Patrick ffrench 'Potential Not To Be: Bersani and Dutoit's _Forms of Being_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9 no. 3, January 2005 Peter Caws 'Theory as Criticism: Bersani and Dutoitπs _Forms of Being_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9 no. 4, January 2005.

In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the ...

Even more than for other treatments, great importance must be given to informed consent in the case of electroconvulsive therapy. In a percentage of cases, the symbolic connotation of the treatment, even if mostly and intrinsically negative, may actually be a determining factor in the patient’s motives for giving consent. On an ethical and medicolegal level, the most critical point is that concerning consent to the treatment by a psychotic subject with a severely compromised ability to comprehend the nature and (...) objective of the proposed therapy, but who nonetheless expresses his consent, for reasons derived from delusional thoughts. In fact, this situation necessarily brings to light the contradiction between an explicit expression of consent, a necessary formality for the commencement of therapy, and the validity of this consent, which may be severely compromised due to the patient’s inability to comprehend reality and therefore to accept the proposal of treatment, which is intrinsic to this reality. With the use of an electric current, the symbolic experience associated with anaesthesia, and the connection to convulsions, ECT enters the collective consciousness. In relation to this, ECT is symbolic of these three factors and hooks on to the thoughts, fears, feelings and expectations of delusional patients. These are often exemplified in the violent intervention of the persecutor in the patient with schizophrenia, the expected punishment for the ’error’ committed for which the depressed patient blames himself and the social repression of the maniacal patient’s affirmation of his inflated self-esteem. (shrink)

Leo Bersani’s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields—including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory. Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness. _Thoughts and Things_ posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts and things. Bersani (...) departs from his psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of being—of our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent, _Thoughts and Things_ will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond. (shrink)

Oxford University Press published eminent literary critic Leo Bersani's first book, on Proust, in 1965, but the work has long been out of print. This new edition comes in response to a recent renewal of interest among philosophers of literature, among others, and features a new preface from the author.

Michel Foucault n'aura cessé, à mesure qu'il élaborait son oeuvre, de repenser sa démarche, ses problèmes, de rompre avec ses propres paradigmes et concepts. Ne peut-on pas voir son oeuvre comme une succession de ruptures et de discontinuités? Impliqué dans des mouvements politiques qu'il a plus tard remis en question, se revendiquant " structuraliste " pour ensuite s'en défendre, moquant parfois ses propres ouvrages, Foucault s'est, à chaque étape de son travail, construit contre lui-même. C'est d'ailleurs ainsi qu'il définit l'attitude (...) créatrice : la création est inséparable d'une volonté de se " déprendre " de soi. Dans cet ouvrage, Arlette Farge, Georges Didi-Huberman, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie et Leo Bersani s'interrogent sur ce geste foucaldien. Quelle place la rupture a-t-elle prise dans le travail philosophique de Foucault, mais aussi dans son rapport aux mouvements politiques ou dans sa vie? En quoi la rupture constitue-t-elle une catégorie d'analyse centrale pour appréhender l'oeuvre de Foucault mais aussi, plus généralement, pour penser le champ intellectuel et des politiques émancipatrices toujours nouvelles? Le présent ouvrage est issu des entretiens réalisés par François Caillai pour son film Foucault contre lui-même (The Factory/Arte France/Ina). (shrink)

What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are the assumptions which make it seem natural to think of art as having such powers? In attempting to answer these questions, I will first be turning to Proust, who embodies perhaps more clearly—in a sense, even more crudely—than any other major artist a certain tendency to think of cultural symbolizations in general as essentially reparative. This tendency, which had already been sanctified as a more or less explicit dogma of (...) modern high culture by Proust’s time, persists, I believe, in our own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism. I will argue that the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged experience has, furthermore, been served by psychoanalysis—more specifically, by a certain view of sublimation first proposed rather disconnectedly by Sigmund Freud and later developed more coherently and forcefully by Melanie Klein. The psychoanalytic theory I refer to makes normative—both for an individual and for a culture—the mortuary aesthetic of A la recherché du temps perdu.As everyone knows, involuntary memories play a crucial role in the Proustian narrator’s discovery of his vocation as a writer. Let’s begin with a somewhat untypical example of the genre, the passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe describing the “resurrection” of Marcel’s grandmother on the first evening of his second visit to Balbec. This passage reformulates the importance of memory for art in terms of another relation about which the theoretical passages that conclude Le Temps retrouvé will be at once prolific and evasive: the dependence of art on death. Leo Bersani is professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. The Forms of Violence/Narrative in Ancient Assyria and Modern Culture, written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, is his most recent publication. Professor’s The Freudian Body/Psychoanalysis and Art will be published this winter. (shrink)

In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault's legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society's mechanisms of domination, demonstrating how conflict within (...) the self lies at the heart of Foucault's life and work. (shrink)

Forewarning -- Merde alors -- Why sex? -- Sensual sucking and sociality -- Force in progress -- Receptivity and being-in -- Staring.

