The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 11.
... The question that underlies the present study concerns the relationship between ethics and identity, which from a Lacanian perspective may be more accurately described as exploring how ethics is constituted in the very process of constructing identities (Lacan, 1992). What has been referred to as "the ethics of the Real" (Contu, 2008, p. 367) is an understanding of human beings as subjects in relation to what Lacan calls the real (Lacan, 1977), the irreducible kernel of reality that we lack access to and around which all our desires and motivations revolve. As I will explain further below, it is in how we position ourselves in relation to this lack of connection to the real that we become ethical subjects (Lacan, 1992). ...
... As we have seen in the foregoing analysis, this entails a careful investigation of how imaginary identities, moral or otherwise, are constructed and then how they fail in particular narratives. It does not entail psychoanalyzing narratives to find what is unconsciously desired, an impossible undertaking anyway from a Lacanian perspective (Lacan, 1977). Rather it involves detecting how fundamental lack disrupts ordinary conscious speech and then carefully discerning whether this is covered over in an imaginary stance and male jouissance or whether it can be enjoyed as female jouissance in a symbolic stance. ...
... All of this suggests that there is a need to rethink ethics from a psychoanalytic perspective. Ethics cannot be understood without also comprehending the complexities of how humans struggle with self and desire driven by unconscious dynamics about lack and the missing real (Lacan, 1977). ...
The study examines how identities in general and moral identities in particular are related to ethical behavior in organizations and what aspects of such identities might drive actual ethical conduct versus only the appearance of such conduct. The study develops a psychoanalytic, specifically Lacanian, framework with which to explore such dynamics and illustrates this empirically by analyzing how employees from a range of organizations narrate their identities as good organizational citizens. The findings reveal that how individuals position themselves regarding common struggles with self and desire affects how much they are confined to appearing to be ethical rather than to act ethically. The study discusses the implications of these findings offering new avenues for understanding organizational citizenship behavior, how ethical conduct in organizations can be explored from an identity perspective and how psychoanalysis may be foundational for the study of ethics.
... (p. 224) Lacan (1977) claimed that the feeling of absence influences the unconscious to a great extent. Lacan explained that, "The sense of absence can take the form of mere "lack" or "need" which force the psyche to make demands; or it can take the highest form of desire" (p. ...
... But this image causes one to be the owner of the body that the infant has not yet accurately attained. Lacan (1977) pointed out that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. ...
Sylvia Plath's works have been the subject of analysis by so many critics with different approaches. What is common in almost all these studies is this American writer's inclination with such themes as distress, isolation and anxiety. This article is going to analyze a number of her poems and The Bell Jar as Plath's only novel in order to probe into the concept of childhood and how it was treated by her. As a matter of fact, the current study intends to prove that her childhood, motherhood, her parents and what happened in her marital life had a great influence on all her works and chased her up to the very end of her life. To achieve this goal, the writer will have a concise analysis of some poems which have been chosen randomly and her only novel through Lacan's theory of childhood. In other words, this paper is going to investigate Plath's preoccupation with childhood as displayed in her poetry. Through her unconcealed presentation of this fascination in many of her applauded poems, she tried to provide a touching and convincing study representing Lacan's theory.
... It is not that there is a preexistent human agent who is missing something from their original wholeness; rather, it is this lack that is needed for the subject to come into existence. Lack is constitutive: 'rupture, split, the stroke of the opening makes absence emerge-just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence' (Lacan 1998(Lacan [1973: 26). Lack is the only thing essential of the 'I': 'the element lost in the process of becoming a human-being is being itself, the pure being, the real, the thing without a name, leaving us with a basic lack as a condition for our becoming' (Verhaeghe 1998: 176). ...
... It is not that there is a preexistent human agent who is missing something from their original wholeness; rather, it is this lack that is needed for the subject to come into existence. Lack is constitutive: 'rupture, split, the stroke of the opening makes absence emerge-just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence' (Lacan 1998(Lacan [1973: 26). Lack is the only thing essential of the 'I': 'the element lost in the process of becoming a human-being is being itself, the pure being, the real, the thing without a name, leaving us with a basic lack as a condition for our becoming' (Verhaeghe 1998: 176). ...
... Jego teoria odnosi się do takich fenomenów jak kultura, prawo czy język, składających się na porządek Symboliczny, który powstaje właśnie w relacji do Realnego. Lacan (1998) opisuje kontakt z Realnym jako spotkanie, które zawsze ma traumatyczny charakter. W języku starogreckim "trauma" oznacza praktyka t e o r e t y c z n a 4(54)/2024 ranę, cielesne obrażenie. ...
... W języku starogreckim "trauma" oznacza praktyka t e o r e t y c z n a 4(54)/2024 ranę, cielesne obrażenie. Dla Freuda jest to uszkodzenie natury psychicznej (Lacan 1998). Takie uszkodzenie jest spowodowane doświadczeniem, które następuje zbyt wcześnie, by zostać zrozumiane. ...
