Concerned to make certain a difference between the human and its machinic simulation, two films released at the start of the new millennium put the trope of the Oedipal at the heart of their action. In doing so, both succeed in establishing the real of the human within its terms. However, by taking the Oedipal as the figure of this difference, both films also unleash a set of possibilities for being human in the new millennium that may not have been (...) entirely expected. In a close reading of both Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001) and I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), this article examines the possibilities for human being as they come to circulate within the narrative structures of both films. In doing so it also examines the further difference drawn between what each film offers as the literal and metaphorical rendition of the Oedipal itself. With the metaphorical opened to the space and time of being excluded as a possibility in its literal rendition, the consequences of the subsequent process of becoming of the human are finally laid bare. (shrink)

As with a previous colloquium at Moscow in 2004, when my topic was literature in the Federal Republic of Germany during the post-World War II decades, I want to speak about tensions between war and postwar generations in Russia and in Germany, and my perspective will again be largely autobiographical. Of course this convergence (bordering on repetition) is not random. For I believe that remarkably complex affinities exist between Germany after the twelve-year-short nightmare of National Socialism and Russia after the (...) long stagnation of the Soviet Union. In both cases, a national collapse made cultural circles and newly elected governments…. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs James Bernauer’s reading of Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in his essay “Oedipus, Freud, Foucault” in order to assess the role that Foucault’s critique of psychoanaly...

As an epistemological perspective, 'nomadism' is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in (...) this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, "Nomadic Assemblages," "Non-Oedipal Cartographies", and "Space-Time Montages", that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields. (shrink)

Quelle est la structure du désir et comment le petit d'homme en vient-il à éprouver le désir pour un objet? Freud s'était posé la question et la théorie du complexe d'Oedipe était une pièce essentielle de sa réponse. R. Girard estime que Freud s'est trompé et que la théorie du désir mimétique, elle, fournit une solution au problème. Je retiendrai trois thèses centrales de la théorie de Girard. Après les avoir situées dans leur contexte pour en saisir correctement le sens, (...) je dirai en quoi, à mon avis, ces thèses ne répondent pas à la question de Freud. Je distinguerai trois moments dans la formation du sujet désirant, moments que je mettrai en rapport avec la structuration de la psyché. À la situation oedipienne, il faut opposer un temps pré-oedipien et un temps post-oedipien; ce dernier implique la résolution de l'Oedipe. Je montrerai que le concept d'étayage permet à Freud de comprendre la genèse du désir à partir du besoin tout en marquant la spécificité du désir par rapport au besoin. Au dire de Girard, Freud a pressenti la nature mimétique du désir. L'usage qu'il fait de la notion d'identification le montre bien. Mais cette intuition n'arrive pas à porter tous ses fruits car Freud soutient par ailleurs une thèse qui contredit la première, à savoir que la libido est directement fixée sur la mère. (shrink)