Vaccination is considered a key factor in the sanitary resolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, vaccine hesitancy can undermine its diffusion with severe consequences on global health. While beliefs in conspiracy theories, mistrust in science and in policymakers, and mistrust in official information channels may also increment vaccine hesitancy, understanding their psychological causes could improve our capacity to respond to the pandemic. Thus, we designed a cross-sectional study with the aim of probing vaccine propensity in the Italian population and explored (...) its relationship with sociodemographic and psychological variables, and with misbeliefs in COVID-19. A battery of questionnaires was administered to a sample of 374 Italian adults during the first national lockdown. The materials included an original instrument—Beliefs in COVID-19 Inventory—and questionnaires measuring perceived stress, anxiety, death anxiety, psychological distress, psychoticism, paranoia, anger, and somatization. The exploratory factor analysis on Beliefs in COVID-19 suggested the existence of three factors: belief in conspiracy theories, mistrust in medical information, and mistrust in medicine and science. These factors were positively correlated with female sex, age, religious beliefs, psychiatric conditions, and psychological variables, while negatively correlated with education levels. We conducted a mediation analysis by means of a structural equation model, including psychological factors as predictors, beliefs in COVID-19 scales as mediators, and vaccine propensity as an outcome. The model showed that death anxiety had a direct positive effect on the propensity to get vaccinated. It also showed that death anxiety reduced the propensity to get vaccinated through a mediated path in believing in conspiracy theories, whereas paranoia was linked to a reduction in vaccination adherence with the mediation effect of mistrust in medical science. Psychological distress reduced vaccination propensity by increasing both conspiracy beliefs and mistrust. On the other hand, anxiety increased the propensity to get vaccinated through a decrease in both belief in conspiracy theories and mistrust in science. Our results suggest that psychological dimensions are differentially related to belief in conspiracy theories, to mistrust in science, and to the propensity to get vaccinated. Based on this result, we propose an original interpretation of how conspiracy beliefs build on a paranoid and suspicious attitude. We also discuss the possible clinical implications of treatment for such pathological beliefs. (shrink)

A compilation of all previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics from the greatest of the generation of Cambridge scholars that included G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes.

Introduction: Physical distancing under the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic had a significant impact on lifestyles, including exercise routines. In this study, we examined the relationship between mental health and addictive behaviors, such as excessive exercise and the use of image and performance enhancing drugs across 12 sport disciplines.Materials and methods: A large cross-sectional sample of the adult population was surveyed. The mean age was 33.09. The number of male participants was 668. The use of IPEDs was assessed in conjunction with (...) psychometric measures such as the Exercise Addiction Inventory and the Appearance Anxiety Inventory. The participants were grouped into activity group and non-activity group according to the presence or absence of their exercise habits. The results were compared between these groups, as well as across sport disciplines, while taking into account the relationship between different psychological measures and IPEDs consumption.Results: The frequency of IPEDs use was higher among AG than NAG, although AG participants reported less history of addictions than NAG. The logistic regression analysis revealed that scores equal to or above cutoff points, in both the EAI and AAI, predicted the IPEDs use. Regarding the differences across the various sport disciplines, those who were involved in practicing Weight Lifting and Cross Fit were found to be more at risk of excessive exercising and more inclined to use a wide range of IPEDs.Conclusions: Although exercise could help to increase well-being and prevent addictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, our results show that those in the AG are particularly vulnerable to excessive IPEDs use. Sport disciplines associated with higher EAI and AAI scores have also shown a higher tendency to excessive IPEDs use. Furthermore, the factor of having above the cutoff scores in EAI or AAI in each sport could indicate larger IPEDs consumption regardless of the discipline. In light of the current findings, it is necessary to better define the “non-excessive” levels of exercise in various sport disciplines and an adequate intake of IPEDs to ensure the safety and well-being of people during a pandemic. (shrink)

The ability to differentiate between what is just and what is unjust may be considered as the precondition to demand one's own rights. Starting from this point, this research was carried out to describe the level of awareness of patients concerning their rights. The main hypothesis was: the higher the socioeconomic and cultural level of patients, the higher is their awareness of their rights. This research was conducted in one of the state hospitals in Turkey in 1998. It is a (...) descriptive study carried out on 128 inpatients in medical and surgical wards. The data were collected by a questionnaire, which included questions on the rights of patients and gave sample cases. The sample cases were designed by referring to the World Health Organization Declaration on the Promotion of Patients' Rights in Europe. Only 23% of the participants were able to recognize patient rights, while 32% could not; the majority (45%) were undecided in recognizing patient rights. The awareness scores were statistically significantly different for educational level categories (F = 5.84; p<0.001). A continuously declining trend was observed for patient rights awareness scores from the highest educational level to the lowest. This partly proves the hypothesis of the research. However, the awareness scores were not significantly different for the other background variables (p>0.05). Most strikingly, 38% of the patients had no idea about their diagnosis and 63% of those who had undergone surgery did not know why they had had the operation. (shrink)