Tekst stanowi analizę sprzeczności między deklarowanym przez społeczeństwa nowoczesne szacunkiem dla praw zwierząt a przemocą, zadawaną im na skalę masową. Sprzeczność ta zostaje opisana w kategoriach rozumu cynicznego, charakteryzującego się rozbieżnością działań i deklarowanych przekonań. Korzystając z psychoanalitycznej ramy teoretycznej, autorka zwraca uwagę na afekt, którego negacja zostaje przedstawiona jako źródło postawy cynicznej. Tekst wskazuje na niesamowity (unheimlich) charakter nowoczesności oraz wiążącej się z nią międzygatunkowej przemocy, których ucieleśnieniem jest w tekście Piramida zwierząt, rzeźba autorstwa Katarzyny Kozyry.
... As maintainers of the patriarchal social order, these men identify with the "gaze of the Father" and act as its emissaries, attempting to intervene in Rose's subjectivity to discipline her within patriarchal society. Lacan's concept of "the gaze of the Father" is based on "the pre-existence of a gaze," aligning with Merleau-Ponty's view [3]. The big Other in the symbolic order possesses dominant power a priori, and the viewer, endowed with the privilege of "seeing" by power, identifies with the big Other under castration anxiety and consciously assumes the responsibility of maintaining the patriarchal social order. ...
This work examines the portrayal of gender interactions in Yishu's novel "The Story of Rose" and its television adaptation, highlighting the evolution from the 1980s to the early 21st century. The novel, narrated from a male internal focalization, exposes the marginalization and objectification of women within a patriarchal society. In contrast, the television adaptation employs a shifting internal focalization, showcasing a more diverse and positive representation of gender dynamics. By applying Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman's theory of "doing gender," the study reveals how gender roles are performed and renegotiated in different social contexts. The analysis underscores the shift from emphasizing gender disparities to fostering a vision of gender equality, reflecting societal progress in challenging and reconstructing traditional gender norms.
... Even if this was initially a spontaneous outcome, the sense of presence has now become an objective for the performing arts as well, as individuals' sensitivities and expectations constantly transform and adapt to new technological mechanisms. Lacan famously asserted that "the Real is impossible", meaning that the Real is impossible to fully grasp, represent, or domesticate within the structures of language and culture (Lacan, 1998). It is the kernel of experience that remains outside of symbolization, something that can only be encountered in moments of rupture, when the coherence of the symbolic order breaks down. ...
Sound Dramaturgies: repoliticizing performance – The paper explores the potential of sound to repoliticize theatre and performance. By examining the activity and dramaturgical practices of the multimedia art collective Medea Electronique (Greece), it highlights contradictions of contemporary art, particularly the continuous transition from ‘everything is political’ to ‘no, not everything is political’ and vice versa. From a post-Brechtian perspective, the political function of art lies in preserving the diverse sensibilities at the core of art’s autonomy. This entails avoiding that art be reduced to a post-political gesture or aligning it too closely with everyday aestheticized experiences.
Keywords: Sound Art; Dramaturgy; Performance; Installation; Digital Art
... That way, autofictional writing practice allows the author to examine psychoanalytically his/her past experiences, particularly childhood memories, which leads Doubrovsky to define autofiction as functioning like a writing cure. Like Freud, Jacque Lacan (1973/1998 views the subject as decentred and fragmented. Based on Freud's Oedipal model of psychosexual development, Lacan proposes a developmental scheme for human beings, by which he explains how individuals come to perceive themselves as unified wholes despite being, in effect, defined by a "lack". 2 According to his model of maturation, at the imaginary stage, the pre-Oedipal infant cannot yet speak, it is subject to impressions and fantasies, urged by drives and desires, and does not have any sense of boundaries and limitations. ...
This study aims to investigate the ways in which poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism have contributed to the development of autofiction. It is contended that the genre has a dialectical relationship with the twentieth century critical theories. Autofiction both affirms and questions the poststructuralist dismantling of the traditional perspectives on the concepts of authority, authenticity and truth by bringing the authorial presence back to the text but fictionalising it to some extent, committing to narrate the truth but creating an ambivalence around it. Autofiction engages with both the possibilities and limits of language in representing the referential world. Autofiction accepts that language fails to portray the reality truthfully; however, at the same time, it holds what language creates to be still connected to the reality of the author. Autofiction's contention of the possibility of truth depends heavily on psychoanalytic theories. It is observed that although autofiction assumes the subject to be fractured by the unconscious and denied access to the whole picture of the self's reality, little pieces of information that are recovered through psychoanalytic processes in autofictional narration provide truthful insights into selfhood and create opportunities to conceive subjective versions of reality. Finally, the postmodernist presumption of collapse of grand narratives is argued to have paved way to autofiction's preoccupation with subjective histories. As district from the postmodernist emphasis on irony, autofiction is considered as intending to provide a truthful representation of the referential by exploring multiple possibilities of the subject and embodied experience.
