Introduction: Locating the Lacanian left -- Antinomies of creativity : Lacan and Castoriadis on social construction and the political -- Laclau with Lacan on jouissance : negotiating the affective limits of discourse -- Žižek's 'perversions' : the lure of Antigone and the fetishism of the act -- Excursus on Badiou -- What sticks? : from symbolic power to jouissance -- Enjoying the nation : a success story? -- Lack of passion : European identity revisited -- The consumerist 'politics (...) of jouissance' and the fantasy of advertising -- Democracy in post-democratic times. (shrink)

Moving into the space of tension and contradiction between philosophy and psychoanalysis, I reflect on the spectral way in which Marx and his legacy appear in the Lacanian Left. I explain this spectrality through the impossible mourning of Marxism. I bring in three authors who prescribe mourning here and ignore its impossibility: Özselçuk, Stavrakakis and Alemán. I resort to Benjamin, Lacan, Allouch and Traverso to problematise the Freudian distinction between mourning and melancholy in its application to Marxism. Instead (...) of mourning with its post-Marxist bet, I defend an openly melancholic position based on the militant historical commitment to the dead and what Lacan has represented as the insurmountable directions indicated by Marx. I distinguish three great idealist attempts by the Lacanian Left to overcome the materially insurmountable directions: Laclau’s anti-essentialist discursive postmodernism, Žižek’s pessimistic Lacanian Hegelianism and Badiou’s Jacobin political Platonism. I contrast the Laclauian democratic populist concessions with the Badiouan-Žižekian fidelity to Marxism and communism. (shrink)

This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left this anti-utopianism slides towards a left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation. Ian Parker's Revolution in Psychology presents a bracing but reductive polemic, in which psychology and psychoanalysis seem to function as mere reflections of capitalist ideology. (...) What goes missing in both accounts is the possibility of a re-thinking of subjectivity, both individual and collective, posed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. (shrink)

A Lacanian Conception of Populism takes issue with traditional theories of populism, which seek to equate populism with hegemony, arguing that these are not only different but even incompatible logics. Timothy Appleton contends that one of the main differences between populism and hegemony has to do with the social totality: whilst hegemony absolutises it, populism eviscerates it, setting in its place an - apparently paradoxical - dispersion of singular instances of 'the people'. The book considers the work of Laclau, (...) Badiou, Žižek and Rancière, before arriving at a novel conceptualisation that Appleton dubs 'the populism of singularities'. In the second half of the book, the author draws out the consequences of this concept for contemporary political theory: the question of how to define 'left' and 'right'; the question of popular enthusiasm and affect; 'truth' versus 'post-truth'; the question of leadership; populism and nationalism; and the relation between populism and political parties. A Lacanian Conception of Populism will be key reading for academics and scholars of political theory, political philosophy, post-Marxist thought, Discourse theory and psychoanalysis. It will also be of interest to those working in the areas of populism studies, cultural studies, gender studies and queer theory. (shrink)

During a period in which institutions have been refashioned to meet the demands of a complex social and political economy, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has helped to alter the public educational system. As scholars and researchers examine the material effects of NCLB, efforts to improve the educational system and its effects must also explore the relationship between policy and racial ideologies including discursive fantasies. This article examines the relationship between NCLB and racial fantasies of Black youth (...) as problematic others in order to help education reform scholarship and advocacy examine the violence of NCLB. (shrink)

Although Robert Zemeckis’s film Beowulf is a re-writing of the Old English epic Beowulf with a shifting of perspective, certain details in the film can only be understood by referring to the poem. That is, a better understanding of the film is tied closely to an awareness of certain narrative elements in the epic. The emphasis on Beowulf in the poem shifts to the Mother in the film. This shift obviously leads to a recontextualization of the narrative elements of the (...) former text. In the epic, Grendel is left without a father; however, in the film, he is fathered by Hrothgar but this biological fathering does not lead to linguistic castration. In their case, things are reversed: rather than the infant being castrated by the Law/language, the biological father is led to a psychic regression due to the son. This appears to be a dramatization of the conflicts between the Other and the shared Other/the representative of the paternal metaphor: that is, Hrothgar. This time, the Other conquers the representative of the paternal metaphor and annuls his masculinity, which radically changes the way in which we evaluate the course of events in the film. These departures make more sense if they are analyzed against the background of Lacanian epistemology. This paper aims to explore the film’s departures from the poem by approaching it from a Lacanian perspective. (shrink)

