Première leçon inédite du Séminaire D’un Autre à l’autre, du 13 novembre 1968. Texte établi par Jacques-Alain MillerNous nous retrouvons pour un séminaire dont j’ai choisi le titre, D’un Autre à l’autre, de manière à vous indiquer les grands repères autour desquels doit tourner mon propos de cette année..

Première leçon inédite du Séminaire D’un Autre à l’autre, du 13 novembre 1968. Texte établi par Jacques-Alain MillerNous nous retrouvons pour un séminaire dont j’ai choisi le titre, D’un Autre à l’autre, de manière à vous indiquer les grands repères autour desquels doit tourner mon propos de cette année...

Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of (...) epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers. (shrink)

The theoretical writings of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou stand at the heart of contemporary European thought. While the combined corpus of these three figures contains a significant number of references to each otherOCOs work, such references are often simply critical, obscure - or both. Lacan Deleuze Badiou guides us through the crucial, under-remarked interrelations between these three thinkers, identifying the conceptual passages, connections and disjunctions that underlie the often superficial statements of critique, indifference or agreement. (...) Working through the rubrics of the contemporary, time, the event and truth, Bartlett, Clemens and Roffe present a new, lucid account of where these three thinkers stand in relation to one another and why their nexus remains unsurpassed as a point of reference for contemporary thought itself."e. (shrink)

The oft‐proclaimed “return to Freud” of Jacques Lacan (1901–81) was a return to what he took to be the great creative insight of Freud, insight into the way that language works in the vagaries of unconscious human experience. In Lacan's own formula, “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1977, p. 234). One way to grasp this may be by reflecting on the familiar anecdote recounted by Freud, himself, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1960 [1901], pp. 8–11). (...) Freud recounts how he had met on a train a well‐educated young man of Jewish descent who, while decrying the anti‐Semitism by which he had been victimized, tries to cite the line from Virgil's Aeneid in which Dido calls for vengeance upon Aeneas, “Exoriare …” – tries, indeed, but fails. Asked for help, Freud quotes the line exactly: “Exoriar[e] ALIQUIS nostris ex ossibus ultor” (Aeneid 4:625, literally: “Let someone (aliquis) arise from my bones as an avenger!”). Recalling Freud's claim that such words are never forgotten without a reason, the young man asks Freud to help him understand the reason for drawing a blank. Freud agrees, insisting on the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis: to say “candidly and uncritically” whatever comes to mind as he concentrates on the forgotten word. (shrink)

Thinking Space is ideal reading for those looking to learn about the Ospatial turn1 in social and cultural theory. As theorists have begun using using geographical concepts and metaphors to think about the complex and differentiated world this book examines the way they use spatial ideas, what role these ideas play in their thinking and what this means for how we think about theory and space. Among the writers discussed are: Simmel, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Cixous, Lefebvre, Lacan, Bourdieu, Foucault and (...) Fanon. (shrink)

In the end of the 1960s France witnessed the response of the younger generation of philosophers to the leftist ideologies of 1968, as well as to the "intellectual models" of that time: Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan etc. It was from this response that the so called "new philosophy" raised. Among them also B.-H. Lévy, who later, as a mature philosopher , in spite of having suppressed his model J.-P. Sartre returned to him in his remarkable biography. The question than is: (...) Which Sartre - then there were more than one Sartre: Sartre as the author of Nausea is not identical with Sartre as a follower of Stalinism - and how could he substantiate the whole century, which was a century of seething of ideas, events mostly tragic, challenges, defeats, which all are constitutive of our modernity? (shrink)

This article argues that Hegel read Lacan. Put less paradoxically, it claims that situating Hegel within a Lacanian paradigm results in an understanding of the future as still open and of history as not ended. Absolute knowing, on this model, is the recognition of the way in which history has developed, not a claim that it can advance no further. The article aims to persuade those who might otherwise dismiss Hegel – for example, persons au courant with poststructuralism – (...) that he still can make a decisive contribution to current debates. (shrink)