Bruno Latour (2004) claims that modernist critique, the kind that removes the false veils of ideology, ‘has run out of steam’. Despite its theoretical variety, it often consists in pointing out how...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antigone-Effect and the Oedipal CurseToward a Promiscuous NatalityBonnie HonigMen, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.—Hannah Arendt, The Human ConditionIn Judith Butler’s book Antigone’s Claim, “promiscuous obedience” is the proposed response to a world constituted by “unwritten laws, aberrant transmissions” (Butler 2000). The worldly condition of “unwritten laws, aberrant transmissions” names an aspect of Antigone’s situation unmentioned by Sina (...) Kramer in her essay on Butler’s New Humanism: the curse. Antigone mourns and desires under the sign of a curse that consigns her forever to a desire that will be unrequited, and a mourning that will never achieve what we now call closure.What is the curse identified by Butler? In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus says to his daughters (speaking about himself), “From none did you have love more than from this man, without whom you will now spend the remainder of your life” (Trans. H. Lloyd-Jones 1994, 1617–19, qtd. in Butler 2000, 60). It certainly sounds like a curse! But what sort of a curse? 1Focusing on Antigone, Butler says Oedipus’s “words... demand that for all time she have no man except for the man who is dead... this is a demand, [End Page 41] a curse, made by Oedipus, who positions himself as her only one” (60). But what Butler calls the curse is actually, or at least also, Oedipus’s statement of gratitude and debt. If Oedipus places himself in a relationship of exclusivity with his daughters, he does so because of the singularity of his debt to them at the time of his death. Here is the longer passage (from a different translation): “My children, on this day your father no longer exists. Now I have perished utterly, and no longer will you bear the burden of tending me, which was no light one, I well know, my children. Yet just one word turns all those toils to nothing, you have been treated as friends by no one more than by this man; and now you will have me with you no longer, through all your days to come” (Trans. R. C. Jebb 1889, 1612–19).2Although Oedipus seems to gift his daughters with freedom when he claims that “no longer will [they] bear the burden of tending” to their father, he also tethers his daughters to himself forever when he says his gratitude to his daughters is so immense that no one will ever love them like he does: they have been, and likely will always be, loved best and most (“treated as friends”) “by no one more than by this man,” their dead father, for all their “days to come” (in the R. C. Jebb translation) or for “the remainder of your life” (in the H. Lloyd-Jones translation). Whether as a statement of love or friendship (the translations vary), the speech both thanks and curses, pressing on us awareness of the intimate closeness of those two speech acts in a way that recalls Derrida’s analysis of the undecidability of the gift (Derrida 1995, 97).For Butler, the speech is a cursed command that Antigone should never love another as much as she loves her father. “His words... demand that for all time she have no man except for the man who is dead, and though this is a demand, a curse, made by Oedipus, who positions himself as her only one, it is clear that she both honors and disobeys this curse as she displaces her life for her father onto her brother” (60). But Oedipus says something a bit different: no one will ever love Antigone as much as he now does. On the one reading he dooms her to be forever unloving; on the other, unlovable or, simply, unloved.Antigone will love, however, and so, since Butler assumes the curse is that Antigone should not love, Butler sees Antigone’s love for her dead brother as a way to both carry and transgress the curse under which she operates. Loving a dead man is Antigone’s promiscuously obedient way to obey and subvert... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.3 (2006) 92-114 [Access article in PDF] A Global Art System: An Exploration of Current Literature on Visual Culture, and a Glimpse at the Universal Promethean Principle—with Unintended Oedipal Consequences Art Education 11-18: Meaning, Purpose And Direction, edited by Richard Hickman; New York, Continuum; 2nd edition, 2004; 176 pp. Global Visual Culture within a Global Art System I have harbored misgivings about the term (...) "visual culture" for several years. Having read Hickman's book with its collection of notable scholars in art and design education, those misgivings turned into qualified acceptance of "visual culture"—so long as it is understood as a global visual culture within a global art system. The ten chapters presented in Hickman's book clearly explore the notion of visual culture in the context of generating an expansive and appropriate canon of art distinctly relevant to our postmodern, multicultural, multidimensional classroom of multiple intelligences.1 And so, art and design education for the twenty-first century must perform three essential functions: one, it must color the classroom with signs of global human pictorial and textual expressions; two, it must attempt to comprehend an immeasurable universe through creative, scaled-down explorations of the phenomenal world all of humanity is subject to; and three, it must open up the Blakeian doors of perception,2 while remaining free of emotional, educational, social, political, or religious ideological bonds. In this light, Hickman's Art Education 11-18 (2004), is a must read for art and design educators currently bogged down in old curriculum, and a must read for educators who incorporate new pedagogical literature easily into their new curriculum. And I say must read because we are on the verge of a revolution in visual art history and education—immersed in it, struggling to make sense of our beloved classical canon of art, and struggling to come to grips with a strangely foreign, beautifully alien, semeiotic reality we call (vaguely) "visual culture." It is a visual culture and history from the north, east, and south. Not just from the west.Key innovative educational issues addressed in these chapters are (respectively) using the dynamic nature of art to expand the curricula (Richard Hickman); the collapse of cultural borders (Lesley Burgess and Nicholas [End Page 92] Addison); a balanced cultural history of the world (Colin Grigg); recognizing art and recognizing visual culture (Howard Hollands); a range of visual cultures and literacy (Darren Newbury); using computer technology as a pathway to a new art and visual culture (Andy Ash); critical study and analysis (Michele Tallack); hand-making as a universal link to nature and art (Rachel Mason); spirituality in the process of art creation (James Hall); and cross-cultural heritage toward a new canon of art (Hickman).I will review each chapter as it pertains to current literature exploring popular pedagogical terms like "visual culture," "postmodernism," "pluralism," and "radicalism" and (more importantly) as it fits into a global system of art and culture. In addition, I suggest another term ("cosmopolitanism"—to identify the viable gay and lesbian aesthetic and culture) not that they are necessarily different, but they are indeed relevant and operate from a fresh literary and historical perspective. Then, I will illustrate how a new, postmodern canon of art must be linked to global visual culture and art in order to expand the concept of visual culture. Thus, I see two tasks before me: the first task is to inventory the philosophy, pedagogy, and meanings within each of the ten chapters in Hickman's Art Education 11-18; and the second task is to integrate key pedagogical ideas highlighted in each chapter as a method of generating a meaningful, holistic, integrated direction for art and design education in the twenty-first century. Integrating Art and Design Education Art is a design process. All subject regimes, D. N. Perkins suggests, are a design process.3 This may seem too obvious now after all these years since the publication of Knowledge... (shrink)

While Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is concerned with psycho-sexual development, it concomitantly presents a novel historical-political imagination. This article compares the post-Oedipal self with the selves envisioned by Nietzsche and Marx, suggesting that while these 19th-century theorists constructed selves that are able to transcend the normalizing and subjugating circumstances of modernity, Freud’s theory defines a healthy self as irredeemably embedded in the prevailing culture and life-orders. In making his case, Freud spurns the quests of Nietzsche and Marx for (...) wholeness of the individual and for self-authorship, and presents the self as structurally agonistic, riven and thoroughly molded by society. (shrink)

Une approche biologique de la genèse de l'identité individuelle. Pour introduire notre discours biologique au niveau anthropologique, nous ferons le line entre un exposé purement ethnologique et un exposé d'analyse linguistique. Cette insertion est d'autant plus cruciale qu'il s'agit de présenter ici une approche de l'identité perpendiculaire à l'analyse structurale - comme le temps est orthogonal à l'espace. Plutôt donc que d'entrer immédiatement dans le vif du sujet, je vais user d'un langage qui peut paraître quelque peu paradoxal ou inadéquat, (...) en décrivant, parmi la mythologie prégnance, quelque chose qui soit symétrique, et non équivalent, de la mort du père: je vais commencer par évoquer les mythes qui concernent la mort de la progéniture. (shrink)

Just Life reorients ethics and politics around the generativity of mothers and daughters rather than the right to property and the sexual proprieties of the Oedipal drama. Invoking two concrete universals – everyone is born of a woman and everyone needs to eat – Rawlinson rethinks labor and food as relationships that make ethical claims and sustain agency. Just Life counters the capitalization of bodies under biopower with the solidarity of sovereign bodies.

« Qu'est-ce qu'un homme révolté? Un homme qui dit non. Mais s'il refuse, il ne renonce pas : c'est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement. »[réf. nécessaire] D'apparence, il existe une limite à la révolte. Cependant, la révolte est un droit. La révolte naît de la perte de patience. Elle est un mouvement et se situe donc dans l'agir. Elle se définit par le « Tout ou Rien », le « Tous ou Personne ». En premier, (...) elle soumet l'idée d'égalité : position d'égal à égal entre le maître et l'esclave. Mais le révolté finit par imposer cette égalité qui se traduit souvent par une inversion des rôles (dialectique hégélienne). Suivant le raisonnement de Scheler, l'homme révolté n'est pas l'homme du ressentiment, c'est-à-dire qu'il ne baigne ni dans la haine ni dans le mépris. La révolte enfante des valeurs. De fait, « pour être, l'homme doit se révolter ». La révolte extirpe l'homme de la solitude puisqu'elle est collective, c'est l'« aventure de tous ». Néanmoins, faire l'expérience de la révolte, c'est faire l'expérience de l'ascèse. Les mythes de Prométhée, d'Achille (avec Patrocle), d'OEdipe et d'Antigone, sont des archétypes de révoltes antiques au même titre que la révolte de Spartacus. La révolte est souvent légitime, elle est l'expression la plus pure de la liberté et semble revêtir le visage de l'espoir. De surcroît, la révolte impose une tension, elle refuse donc formellement le confort de la tyrannie ou de la servitude. Le révolutionnaire a la volonté de « transformer le monde » (Marx) alors que le révolté veut « changer la vie » (Rimbaud). (shrink)

