Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation
... They also draw out two dimensions of jouissance concerning trauma and repetition. Here I rely on theoretical developments by Copjec (2004), Žižek (2020a, 2020b), and Zupančič (2017). I refer the interested reader to these authors for more detailed discussion. ...
... Drive itself is divided-the drive's lack is not physiological but immanent to the structure of drive itself. And nevertheless, this tension provides the motor force for psychical life, the demand for work-which, for Lacan, is a demand for speech (Copjec, 2004;Fink, 2011). ...
... There are signifiers, representations that can be spoken, forgotten, remembered, dreamed, bungled, and so on. Yet, every saying contains some unsayable (Copjec, 2004). Some alluded to excess insists as resisting full expression. ...
This chapter develops the Lacanian concept of jouissance—a traumatic excess of enjoyment which may not be felt as such—in relation to the real, imaginary, and symbolic registers. I demonstrate how Lacan extracts these concepts (and others, such as das Ding, objet a, $, S1, S2) from some of Freud’s major texts. I also discuss how the Lacanian real is an antagonism immanent to the symbolic, the symbolic’s own structural inconsistency. This conceptualization will be central to my subsequent integrations with neuroscience.
... The belief that we are loved, it is often said, produces the greatest possible happiness. But the paradoxical notion that humans are happiest when unhappiness also plays its role is exemplified in the understanding of love extracted from Lacan's Seminar On Feminine Sexuality [7] by Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists, such as Bruce Fink [8,13,14], Dylan Evans [15], Joan Copjec [16], Salvoj Žižek [17] and Todd McGowan [18]. Such theorists carefully differentiate between romance and love. ...
... He found it anomalous that some of his unhappy patients resisted gains in therapy, finding ways to subvert these and make themselves worse again [18] (pp. [15][16]. Also, patients were often compulsively afraid of success. ...
... Lacan insists that, by contrast, love seeks "what lies under the habit" [7] (p. 6). In other words, as Copjec interprets it, "when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself" [16] (p. 9). ...
This philosophical investigation is motivated by the common association between happiness and self-transcendence, and a question posed by Freud: “Why is it so hard for men to be happy?” I consider the answers given in three key texts from the psychoanalytic tradition, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, and Abraham Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Based on a distinction between opposing forms of self-transcendence, ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution, the authors articulate the relation between self-transcendence and happiness in different, but equally unsatisfactory, ways. In all three texts, a dominant ideological framing is discernible, which prioritises the present/positive and ignores the work of the absent/negative, ironically leaving us with a sense of futility concerning the pursuit of happiness. I propose that an approach influenced by Lacanian ideas, which acknowledges the role played by unhappiness in producing happiness, plausibly challenges the traditional conception of happiness that places it out of human reach as the effect of a perfectly self-transcendent state. Instead, understood as the effect of resistance to the notion of self-transcendence as self-perfection, happiness, while still difficult to achieve because it requires another kind of self-transcendence, becomes attainable here and now by ordinary individuals.
... While the work demanded by the drive recruits representational and motoric (symbolic) mechanisms, the drive ultimately aims at a surplus outside of representation (i.e., the real). To this extent, the jouissance encountered in the drive's repetitive circuit has a surprising quality-the enjoyment one derives is not what one expects (Copjec 2004;Johnston 2005). ...
... One must produce new signifiers, new ways of dealing with the traumatic drive-surplus. Here jouissance operates at the level of the new, grasping something of the real (Copjec 2004) and motivating a change in the symbolic framework. With respect to the drive, it might be considered a moment of breaking its rigid symbolic structure, thereby opening the possibility for a new path of enjoyment. ...
... Lacan formalizes this with his theory of the real within the symbolic. To apply this model to language, every saying contains some aspect of the unsayable (Copjec 2004). Every instance of signification (e.g., speech, representation, thinking) is coincidental with an unknown, excessive presence. ...
Jouissance is one of Jacques Lacan’s most impenetrable concepts. Yet it is essential to Lacan’s view of sex. The term is sometimes translated as “enjoyment,” but this misses key features of the concept, notably its “traumatic,” excessive character. This excess points to a structural negativity within the subject (i.e., the real), an original split that cannot be remedied. In this first of a series of three papers, it is proposed that “surplus prediction error”—as understood within contemporary neuropsychoanalysis—is a neural correlate for jouissance. In part 1, jouissance is explicated within Lacanian metapsychology, primarily in reference to Lacan’s real and symbolic registers. Jouissance is an excess enjoyment, outside of the binding, representational capacities of language. The real is the negativity or antagonism within the symbolic, the limit of language and meaning, the point where jouissance emerges. To clarify the relationships among these terms, their positions are traced in some of Freud’s major concepts, including drive, infantile sexuality, repetition, and the unconscious. A basic understanding of jouissance is necessary for the rest of this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic project.
... Powiedziałbym więc nawet, że Albertyna, choć w porządku fabuły jest odrębną, fascynującą postacią kobiecą, gdy spojrzeć na nią z innej perspektywy, staje się w proustowskim dyskursie spersonifikowaną, wewnętrzną funkcją Marcela, "częścią jego osoby" (por. VI 460), czy też owym niezbędnym przecież dla każdego pisarza "fantazmatem podtrzymujący [go] w zasadniczej chwiejności" (Lacan), "odrobiną niebytu w [jego] podmiotowym rdzeniu" (Joan Copjec) 38 , albo właśnie, jak mówi sam Proust, "połacią pustki" pozostawioną do wypełnienia -rzecz jasna "w podróży pisania" (Barthes) 39 . ...
