politics, I argue that romantic anti-capitalism contains a potential for the latter. The essay further traces the link between Lukács’s ‘romantic politics’ and the persistence of a thought of the tragic (a ‘tragic vision’) in his texts that, despite its temporary decline during his realist period, is undismissable in different constellations of his thought. (shrink)

Situating psychoanalysis as the foundation of the therapeutic community and as a spiritual exercise, the author argues that contemporary approaches articulate a form of akēdia – a desire to be elsewhere – both in its focus on expectation and its misunderstanding of the nature ‘place’. This amounts to an avoidance of being-with the subject of psychosis. This leads to a discussion of the formation necessary for therapeutic community practitioners which is in opposition to the notion of training. Such a formation (...) amounts to an inscription into the discourse of the therapeutic community with specific reference to the Law (Oedipus). -/- L’autore intende la psicoanalisi come esercizio spirituale e la colloca come base fondante della Comunità Terapeutica. Egli critica gli approcci contemporanei al trattamento della psicosi, poiché mettono in atto qualcosa di simile al desiderio di essere altrove -akēdia- sia per quanto riguarda le aspettative che l’incomprensione del ‘luogo’ della natura. Questo atteggiamento porta a un evitamento dell’essere-con la psicosi. Tali premesse aprono di fatto la discussione sulla necessaria formazione degli operatori di una comunità terapeutica che non può essere racchiusa nella parola training. La formazione degli operatori è nell’essere, nell’appartenere alla stessa comunità terapeutica e non può che far preciso riferimento ai concetti edipici di confine e di Legge. (shrink)

This paper explores issues that arise between Adorno and Marcuse over the potentials and implications of Freudian theory. These concern whether it is possible to expound a non-repressive relationship between what Freud calls the life and death drives, on the one hand, and the ego, on the other, that does not collapse into abstract utopianism or clear heteronomy. After detailing the theory of instincts and ego formation that early critical theory draws from Freud, I argue that neither Adorno nor Marcuse (...) is successful in articulating the possibility of such a non-repressive form of subjectivity: Adorno produces a powerful conception of freedom as non-reductive, communicative reconciliation between ego and instinctual nature, but remains committed to a Freudian conception of the interplay between elements of the psyche that makes it difficult to see how reconciliation could be actualized therein. Marcuse, on the other hand, develops a conception of liberation that largely abandons the ideal of ego autonomy by rendering the ego a spectator to the unfurling of instinctual impulses. In the concluding section, I argue that a more judicious evaluation of the death drive’s contribution to critical thought could clear space for a rapprochement between Adorno and Marcuse, and a more successful incorporation of Freud into critical theory. (shrink)

In 1939 Gaston Bachelard published a book Lautréamont on the poem The Songs of Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse. Bachelard’s Lautréamont was inspired by the method of psychoanalysis. The purpose of this article is to analyze Bachelard’s interpretation of the Chants, to compare his version of psychoanalysis with the versions of Freud and Jung, and to show its meaning in the historical and philosophical context.

Engaging the World explores Luce Irigaray’s writings on sexual difference, deploying the resources of her work to rethink philosophical concepts and commitments and expose new possibilities of vitality in relationship to nature, others, and to one’s self. The contributors present a range of perspectives from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, literature, education, evolutionary theory, sound technology, science and technology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. They place Irigaray in conversation with thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, René Decartes, and (...) Avital Ronell. While every essay challenges Irigaray’s thought in some way, each one also reveals the transformative effects of her thought across multiple domains of contemporary life. (shrink)

If, as Axel Honneth has recently argued, critical theory needs psychoanalysis for meta-normative and explanatory reasons, this does not settle the question of which version of psychoanalysis critical theorists should embrace. In this paper, I argue against Honneth's favoured version – an intersubjectivist interpretation of Winnicott's object-relations theory – and in favour of an alternative based on the drive-theoretical work of Melanie Klein. Klein's work, I argue, provides critical theorists with a more realistic conception of the person and a richer (...) explanatory account of human aggression and destructiveness than does Honneth's intersubjectivist view. As such, it better serves the ends for which Honneth claims that critical theory should turn to psychoanalysis in the first place. (shrink)