This article follows Jacques Derrida, who follows the animal-machine. In his lecture The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida could easily have swapped “the animal” for “the machine” . In fact, throughout his readings of René Descartes, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas, the machine emerges right alongside the animal. In defining the limits of the human, these thinkers present the animal and the machine together in order to elevate the human. Unlike the human, who responds, the animal-machine (...) merely reacts. The animal-machine may approximate certain human actions, but it can never, according to Descartes, in Derrida’s words, “respond to our questions” and will always suffer from a “lack .. (shrink)

An accessible, higher-level introduction to a key selection of continental European thinkers from Spinoza to Zizek. Covering 'classical' exponents of the tradition such as Hegel and Marx, 'moderns' like Gramsci and Habermas and 'postmoderns' like Lacan and Deleuze, the volume introduces the main ideas of each thinker and reflects on their enduring theoretical relevance. The impressive breadth and contemporary angle make this a unique, up-to-date collection that will be invaluable to students and teaching staff alike.

Examining the still underexplored elements in educational theorist Paulo Freire's work, this essay begins from his claim that problem-posing pedagogy works as a “kind of psychoanalysis.” Situating Freire between the critical philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, Alex Armonda offers a new reading of the problem-posing dialectic, mapping parallels between Freirean pedagogy and psychoanalysis on the nature of the subject/object relation, while thinking new connections across the philosophical-analytical divide on questions of being, subjectivity, and politics. First, he discusses the onto-epistemic specificity of (...) “the human” in Freire and situates it in relation to the split subject of the unconscious in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Second, he presents the subject/object encounter in Freire, demonstrating that a similar notion of the unconscious informs Freire's account and plays a central role in his understanding of the banking and problem-posing pedagogical experiences. Advancing a Lacanian reading of the problem-posing encounter, Armonda concludes by reflecting on key differences between the dialectical-materialist and psychoanalytical interpretations of Freire, and how the latter opens new perspectives on “reality” as an inconsistent space of contest, generating alternative ways of conceiving political subjectivity and the possibility of radical social transformation in the present. (shrink)

This is a unique collection presenting work by Alain Badiou and commentaries on his philosophical theories. It includes three lectures by Badiou, on contemporary politics, the infinite, cinema and theatre and two extensive interviews with Badiou – one concerning the state of the contemporary situation and one wide ranging interview on all facets of his work and engagements. It also includes six interventions on aspects of Badiou's work by established scholars in the field, addressing his concept of history, Lacan, (...) Cinema, poetry, and feminism; and four original essays by young and established scholars in Australia and New Zealand addressing the key concerns of Badiou's 2015 visit to the Antipodal region and the work he presented there. With new material by Badiou previously unpublished in English this volume is a valuable overview of his recent thinking. Critical responses by distinguished and gifted Badiou scholars writing outside of the European context make this text essential reading for anyone interested in the development and contemporary reception of Badiou's thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionCarolyn J. Dean (bio)... even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an occasion for misunderstanding?—Georges Bataille, The Accursed ShareAt the current juncture in the history of studies “on Bataille,” admiration and indebtedness have given way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire for accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitable critical shifts, symptoms of an (...) immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarily taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewed production of Bataille.During his lifetime (1897–1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a “pornographer” and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some intellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimely death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic books and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from “Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida” [Habermas 14]. 1 Bataille’s remains are located in the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinning biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet his work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving its insights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dépense (expenditure), his mysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends, viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille’s refusal to be hard in the conventional sense—his repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945, Bataille wrote that he was the “contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from the shore, because in fact... I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one who is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can have it to one’s heart’s content...” [OC 6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: “Bataille’s cogito, thus, reads: ‘I sink therefore I am’” [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of a sink-or-swim philosophy, but of “the hard desire to endure”—words he wrote to describe Vincent Van Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille’s perspective, the necessary precondition of his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entails yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creation required symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission (“Heroism,” he said, “is an [End Page 3] attitude of flight” [OC 5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille’s most relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink—for this Bataille was giddily embraced after his death. By 1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was equally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists who did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny for their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of that special issue insisted on Bataille’s “ethics” of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held “onto the possibility of an ethics” through a paradoxically “incessant repositing of the ethical” [Stoekl 2, 5]. This account of Bataille’s ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in... (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's fearlessness towards speaking the body has earned for her work the dismissive label "essentialist." But Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un suggest that essence may not be the unitary, monolithic, in short, essentialist category that anti-essentialists so often presume it to be. Irigaray strategically deploys essentialism for at least two reasons: first, to reverse and to displace Jacques Lacan's phallomorphism; and second, to expose the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian (...) metaphysics which denies women access to "Essence" while at the same time positing the essence of "Woman" precisely as non-essential (as matter). (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's fearlessness towards speaking the body has earned for her work the dismissive label “essentialist.” But Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un suggest that essence may not be the unitary, monolithic, in short, essentialist category that anti-essentialists so often presume it to be. Irigaray strategically deploys essentialism for at least two reasons: first, to reverse and to displace Jacques Lacan's phallomorphism; and second, to expose the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian (...) metaphysics which denies women access to “Essence” while at the same time positing the essence of “Woman” precisely as non-essential. (shrink)