Proustowski świat w Combray miał tylko dwie strony: „dwie «strony», w które można było pójść na spacer, i tak przeciwstawne, że idąc w jedną albo w drugą stronę [d’un côté ou de l’autre], nie wychodziło się od nas przez te same drzwi: stronę Méséglise-la-Vineuse, którą nazywaliśmy także stroną u Swanna […] i stronę Guermantów”. Jak jednak wiadomo, w tym słynnym fragmencie powieści W stronę Swanna chodzi nie tylko o geografię: obraz dwóch stron, oddzielonych nieprzekraczalnym dystansem, to także zapowiedź ideowego i emocjonalnego planu całego cyklu W poszukiwaniu straconego czasu. Jednak wyjątkowość tej „mentalnej topografii” pozwala – jak uważa autor – widzieć w niej przede wszystkim ogólniejszy paradoks poznawczy, pewien model konceptualny, w którym relacje przestrzenne – lub zjawiska opisywane za pomocą przestrzennych metafor – ulegają radykalnej problematyzacji. Nie chodzi już o usunięcie dystansu między dwiema stronami; przeciwnie – istotne jest o uchwycenie tej pierwotnej i modelowej niejako sceny w jej źródłowym napięciu i niestabilności („recto/verso”), o rozpoznanie w figurze spacerów „to w jedną, to w drugą stronę” oscylacyjnej logiki „fantazmatu podtrzymującego podmiot w jego zasadniczej chwiejności” (Lacan). Autor analizuje problem „nierozstrzygalności” na wielu przykładach zaczerpniętych z dzieła Marcela Prousta.
... Rather than, or at least along with, thinking of a group coalescing around what principles, histories, aims, or characteristics unite them, we might want to consider the even stronger bonding potential of the minor and sometimes major feelings that accompany what has given up, lost, or been denied (Copjec 2002). Unconsciously, the trauma of this loss is often disavowed and displaced onto others, even though it maintains its affective source at the site of our divided subjectivity itself. ...
Theorizes unconscious aspects of sports fandom in the context of identity and empire.
... The following construction of a Lacanian account of love may not reflect precisely what Lacan intended; this is always hard to know for sure. Rather, it is constructed primarily from 'The Mirror Stage' (Lacan 2006a), 'Aggressivity' (Lacan 2006b), Seminar XII (Lacan 1964(Lacan -1965, Seminar XX (Lacan 1998), and work by Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists such as Joan Copjec (2002), Dylan Evans (1996), Bruce Fink (1995Fink ( , 1997, Todd McGowan (2016) and Slavoj Žižek (2006). Translating Hegel's dialectic of recognition into psychoanalytic discourse, Lacan's (2006a) 'mirror stage' places the moment of self-other recognition, which inaugurates desire, in early egodevelopment. ...
This article discusses Charles Taylor's analysis of the ‘politics of recognition’, which reveals that the major versions of the latter share an ideological conception of Eros as a binding, unifying force. Such striving for oneness is seen as key to forming harmonious, just communities and nations, and ultimately global cohesion. I refer to this as the ‘ideology of Eros’. However, Taylor highlights an ironically divisive opposition concerning how to realise such oneness, based on incompatible foundational principles: ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. Instead of a choice, Taylor opts for the demanding political task of ongoing negotiation between them. I augment Taylor's analysis by re-evaluating the figure of ‘non-recognition’ arising from Lacan's critique of the ‘ideology of Eros’, which is centred on Socrates’ encounter with Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium and to which he adds his notion of genuine love, which affirms an ethic of healthy ‘non-recognition’. I argue that this ethic supports the difficult political task that Taylor rightly calls for.
... 18. Here I explicitly steer clear of the relation of trauma to childhood neurosis, a staple in Freudian and Lacanian psychology, and instead move to an interpretation of the drive (Copjec 2002) that centers more on Freud's (1920) reading of war neurosis following World War I, where he places the focus on the fact of the contemporaneousness or the presentness of the past. The dreams of soldiers that repeat the war, as Freud points out, constitute not fragments of memory but actual repetitions of the traumatic event. ...
The 2013 flash floods reproduced an everyday that was textural, the returning past of the event combined with gestures from within the everyday, to disorient survivors of the event. I attempt in this essay to analyze the return of the event as producing psycho-spatial affects, drawn from the psyche’s own propensity to return while repressing the event that causes the return, described within psycho-analytic literature as “afterwardsness.” Such afterwardsness is conditioned by the sheer incomprehensibility of environmental change that took place in just three days in the Mandakini Valley between June 15 and June 17, 2013. Following the flood, delays with the recovery process, and particularly with the process of compensation, exacerbate this trauma, leading to an extension of the temporality of trauma infinitely forward.
... In the terms presented here, anguish corresponds to the uncertainty of uncertainty, a pure overbearing J indexing the radically unknown dimension of the Other (i.e., das Ding; Copjec, 2004;Lacan, 1959Lacan, -1960see Chap. 4). ...
If jouissance arises from the point of antagonism within the symbolic, and I claim that jouissance corresponds to (prioritized) surplus affective consciousness, then is it possible to formulate antagonism within the brain? Here, I demonstrate how antagonism is not only immanent to the brain’s inherited structure; it is also necessary for affective consciousness. Consciousness depends on antagonism (the real) immanent to a brain organized as a differential system (the symbolic). This allows me to situate the Lacanian split subject ($), objet a, and das Ding—as well as develop the notion of an emotional system operating in the logic of jouissance: J(E).