This paper mobilises the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and enjoyment to better understand how processes of education aimed at extending and defending democratic life might respond to and engage with populist politics. I approach this task by engaging with a particular vector of Mouffe and Laclau’s political philosophy, moving from a critique of liberal democracy’s rationalist pretensions to their insistence that left populism and its passionate construction of a ‘people’ is the central task facing radical politics. This attention to (...) the libidinal basis of political identification locates them in a community of Left Lacanian thinkers who reframe the problems of democratic politics in terms of desire and enjoyment rather than miseducation or its lack. Whilst this position might suggest a binary choice between different analytical frames, I inquire into what insights are generated by theorising left populism as an ‘education of desire’. The paper is organised into four main parts: the opening discussion clarifies my understanding of education by engaging with the literature on educational agonism. The second section lays the groundwork for a critique of the way in which education is fetishized, in different ways, by liberals and radicals as a panacea for populist politics. The third section reframes democratic crisis as an enjoyment problem in order to better grasp the relationship between the liberal democratic disavowal of its own irrationality and the structure of right-wing populist enjoyment. The fourth section applies these insights to develop a critical analysis of what is at stake when we explicitly consider the left populist construction of a ‘people’ as an educational task. I conclude by drawing together and summarising the main features and considerations of left populism understood as an education of desire. (shrink)

This article deals with the category of antagonism as proposed by Ernesto Laclau, delving into its basal philosophies and analyzing some of their tensional aspects. We being by identifying two fields, namely, post-foundational political thought and the Lacanian left, and link them to the category of antagonism. Second, the philosophical tensions between the category and these fields are examined through two concrete exponents: Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek, reporting certain incompatibilities and criticism regarding both authors’ proposals. Finally, a (...) few open questions are raised in regard to the category of antagonism, stemming from previous discussions and Laclau’s own limitations. (shrink)

Lacanian Zizek attempts to Hegelian and anti-capitalism, is to establish close contact. Critique of global capitalism in the process, Zizek and other left-wing intellectuals exists between the points of attack. Although the distinction between Lacan Zizek, "it sector" of several concepts, but he Lacan's "real world" equated with capital, this is a misunderstanding. Political interference in how to deal with Lenin and decision theory, the Zizek see an objective principle of universality and the concrete application of the theory (...) that exists between the cracks, but far-fetched to understand the universality of the vacancy for the Lacanian sense of energy refers to. Zizek left Ji theoretical difficulties inherent in the theory that his position must be re-reflect on their own tension. Zizek sets out to bridge the Lacanian Hegelianism and anti-capitalism. Despite their common endeavor to criticize global capitalism, there is a discrepancy between Zizek and other left-wing intellectuals. Although Zizek distinguishes different interpretations of Lacan's concept of le rée / the real, he misreads it by equating it with capital. In matters of dealing with Lenin's theory of political intervention and decisionism, Zizek perceives the chasm between a universal principle and its application in reality. However, the universality of the principle is understood, in a far- fetched fashion, as the empty signifier in Lacan's sense of the word. The dilemma of Zizek's left-wing theory compels him to reflect on the tension of his own position. (shrink)

The work of Slavoj Žižek has become an essential reference point for debates concerning the future of left radical thought and practice. His attacks on identity politics, multiculturalism and ‘radical democracy’ have established him as a leading figure amongst those looking to renew the link between socialist discourse and a transformative politics. However, we contend that despite the undeniable radicality of Žižek’s theoretical approach, his politics offers little in the way of inspiration for the progressive left. On the (...) contrary, his commitment to Lacanian categories reasserts the primordial character of alienation, hierarchy and domination, and his proposed schema for confronting the status quo, the model of the Act, serves to reaffirm rather than contest the given. We suggest that a genuinely transformative politics should (contra Žižek) stress the necessity for the prefiguration of alternatives, of linking and radicalizing ‘petty’ resistances, of encouraging critical and utopian forms of thought and activity. (shrink)

Two terms, solitude and common, were chosen in order to develop some reflections on the articulation between difference and sameness in Lacan’s teaching and to tease out some political implications therefrom. In this context, an analysis of the collective experience of transmission such as is practiced and theorized in Lacan’s École de la cause enables a critical evaluation of the so-called Lacanian left.

