David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's pre-critical works which attest to this tendency—“An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime—to the final form of (...) the critical philosophy. (shrink)

David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's pre-critical works which attest to this tendency—“An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime—to the final form of (...) the critical philosophy. (shrink)

David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's pre-critical works which attest to this tendency—“An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime—to the final form of (...) the critical philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers Freud's 1920 text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in light of Jacques Derrida's critical commentary on it in The Post Card. Against the deconstructive reading that highlights the performative aspects of Freud's speculative remarks, David-Ménard reads Freud's theory of the death drive as an epistemological and experimental hypothesis necessary for giving an account of the complexity and diversity of the clinical phenomenon of repetition in psychoanalysis. Though the death drive never appears locatable as such in the various (...) examples given by Freud, it is nonetheless accessible in the constellation of differences produced by traumatic dreams, children's games, etc. (shrink)

Under this title, I wish to clarify the philosophical perspective that has run through my work for the last fifteen years, in three volumes: L’hystérique entre Freud et Lacan, La folie dans la raison pure, and Les constructions de l’universel. In the first of these works, I reflected on the status of the body in psychoanalysis, on the distance that needed to be taken with regard to the two Western traditions of thought concerning the body, namely those of Aristotle and (...) Descartes, in order to understand Freud’s conceptions of the erogenous body and the drive. I also raised the question of the divergence between the physiological- and the drive-constructions of the body. In my second book, I tried to understand to what degree a philosophical system, in this case Kant’s transcendental theory of the object, may be the meeting point between a new logic—a new logic of negation in Kant’s case—and a fantasized encounter with a mad thinker. I also considered the way in which a philosophical text weaves several active heterogeneous directions like the warp and the weft within thought, and how they may be spotted in the text. Finally, in Les constructions de l’universel, I considered the relevance of the concept of the universal for understanding how conceptual thought detaches itself from its author, and compared art, philosophy, and dream analysis from this point of view. I also tried to evaluate the pertinence of Lacan’s project of producing a logic of sexuation, and the degree of autonomy such a project has with respect to the internal ambiguities of the logical and philosophical concept of the universal. In these three books, I have practiced a philosophy of contingency—contingency of the relation between discourses and contingency of the real with respect to the thought which knows it. It is this philosophy of contingency that I would like to explain. (shrink)

Neste artigo, trata-se, por um lado, de compreender até que ponto a existência humana e o pensamento, naquilo que eles têm de inventivo, são feitos de sínteses disjuntivas. E qual tipo de repetição entre os elementos, ligados de maneira nãocasual, mas não sistemática, supõe esta síntese tão importante no pensamento de Gilles Deleuze. Por outro lado, trata-se de saber se esse conceito de repetição converge com aquele que reclama a psicanálise.

David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's precritical works which attest to this tendency-"An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind" and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime-to the final form of (...) the critical philosophy. (shrink)

Za klasično in moderno politično filozofijo od Hobbesa prek Kanta in Hegla do Marxa postanemo državljani, ko svojo zakoreninjenost v družinske in družbene vezi spremenimo v pravni in/oziroma politični obstoj. Judith Butler in Marc Abélès, s tem da poudarjata prekarnost politike, postavljata pod vprašaj klasične distinkcije, kot je ločevanje med zasebnim in javnim, ko pokažeta, da sta imanentnost in kontingentnost konfliktov konstitutivna za vznik politike danes. Ker mislita politiko onstran države, tako Butler kot Abélès pojmujeta politični prostor kot križišče različnih (...) razsežnosti konkretnega prostora, kjer postane vidna prekarnost teles. Opirajoč se na ta dognanja, se avtorica distancira od ontologije prekarnosti, kolikor le-ta zamrači radikalno kontingentnost svobode, ki je vedno svoboda pod različnimi pogoji. Zato da bi lahko naredili vidno kontingentnost ustvarjanja političnega prostora, je zato nujno upoštevati konkretne družbene in zgodovinske pogoje takega ustvarjanja. Neontološko pojmovanje prekarnosti politike pa nasprotno omogoča pokazati nenavadno bližino metod, ki jih uporabljajo v psihoanalizi in politični antropologiji. Psihoanalizi in politiki je skupno to, da konstruirata prostor za tavanje. Toda če psihoanalize vseeno ni mogoče priličiti politiki, kolikor ima namreč opraviti s posameznimi singularnostmi in ne kolektivi, pa vseeno lahko ponudi orodja za analizo političnih situacij. (shrink)