Este ensaio examina o relacionamento possível entre o pensamento de Martin Heidegger enquanto emerge no Zollikon Seminaire na sua troca de idéias com Medard Boss e a perspectiva da psicanálise como aparece através do prisma da releitura de Freud oferecido por Jacques Lacan. Heidegger entende Freud como vítima de uma compreensão positivista da ciência que procura explicar o comportamento humano patológico por um complexo de causas discerníveis conscientemente. Quando determinados fenômenos não podem ser explicados desta maneira, Freud postula um (...) jogo de causas psíquicas que não são conscientes, cuja soma ele chama o "inconsciente". Desde que todos os fenômenos humanos são, para Heidegger, discerníveis via uma profunda fenomenologia do ser humano como o ser-no-mundo, a construção hipotética de Freud é desnecessária e, a longo prazo, perniciosa. Mas Lacan propõe uma nova maneira de compreender o inconsciente descoberto por Freud, a saber, que não deve ser entendido como um sistema físico de forças hidráulicas, mas como um processo que seja estruturado como um idioma. A pergunta levantada neste ensaio é se Heidegger seria ou não igualmente hostil à hipótese de Freud, apresentada a ele dentro da forma de Lacan, como algo "estruturado como um idioma". O ensaio sugere que a resposta poderia ser "provavelmente não". Baseado num exemplo clínico altamente simplificado, este ensaio esforça-se para mostrar a compatibilidade entre determinados conceitos básicos de Heidegger e diversos, de Lacan, em especial as noções da verdade e da liberdade.This paper examines the possible relationship between the thought of Martin Heidegger as it emerges in the Zollikon Seminaire through his exchange with Medard Boss and the perspective of psychoanalysis as it appears through the prism of Jacques Lacan's rereading of Freud. Heidegger takes Freud to be victim of a positivist conception of science that seeks to explain pathological human behaviour by a complex of consciously discernible causes. When certain phenomena cannot be explained in this way, Freud postulates a set of psychic causes that are not conscious, the sum total of which he calls the "unconscious." Since all human phenomena are, for Heidegger, discernible through a thorough-going phenomenology of human being as being-in-the-world, Freud's hypothetical construct is unnecessary and, in the long run, pernicious. But Lacan proposes a new way to understand the unconscious that Freud discovered, namely, that it is not to be thought of as analogous to a physical system of hydraulic forces but rather to a process that is structured like a language. The question raised in the paper is whether or not Heidegger would have been equally hostile to Freud's hypothesis, if it had been presented to him in Lacanian fashion as something "structured like a language". The paper suggests that the answer could be "probably not". On the basis of a highly simplified clinical example, it endeavors to show the compatibility between certain basic Heideggerean concepts and several of those essential to Lacan, especially the notions of truth and freedom. (shrink)