Addresses the issue of transference from a Lacanian perspective and discusses the implications which transference has in working with criminal clients. The article begins by briefly discussing the constitution of Lacanian subjectivity which includes a discussion of J. Lacan's concepts of the imaginary and symbolic orders. The idea of transference is then situated between the play of the imaginary and symbolic orders which constantly asks the question, what does the Other want. This question is especially important in the (...) therapeutic work with criminal Ss, and reveals certain countertransference possibilities which when left unexplored, can greatly threaten the success of the treatment. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The book shares Žižek's central problem of how to revitalize the radical political left through theory. It initially follows the argument developed in The Ticklish Subject that contemporary leftist thought is divided by antagonism between a Marxist revolutionary politics founded on Enlightenment philosophy and a politics of identity founded on post-modern post-structuralism. How Žižek used Lacan's theory of character structures is examined here to describe this theoretical deadlock and explain how the dominant contemporary ideologies of liberal tolerant multiculturalism and (...) reactionary "pseudo-fundamentalism" compete to mobilize the individual subject's unconscious drive to enjoyment. The book thus emphasizes the moments in which Žižek hints that Lacanian theory may describe a practice that facilitates the resolution of antagonisms that placate radical leftist politics. It challenges prevalent interpretations of Lacanian ends of analysis, to ultimately connect the psychoanalytic cure to the leftist project of social and political liberation. The Subject of Liberation argues that if Lacan is to be useful to leftist politics, then the left has to develop its own definitions of the post-analytic subject, and proposes one such definition developed out of Lacanian and Zizekian theory. (shrink)

This article describes the conditions under which it is possible for neoliberalism to render itself invisible to the economic field that created it, allowing that field to define the discourse as a paranoid construction of the left. In addressing the issue, the text aims to extend the reach of Bourdieu’s field theory by infusing it with aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis. This construction facilitates the use of the example of neoliberal economics to suggest wider principles of field functionality. It (...) is suggested that the main purpose of any field is not the generation of new knowledge but the preservation of its doxa, which is protected by a series of self-legitimation strategies. In the example of neoliberal economics, the strength of these systems has allowed that field to close its eyes to the catastrophic failure of its knowledge. (shrink)

Lacan and Capitalist Discourse explores the political and theoretical connections between the Covid-19 Pandemic and Capitalism, unravelling the direct consequences of Lacan's thesis of so-called "Capitalist Discourse". Jorge Alemán provides an account of neoliberalism, its mechanisms to produce subjectivities and the new modes of the political far Right. The book begins with the problem of a possible exit from capitalism, continuing to consider the possibilities of mourning and the active production of a new Left. Alemán engages deeply with a (...) range of thinkers: primarily Lacan, but also Heidegger, Marx, Laclau, Foucault, Butler, Badiou, Althusser, and others, in making his case. Lacan and Capitalist Discourse will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to academics of psychoanalytic and Lacanian studies, cultural theory, philosophy and political thought. (shrink)