... Then there is the enigmatic register of the 'real', which surpasses language or the symbolic, and which Joan Copjec (2002) describes as the register that manifests itself where we reach the 'internal limit' of language-when all our efforts to say something intelligible about a phenomenon or experience come up against a wall of inscrutability. Although the 'real' cannot be accessed directly in language, given that it escapes every effort to draw it into the symbolic sphere, endlessly generating more attempts to grasp it linguistically, it could play an important role in therapeutic interventions regarding addiction, as argued below, given that in Seminar 11, Lacan (1981) regards trauma-in the context of repetition-as a kind of privileged event for a 'missed encounter' with the real. ...
The present article attempts to demonstrate that Jacques Lacan's notion of the human subject provides the conceptual resources to come to a better understanding of addiction-a particularly intractable phenomenon, judging by the number of theoretical approaches to it. The structure of the subject in terms of the three 'orders' of the 'real', the 'imaginary', and the 'symbolic', according to Lacan, is briefly discussed as a necessary backdrop to the discussion that follows. It is argued that, because the ego is for Lacan an imaginary construct, one would look in vain to it for 'ego stability' to overcome addiction, and that it is to the 'je' ('I') of the symbolic that one should turn instead. The function of desire, and its relation to excess, are noted, before exploring the latter concept in relation to jouissance in two contexts. The first relates to jouissance, trauma, the 'real', prohibition, and transgression, and the second to jouissance, repetition, masochism, and the death instinct. These articulations of jouissance are subsequently employed to arrive at formulating possible therapeutic interventions, which are then, in turn, related to the role of the 'talking cure' in the symbolic register. To conclude, the question of power relations in political terms, and the implications of living in a capitalist society are briefly indicated.
... For this, we return to psychoanalysis. According to Copjec (2004), utilitarianism is an ideological fantasy that falsely believes in "utility"-an object's ability to satisfy an "objective" human needand that "complete satisfaction is attainable by anyone who sets about realizing a rational plan" (p. 168). ...
What can China bring to the international dialog of eco-fashion? How can Chinese ways of imagining sustainability teach us new ways to think about fashion, ethics, and environment? This paper focuses on the design practice and philosophy of China’s first-generation eco-fashion designer, Ma Ke, and places her work in juxtaposition with the mainstream discourses of eco-fashion in the US. Adopting a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach, my analysis identifies an ideology of utilitarianism in the US discourse of eco-fashion that aims to maximize resource usage and minimize pollution and waste. Ma Ke’swork, by contrast, criticizes utilitarianism and proposes to conceiveour ethical relationship with the material world not through utility, butthrough memory and history. She portrays textiles as a humble medium that records the past, while the traces left from the past constitute the most seductive part of our clothes. Ma Ke’s work, I argue, offers a critique of the dominant ideologies in Western eco-fashion and helps us rethink the relationship between fashion, environment, and the ethics of consumption.
... Such re-quilting of fantasy undermines the hold 'the thing' has as embodying the (impossible) promise of enjoyment and displaces it to a different terrain, one that does not any longer eschew 'the encounter with the Real', i.e. those processes and concerns that that have been repressed, disavowed or foreclosed. It rejects the Master discourse as just another fantasy and strives to displace the Master from its pedestal (Žižek 2000, Zupančič 2000, Copjec 2002. In this section, we shall attempt to encircle parts of the Real that are repressed through the lure of certain fantasies, thereby contributing to re-orienting desire around a different 'object-cause of desire'. ...
This paper focuses on what I refer to as Climate Populism and how this structures not only many radical climate movements but also the liberal climate consensus. I argue that the architecture of most mainstream as well as more radical climate discourses, practices, and policies is strictly parallel to that of populist discourses and should be understood as an integral part of a pervasive and deepening process of post-politicization. Mobilising a process that psychoanalysts call ‘fetishistic disavowal’, the climate discourse produces a particular form of populism that obscures the power relations responsible for the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. I shall mobilise a broadly Lacanian-Marxist theoretical perspective that permits accounting for this apparently paradoxical condition of both acknowledging and denying the truth of the climate situation, and the discourses/practices that sustain this.
... Joan Copjec notes that Hegel's understanding of gender is social and biological, but not sexual.Copjec (2003) writes: "[…] this difference turns out to be, in his reading, only a gender or biological difference, not a sexual one; that is, Antigone and Creon enact a division of labor that is defined sociologically, according to the spaces they are allowed to inhabit and the roles they are encouraged to assume, given their biology" (15).2 Followi ...
Shaped by Hegel, philosophy’s approach to Antigone has always been firmly rooted in all the assumptions of realism, with proper, true-to-life, consistent, and plausible characters. These characterological mimetic interpretations often feed off of each other within the context of what’s perceived as “realist” drama, with its focus on characters and their insoluble, hence tragic, conflict. Starting with the twentieth-century avant-garde, however, theatre became less and less interested in characterological mimicry as a foundation of drama and what follows, as the foundation of the theatrical experience itself. Along with the shift in our approach to character, we have also experienced a shift in our understanding of other Aristotelian components of drama (“Plot” and “Thought”) and dramatic genres (“Tragedy”). As our sense of character and Thought shifted from stable to unstable, so did our understanding of tragedy and its role at the junction of theatre and philosophy. Tragedy has shifted from dialectic to aporia, from binary to polynary. Antigone—with its multiple interpretations and critical lenses—illuminates this fundamental shift in our understanding of tragedy and, thus, the fundamental shift in the relationship between theatre and philosophy in postdramatic theatre.