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a (...) structured exercuse in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse. (shrink)

The early Schelling and the romantics constructed the unconscious in order to overcome the modern split between subjectivity and nature, mind and body, a split legislated by Cartesian representationalism. Influenced by Boehme and Kabbalah, the later Schelling modified his notion of the unconscious to include the decision to be oneself, which must sink beneath consciousness so that it might serve as the ground of one's creative and personal acts. Slavoj Zizek has read the later Schelling's unconscious as a prototype of (...) Lacan's reactive unconscious, an unconscious that only exists as the excluded other of consciousness. This reading, though close to the text of Schelling, misses something essential: the unconscious for Schelling is not a repression but a condition of the possibility of life and love. (shrink)

This article represents an attempt at identifying a lack (of a lack) in analytic philosophy. It claims that one of the central features common to a variety of analytic philosophies is the absence of an investigation of what Jacques Lacan has identified as the lack of being ( manque à être ). This lacking lack is investigated through what could be termed a Lacanian intervention into one of the finest (relatively) recent products of the analytic tradition, Robert Brandom's Making (...) It Explicit . The aim of the intervention is twofold: first, to identify some of the (maybe surprising) similarities between Brandom and the Lacanian tradition; second, to identify the lacking lack within analytic philosophy by focusing on what Brandom (`explicitly') does not say — and to argue that what is thus usually passed over in silence in the analytic tradition contains a perspective of fundamental significance to understanding humans and their societies. Key Words: analytic philosophy • Robert Brandom • drive • Jacques Lacan • lack • original accumulation • psychoanalysis • Slavoj Zizek. (shrink)

In _Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty,_ editor Hugh J. Silverman has collected essays from the leading scholars in Continental philosophy, creating a forum for the discussion of contemporary writings and differing perspectives on the role of philosophy since the death of Merleau-Ponty: Sartre, Barthes, Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Habermas, and Derrida. Included in this volume is Silverman's translation of Merleau-Ponty's last course at the Collège de France in 1960-61 and an extensive research bibliography. Originally published in 1988, (...) _Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty_ is a fascinating inquiry into the developments, directions, and ruptures in Continental philosophy since Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionCarolyn J. Dean (bio)... even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an occasion for misunderstanding?—Georges Bataille, The Accursed ShareAt the current juncture in the history of studies “on Bataille,” admiration and indebtedness have given way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire for accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitable critical shifts, symptoms of an (...) immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarily taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewed production of Bataille.During his lifetime (1897–1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a “pornographer” and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some intellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimely death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic books and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from “Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida” [Habermas 14]. 1 Bataille’s remains are located in the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinning biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet his work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving its insights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dépense (expenditure), his mysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends, viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille’s refusal to be hard in the conventional sense—his repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945, Bataille wrote that he was the “contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from the shore, because in fact... I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one who is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can have it to one’s heart’s content...” [OC 6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: “Bataille’s cogito, thus, reads: ‘I sink therefore I am’” [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of a sink-or-swim philosophy, but of “the hard desire to endure”—words he wrote to describe Vincent Van Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille’s perspective, the necessary precondition of his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entails yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creation required symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission (“Heroism,” he said, “is an [End Page 3] attitude of flight” [OC 5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille’s most relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink—for this Bataille was giddily embraced after his death. By 1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was equally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists who did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny for their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of that special issue insisted on Bataille’s “ethics” of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held “onto the possibility of an ethics” through a paradoxically “incessant repositing of the ethical” [Stoekl 2, 5]. This account of Bataille’s ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in... (shrink)