RESUMO: Em grande medida, os estudos sobre a constituição do arcabouço teórico do lacanismo têm ocorrido ao largo do exame de sua historicidade. Essa negligência reforça o ocultamento do processo social que levou a produção lacaniana a uma profunda integração entre a formalização e a etificação da teoria. Esse processo não pode ser compreendido sem a contextualização crítica da conjuntura política que cercou a proposta e a existência da École Freudienne de Paris, fundada por Lacan, em 1964. A estreita convivência (...) com os jovens militantes dos grupos da esquerda extraparlamentar da época, notadamente os maoístas, e a assimilação de suas problematizações fizeram do pensamento lacaniano e da EFP o espaço de objetivação de um discurso movido pela paráfrase política e seus efeitos de engajamento. Este artigo pretende expor as linhas de estruturação político-social dos conceitos forjados por Lacan, em meio à instituição e à consolidação de sua Escola. ABSTRACT: To a great extent the studies of the constitution of the Lacanism theoretical framework have occurred off the examination of its historicity. This neglect strengthens the concealment of the social process that led the Lacanian production to a deep integration between the theory formalization and the theory ethification. This process can not be understood without grasping the context of the political environment that surrounded the proposal and the existence of École Freudienne de Paris, founded by Lacan in 1964. The close contact with the young militants of the extra-parliamentary left groups of the time, notably the Maoists, and the assimilation of the problems they rose made the Lacanian thought and EFP the place of objectification of a speech moved by the political paraphrase and their engagement effects. This article aims to expose the lines of political and social structure of concepts forged by Lacan through the establishment and consolidation of his School. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most influential philosophers of our current age. His work as a whole largely draws from Platonic, Cartesian, Hegelian and Lacanian thought, and has been applied to the analysis of empirical sciences, political-economic theory, as well as contemporary spirituality and theology. Jordan Peterson is a well respected clinical psychologist and has recently become one of the most influential public intellectuals of our current age. His work as a whole largely draws from Christian, Nietzschean, Jungian (...) and Piagettian thought, and has been antagonistically situated in contemporary debates on the nature of gender identity, sexual expression, communist ideology, and the importance of responsibility for a meaningful life. During Peterson’s rise to global fame these two thinkers have often been symbolically positioned by those familiar with their work as figures in an oppositional determination : Žižek standing for the future of the progressive left and revolutionary communist values, and Peterson standing for the future of the conservative right and traditional patriarchal values. In this work it is argued that the difference internal to this antagonistic positioning can be put to a productive utility. Towards this end I first attempt to use Christianity, Postmodernism and Psychoanalysis as thematic structures to focus on their core differences. Secondly, I attempt to summarize the major points of agreement that emerged from their public debate/dialogue/discussion. These two goals are established to demonstrate the importance of higher order dialogue capable of reconciling opposed figures of consciousness. Such reconciliation would not represent a synthesis to erase all differences, but rather a reconciliation that would open new spaces of productive discourse capable of approaching the nature of psychology and society. (shrink)

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–81) left a legacy of thought that increasingly commands the attention of American scholars and critics. His provocative essays and wide-ranging seminars and lectures attempted, with remarkable success, to bridge the supposedly unbridgeable gap between the humanities and modern science. For some time his influence has shadowed the theoretical work being done in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, women’s studies, and literature. In Lacan and the Human Sciences eight eminent scholars examine how ideas entered these fields, how (...) well they were understood and adapted, and what fruit they have produced. The editor, Alexandre Leupin, whose introduction reveals the underpinnings of Lacan’s thought, views the book as a blueprint for overcoming the present impasses of scientific and humanistic discourses and their imaginary contradictions. The essays demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The relevance of his work to epistemology is considered by Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan; to anthropology, by Jean-Joseph Goux; to feminist studies, by Jane Gallop; and to literature, by Dennis Porter and Denis Hollier. The result is a book that points to a new and more pertinent way of dealing, on one hand, with the problems of epistemology and, on the other, with the question of literary theory in the humanities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Testament of the Other: Abraham and Torok’s Failed Expiation of GhostsChristopher Lane (bio)Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1. Ed., trans., and intro. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok. Questions à Freud: Du Devenir de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Belles Lettres-Archimbaud, 1995.Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok. “Questions to Freudian Psychoanalysis: Dream Interpretation, Reality, Fantasy.” Trans. Rand. Critical (...) Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 567–94. [“QFP”]Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable and immortal elements of life, which, having once been, can never die, though they blend and change and change again for ever.—H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s MinesWhat haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.—Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel1. PrologueNicolas Abraham and Maria Torok may be best known for advancing a theory of transgenerational haunting. According to this theory, repressed secrets are passed from one generation to the next if they are “encrypted” as unprocessed and traumatic information. Before Abraham’s death in 1975, he and Torok saw their analytic role as reparative: Encouraging their analysands to mourn repressed secrets, they hoped to transform their analysands’ perspectives on family history.Abraham and Torok quickly became known for expanding Freud’s emphasis on the subject’s conflicting desires and identifications. From 1968 on, when Abraham published “L’écorce et le noyau” (“The Shell and the Kernel”) as an extended review of Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis, he and Torok published their claims in cheerful defiance of Freudian orthodoxy, acquiring a reputation in France—and, later, in England and the United States—for shattering such “doctrinaire” elements of psychoanalysis [End Page 3] as the Oedipus complex and death drive, penis envy, and the primal scene, as well as for criticizing Lacan’s alleged stranglehold on psychoanalysis in France and much of Europe. 1 After publishing L’écorce et le noyau (1987), a collection of their essays (many coauthored), and a radically new interpretation of Freud’s patient “the Wolf Man,” Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’homme aux loups (1976; trans. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy), Abraham and Torok were championed in Europe and the United States by theorists delighted to see a “poststructuralist” critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Ironically, Abraham and Torok’s work received almost comparable support from analytical philosophers eager to denounce Freud’s “unscientific” precepts.Now that the first volume of Abraham and Torok’s essays has appeared in translation, non-Francophone readers have an opportunity to assess what Abraham and Torok contributed to psychoanalysis and to revisit the debates they staged with Freud and Lacan in the 1970s and—posthumously for Abraham—in the ‘80s. Reviewing this collection is not a simple task, however, because its conceptual interests are so diverse and because Torok’s coauthored work with Abraham differs radically from the essays and book she published recently with Nicholas Rand, editor and translator of The Shell and the Kernel. Rand’s interventions confirm Torok’s latest arguments but they also, occasionally, misleadingly frame the older work in terms of the new. Readers may therefore see Rand’s editorial notes and introduction as guides to how he and Torok now view Torok’s collaboration with Abraham. We can only speculate whether Abraham would have interpreted the collaboration the same way. 2How does Abraham and Torok’s account of psychic “encryptment” differ from Freud’s model of repression? Assessing their revision of Freud’s metapsychological project, Abraham and Torok declare, “It would be presumptuous indeed to allege that we have reached our goal. Yet it would be false modesty to deny our suspicion that we are finally entering an open road” [140]. 3 Echoing Freud’s conviction that in dreams he had discovered “the royal road to the unconscious,” Abraham and Torok encourage a comparative reading of their psychoanalytic “road” and Freud’s. The following essay undertakes this reading, but it also speculates on what Freud’s and Lacan’s emphasis on [End Page 4] psychic... (shrink)