... Następstwem staje się generowanie roszczeń wobec rodziców z domaganiem się przejęcia interwencji wychowawczych na terenie szkoły, przy jednoczesnym krytykowaniu dydaktyków za przesadne wymagania i stwarzanie sytuacji sprzyjających powstawaniu przestrzeni odmowy uczestnictwa w edukacji. Następuje zatem pozorny podział kompetencji, coraz bardziej pogłębiający przepaść pomiędzy tym, co merytoryczne, (Lacan, 1981) została ograniczona funkcja widzenia, która związana jest ze świadomością. Tym sposobem rozszczepienie między okiem a spojrzeniem obnaża przepaść pomiędzy światem estetycznym a bytem podmiotu wyznaczanym przez spojrzenie (Węc, 2015). ...
... Even if this was initially a spontaneous outcome, the sense of presence has now become an objective for the performing arts as well, as individuals' sensitivities and expectations constantly transform and adapt to new technological mechanisms. Lacan famously asserted that "the Real is impossible", meaning that the Real is impossible to fully grasp, represent, or domesticate within the structures of language and culture (Lacan, 1998). It is the kernel of experience that remains outside of symbolization, something that can only be encountered in moments of rupture, when the coherence of the symbolic order breaks down. ...
Sound Dramaturgies: repoliticizing performance – The paper explores the potential of sound to repoliticize theatre and performance. By examining the activity and dramaturgical practices of the multimedia art collective Medea Electronique (Greece), it highlights contradictions of contemporary art, particularly the continuous transition from ‘everything is political’ to ‘no, not everything is political’ and vice versa. From a post-Brechtian perspective, the political function of art lies in preserving the diverse sensibilities at the core of art’s autonomy. This entails avoiding that art be reduced to a post-political gesture or aligning it too closely with everyday aestheticized experiences.
Keywords: Sound Art; Dramaturgy; Performance; Installation; Digital Art
... In psychoanalysis, this is not solely due to the formal arrangement of the contract -it is also produced by the transference relationship (Baranger et al., 1983). As in the mother/child situation, the analysand finds himself preoccupied with what the mysterious other -the analyst -wants from him (Lacan, 1964). From the analyst point of view, we notice instead how patients often act as if they are already certain what we want from them, which shapes their demeanor and manner of speaking profoundly. ...
... As the gaze is the 'object of the act of looking', it is not on the side of the subject anymore. It is the gaze of the Other (Evans, 1996) and in Lacan's words, 'I see only from one point, but in my existence, I am looked at from all sides' (Lacan, 1998). The subject caught by the gaze of the Other is in the object position and the inability to control the gaze coming from the Other is uncanny and traumatic for the subject. ...
Franny Choi’s first poetry collection, Floating, Brilliant, Gone (2014), challenges the idealized realism of much of Asian American literature, which, in the words of Sue-Im Lee, unfortunately “generates a coherent, stable, and classifiable notion of Asian American identity.” Instead, Choi’s poetry defies this idealization through an experimental approach. This approach arises out of a combination of past traumas that haunt the present (Grace Cho) with a speaking voice. The combination of haunting and speaking results in an experimental form that allows Choi’s poems to foreground the political and historical implications of the way that experimental form can resist the idealization of a more realist approach to narration. The first poem in the collection, “Notes on the Existence of Ghosts,” highlights some of the ways that the unspoken, but still present past haunts both now and in the future. Then, Choi’s prose-poem “The Mantis Shrimp Speaks” triangulates the biological features of the coiled physical strike of the mantis shrimp with the strength of female immigrants to speak their anger. And finally, the poem “How to Win an Argument” combines both haunting and triangulation to envision a shining light, a “spark in the wind—floating/and brilliant and gone,” that is born out of anger, out of “the coals of your stomach.” This angry light both projects who you are out into the world and fights against a world that does not take your own pains seriously. This light unsettles situations that might otherwise have been faced in meekness and self-sacrifice. In other words, Choi’s poetry does not imagine the idealized coherence of realistic Asian American narratives, but rather suggests an experimental disruption that makes room for angry voices demanding change. This disruption is seen as a non-masculine form of anger, which is also found and given different takes on in Don Lee’s short story collection The Partition (2022) and the poetry of Emily Jungmin Yoon, while Alexander Chee’s debut novel Edinburgh (2014) develops the more negative side of anger, which is an important tension that will be found in all the works of this book.
This memorial volume for the late Bamberg Professor of English Literature Christoph Houswitschka, who died far too early in 2022, is as multifaceted as the research interests of the deceased and includes academic contributions from his various fields of research, personal obituaries and memories as well as creative contributions. From contemporary Jewish studies, especially in the Anglophone world, to political history, refugee and migration studies, medieval studies, the long 18th century and other academic contributions, to poems, eulogies, short stories and even an entire play — this volume brings together colleagues, companions and friends of Christoph Houswitschkas to honor his life and (academic) work and to commemorate him and his research.
This paper aims to reflect on the possibilities of analysing gazes within a specific social situation, namely tourist visits to Rio de Janeiro’s favelas . The paper aims to do so outside the line initiated by John Urry’s tourist gaze. In fact, the goal here is to first describe gazes in their interactional aspects. Therefore, this paper focusses less on the idea of structured perception, which is the crux of Urry’s theory, but rather on the effect of the gaze within concrete situations. By referring to a set of rules and norms operating in the agency of what is given to see, what tourists desire to see and what is concealed from their gaze, this paper eventually follows a different approach toward understanding what structures the tourist experiences.