... Structurally speaking, an event of this kind occurred in the massive revolt that slaves launched under the leadership of the gladiator-slave, Spartacus, against the might of Rome in 72-71 BCE (Mallory, 1971), at the end of which he and thousands of his followers were executed by the Romans. This epitomises what Lacan names 'the revolutionary's choice: freedom or death!'-a situation which entails a win-win scenario, unlike the so-called 'mugger's choice' ('Your money or your life!'), which is a lose-lose situation (Copjec, 2002). How so? ...
This article attempts to think through the many, often contradictory aspects of the present ‘pandemic’, with a view to arriving at a cogent notion of what ‘psychotherapy’ would mean under these circumstances. It begins with a note on the hermeneutic meaning of ‘prejudice’ and how this applies to the present article, and then proceeds to a consideration of the relevance of the idea of ‘mass psychosis’, informed by Leonard Shlain’s characterisation of the 16th century witch hunts in western Europe, in the course of which more than half a million women were executed as supposed ‘witches’. This suggests a parallel with today’s manifestation of what is arguably a mass psychosis, induced by endemic fear of lethal contamination, fed by global governmental responses (prescribed by the World Health Organization) to the alleged ‘pandemic’ caused by this pathogen. Aspects of what might be called the current ‘vaccine tyranny’ are investigated, as well as the nature of a ‘mass psychosis’, which is explored from various perspectives (including Lacanian psychoanalysis), before attention shifts to the issue of appropriate psychotherapy, with recourse to the thinking of Julia Kristeva on ‘revolt’ and Lacan on the ‘revolutionary’s choice’.
... Jouissance is then hopefully metabolized in such a way that the subject is not left in a deadlock. This entails a change in the fundamental coordinates of whatever possibilities of metabolization exist that would allow new possibilities to emerge (Copjec 2004;Verhaeghe and Declercq 2016). ...
In parts 1 and 2 of this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic series, surplus prediction error was presented as a neural correlate of the Lacanian concept of jouissance. Affective consciousness (a key source of prediction error in the brain) impels the work of cognition, the predictive work of explaining what is foreign and surprising. Yet this arousal is the necessary bedrock of all consciousness. Although the brain’s predictive model strives for homeostatic explanation of prediction error, jouissance “drives a hole” in the work of homeostasis. Some residual prediction error always remains. Lacanian clinical technique attends to this surplus and the failed predictions to which this jouissance “sticks.” Rather than striving to eliminate prediction error, clinical practice seeks its metabolization. Analysis targets one’s mode of jouissance to create a space for the subject to enjoy in some other way. This entails working with prediction error, not removing or tolerating it. Analysis aims to shake the very core of the subject by provoking prediction error—this drives clinical change. Brief clinical examples illustrate this view.
James Baldwin is a thinker of the potential of “the individual” in disenchanted modernity. Drawing on work by Ashon T. Crawley, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, the essay explores this claim by tracing the resonances between the museum scenes found in two of Baldwin's novels: one in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), where characters visit the Museum of Natural History, and the other in Another Country (1962), where they are dazzled by a work of abstract expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art. The echoes between the two scenes actualize Baldwin's suggestion that it is in aesthetic practices, whether within or outside the museum, that diasporic modernity's aborted potential can be resuscitated. In particular, at stake is the actualization of the self-generating diasporic subject, unbeholden, in protest or adaptation, to any preconceived schemas of white epistemology.
This article seeks to reconceptualise the figure of the homme fatal as an archetype of significance in American film noir. By examining how homosexuality is portrayed as reflective of deviant masculinities in films such as The Maltese Falcon (1942), Laura (1944), and Gilda (1946), this article argues that what critic Vito Russo famously termed the ‘deadly sissy’ (70) in his landmark text, The Celluloid Closet (1981), is, in fact, a true conceptual counter to the femme fatale . Using the framework presented in Christopher Breu and Elizabeth Hatmaker’s study Noir Affect (2020), this article conceptualises the homme fatal as an agent of negative affect, characterised by its resistance to ‘positivisation’—the societal and philosophical drive toward normative affirmation (3). By reconceptualizing the homme fatal not as a dangerous man but as a figure representing deviant masculinities, this article analyses this under-researched archetype. It explores how the homme fatal , as an archetype, both reflects and refracts cultural and social anxieties, resisting hegemonic ideals of masculinity by not only embodying but also embracing its inherent negativity.
If readers of Lacan had taken Joan Copjec seriously in 1996, they would have understood Lacan through topology and become aware of the logical and historical priority of projective geometry over Euclidian space and its Cartesian manifestations. Copjec’s critique of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer is under-appreciated, because most Lacanians still do not accept the contention by Lacan and Copjec, that the topology of psychoanalysis began with Pappus of Alexandria (300 CE) and Girard Desargues (1591–1661), and continued through the works of Möbius, Klein, Gauss, and other nineteenth-century mathematicians. Under-appreciation of Lacan’s visualizations has delayed a productive merger of projective geometry and ethnology. Stonehenge, the Egyptian obelisks and pyramids, Mayan ritual centers, and the projections of solar images on floors described in Chinese texts, teach us that “smart architecture” dates back at least to the eleventh century BCE. John Dee’s horologium of 1583 shows how the Renaisssance tempietto drew on this tradition and restated the principles of projective geometry. It is up to a new generation of Lacanian theorists to rise to the proven standards of the past. Here, Copjec’s thesis rings most clearly. The progressivist thesis of Positivism, whose worst ideas have been mind-body dualism and the staircase of “eras” improved by technology, is utterly false. Rather than denounce the false, however, we should promote the truth, whenever it can be found.