Gillett argues that there are unexpected confluences between the tradition of Frege and Wittgenstein and that of Freud and Lacan. I counter that that the substance of the exegeses of Frege and Wittgenstein in Gillett's paper are flawed, and that these mistakes in turn tellingly point to unclarities in the Lacanian picture of language, unclarities left unresolved by Gillett. Lacan on language is simply a kind of enlarged/distorted mirror image of the Anglo-American psychosemanticists: where they emphasize information and (...) representation, he emphasizes evocation and connotation. Neither contrasting emphasis is remotely adequate to linguistic action-in-the-world. Is "the unconscious", as Lacan claims, a "network of signifiers"? Arguably, yes; but most ordinary / actual language does not involve such "signification". Words primarily "signify" concepts or things only in exceptional circumstances; normally, words are transparent, and nothing at all is meant by them except in an actual situation of use of a sentence. Second, is "the unconscious" structured like a language? Again, yes-- if we understand by "language" what Lacan asks us to. "The unconscious" arguably is structured like a language--as Lacan (inadequately) understands language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 71-97 [Access article in PDF] The Subject of Religion Lacan and the Ten Commandments Kenneth Reinhard Julia Reinhard Lupton Despite Freud's Nietzschean unmasking of religion as ideology, psychoanalysis has frequently been attacked as itself a religion, a cabal of analyst-priests dedicated to the worship of a dead master. Such critics "do not believe in Freud" in much the same way as atheists "do not believe in (...) God," and their rejections of psychoanalysis in the name of the secular partake in the very structure of religious thought they claim to repudiate. In Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent, Lacan comments on the blindness of the atheistic insight concerning religion: "I know that you're not believers, right? But that doesn't mean that you aren't all the more conned... because even if you are not believers, you still believe in that aspiration [for the love of God]. I won't say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you" [Dec. 18, 1973; our trans.]. In Lacan's analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious "suppositions" or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacan's strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us—supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity, and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation.Throughout the decades of his seminar, Lacan addressed the monotheistic foundations of Western subjectivity as a set of discursive ruptures or cuts which continue to scar and brand the modern subject beyond their secular abrogation. Distinguishing between Freud "the individual with his atheistic profession of faith" and "the Freud who was the first to acknowledge the value and relevance of [the] myth... we call the death of God" [S VII 192–93], Lacan insists that Freud regarded monotheism as an epochal divide that irrevocably altered all that came before and after it: "On the left of this [monotheistic] message, there are some things that are henceforth outdated, obsolete; they no longer hold beyond the manifestation of the message. On the right, things are quite different" [172]. What, in Lacan's analysis, is the difference that monotheism has made, both during its periods of dominance and after? The laws, narratives, and symbols of monotheism continue to undergird key fantasies of personhood, nationhood, and neighborhood in the modernity that purports to have supplanted them. In Lacan's formulation, monotheism "supposes" the subject of these fantasies, precipitating it from out of the expanse of signifiers and in relation to a sublime object of both unbearable enjoyment and social obligation. Moreover, it is the scandal and the gift of monotheism that it not only creates moments of traumatic singularity, but also thinks the singular as trauma, rending the fabric of an animistic nature which would unite every polarity of being in the fullness of a sexual relation. Unlike the gods of Greek philosophy, the monotheistic God is not part of the nature he creates. In its decisive thinking of singularity, monotheism elicits and eludes all rapprochement with philosophical conceptions of the One, whether in the guise of Hellenized Judaism, Pauline theology, or Arab Aristotelianism. Lacan extends the monotheistic project of thinking singularity [End Page 71] by insisting that "there is something of One" [il y a de l'Un]—not the self-identical One of Greek logic, mathematics, and cosmology, but the One of a violent rupture that creates subjects and their worlds around a void, an un that un-does the primacy it speaks.If, from the Lacanian vantage, the singular invention of the God shared by the People of the Book forever separates religion from philosophy, we would also insist that religion is not simply a subset of "culture," understood as the symbolic practices that unify a people... (shrink)