In this paper, I will reread the history of molecular genetics from a psychoanalytical angle, analysing it as a case history. Building on the developmental theories of Freud and his followers, I will distinguish four stages, namely: (1) oedipal childhood, notably the epoch of model building (1943–1953); (2) the latency period, with a focus on the development of basic skills (1953–1989); (3) adolescence, exemplified by the Human Genome Project, with its fierce conflicts, great expectations and grandiose claims (1989–2003) and (4) (...) adulthood (2003–present) during which revolutionary research areas such as molecular biology and genomics have achieved a certain level of normalcy—have evolved into a normal science. I will indicate how a psychoanalytical assessment conducted in this manner may help us to interpret and address some of the key normative issues that have been raised with regard to molecular genetics over the years, such as ‘relevance’, ‘responsible innovation’ and ‘promise management’. (shrink)

In Powers of Horror,1 the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva presented the first explicit, elaborated theory of ‘abjection,’ which she defines as the casting off of that which is not of one’s “clean and proper”2 self. According to Kristeva, abjection is a demarcating impulse which establishes the basis of all object relations, and is operative in the Lacanian narrative of subject formation in early childhood via object differentiation. Abjection continues to operate post-Oedipally to prevent the dissolution of the subject by repressing identification (...) with that which is other, and particularly that which is only tenuously other: the abject. Though Kristeva’s theory is braided into problematic Freudian premises, this essay will argue that abjection remains operative independent of the Oedipal model. (shrink)

My article in this issue of PPP is based on a lengthy book, La Société du malaise, in which I examine the shift from Oedipal neurosis to narcissistic pathologies in France and in the United States, viewing this shift in connection with changes in social ideals regarding autonomy that I summarize as autonomy–aspiration and autonomy–condition. Using the notion of social pathology, I consider sociological/anthropological dimensions of so-called mental health problems by viewing them as individualistic ways of dealing with adversity or (...) misfortune in a form of life permeated with the autonomy–ideal. Changes in ways of acting in society go together with changes in forms of being.. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze et Jean-François Lyotard sont deux figures centrales de la pensée française contemporaine. Leur connivence, née dans les années 1970 alors qu'ils enseignent à l'Université expérimentale de Vincennes, procède d'une critique partagée de l'humanisme classique, d'une distance comparable à l'égard du structuralisme, enfin d'une thématisation commune du désir et de la sensibilité. La publication, à deux ans d'intervalle, de L'Anti-Oedipe et d'Economie libidinale confirme cette proximité : les auteurs y soutiennent des positions éthiques et politiques tout aussi intempestives. On (...) aurait pourtant tort de croire que leurs idées relèvent d'une même «philosophie de la différence», expression qui caractérise la seule entreprise de Deleuze. Dès les années 1980, Lyotard et Deleuze ont en effet divergé sur le sens à accorder à la psychanalyse, à l'oeuvre de Wittgenstein ou encore à l'obligation morale. Le propos du présent volume est de mettre à profit quarante années de recul pour confronter à nouveaux frais ces deux représentants de la philosophie française, en restituant l'héritage, l'évolution et le prolongement de leurs pensées respectives. Les contributions ici réunies déploient le large éventail des disciplines que Deleuze et Lyotard ont explorées et discutées. Elles s'intéressent aussi bien à la période de leur plus grande proximité théorique qu'à l'apparition des différends les opposant, au moment même de l'avènement, chez Lyotard, du concept de «différend». (shrink)

In the long line of French Sade studies, Deleuze's essay Coldness and Cruelty marks out a special place. By discussing Masoch both in addition to and in contrast to Sade, Deleuze reveals the stakes of his book: he wants to unmask the concept of sadomasochism as a clinical nonentity. In their paper, the authors explain the arguments supporting this project and show their relation to Deleuze's reading of Bergson. They then argue that there is a second, similarly Bergsonian criticism of (...) Freudian psychoanalysis operating in the background of Coldness and Cruelty. This more wide-ranging criticism takes Freud to task for conceiving perversion, like neurosis, in Oedipal terms. This conception, Deleuze holds, forgets that perversion and neurosis represent two different worlds that essentially have nothing to do with each other despite crossing in clinical experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Christ (...) and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties.Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body.However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all.Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche.The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also... (shrink)