The ethical turn in postmodern thought has made ever more pressing the question, How is one to live one’s life? In this thesis, I propose an answer based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, extended upon by the work of Alain Badiou. Chapter One introduces an existential understanding of ethics and meaning, presenting concepts such as the ethical chain, the economy of meaning, and bad faith, that lead us to a perspectivist non-binding normative ethics that is compatible with the three poststructuralist tenets of performativity, contextualization, and the amelioration of difference. Chapter Two addresses the validity today of Sartrean existentialism—including not only Being and Nothingness but also the Notebooks for an Ethics, the two volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the Hope Now interviews with Benny Lévy—via a series of Refutations to charges that it is outdated; that it is irrational; that it is not universal and therefore not a philosophy; that it is nihilist; that it absolutizes freedom and is therefore relativist; that it is humanist; that it is metaphysical, or ontotheological; and that it is incompatible with the poststructuralist belief in the decentering of the center. I establish that Sartrean existentialism withstands these criticisms. Chapter Three brings in the work of Alain Badiou to elaborate upon Sartre’s rather vague notion of an Apocalypse, which Badiou calls an event. I provide biographical and intellectual links between the work of Sartre and that of Badiou, before detailing how Badiou extends and enhances the Sartrean framework in his development of the structure of an event. Chapter Four employs the Sartrean-Badiouian existentialist framework in a reading of John Williams’s novel, Stoner, whose protagonist seems ordinary and unsuccessful, but who is shown with the aid of my reading to lead a life full of meaning. This reading also brings in details of Badiou’s four truth procedures and thus makes concrete his often abstract thought. Chapter Five concludes with a summary of the previous four chapters, followed by a direct comparison of Sartre’s and Badiou’s thought. I then engage with two other leading postmodern ethical theories, Richard Rorty’s liberal ironism and Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida’s ethics of the Other, to show how Sartrean-Badiouian existentialism offers the more comprehensive ethical framework.
This volume provides an overview of Catalan culture through the lens of Affect Studies. The goal is to examine and interpret literature, performing arts, music, and dance as reflections of contemporary emotional regimes. The essays in the book address two primary objectives regarding the presence of emotions in today’s world. Firstly, they explore discourses on pain, vulnerability, anger or resilience, among other concepts, to explain how emotions and affects manifest in culture. Secondly, they examine the mechanisms by which art can either challenge or reproduce societal affective mandates.
This chapter turns to thinkers and sages from the dawn of times, who conceptualized jealousy together with envy in various, intriguing fashions. It provides etymological and philological definitions of jealousy and envy from major dictionaries of English, Hebrew, and French, as well as theoretical elaborations from Aristotle to Pierre Charron and Benedetto Varchi, La Rochefoucauld to Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec. It seeks to underline a consistent difference between the definitions based on logic and reaches the conclusion that current definitions and differences fail to provide it.
The chapter proposes analyzing coworking spaces in consideration of the relations of production, productive of and produced in them to lay out the different socio-economic conceptions promoted and their ethico-political ramifications. Three different types of coworking spaces in Istanbul (capitalist-run, commons-based and public) are hence scrutinized to demonstrate the potentials and challenges they pose to class transformation. The conflict-averse mutualist discourse prevalent in capitalist-run coworking spaces is argued to pose a challenge to such transformation, while commons-based and public coworking spaces are argued to carry the potential to create encounters that cater to it. The latter spaces are also analyzed as for the variety of challenges regarding their sustainability. The presented account is based on larger research on freelancing in Turkey, which included in-depth interviews with freelancers from various industries as well as activist-research in a common-based coworking space, and a freelancers' solidarity network in Istanbul.
Declaración de principio: el presente se trata de una traducción
libre, no revisada, realizada con fines estrictamente académicos, a saber: dar a conocer a la comunidad académica hispanohablante, y de la lengua portuguesa si se quiere, esta interesante obra que bien podríamos ubicar en el “naciente” campo de los “estudios lacanianos de las organizaciones y el trabajo”. Este esfuerzo académico lo hemos adelantado en un trabajo colectivo e intergeneracional entre profesor, Johnny Orejuela, y las estudiantes, Carolina Valle y Valentina Muriel;
queremos, continuando con el espíritu de la obra original: darlo a conocer al mundo en versión de “libre acceso” o “acceso abierto” (open acces) para que circule y se democratice así el valiosísimo conocimiento aquí concentrado para descifrar el mundo subjetivo del trabajo.
This paper proposes that we consider the erasure of Kashmiri Muslim men from Indian feminist solidarity discourse. This is a question both of disappearance and of nonbeing. Gender, far from being a self-evident ontological fact, obfuscates; a process explored through the Fanonian notion of “the colonizer’s invitation to identity” and the psychoanalytic concept of the impossibility of sexual difference. A certain grammar of gender—deployed by both the Indian state and the secular liberal-left—covers over the fundamental antagonism of Islam heightened by the occupation. Carceral consensus among seemingly opposed political forces produces Islam as an intensely masculinized threat, against which the precarious Indian project needs to be protected. The Kashmiri militant, always rendered male, simply does not “fit” progressive imaginaries and makes neat solidarities tense, which are themselves emblematic of the colonizer’s terrified consciousness. That this Indian grammar loses coherence when confronted with militant Kashmiri women also reveals how, far from being coherent, gender is a grammar mediated and disarticulated in its relation to Islam. This Indian grammar, this covering over of the drama of nonbeing, justifies the disappearance of the Kashmiri man—rendered excessive and in excess, everywhere and nowhere.