_Philosophy Beside Itself _ was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, (...) translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests. Stephen Melville's aim in _Philosophy Beside Itself _ is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline. Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's _Blindness and Insight _and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement. Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa. (shrink)

Tina Beattie has re‐read Aquinas in the light of Lacanian theory and found the later Lacan's transition to what he calls the register of “the Real” to be significant for a revitalised theology beyond traditional intellectual categories. She argues for a maternal Trinity which she believes to lie hidden in Thomas and, in support of this, she contends that Lacan left behind Freud's paternal preoccupations in favour of maternity. This response to Beattie will re‐examine Lacan's trajectory from “the (...) Symbolic” register to “the Real” through the lens of what he said in his year‐long seminars about Moses, whom he regarded as a representative of “the Symbolic”, and it will demonstrate that paternity remained a constant in Lacan, who even came to see “the Real” itself as a name of the father. (shrink)

Criticism of Hegel has been a central preoccupation of “postmodern” philosophy, from critical theory and deconstruction to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Foucauldian “archaeology.” One of the most frequent criticisms is that Hegel's invocation of “absolute knowledge” installs him in a position of authorial arrogance, of God‐like authority, leaving the reader in a position of subservience to the Sage's perfect wisdom. The argument of this article is that this sort of criticism is profoundly ironic, since Hegel's construction of the role (...) of the Sage possessing absolute knowledge is in fact an elaborate mask covering over a radical project of disappearance of the author by which it becomes the reader who is left to author the text. The article explores Hegel's commitment to his own death as an author in his invention of a new method of demonstration, his epistemology, his philosophy of language, his theory of desire, and even in the seemingly least likely place of all, his portrait of “absolute knowledge.”. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek has emerged as the pre-eminent European cultural theorist of the last decade and has been described as the ultimate Marxist/Lacanian cultural studies scholar. His large and growing body of work has generated considerable controversy, yet his texts are not structured as standard academic tomes. In Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real, Matthew Sharpe undertakes the difficult task of drawing out an evolving argument from all of Zizek's texts from 1989 to 2001, and reads them as (...) the bearers of a single theoretical project, providing an authoritative, reliable, clearly written and well-structured account of Zizek's demanding body of work. From an exposition of Zizek's social and philosophical critical theory the book moves to a critical analysis of Zizek's theoretical project and its political implications. Sharpe concludes by suggesting that Zizek's work, however, raises as many questions as it answers; questions both about Zizek's theoretical system and to the wider new Left in today's world. (shrink)

When evaluating R.K. Narayan, Shashi Tharoor seems to commit himself to these theses: Narayan has a natural style of writing, or a style which is second nature to him; to go significantly beyond his limited range he would have to experiment more with language, reducing the accessibility of his fictions. I cast doubt on this combination by proposing that Narayan’s middle-of-the-road style requires suppressing linguistic innovations in earlier drafts.