The impact of social media on tourism experience has been a common theme in existing research. However, there is a noticeable lack of focus on the genesis of lodgers’ experience, notably at the internet-celebrated B&Bs. Our study conducted within the context of mainland China’s rise in Bed and Breakfasts (B&Bs) over the last decade, employing qualitative methodologies, based on interview content from 17 residents and 6 practitioners in the B&B industry, exploring the evolution and structure of guest experience at these unique accommodation offerings. Results from our study distinguish two categories of guest experience at internet-celebrated B&Bs-functional and symbolic. These experience traverse three stages: pre-trip, during the trip, and post-trip. Deeper analysis shows a decisive role played by media-spectacle in this process, merging these stages into an integrated meaning-generation system. This system reveals a bidirectional relationship between media-spectacle and guest experience, typified by positive elicitation and negative validation. Consequently, we provide a grounded understanding of guest experience at internet-celebrated B&Bs, taking into account the effect of media-spectacle.
One of the common criticisms of Kant's moral theory is the excessive attention to reason and its absoluteness in the moral law. In such a way that neglecting other elements involved in the moral judgment, including feelings, leads to the impossibility and emergence of the sadistic strain of Kant's moral foundations and provides a suitable ground for the emergence of evil. According to this view, evil is considered to be associated with good, because what is meant by moral good is an action that is in accordance with the absolute, regardless of its content. Aligned with the impossibility of the absolute, Sade moves Kant's moral foundations and considers the name of every absolute will to be evil according to the principle of non-contradiction. Therefore, any morally heinous act can be willed according to the moral law according to the inclusion in the maxim, without disturbing the foundations of the absolute. According to Lacan, loyalty to desire and its insatiability is a moral criterion that If morality is considered devoid of pathological elements, it will become its opposite, simple morality, and the morality of desire, instead of moving from one object to another object, will be caught in the bed of simple satisfaction, as a result, in the movement towards pleasure at the ultimate threshold. The truth remains. Kant uses the special concept of respect as a representative of the pathological element to avoid falling into the sadistic side of his ethics and to fix this gap for his ethics.
چکیده به فارسی:
از انتقادات رایج به نظریۀ اخلاقی کانت، توجه بیش از حد به عقل و مطلق بودگی آن در قانون اخلاقی است. به گونهای که بیتوجهی به سایر عناصر دخیل در حکم اخلاقی از جمله احساسات منجر به ناممکنی و ظهور سویه سادیستی مبانی اخلاقی کانت میشود و زمینۀ مناسبی برای بروز شر فراهم میآورد. مطابق این نگاه، شر ملازم با خیر تلقی میشود چرا که مراد از خیرِ اخلاقی عملِ مطابق با امر مطلق است فارغ از محتوای آن. همسو با ناممکنی امرمطلق، ساد مبانی اخلاقی کانت را جابهجا میکند و نام هر اراده مطلقی را با توجه به اصل عدم تناقض شر میانگارد. بنابراین میتوان هر عمل شنیع اخلاقی را با توجه به گنجاندن در ماکسیم، مطابقِ قانون اخلاقی اراده کرد، بدون اینکه خللی به مبانی امر مطلق وارد شود. از نظر لکان وفاداری به میل، و ویژگی ارضا ناپذیری آن ملاک اخلاقمندی است که اگر اخلاق تهی از عناصر پاتولوژیک لحاظ شود تبدیل به ضد خود یعنی اخلاق سادی خواهد شد و اخلاقِ میل به جای آنکه از ابژهای به ابژۀ دیگر حرکت کند در بستر ارضای سادی گرفتار خواهد آمد، در نتیجه در حرکت به سوی ورای لذت در غاییترین آستانۀ واقعیت جا میماند. کانت برای اجتناب از درافتادن در سویۀ سادیستی اخلاق خود از مفهوم خاص احترام بهمثابه نمایندۀ عنصر پاتولوژیک و رفع این شکاف برای اخلاق خود بهره میبرد.
One of the most sensitive representations in cultural, moral and political discourses is that of motherhood. The idea that a mother would feel estranged from her child, or even regret having a child, is a taboo that has only begun to be considered in the twenty-first century. What is a "bad" mother, how and why are idealized representations of motherhood now being questioned? In this analysis, the work of Julia Kristeva stands at the forefront. Through her reworking of Melanie Klein's object theory above all, Kristeva challenges "natural" motherhood as a fetishized construct. Most importantly, Kristeva's theory of the abject presents a critique of the fetishization of motherhood and its entwinement with consumer society. This essay mobilizes Kristeva to analyze fictional and cinematic works by Rachel Cusk and Maggie Gyllenhaal concerned with the undoing of idealized ideas of motherhood. Cusk's novel A Life's Work (2001) offers an autofictional narrative of her first experience of motherhood, one of boundlessness, exasperation, sleeplessness and fear; of fluids, smells and noise. Unable to fulfill her daughter's needs, unfulfilled herself, critical of her environment and her peers, she provides witness to an alienated experience, that of a "bad" mother. Further, in Cusk's novel, this is intimately connected to the development of consumer society and its mythology of motherhood. For its part, Gyllenhaal's film The Lost Daughter, which adapts a novel by Elena Ferrante, tells a story of abjection at the edge of the loss of self, and puts the question of what it means to be a "natural" mother in focus. Having recourse to theories of the object in capitalism, assisted by C. B. McPherson and Sigmund Freud, this essay argues for the contemporary significance of Julia Kristeva's work in the face of fantasies about motherhood in capitalist society.