In the first part of this paper, the current ‘pandemic’ was approached through the lens of (mainly) the concept of Homo sacer, elaborated on by Giorgio Agamben (1998). Taking the work of Michel Foucault on the ‘disciplinary society’ and ‘bio-politics’ further, and drawing on the role played by the principle of Homo sacer in antiquity, Agamben uncovers the disconcerting extent to which this principle has become generalised in contemporary societies. In antiquity, the principle of ‘sacred man/human’ was invoked in cases where someone was exempted from ritual sacrifice, but simultaneously seen as ‘bare life’, and therefore as being fit for execution. Agamben argues that the sphere of ‘sacred life’ has grown immensely since ancient times in so far as the modern state arrogates to itself the right to wield biopolitical power over ‘bare life’ in a manner analogous to ancient practices, and finds in the concentration camp the contemporary paradigm of this phenomenon. Arguing that today we witness a further downward step in the treatment of humans as ‘bare life’, these concepts are employed as heuristic for bringing into focus current practices under the aegis of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’. In particular, the spotlight falls on those areas where burgeoning ‘bare life’ practices can be detected, namely ‘origin of the virus’ and ‘lethal vaccines’ in Part 1, while ‘engineered economic collapse’, ‘chemtrails’, and ‘what (to expect) next’ are scrutinised in Part 2. In the light of emerging evidence, it is argued that these practices take the notion of Homo sacer, ‘bare life’, and its concomitant biopolitical and pharma-political practices to unprecedented, virtually incomprehensible levels of depravity. Before turning to these, however, at the outset of Part 2 attention is given to a ‘Platonic’ psychotherapy, complemented by its Kristevan counterpart, to demonstrate that one is not defenceless against the depredations of the cabal.
The Covid-19 pandemic heightened already intense and increased scrutiny of public education in recent years. The administrative impulse to stage community engagement efforts to deliberate upon these questions, however well-intentioned, rarely realises full community engagement and reflection. Based on an examination of public engagement events held at Florida schools related to the Covid-19 health crisis, the proposed essay identifies a more concerning transformation of “public comment” into a weaponisable prop for lawmakers seeking the public legitimacy necessary for their agenda, marrying the worlds of critical studies with those of public administration and its orientations. More than merely failing to genuinely engage the public, we argue that such events forestall a more productive arrangement of the democratic form that does not rely on publicness and the leader that secures that space. Ultimately, we suggest a path that affords the possibility of public engagement, but that does not seal off the possibility of that more radical democratic future to come.
This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a sort of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal.
Although the desire to be free from God springs from humanity’s wish to enjoy pleasure without restraint, Lacan observes that humans remain neurotic and unhappy. That is because the prevailing “dead of God” form of atheism relies on the denial of a father/god, a negation that inadvertently replicates the logic of religion. Lacan, by contrast, grounds his atheism in a theory of pleasure that recognizes the role of “unpleasure” in breaking the tedium of easy, unlimited gratification. Turning to Greek tragedy, Lacan shows how the ancient world used the gods as creators of “unpleasure” to generate human jouissance. The figure of Antigone, in particular, shows how the divine function can fulfill “the true formula of atheism,” which is not “God is dead,” but rather, Lacan affirms, that “God is unconscious.”
Conventional accounts of the 1979 Iranian revolution emphasize the loss of the revolution’s “true” spirit in the violence of the Islamic state. In contrast, this essay foregrounds a recurring dream of parricide in the generation of children of revolutionaries, to explore the fetishization of the revolution in such accounts. This dream refracts the violence and loss emphasized in the narratives of the revolution. In dethroning the fetish of the revolution, it enables a confrontation with the losses and limits of earlier theological and political paradigms indexed by the event of revolution. As a form of anthropological defamiliarization, the dream thus offers an opportunity for a speculative encounter with loss as a political-theological horizon of renewal.
Peut-on songer à une esthétique freudienne ? Si nous nous référons aux textes où Freud évoque ouvertement l’art, il s’agirait d’une esthétique dont le caractère conservateur contraste dramatiquement avec le caractère subversif de sa découverte de l’inconscient. Avec un Freud divisé entre le victorien et le subversif, nous proposons l’hypothèse d’une autre esthétique freudienne possible, à condition de ne pas utiliser les textes où son objet d’étude est l’art, mais le mot d’esprit. Ainsi, nous verrons comment la question du sens dans le non-sens est présente autant dans ses textes sur l’art que dans son analyse du Witz. Néanmoins, nous constatons que le Freud de l’art semble plus enclin au sens, tandis que celui du trait d’esprit, non sans difficulté, trouve le moyen d’aller au-delà du sens. Ceci, grâce à une notion présente autant dans « Le poète et l’activité de fantaisie » que dans « Le trait d’esprit… » : le jeu de l’enfant.
In her novel, Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion explores passivity as a way to contest the neoliberal conception of freedom. Neoliberalism celebrates ever greater freedom (its slogan being “you can be whatever you want to be”); yet, this freedom coincides with the imperative to compete, improve, and maximize one’s productivity. Against this capitalist notion of freedom, Didion seeks to defend the resolutely negative power of human potentiality, namely what Giorgio Agamben calls “impotentiality” – a potential not to do. For Agamben, the paradigmatic figure of impotentiality is Bartleby in Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” carves out a space for the potentiality-not-to, by suspending the dichotomous logic of potentiality vs. actuality. In Play It as It Lays Didion explores a similar possibility for inaction through her depressive heroine Maria. In a culture in which one’s agency is merely reduced to his or her capital-enhancing activity, Didion suggests that Maria’s passivity, her retreat into herself, paradoxically constitutes a sovereign gesture. It punctures a hole in the capitalist world that knows no limits and no negativity.
