This essay performs a comparative reading of the themes of language, otherness and subjectivity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan. Their focuses on the place and role of an ethical subjectivity who is profoundly affected and displaced by the (non)presence of the absolute Other provide apt philosophical material for comparison and contrast. Through a close analysis of the important philosophical and psychoanalytic themes in Levinas’ early work Totality and Infinity and Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, (...) I demonstrate how the different articulations of alterity in both influence their separate conceptions of the possibility of ethics in relation to decentered notions of subjectivity. In reading both, I argue that Lacan’s treatment of otherness and the eccentric nature of language provides a reimaging of certain gaps in Levinas. In return, I position Levinas as being able to provide a notion of ethical community that Lacan leaves out. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the seventeenth century, when the modern Self emerged in the shape of a self-assured Cartesian cogito, a radically opposite movement of ‘emptying’ or ‘deconstructing’ that Self took place. The religious subject, having become modern, understood its ultimate aim as becoming selfless. The battlefield on which the new subject fought the fight with its own modern condition was the issue of ‘love’. ‘What is the status of his Self when it is involved in the act of love?’ was the central (...) question in seventeenth century religiosity. This essay examines the early modern idea of pur amour and focuses only on two voices in the Querelle Du Quiétisme, François de Fénelon and Nicolas Malebranche. Fénelon vehemently defended the pur amour, a concept he adopted from a century-long tradition of spirituality in France and which he tried to explain and legitimize in a systematic and theoretical way. Malebranche was highly critical of that tradition, but refused neither to use the term nor to refer to the ideal of pur amour. His interpretation of the Self, however, forced him to draw different conclusions on the nature of pure love. (shrink)

Without the support of imagination, one would not have the slightest idea of the cruel ‘real’ that has occurred in the Nazi extermination camps. Yet, in documentaries imaging the events of the Shoah, one runs the risk of missing their most basic property, namely their unimaginability. The mere idea that one is able to imagine the unimaginable comes down to a denial of the Shoah’s status as an event that defies our understanding. The unimaginable ‘real’ of the Shoah, however, is (...) not simply located in its object, in the cruelty of what happened in the camp. The Shoah makes us at the same time facing the unimaginable ‘real’ of the modern subject—the blind spot in our own identity. If we need imagination to deal with the Shoah, it is also because of an ungraspable ‘real’ in ourselves. This is why adequate Shoah representations, acknowledging their object as being beyond representation, include the same ‘beyond’ concerning the subject of the Holocaust memory. The essay makes this clear in an elaborated comparison of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film, Shoah, with some conceptual works of art from the late nineties—all of this ‘fine-tuned’ in a reflection upon Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates the ways we look to children to educate us and explores how we might depart from that dynamic, exploring how a range of conceptual frameworks from historical and cultural studies and psychoanalysis might contribute to understanding the problematic of childhood, its problems and its limitations. While ‘child as educator’ may appear to reverse the typical power relations between adults and children, it is argued that this motif in fact repeats many of the same problems as any (...) claims about what children, and especially what ‘child’, is like. Specifically, the paper first reviews analyses of what is at stake in the figure of ‘child’; second, feminist engagement with the notion of ‘intersectionality’ is discussed in terms of how it might inform debates about childhood. Finally, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches, analysis focuses on the notion of misrecognition structured in the ‘as’ connecting ‘child’ and ‘educator’. (shrink)

Anglophone musicologists read the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek more than they read the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and they are more concerned with Žižekian academia than they are with Lacan’s clinical practice. Two major problems emerge: Lacan is conflated with Žižek, and Lacan is conflated with Kant. As a result, analytic discourse is confused with post-modern academia as well as an eighteenth-century master-discourse on the Sublime. According to the author’s argument, Lacanian musicology is a misnomer, for it in fact refers (...) to Žižekian musicology, and what musicologists call the Lacanian Real is not really Lacanian. The re-branding of the Kantian Sublime and/or the Thing as the Lacanian Real is not necessary; it is a symptom of confusion. The article concludes with a cautious recommendation, pertinent to the study of music and discourses. (shrink)

Communitarians and liberals have long held vigorous discussions about the status of the self. The former argue that we do not actively choose our ends, but that they come to the fore through self-discovery. This implies that the self is encumbered and that the liberal self—one capable of choosing his ends—is unrealistic. In this article, we consider these two paradigms and especially Will Kymlicka’s position within this debate. Kymlicka defends a liberal theory without relying on an unencumbered self, and may (...) therefore have rescued liberalism from communitarian attacks. In the first part of our article, we argue that Kymlicka’s theory can only be sustained if it involves an unencumbered self that is prior to its ends. Ultimately, this means that the communitarian critique on liberalism can no longer be refuted. In order to support our argument, we introduce a distinction between the metaphysical depiction of the self as an unencumbered chooser and the psychological depiction of the self, which draws upon people’s understanding of themselves as being constitutively bound to certain ends. In the second part of our article, we invoke Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory in order to assert that neither communitarians nor liberals are entirely able to explain what is at stake when individuals describe being bound to ‘extimate ends’—ends they feel they did not choose, yet cannot relinquish. Although both philosophical paradigms cannot fully account for the ‘extimate subject’, in the policies they respectively defend, liberalism is the one that should be preferred. (shrink)