This article concerns the notion of aesthetic negativity, and related ideas regarding the autonomy of art. After giving some initial definitions and a brief historical sketch of these concepts, we will examine the definition proposed by arguably the greatest thinker of aesthetic negativity, Theodor Adorno, and its recent semiotic reconstruction in the work of Christoph Menke. This reconstruction configures aesthetic negativity and autonomy jointly as the capacity of artworks, and the experiences that they occasion; to processurally negate ‘‘automatic’’ modes of (...) understanding. This account is then critiqued, and contrasted with views on aesthetic experience that stress its nonconceptual and asemiotic aspects, and the close affinity of this modality of experience with perceptual presence and affective intensity, with a clear reference to the phenomenological tradition. Some recent ideas about how semiotic and phenomenological theories regarding art can interact are then cited, and an undertheorized aspect of their connection introduced, which is the main original import of the article. This connection, which is furnished by the concept of aisthetic trait, is derived from psychoanalytic metapsychology, and is an example of how the meaning and presence effects of art can act not just in a competing synchronic fashion, but can morph into each other over time. A trait is a signifier-like perceptual remnant of a prior subjective experience of high intensity that provides a kind of ratification of the experience that endures within the life history of an individual. This is then shown to have relevance to the previous topics of aesthetic negativity and autonomy in terms of the way that the trait mechanism may bring to light important diachronic aspects of aesthetic experience that are currently absent in other accounts in the literature. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relation between citizenship and orientalism under the new conditions of indebtedness resulting from austerity. Taking its departure from a condition of precarity under debt economy, the crisis of Europe is described as the anxiety produced by a reversal of those paradigms that have sustained the image of Europe so far. This reversal coincides with a return in Europe of that which for a long time was ejected outside in order for Europe itself to be constituted as (...) a unified symbolic reality. The chapter illustrates how this new economy has exposed a certain ‘disorienting’ effect of austerity, contributing to rekindling the ambiguities of Europe and therefore reconfiguring the image of the European self against its others. It concludes that this reconfiguration forms the background against which a new relationship between citizenship and orientalism in contemporary Europe should be examined. (shrink)

This paper addresses the scarcely scrutinized topic in the consumer culture literature regarding how a social actor consumes himself through speech acts. More specifically, by introducing a new type of speech act, viz. the taboo speech act, and by effectively differentiating it from expletives, slang, and swearing words and expressions, I outline how subjectivity appropriates and individuates its systemic underpinning as other or linguistic system (Saussure) and wall of language (Lacan) in linguistic acts of transgression. Taboo speech acts do not (...) merely express emotions, such as anger and frustration. They also seek to contain a linguistic system as an ideational totality of acts of parole in a primus affectivus that is incumbent on the inverse sublimation of epithets and cultural symbols standing synecdochically in a pars pro toto relationship for the limits of what is culturally/linguistically sanctioned. The subject consumes/annihilates and institutes itself at the same time in taboo speech acts whose mission may not be fully accounted for through conversational pragmatics, insofar as they perform at a more foundational level a social ontological function. The offered analysis aims at contributing to the extant literature in consumer cultural theory, applied linguistics, and social theory. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan was constantly and consistently motivated by the aims of carrying out, improving, and critically understanding psychoanalytic practice and theory. In his work and teaching, he examined and (re)incorporated a number of key experiences, conceptions, and insights from moral life and moral theories into psychoanalysis. -/- One particularly interesting aspect of Lacan’s work, particularly in terms of moral theory, is that while problematizing them, and reconceiving how we must understand them, his approach remains anchored by key themes, concepts, and (...) experiences of older moral theories and perspectives, such as the truth of the human subject, the nature of the good, and the processes and pitfalls of moral development. -/- Three main sets of issues are analysed and discussed in this chapter. First, we examine Lacan’s criticisms of modes and schools of psychoanalysis that converted it into a simplistically moralistic discipline such as ego-psychology. Second, we run over Lacan’s main discussions and partial appropriations of Aristotelian, Kantian, Utilitarian, Sadean, and Judeo-Christian moral perspectives. Third and finally, we go deeper into discussing the implications Lacan’s reinterpretation of selected Freudian concepts bear for ethics, particularly in terms of ethics of subjectivity. Put very briefly, we might say that Lacan is situating a process of becoming-subject within a never-complete field of ethical discourses. (shrink)

A partir du renvoi à la « maxime de Platon » insérée dans l’avant dernière page de la première édition de L’interprétation du rêve, l’auteur expose d’abord les convergences entre la conception du rêve de Platon présentée dans La République et les intuitions qui fondent l’édifice métapsychologique freudien. A la lumière des sources textuelles citées par Freud et de ses intérêts, l’auteur avance ensuite l’hypothèse selon laquelle Freud aurait non seulement omis de reconnaître la généalogie théorétique platonicienne de la « (...) via regia menant à la connaissance de l’inconscient », mais aussi utilisé le dialogue antique comme source d’inspiration tacite pour la composition de L’Interprétation du rêve. (shrink)