Literature, written by men, abounds with men (and boys), awash in emotions. Men in and out of love, men in or outside of power, fearful, raging, anxious, at the crossroads, through the rings of hell and back, men underground and bird men, third men and first men and second-best. Men feeling and sensing beyond emotions with a name: pre-linguistic affects to shared moments of feeling. Men of color. White men. Invisible men. Men in the trenches, hardboiled men, warriors, poet-scholars, monks, emperors, loners, lost boys, comics, orphans, artists, wanderers, pícaros, adventurers, explorers, inventors. Laborers. Prisoners. Quixotic or Faustian. Queer guys and transmen. Lovers, conformists, rebels. Idlers. Fathers. Sons. Grandsons. These are just a few of the cultural roles and social constructions of masculinity we encounter in narratives and lives. This book suggests that one of the central concerns of the world modern novel and film, as modern narratives by diverse authors (even cis white male ones, not necessarily feminist in outlook), has been to contest the dominant ideologies of maleness (and not to confirm patriarchal norms). While maleness in many societies may seem self-evident, reinforced as it is in myriad social practices and cultural representations, many critical novelists and filmmakers question how we come to agree on certain notions of masculinity as dominant or not. And the more we think about it, the less certain we are about masculinities’ foundations; “foundations” may not even be the right term.
Feeling men. Some of the narratives discussed in this book that imagine a masculinity beyond the selfsame and hegemonic shell turn to the possibility of touch as an ethical response to the other. This is not a violating or damaging touch, however. It is what can transpire between the subject and the other in meeting and, as Lévinas puts it, “saying without the said.” He finds it in “the caress of love, always the same, in the last accounting (for him that thinks in counting) is always different and overflows with exorbitance the songs, poems and admissions” (Otherwise than Being, 185).
This article offers a reflection on the Lacanian theory of the representation of the sexual relation in film. It draws on the Lacanian logic of sexuation and its interpretation by Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek, analyzing what the author calls the cinematic non-relation, taking as an example Alfonso Cuarón’s film Y tu mamá también (2011). The article begins by returning to the work of Laura Mulvey, who was one of the first theorists to use psychoanalysis as a political weapon to challenge the phallocentric portrayal of women in Hollywood cinema. The author argues that Mulvey was correct in her conclusions, however not with regard to the production of a “ male gaze”, but rather with regard to the cinematographic construction of male desire, which is a constitutive element of patriarchal society. The author argues that it is not by creating an “alternative” cinema, but rather developing critical theory, itself, as a political weapon that we are able to challenge the dominant ideology. It is the practice of theory that politicizes cinema and the spectator, rather than the reverse.
Als Juraj Herz im August 1968 seinen Film "Der Leichenverbrenner" drehte, marschierten die Truppen des Warschauer Pakts in der damaligen Tschechoslowakei ein; ein Ereignis, das die Dreharbeiten unterbrach: viele Innenaufnahmen waren noch nicht fertiggestellt und der Hauptdarsteller, Rudolf Hrušínský, tauchte für einige Zeit unter. Der Einmarsch war auch ein Ereignis, das Herz in seinen Film integrieren wollte, obwohl dessen Plot 30 Jahre früher angesiedelt ist: Ein alternatives Ende, das gedreht, aber unter dem Eindruck der Besetzung des Landes vermutlich vernichtet worden ist, zeigt zwei Mitarbeiter des titelgebenden Krematoriums, die sich in einem Café unterhalten, während im Hintergrund die russischen Panzer vorbeirollen. Es drängt sich die Frage auf: Welcher Art ist die Verbindung des Films zur Geschichte, dass es möglich schien, semi-dokumentarische Bilder in seine doch vermeintlich klar als fiktional erkennbare Welt einzufügen? Diese Frage möchte ich zum Anlass für einige Erörterungen nehmen, die das Verhältnis zwischen historischer und ästhetischer Erfahrung betreffen. Ich glaube, dass eine Einsicht in dieses Verhältnis hilfreich sein kann, um die aktuelle Relevanz der poetischen und politischen Umwälzungen von 1968 einzuschätzen. Meine Erörterungen werden sich einerseits um die Frage drehen, ob sich dieses Verhältnis mit Hilfe zweier Begriffe denken lässt, die mir hier relevant zu sein scheinen: nämlich mit dem Begriff der Banalität, wie er durch Hannah Arendt in ihrem 1964 auf Deutsch erschienenen Buch "Eichmann in Jerusalem" geprägt worden ist, und mit dem Begriff des Grotesken, der noch zu erläutern sein wird. Andererseits und etwas konkreter wird es um das Problem gehen, wie das eine - die historische Erfahrung - ins andere - die ästhetische Erfahrung - übergehen kann.