In this long excerpt, Bibler argues that, in Hegel’s logic, thinking devours the object—the Absolute is achieved—and therefore thinking itself disappears. Yet thinking necessarily involves being, e...

This paper examines some French feminist uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I focus on two Lacanian influenced accounts of psychological oppression, the first by Luce Irigaray and the second by Julia Kristeva, and I argue that these accounts fail to meet criteria for an adequate political psychology.

Alain Badiou has claimed that Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude (Bloomsbury, 2008) "opened up a new path in the history of philosophy." And so, whether you agree or disagree with the speculative realism movement, it has to be addressed. Lacanian Realism does just that. This book reconstructs Lacanian dogma from the ground up: first, by unearthing a new reading of the Lacanian category of the real; second, by demonstrating the political and cultural ingenuity of Lacan's concept of (...) the real, and by positioning this against the more reductive analyses of the concept by Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Saul Newman, Todd May, Joan Copjec, Jacques Ranciere, and others, and; third, by arguing that the subject exists intimately within the real. Lacanian Realism is an imaginative and timely exploration of the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

Affect is a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis, but there has long been a misperception that Lacan neglected affect in his writings. We encounter affect at the beginning of any analysis in the form of subjective suffering that the patient hopes to alleviate. How can psychoanalysis alleviate such suffering when analytic practice itself gives rise to a wide range of affects in the patient’s relationship to the analyst? Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, is the first book (...) to explore Lacan’s theory of affect and its implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice. In it, Colette Soler discusses affects as diverse as the pain of existence, hatred, ignorance, mourning, sadness, "joyful knowledge," boredom, moroseness, anger, shame, and enthusiasm. Soler’s discussion culminates in a highlighting of so-called enigmatic affects: anguish, love, and the satisfaction related to the end of an analysis. Lacanian Affects provides a unique and compelling account of affect that will prove to be an essential text for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers. (shrink)

This paper examines some French feminist uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I focus on two Lacanian influenced accounts of psychological oppression, the first by Luce Irigaray and the second by Julia Kristeva, and I argue that these accounts fail to meet criteria for an adequate political psychology.

In his article How Did Marx Invent the Symptom? Žižek discusses his project of a critique of ideology, he proposes, since the concept of real abstraction by Sohn-Rethel, that are a virtual dimension that structure the practices, which, in turn, the beliefs or the subjectivity is submitted to. On contrary to the classical critique of ideology, that step in the levels of practices or the subjectivity, in Žižek’s project the subjectivity is just a rebound effect of the practices and the (...) the practice is what are ideological, then the critique of ideology must to act over the practices, nor on the believes. And, the way to do this is acting over the real abstraction, or, the phantasy, the ideological phantasy. Our propose in this article is to show how this project of a critique of ideology fits in the lacanian structure known as Graph of Desire. In this way, the lacanian graph will be a generic topology to a critique of ideology or phantasy. (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)