"The work of Jacques Lacan is associated more with literature and philosophy than mainstream American psychology, due in large part to the dense language he often employs in articulating his theory - often at the expense of clinical illustration. As a result, his contributions are frequently fascinating, but their utility in the therapeutic setting can be difficult to pinpoint. Lacanian Psychotherapy aims to fill in this clinical gap by presenting theoretical discussions in clear, accessible language and applying them to (...) several chapter-length case studies, thereby demonstrating their clinical relevance. The central concern of this book is the application of Lacan’s notion that the unconscious is structured like, and by, language. This implies a peculiar manner of listening ("to the letter") and intervention, which Miller applies to a number of common clinical concerns - including case formulation, dreams, transference, and diagnosis - in the context of psychotherapy"–Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Being born into a family structure—being born of a mother—is key to being human. It is, for Jacques Lacan, essential to the formation of human desire. It is also part of the structure of analogy in the Thomistic thought of Erich Przywara. AI may well increase exponentially in sophistication, and even achieve human-like qualities; but it will only ever form an imaginary mirroring of genuine human persons—an imitation that is in fact morbid and dehumanising. Taking Lacan and Przywara (...) at a point of convergence on this topic offers important insight into human exceptionalism. (shrink)

Historians of rhetoric refer to two Sophistics, one in the 5th century B.C. and another c. 2nd century A.D. Besides these two, there is a 3rd Sophistic, but it is not necessarily sequential. (The 3rd is “counter” to counting sequentially.) Whereas the representative Sophists of the 1st Sophistic is Protagoras, and the second, Aeschines, the representative sophists of the 3rd are Gorgias (as proto-Third) and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man.To distinguish between and (...) among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then Protagoras, Gorgias, and Lacan, the author determines how far each of these personages can “count.” The model of counting, used semiotically across the topoi of “possible/impossible,” is that of the people of New Guinea: “one thing, two things, many things.” It is determined (generally) that the philosophers, including Aristotle, count to “one”; the Sophists to “two”; and Gorgias, Lacan, and Lyotard, et al. count to “many things,” thereby breaking up a monism or binarism. The ancient philosophers employ a substratum of probability to hold together the contraries of “possible/impossible”; the Sophists employ anti/logic, which keeps the contraries/antitheses separate and therefore without synthesis, but which eventually threatens the integrity of the substratum, or the law of non-contradiction; and Gorgias, Lacan, Lyotard et al. theorize about the “impossibility”/“Resistance” of the Logos (reason, logic, law, argumentation, history) to Theory/Totalization, because of the Gorgian Kairos and the Lacanian Real — both of which enter the Logos and break up the cycle of the antitheses and create “something new, irrational” (Untersteiner).This “breaking up” has a negative/positive influence on Protagoras's “man-measure doctrine,” which in turn has a similar influence on “the problem of the ethical subject.” The subject/agent not only no longer “knows” (by way of Logos) but also no longer “acts” (as independent agent); the subject becomes a function of Logos as determined by Kairos/Real; it moves from a hypotaxis/syntaxis of “one” and “two” to a radical parataxis/paralogy of “some more.”From the “Impossibility”/“tragedy” of knowledge, however, comes the “Possible,” or “Possibilisms,” which allows for the new (though divided) ethical subject to reclaim its position as “individual.” Such a reclamation of the subject, however, has a profound effect on argumentation, and especially the notion of “consensus.” What is wanted, then, in a Third Sophistic “ethical” — as opposed to a “political” — rhetoric is “dissensus” through radical parataxes and paralogies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

This article focuses on the implications of modernity for human culpability and moral responsibility. Although the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation is most often approached theologically and pastorally, this article is intended as an answer to Pope Benedict XVI's call to explore catechesis through new lenses by adopting a psychological therapeutic approach. As such, this article will examine how the rejection of religious ascription to God for defining and determining the good and re-ascribing it to humanity leads to a rupture (...) and the psychological conditions of anxiety, depression, and melancholia. The article will go on to argue for a Lacanian reading of Thomas Aquinas’ definition of the good and how the Thomistic understanding provides a more comprehensive approach to determining culpability and overcoming the associated fear which leads to anxiety, depression, and melancholia. (shrink)