Sculptor and artist-researcher Marta Frėjutė explores the meaning of faults, slippages, and errors from different perspectives in her own work.
Jacques Lacan refers in his XI’s seminar to Kant’s early essay on “Negative Magnitudes” (1763), suggesting that in this essay, Kant challenges the concept of cause as later addressed in the transcendental project. Kant’s early conception of cause cannot be overshadowed by his later thought. According to Lacan’s reading, the essay on Negative Magnitudes shows cause as an unanalyzable concept, as introducing an irreducible gap into the relation between ground and consequence. This article aimed to examine the productivity of the notion of cause as an unanalyzable gap to our understanding of concepts. The article first focuses on Kant’s essay and his concept of cause and specifies how it triggered Lacan into suggesting this idea. The article secondly traces Lacan’s motivation in addressing Kant’s essay as a key to understanding the notion of cause in psychoanalysis. Third, the article establishes the productivity of this notion of cause for the psychoanalytic understanding of psychic reality.
This article is an investigation of sex: in its capacity for expansivity and generativity, but also in the particular threat it holds to us, our social ties with others, the symbolic, material, or intersubjective ground upon which those ties are made. This article makes the argument for an alternate politics of consent, away from the affirmative and toward the limit, examining the potentially radical possibilities therein for transforming subjectivity and sociality toward something else. Drawing from the form and content of hardcore pornography toward fleshing out its argument, this article proposes a model for the sexual that erodes at the global and interpersonal orders of being. Through a Lacanian notion of feminine sexuality and through Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs,” this article proposes a transformative model of self-shattering through the bodies of pornographic actresses in Bryan Gozzling’s pornographic series Hookup Hotshot. In its disorganizing, void, open, wet, faceless, repetitive, unnamable, shattering, impersonal, unificatory potential, sex proves to be fertile ground for the cultivation of a something else that would both threaten and transform us.
This article introduces Homo Putans, the “supposing human,” as a novel philosophical framework for understanding human existence. Supposing, distinct from mere thinking or imagination, involves hesitation, doubt, and a creative engagement with possibilities. It is characterized by its ability to confront ambiguity and construct meaning in the face of uncertainty. The proposed concept, “supposing,” is examined as both a cognitive and philosophical act that bridges the gap between uncertainty and understanding. Drawing on historical and contemporary philosophical traditions, including Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If and phenomenological insights from Husserl and Brentano, the study situates supposing as a significant process in human cognition and meaning-making. While rooted in philosophical inquiry, the article also considers conceptual alignments with cognitive science to explore how supposing shapes perception and decision-making. By thriving in ambiguity, supposing is framed as an act of constructing potential realities and engaging with the unknown.
The notion of the unhomely (Unheimlich) has become familiar to the point of being taken for granted. Philosophy should thus question the seemingly obvious meaning of this term, whose investigation shows it to be grounded upon a negation of a negation. The first negation is the negation of the primordial being (rav) by the economy, comprised of the Greek terms “house” (oikos) and “law” (nomos). The rav’s pre-economic being is exemplified by the figure of the mayfly in Rilke’s Eighth Elegy, which dwells within the world without any barrier in the form of an egg or a womb that could have separated it from the world. The phenomenon of the unhomely can thus be seen as a re-eruption of primordial being after it has been negated by the economy. This eruption should thus be considered as a negation of a negation, and hence as an event of hospitality in which what is most alien is hosted within the confines of the known and the familiar. This hospitality of the entirely Other is apparent in Israeli artist Sigalit Landau’s work “Shelter.” What reappears in this artwork is the negated Jewish extinction anxiety at the heart of a self-affirming Zionist existence.
A distinction should be drawn between morality and ethics in the Levinasian sense. Morality is understood as a set of laws, whether originating in God or the subject. Ethics originates from the responsible response to the call emanating from the face of the other person, conceived as a trace of the radical alterity of the infinite God. Regarding Levinas’ ethics, the following questions are raised: (1) Is the other without violence? (2) Is the other’s face the site of the epiphany of radical alterity? (3) Is radical alterity without violence? An analysis of Derrida, Sartre, Freud, and Lacan shows that the other could be infused with violence, whether contingent or a priori. Moreover, the other’s face is not a site of epiphany, as it is always already covered by a veil of facial expressions. The ensuing conclusion is that the site of disclosure should be shifted from the face of the other to the work of art. What is disclosed in art is primordial violence as manifested in the myth of Babel. As such, it is identified with the Joycean expression “he war” and with the notion of the “rav,” a Hebrew term that acquires three consequent meanings: manifold (ribui), dispute (riv), and sovereignty (rav).