This article discusses how decentered understandings of addiction might benefit from ongoing debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Departing from recent critiques in critical addiction studies, it claims that psychoanalysis offers a framework that both challenges abstract, essentialist ontologies and recognises addiction as a valid phenomenon. Crucial to this framework is a notion of freedom linked to the symbolic break with bodily enjoyment, which, according to Lacan, lies at the origin of the constitution of subjectivity and which neither presupposes the existence (...) of a conscious will nor rejects freedom as a mere product of abstract bio-political governmentality. The article explores how, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, addiction is seen as a way of denying this freedom through the realisation of an enjoyment independent of the symbolic order. Moreover, the article argues that its definition of addiction allows for both a decentered understanding of addiction and a critical challenging of current societal processes of addictification. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan's impact upon the theory and practice of psychoanalysis worldwide cannot be underestimated. _Lacanian Psychoanalysis_ looks at the current debates surrounding Lacanian practice and explores its place within historical, social and political contexts. The book argues that Lacan’s elaboration of psychoanalytic theory is grounded in clinical practice and needs to be defined in relation to the four main traditions: psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and spirituality. As such topics of discussion include: the intersection between psychoanalysis and social transformation a new (...) way through deadlocks of current Lacanian debate a new approach to ‘clinical structures’ of neurosis, perversion and psychosis _Lacanian Psychoanalysis_ draws on Lacan's work to shed light on issues relevant to current therapeutic practice and as such it will be of great interest to students, trainees and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, counselling and other domains of personal and social change. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Slavoj Žižek’s Freudian-Hegelian interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and argue that Žižek’s critique of Shelley’s ambiguous and contradictory attitude toward the French Revolution and its regime of terror remains central to the debates about the revolutionary and Enlightenment ideals today. For Žižek, Shelley employs the family myth not only to obfuscate the social reality of the French Revolution, but also to subvert the bourgeois family from within, through its transgressive sexual (...) politics. Although Shelley manages not simply to dismantle modernity, she expresses a radical commitment to a “pure Enlightenment subjectivity”. Nonetheless, Shelley fails to articulate the speculative identity of the Enlightenment and revolutionary terror. Žižek’s analysis of Shelley’s ambiguous position on emancipatory politics has major implications for his critique of Leftist debates about Muslim refugees in Europe and transgender sexuality. It is still urgent, Žižek correctly insists, to interrogate the ways in which identity politics and the human rights regime can be readily appropriated and commodified in late capitalism. (shrink)

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a (...) culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought. (shrink)

There are many different kinds of libertarianism. The first is right libertarianism, which received its most powerful expression in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), a book that still sets the baseline for discussions of libertarianism today. The second, I will call faux libertarianism. For reasons I will explain in this paper, most ‘man-on-the-street’ libertarians and most politicians who claim to be libertarians are actually this kind of libertarian. And third, there is left libertarianism, which is what I (...) shall spend most of this paper explicating. But I will not simply be surveying the views of those who identify as left libertarians and put this forth as if I were engaged in an exegetical exercise. Instead, what I shall set forth is a kind of manifesto, a statement of why I consider myself a left libertarian, one that takes this approach to political morality well beyond where it was left around the end of the last century by the previous generation of left libertarians. My hope is to provide those who find certain left libertarian ideas attractive a guide by which they can explain and harmonise their own views, recognise left libertarianism as a distinct comprehensive political doctrine, and feel more open to identify themselves as left libertarian too. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan’s theorization of the imaginary has been regarded generally as an organic part of the crucial development of psychoanalytic theory in its post-Freudian stage. This article situates the Lacanian imaginary in the context of contemporary discussions of ‘theory after poststructuralism’, arguing that it moves radically beyond the poststructuralist terrains of deconstruction and discourse-analysis, and is able to off er new insights on various studies. Especially, it can help (re)examine some aporias in the field of Sinology. This article devotes (...) its main body to demonstrating that the Lacanian account of the imaginary is powerful in exploring the assumptions and expectations of modern Sinophone intellectual discourse. Deconstructive discourse-analysis alone is insufficient for understanding the underlying forces that have been fundamentally shaping the contours of modern Chinese intellectuality, and attention needs to be paid to the psychological dimension of Chinese thought. With the aim of tracing and interrogating these underlying forces, this article seeks to show how the fervor for discussing the ‘problem of China’ reveals a hidden psychical mechanism. (shrink)

Lacan: Television – let’s proceed like idiots; let’s take this title literally and ask ourselves a question, not the question, “what can we learn about TV from Lacan’s teaching?” which would get us on the wrong path of so-called applied psychoanalysis, but the inverse question, “what can we learn about Lacan’s teaching from the TV phenomenon?” At first sight, this seems as absurd as the well-known Hegelian proposition defining phrenology, “the spirit is the bone”: the equalization of the most sublime, (...) elusive theory with the vulgar mass-cultural phenomenon. But perhaps, as in the Hegelian proposition, there is a “speculative truth” beneath the obvious banality – perhaps certain peculiarities of the American TV program allow us to grasp the fundamental Lacanian proposition that psychoanalysis is not a psychology: the most intimate beliefs – even the most intimate emotions such as compassion, crying, sorrow, laughter – can be transferred, delegated to others without losing their sincerity. (shrink)