Schelling has been exploited for a variety of psychoanalytical projects, from Marquard’s revision of Freud, to various readings of Jung, to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. What we have not seen is an elaboration of the psycho-therapeutical implications of Schelling’s metaphysics on its own terms. What we find when we read Schelling as metapsychologist is a nonpathologizing theory of dissociation. Like anything that lives, the psyche dissociates for the sake of growth. The law of productive dissociation is the source of (...) psyche’s adaptive power and an explanation of the structure of its illnesses. (shrink)

Les quinze sections de cet ouvrage proposent un parcours de réflexion à partir du démantèlement sadien de la normativité et de la déconstruction kierkegaardienne de la vie "bonne", qui engage des auteurs tels qu'Adorno, Arendt, Otto Gross, Agnes Heller, Kalivoda, Lacan, Cavell, Nussbaum, parmi d'autres, dans une analyse inusitée de la subjectivité révolutionnaire et des individualités révoltées. Ces critiques de l'aliénation comme "métaphysique de l'essence humaine" relancent, d'après l'autrice, la continuité artistique et l'aspiration politique du romantisme révolutionnaire, réinstallant ainsi (...) la dialectique permanente du libertinisme et du romanticisme au coeur même de l'échafaudage communiste comme scène réelle, symbolique et imaginaire de l'émancipation humaine."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of FranceAndrew J. McKennaThe Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France, by Eugene Webb; ix & 268 pp. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993, $35.00.That psychology and sociology are one science is the fundamental premise guiding Eugene Webb’s The Self Between, which he defines early on as “a self constituted dynamically and continuously by (...) the relationships it finds itself involved i n.” The “new social psychology of France” designated by his subtitle is mostly the one inspired by René Girard’s mimetic model of human behavior, to which four of Webb’s seven chapters are specifically devoted.Girard’s idea, which he learned from our literary masterpieces, is that human desire is mimetic, that it imitates other desires in its choice of objects and in pursuit of their possession. As desires converge on a single object, the locus of conflict will be between subjects rather within their individual psyches, a consequence that motivates Girard’s ongoing critique of Freudian psychoanalysis.But Freud’s theories are everywhere disputed in this book, which reports reliably on the devastating critiques advanced by François Roustang, Marie Balmary, and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. Roustang has convincingly (and entertainingly) uncovered Freud’s blindness to the pathologies of transference and discipleship investing the foundation of psychoanalysis. A pattern of rivalry for recognition and preeminence guides Freud’s career in a way that is reenacted around Lacan. Balmary, somewhat a Lacanian her self, has turned psychoanalytic theory against Freud to explore his own family secrets, while severely questioning the master’s bid for a universal theory pursued via self-analysis amidst a period of emotional upheaval. And Borch-Jacobsen has shown how th e dynamics of hypnosis that Freud rejected early on were brought back as transference, while arguing for his own part that mimetic identification with the other, rather than any primordial drives, is what brings the subject into being. These informat ive chapters help bring us up to date on significant debates that have developed since Lacan drew the French intellectual world, and so many Americans after it, into the orbit of psychoanalysis.But by far the bulk of Webb’s attention goes to Girard’s work and to that of [End Page 191] scholars and practitioners who have sought to extend it further in the social sciences. Principle among them is Jean-Michel Oughourlian, whose Puppet of Desire (translated by Webb in 1991) demonstrates how the mimetic model plays out in psychotherapy, notably in the workings of hypnotism and somnambulism, in cases of demonic possession, and in obsessional neurosis. In each case, the subject is unwitt ingly captive of another’s desire in a way that produces behavioral anomalies and disorders that are nonetheless available to lucid, jargon-free diagnosis. What is appealing here is the deployment of a rational explanation for irrational behavior, once we grasp the paradoxical rationale of desire; equally appealing prospects of actual healing are outlined here and at the end of the book, where possibilities of freedom and responsibility are resurrected from a technical vocabulary that smothers them.Girard’s idea of the self as relation, as interdividuality, rather than as a discreet unit, has social and political dimensions to which we only find tantalizing allusions in his works. They have been pursued with acumen by such writers as André Orléan, Paul Dumouchel and especially Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who figures importantly among those aligning systems theory with theories of social and economic organization. Like Borch-Jacobsen and Roustang, Dupuy restores due attention to concep tions of crowd behavior outlined at the end of the last century by Tarde and Le Bon, whose best insights Freud studiously discarded.This is richly interdisciplinary work, strongly suggesting that we variously redraw and erase lines defining academic fields. Occam’s razor flicks often and decisively in these pages, which restore needed balance to the effects of some wild er French imports. Webb brings no new ideas of his own to this capable synthesis, but his accurate report will help guide researchers toward major recent developments in France around and mostly beyond Freudian psychoanalysis... (shrink)