Lacanian theory is not only a theoretical support for a certain kind of clinical practice, but also a powerful intervention in the traditional field of philosophy. The article aims to develop the sense in which the concept of the unconscious can be understood as a genuinely speculative concept. It starts from two different readings of the Cartesian cogito proposed by Lacan and insists on the significant fact that Lacan develops his second reading of the cogito in the context of his discussion of the logic of fantasy. It has been suggested by some interpreters that Lacan’s concept of fantasy – as that which gives us access to reality – echoes the Kantian notion of the transcendental. The article explores their similarities and differences in order to show what constitutes Lacan’s truly revolutionary contribution to modern philosophy, particularly when it comes to questions of objectivity, objective knowledge and the subject’s place within it. It proposes to formulate this revolutionary contribution with the following thesis: the same thing that makes possible the formations of the unconscious also makes possible objective, scientific knowledge. And this something is the gap, the hole that the subject bores in reality when it is constituted as the subject of knowledge vis-à-vis or in relation to reality. For this is precisely the gap, the rupture, where the signifier, the signifying chain, takes hold of the real and becomes something other than a mere reflection or symbolic reproduction/redoubling of reality.
The multicultural context generated cultural diversity but also cultural conflicts. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia deals with problems generated by the cultural difference, focusing on the condition of individuals in a multicultural context. Racial hybridity is a prominent theme in Hanif Kureishi's novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, as it explores the complex identities of its characters in a multicultural society. Set in the suburbs of London during the 1970s, the novel follows the journey of its mixed-race protagonist, Karim Amir, and his challenges of cultural assimilation and self-discovery. Through Karim's experiences, Kureishi skilfully analyses the concept of racial hybridity and its implications in a society that is increasingly diverse. This paper focuses on the representation of race, identity and home in postcolonial literature, mainly in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of the Suburbia.
This chapter describes a series of attacks that I was subjected to after delivering a lecture on the topic of ‘white anxiety’. The focus of the attacks concerned the notion of the ‘end of whiteness’, and the idea, discussed at length in the foregoing chapter, of a type of ‘white suicide’. The chapter cites indicative extracts from the barrage of hate messages. The over-arching purpose of the attacks was to consolidate an oppositional hard-right political identity—often, but not always of a generally White Nationalist sort—and, accordingly, to stoke a politics of grievance, by linking together a series of maligned signifiers associated with a progressive or leftist position. What was less expected was the sheer extent of the ‘unreconstructed’ types of racism and antisemitism on display. I try to understand this via the discursive trope of the ‘race traitor’ and by means of the idea of performative offensiveness, that is, the demonstrative attempt to offend, by explicitly saying and relishing that which is typically prohibited. Oddly enough, despite that many implied threats were issued, and a great many unpleasant things were wished upon me and my family, there was still a suggestion that I might be rescued, retrieved from ‘woke indoctrination’. I close with a few critical reflections on my own position of enunciation.
Le Fanu’s most famous work, the lurid vampire novella ‘Carmilla’, is saturated with womb imagery of intra-uterine ‘blood-stained annals’ (260), which echoes around the gynaecological architecture of secretive chambers and corridors in the Gothic castle. This maternal mise-en-scène finds a precedent in Le Fanu’s fairy tales, folkloric narratives which rehearse Carmilla’s maternal gaze through amniotic hinterlands and superstitions engaging with Irish and European folkloric epistemologies of fairies, witchcraft, and clairvoyance. While Le Fanu was a Protestant and son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, the family was steeped in the folklore heritage of their motherland Abingdon, Limerick, a mostly working-class and suspicious Catholic rural parish. Le Fanu’s brother William recalled how their father Thomas stopped labourer Mick Tucker from burning his son Johnny, whom he believed was a fairy changeling (1893, 37–38). Le Fanu’s fairy tales reverently engaged with these superstitions, evoking a pre-Christian, pre-colonial folkloric belief system which wrote an Irish landscape of viscous, womby bogs and fairy-dwellings inhospitable to patriarchy. This motherland bred superstitions about fairy midwives, human surrogates and changelings, and betrayed anxieties surrounding the maternal body and the child it produced, an archaic anxiety Le Fanu was compelled to repeat through his own narratives.
Spiritualism, a religious movement combining Christianity with the belief the souls of the deceased can be communicated with ‘beyond the veil’ through practices like séances, thrived in North America and Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries, capitalising on the high rate of infant and war mortalities during the period. Practitioners channelled spirits with departed children being common manifestations, and the reproductive capacity of women made them the perfect medium. Women could birth spirits without the need of men, and this idea of Spiritualism as an exclusively female parthenogenetic act simultaneously seduced and troubled male investigators.
A content warning: Over the past decade Melissa Makala (2013), Dara Downey (2014), Emma Liggins (2020), and others have offered essential focus on nineteenth-century women’s ghost stories, which had been largely absent in Gothic criticism. I hope to find and discuss the maternal gaze in these tales, but first I wanted to untangle the knots the governess’ maternal gaze has woven in The Turn of the Screw. However, like everyone else I find myself caught in her cat’s cradle, and trying to understand the governess’ meaning has led me to question my own perception. I have concluded it is impossible and this is her trick, her distraction technique, so I hope what follows is coherent.