Abstract
Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, painter, and novelist whose work mixes genres, disciplines, and cultural idioms. Sitt Marie-Rose is a fictional account of the real-life story of Marie-Rose Boulus. Boulus was a Syrian Christian social worker in Beirut who was abducted and killed by the Christian Militia during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War. At once martyr and traitor, she gives a body to the political and sexual anxieties associated with the traitor. In this paper, I put Adnan’s novel in conversation with psychoanalysis, drawing on the study of traitors by Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly to examine how the figure of the traitor can be gendered. A female traitor’s betrayal destabilizes not only the tenuous lines of group cohesion or national belonging but also the implicit sexual forms of bonding present in such groups. This inner undoing provokes vicious violence: “we do not want to hear the unsettling news that might come from anywhere else. We are never more ruthless than when we are trying to block out parts of our mind” (23), writes Jacqueline Rose. I take the figure of the traitor, in this case the female traitor, as a figure for that inner unsettling of our enchantment with ourselves and our nation. Thus, the novel renders visible the vulnerability and tenuousness of national belonging: Adnan proposes a model of love that upsets the fragile but hardened brotherhoods, leading to other solidarities that transcend the love of the same (brother) by introducing sexual difference, the woman, and the traitor.
In the effort to articulate political theory and psychoanalysis, two psychoanalytic metaphors—symptom and sublimation—have been separately used by political theorists to explain the emergence of populism and its relationship with democracy. Going back to the works of Freud and Lacan, this paper provides a critical reassessment of the uses of these two psychoanalytic metaphors by authors such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Benjamin Arditi. The paper concludes that the two metaphors are complementary, as the distinction between symptom and sublimation is key to differentiating between undemocratic and radical democratic constructions of popular identities.
This chapter argues that liberal theories of the subject and liberal theories of the promotion of equality and justice perpetuate an Oedipal problem. We consider two preeminent liberal thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Rawls, and locate a similar paternalistic reliance on submission to untranscendable political authority in both thinkers. We argue that Rawls and Emerson are emblematic of a wider liberal Oedipal problem that creates conditions that foment resentment, rivalry, and anti-solidarity.KeywordsJohn RawlsRalph Waldo EmersonMeritocracyPaternalismLiberal Oedipal problemSubmissionLiberalism
This chapter analyzes the composition of the social superego, the predominant form of the superego under late capitalism. It looks specifically at the political basis of Freud’s discovery of the superego and how Freud’s concepts, from Oedipus, death drive to the superego, must each be read with an explicitly political context in mind. It then turns to the work of Étienne Balibar and Kojin Karatani and apply their analysis of the Freudian superego to understand the way this concept changes more fully in moments of uprising political instability and crisis, and how through this reading we can understand late capitalism as a time that is superego deprived. With this understanding of the superego in mind, we gain better insight into the paradox of liberation and how superegoic dynamics play into politics.KeywordsSocial superegoFreudOedipusPsychoanalysis and politicsKojin KarataniDeath driveLate capitalism
In her book The Human Condition, philosopher Hannah Arendt analyzes how political theory and activity in Western, industrialized societies have changed significantly since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. One interesting claim that Arendt makes is that humans in the modern age have lost an "authentic concern for immortality." The purpose of this essay is to articulate what an authentic, Arendtian concern for immortality is, and to defend her claim that humans in the modern age lack such a concern. By utilizing Jean Baudrillard's analysis of modern consumerism and social psychology, I defend Arendt's claim that modern humans do in fact lack such an authentic concern. Finally, I conclude the essay by responding to what I take to be three possible objections to my argument and show that they ultimately fail.
The present paper attempts to think through the many, often contradictory aspects of the present so-called 'pandemic', with a view to arriving at a cogent notion of what 'psychotherapy' would mean under these circumstances. It begins with a consideration of the relevance of the idea of 'mass psychosis', informed by Leonard Shlain's characterisation of the 16 th-century witch hunts in western Europe, in the course of which more than half a million women were executed as supposed 'witches'. This suggests a parallel with today's manifestation of what is arguably a mass psychosis, induced by endemic fear of lethal contamination, fed by global governmental responses ('prescribed' by the WHO) to the alleged 'pandemic' caused by this pathogen.
Aspects of the current ‘vaccine tyranny’ are investigated, as well as the nature of a ‘mass psychosis’, which is explored from various perspectives, before attention shifts to the issue of appropriate psychotherapy, with recourse to the thinking of Julia Kristeva on ‘revolt’ and Lacan on the ‘revolutionary’s choice’.
This article examines the interplay between homosexual desire and anxiety in the poetry of Blai Bonet, one of the most important, complex, and problematic figures in modern Catalan literature. Bonet is usually presented as a homosexual author, but the way his poetry articulates same-sex desire is far from straightforward. Critics have highlighted the sensuality and eroticism of his poetry, as well as the importance of mysticism and Catholic imagery. However, a specific analysis of homosexual desire in Bonet’s poetry has never been undertaken. Through a psychoanalytically-oriented reading of various poems by Bonet, this essay traces the movement and the effect of anxiety in a textual corpus characterised by a tension between a body mortified by pain, illness, and guilt, and an ecstatic body that seeks satisfaction in the social underworld, in voyeurism and fantasy, and in textual play. Blai Bonet’s literary project promotes a textual revolution through the dissolution of genres and the proliferation of voices: he defines himself as “a poet without intimacy” whose work performs a radical dispersal of the subject, yet paradoxically his own name is constantly enunciated in the poems, while his body remains silent, concealed behind ellipses or in elusive references to (gay) sex. This article argues that following the trace of anxiety in Bonet’s poetry allows us to move towards the locus where he confronts the complexities of his desire: through an act of sublimation that restates the sexual in creative life, Bonet turns anxiety into comedy, guilt into a sense of humour, and textual experimentation into a form of ascesis.
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