In 1966 Michel Foucault pointed out that the generation of thinkers who had taken as their model Sartre or Merleau-Ponty had suddenly become part of the intellectual museum. A new generation of thinkers had appeared whose passion was not for “meaning”, “man” and “commitment”, but for the “concept and the system”.One could say that the break with the past generation began the day that Levi-Strauss with regard to societies and Lacan with regard to the unconscious showed us that “meaning” (...) was probably nothing but a sort of surface effect, a scum, and that that which affected us most profoundly, that which preceded us, that which maintains us.in space and time was the system.“Our task, Foucault went on, is to free ourselves from humanism and in that sense our work is political.” For some time Foucault and those who thought like him were classed as ‘academics”, that is as people whose thinking had little or no implications for the ongoing state of the society. Then came the May movement of 1968 and in February of 1969 a major gathering was held and the main speakers were Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault. (shrink)

Informed by Hazel Barnes's interpretation of Sartre's thought, as well as her own sympathetic construction of a Sartrean psychoanalysis, Cannon undertakes the ambitious project of defending Sartre's existential psychology. She distinguishes it from Freud's psychoanalytical theory, indicates previously unseen associations between Sartre's psychology and post-Freudian object-relations theories, and discusses and criticizes Lacan's elaborate structural psychology. This innovative study breaks through the artificial barrier separating philosophical conceptions of the self and its development from the rich theoretical and practical field of (...) post-Freudian interpretations of the complexity of the self. Despite the sophistication of philosophical analyses of the self that have appeared recently, many of them disappoint because of their physicalist reductionism and their distance from concrete, living human beings seeking to cope with the multiple factors that impinge upon their actual existence. Cannon shows us not only how much Sartre has contributed to an understanding of the dynamics of the becoming of the self, but--in her discussions of anticipations of "object-relations" theory in H. S. Sullivan, as well as the concepts of Winnicott, Masterson, Kernberg, Kohut, and other post-Freudian psychotherapists--she also shows us how much psychotherapists have contributed to the conception of the full-blooded, concrete self. (shrink)

The article examines the unconscious uncontrolled side of the human psyche, analyzes approaches to determining the structure of the unconscious, its constituent elements and their relationships from the point of view of the concepts of prominent psychoanalysts Z. Freud, C. Jung and J. Lacan. The significance of the "mirror stage" described by Lacan is revealed. in the understanding of human self-consciousness. Particular attention is paid to Lacan's thesis that the unconscious is, first of all, language; and it (...) is he who acts as a manifestation of a structure that has clear patterns. It is through language that we can approach understanding of the connection of the unconscious with the conscious world in the context of Lacan's definition of the triad of "real", "imaginary" and "symbolic". The purpose of the study is to show the relationship between the concepts of the structure of the unconscious and the fusion of psychoanalysis with philosophical and linguistic structuralism, which gives rise to a variety of approaches and interdisciplinary research in understanding the essence of the unconscious and interpreting social phenomena through the linguistic structures of myth. (shrink)