Based on the two clinical cases of a young adult and an adolescent in psychotherapy, this article reflects on the conscious and unconscious psychological aspects that are implicated in ‘first sexual experiences’. Regardless of the emotional circumstances that surround the actual experience and the way in which they take place, an aggressive, even violent fantasy is very frequently associated with the ‘first time’. This fantasy can complicate or hinder access to a shared sexuality with a partner. This article links such fantasies, on the one hand, to the Oedipal disappointment often experienced when a young person takes their initial step into genital sexuality, and, on the other, to the revival of an infantile sexuality endowed with a sense of separation. The exploration of the violent fantasies and death drive in therapy may facilitate the advent of a more consensual form of engagement with the other.
Deafness has taken us to very dark places. Hyper-individualisation and confirmation bias are common mechanisms used to flatten the other’s complexities into a mirror. To enclose ourselves in narcissistic bubbles where the ideal self (Lacan, 1938) can be accommodated without risk. These bubbles are communities without noise, in which everyone agrees, everyone communicates clearly. But these bubbles, just like soap ones, are precarious. They are imaginations of a relationship with the other that does not exist. That is why they are frequently bursting. They are extremely sensitive, made of a clear extra thin membrane that distortedly reflect what is inside and what is outside.
Listening to the other is to burst the bubble. It is to relinquish the alleged ability to acquire information about the other’s thoughts, feelings, or activities without incorporating this other. It is to open oneself to the complexity of the other through the word, to the possibility of creating a third between me and them.
We tend to take listening as a given. Hearing is indeed a physical attribute, but listening takes practice. It requires time and attention. Usually, while listening, we are already thinking about where we agree, where we disagree, or what we will say in response. The focus is on the self not on the other. But genuinely listening is to give power to the other. We tend attribute power to the ability to talk, not to the ability to listen. We choose our leaders based on their speaking skills, not their listening skills. We learn, practice, judge, and reward speech and forget to value listening. But a momentary respite from all the pervasive noise can be powerful. To think of who we are giving our power of listening can potentially trump a quest for sound and fury. It can be a chain reaction in which each person who is genuinely listened to feels naturally inspired to listen to the next. Thus, creating more bridges of dissimilarity than walls, which seems to me to be the future of any relationship we can think of building with the other.
This article examines how the music in the film Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) conceptually generates opposing phantasms. Reflecting the trauma of early Francoism, specifically the Spanish Civil War, the soundtrack oscillates between the disquieting chronological reality and the fascinating yet terrifying fairytale world. A special space is devoted to the musical redistribution of the sensible, mirroring the strong affective, aesthetic, emancipatory and phantasmatic potential of Foley sounds. Such musical resistance undermines phallic authority, fostering a phantasmatic conflict that blurs the boundaries between imaginable and unimaginable reality.
Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977) has often been considered a contemporary classic that updates the nineteenth-century ghost story and narratives of haunted houses, while it reflects latent fears about the collapse of the traditional family, and the threat to hegemonic masculinities upon the rise of feminist studies. Drawing on Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine, it is feasible to reinterpret one of King’s most iconic novels as a representation of latent male fears of the trope of the monstrous mother in its different representations. It may be thus argued that, from a male perspective, the archetype of the monstrous mother derives from patriarchal motherhood, as a male interpretation of the ancestral and primal dread toward the maternal power of life generation and destruction as well as toward the primordial role of the mother during the preoedipal and oedipal phases of development. This article offers an analysis of King’s novel The Shining focused on the trope of the monstrous mother, as a result of patriarchal motherhood in its diverse manifestations, encompassing the archaic mother, the phallic mother, and the castrated mother.
Chapter 4, “Foucault’s Theatre of War”, presents the thematic of constant war as a logical framework for grasping the genealogical use of history which has the potential to bring about its own wreckage with telling political underpinnings. The auto-destructive structure of Foucault’s hystorical critique locates a point of impossibility for its own operations which I approach from Lacan’s account of the Real as the impossible qua discursive formalization. Drawing on clinical perspectives, I explain how Foucault’s genealogical staging of “repeated scenes of violence” brings into focus the binary structure of the modern discursive arena as an ongoing struggle between the psychoanalytic ‘forces’ of hysterical desire (the Hysteric) and perverse drive (the University). The structural impasse of the Real in Foucault’s hystorical critique leads to a comment on the topological structure of the Möbius band in a discursive context. I conclude Chapter 4 by arguing that the framework of war impels Foucauldian critique toward a moment outside of discourse and thus forces him to pass to another one.
Chapter 6, “The Parrhesiastic P(a)ct”, charts the consideration on the part of both Foucault and Lacan of an ethic of the ‘discursive act’ to highlight the ethico-political stakes that inform their work. I identify ‘freedom’ in Foucault and ‘polymorphous perversion’ in Lacan as key factors that define the ontological precarity—the shifting and uncertain context—in which ethics emerges. I argue that Foucault and Lacan both formulate an account of ethics centered on the act of speaking which does not suppose the fixity or rigidity of identity as its ground. I differentiate an ethics of speaking from an ethics of coincidence with oneself or one of confession and self-disclosure. Drawing on Lacan’s L schema, I explain how his concept of ‘full-speech’ and later account of the ethic of the well-spoken (bien-dire) is correlated with the implication of the speaking subject in the enjoyment that her symptom denounces. The discursive context in which speech introduces a critical interruption that modifies the speaker’s mode of being is equally explored in Foucault’s analysis of the ancient practice of parrhesia in which the speaker uses their free courage to demonstrate reflexivity toward their own position of enunciation. Chapter 6 provides a picture of psychoanalytic praxis as an act that transpires inside the frame of speech and depends on the position of the Analyst to maintain that frame.
Chapter 5, “Le Point de Capiton: Two Kantian Legacies”, sketches Foucault’s discursive passage from Hysteric to Analyst, drawing on the conceptual landscape that Lacan developed to give new rigor to the psychoanalytic account of language. Applying the Lacanian concept of the point de capiton (quilting point) and related notion of the ‘signifying chain’, I outline the retroactive logic of the determination of meaning as it figures in the act by which Foucault symbolizes his philosophical project of critique. I interpret Foucault’s repeated attempts to situate himself in relation to the symbolic economy of Kant’s critical philosophy as a key instance of ‘the slippage of signification’, refracted by the vector of changing subjective intentions. The identificatory signifier ‘Kant’ has a shifting and contingent signified in Foucault’s discourse with no stable referent. Drawing on the elementary cell of Lacan’s graph of desire, I present Foucault’s lecture course “The Government of Self and Others (1982–83)” as the site of chain’s punctuation: the retroactive moment when the signifier and signified form an attachment. Chapter 5 offers an account of how Foucault’s critical ontology symbolizes the contingent dimension of Kant’s transcendental legacy and realizes the symbolic by situating the question of enlightenment in a past and future signifying relation to the Real.
Chapter 7, “Towards a New Erotics”, reflects on the juncture in which each thinker approaches the question of subjectivity not in terms of who we must be, but how we might live in the world without the supposition of a fundamental or unproblematic identity, or where it becomes the object of analysis. I examine erotic experience through the lens of an affective encounter, highlighting the Imaginary dimension in which the relationship between analyst and analysand unfolds in the analytic situation. Drawing on Seminar VIII: Transference (1960–62), I introduce Lacan’s claim that transference manifests itself as a love of knowledge, reflecting on how the Analyst embodies the address for love through an engagement with the Real. Shifting the discussion to Foucault’s analysis of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, I consider two erotic domains (‘care’ and ‘psychagogy’) in which philosophy is understood not as a form of knowledge dependent on the Master’s reason, but rather a certain style of discourse that aims at transforming both the speaker and the listener. Chapter 7 concludes with a reflection on my own subjective encounter with Lacan and Foucault as erotic thinkers and the way in which the eros of their thought can be linked to ethical experience.
This chapter aims at exploring changes in the notion of Other and Otherness in two currents of thought, operating in different historical-epistemological contexts: Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis in the twentieth century and critical posthumanism in the twenty-first century. In these contexts, the critique of humanism is centred on the subversion of the modern subject.
Considering these two lines of theoretical thought, the chapter proceeds to analyse the way in which both conceive the Other as an entity that surpasses and decentralises the subject, both the subject of the unconscious and the subject beyond the human, to criticise the Western humanist tradition that places man at the centre of the world and as the measure of all things. Psychoanalysis and posthumanism invest the Other with different materialities and functions, whether symbolic and negative or substantial and positive.
In the case of the former, the Other ensures that, for the human subject, the world is not an immediate given; in the case of the latter, the Other is the world, and, as such, it is diluted, like the subject, within the sphere of vital immanence. In the symbolic sense, the Other establishes a structural definition of the subject, whereas in the posthumanist sense it implies understanding the subject in terms of identity(ies). This analysis discusses the anthropocentric impasse in psychoanalysis as the cause of its present theoretical and conceptual shortcomings and the reason for the indifference with which its legacy is viewed in posthumanist circles. It also discusses the posthumanist promotion of two pre-Freudian humanist ideals: the subject of the consciousness and the macrocosmic-microcosmic harmony.
Caring, writing and the desire for knowledge are deeply intertwined phenomena in Amalie Smith’s poetry collection I CIVIL and Hanne Ørstavik’s novel Ti Amo, both of which portray women in romantic relations with men who are cancer patients. Through depictions of the women’s initial attempts to maintain the closeness to their partners, the books explore the relational and somatic borderland between symbiosis and separation from the perspective of two informal caregivers. Taking a Lacanian approach, this borderland can be understood as a passage from the symbolic to the real which the women gain access to through their intense desire for knowledge and bodily experiences of jouissance and abjection. As informal caregivers for men who are unlikely to survive their illness, the women experience conflicting relational desires for both intimacy and distance. This article investigates how the passage from the symbolic to the real reintroduces the women to relational challenges from an early developmental stage and thus helps them solve the aforementioned conflict.
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