Da bi se izognili lažni dilemi utopičnega idealizma in konzervativnega empiricizma, ko gre za transformacijo realnega, pričujoči članek obravnava disjunktivno sintezo dveh ločenih, a povezanih področij delovanja in mišljenja: področje spolnega nezavednega in področje političnih sprememb. Kritični pretres tradicionalne heglovske in/ali marksovske teze, da lahko spremenimo realno zgolj, če izhajamo iz resnične in koherentne teorije, je izhodišče za analizo treh primerov naddoločenosti, ki je značilna za sodobne emancipatorne boje: »politiko ulice«, »revolucijo« in »reorganizirajočo dinamiko spolnega nezavednega«. S poudarjanjem kontingentne artikulacije (...) emancipacije in »resnične želje« članek analizira realne, vendar nepredvidljive posledice, kot izhajajo iz kontigentnosti lastne situacijske naddoločenosti. Ker producirajo neutopični »onkraj«, so ti trije primeri naddoločenosti sodobnih bojev obravnavani kot lokalizirane antiutopije, ki predstavljajo neverjetno, a resnično »topio« za emancipacijo, namesto da bi postali normativni model. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary of David -Ménard’s Répétition et invention en Deleuze et Freud.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Foucault for Psychoanalysis”Monique David-Ménard’s Kind of BluePenelope DeutscherFoucault for psychoanalysis? This is a paradoxical question. Foucault also produced a critique of psychoanalysis, aiming to show that sexuality was not an a-temporal reality, nor a truth eventually discovered by Freud. It was a discursive formation, one among others.—Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, 172.To the philosophers..A practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of philosophy, Monique David-Ménard (...) extends a singular proposition to philosophers. She is not the first philosopher to engage the assumptions of psychoanalysis, but hers is a particularly idiosyncratic suggestion for how to think with the analyst’s clinical work, intimate and alien. She has proposed we do so in the company of Gilles Deleuze,1 and most recently, in Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle (2011) has extended her invitation to think with the clinic through an ingenious reading of Michel Foucault.As Eloge opens, David-Ménard’s reading of Foucault is far from the scene. Early in the work, we are asked to think with a practice, seemingly in a different register. An analyst finds herself accused of being an obstacle, of opposing the analysand’s wishes in life. In this context, we are asked to think about the blue of a painting in the room where the analysand waits (David-Ménard 2011, 34). [End Page 111]Given the criticisms of psychoanalysis elaborated in the work of Foucault and Deleuze, one might have expected these philosophers to be considered in Eloge in that stead.2 Or, one could imagine Foucault playing a role because of his genealogical analysis of the formation of the Oedipus complex.3Two years after the publication of Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault had, in Abnormal, characterized the desiring space of the family as stimulated in a capillary network of individualizing normalization (Foucault 2003, 257), linked by medicalized and expert concern of which parents became the auxiliaries. They are charged, and charge themselves, with the goals of family health, of preservative and defensive good parenting, and with the conduct of the child’s conduct. Foucault describes the pre-twentieth century emergence of lay and expert preoccupation with the dangers of childhood masturbation. This produces an environment whose intensive scrutiny involves a close “folding of... parents’ bodies over... children’s bodies” (ibid., 265) in a saturated, hermetic environment stimulating oedipalized desire. This means one can offer a genealogical account of the conditions of formation of the latter. These include a responsibilization of parents, who control for the presence of abnormal sex, advised by new experts (lay, medical, pseudo-scientific) in collective crusades for health and life. Thus there is differentiation through minor gradations of abnormality. Even the specificity of the architectural spaces in which scrutiny is directed plays a role in the hollowing out of the child’s putatively interior psychic-sexual life, the intense object of “palpating” interest (Foucault 1978, 45) in new apparatuses of knowledge-power (Foucault 2003, 327).Because he presents this as the context in which the “nuclear and substantial family was gradually constituted” (Foucault 2003, 264), along with its oedipal configurations of desire, Foucault emphasizes the contingency of both. Psychoanalysis would be, from his perspective, willfully indifferent to these or other possibilities for genealogical analysis of the apparatus of power, knowledge, and the body, of the repeating configurations of desire that are its special domain of expertise,4 and the emergent forms of authority associated with the analyst, described in History of Madness (Foucault 2009) and in Psychiatric Power (Foucault 2006).Perhaps we’d expect to see David-Ménard, the psychoanalyst, addressing these accounts, but they are neither repudiated in Eloge, nor extensively discussed. Far from rejecting a genealogical analysis of psychoanalysis, she promotes its promise. But this is so in a particular sense.Necessity and repetitionA particular patient might fear being “mad like her mother.” She might fear being denied, trapped, or annihilated (David-Ménard 2011, 33). She might [End Page 112] consider herself somehow denied a lover. She might seem to be denying herself a lover. There’s a degree of necessity in all these variants. Perhaps these... (shrink)

Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David-Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

: Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David-Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David'Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Object Life in Monique David-MénardJudith ButlerThe three papers published here were originally given as part of a colloquium, “Objects, Phantasms, Life, and Death” on the work of Monique David-Ménard at Columbia University in April 2014. Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher who has been teaching at the Université de Paris VII-Diderot and has been engaged in private psychoanalytic practice for (...) many years. Her work is distinguished in part because of the way she brings clinical experience to philosophical inquiry, and how she understands the unconscious to support and disrupt various philosophical systems. Trained in the Lacanian school, but returning time and again to Freud with her own questions, she has written extensively on the problem of drives, the role of biology in psychoanalysis, all along staging a way of thinking about philosophy and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating. Engaged by feminist philosophy, she has offered a way of thinking about sexual alterity, social embodiment, [End Page 80] and gender, to offer a different “French feminist” trajectory than those usually canonized in English.David-Ménard completed a master’s degree in philosophy with Paul Ricoeur (Université de Nanterre, 1968), a doctorate in psychopathology and psychoanalysis with Pierre Fédida (Université Paris-VII, 1978), and a doctorate in philosophy with Jean-Marie Beysade (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-III, 1990). She was a professor of philosophy in Reims, Sceaux, and Paris-VII, and received her psychoanalytic training at the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) then led by Jacques Lacan; she was a member of that school in 1979–80. Between 1982 and 1994 she was a member of the Centre de formation et de recherches psychanalytiques (CFRP) and then became a member of the Société de psychanalyse Freudienne in 1994. She was Directrice of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris from 1992 to 1995, and served as its vice president from 1995 to 1998. In 1999 she was appointed professor of psychopathology and psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris-VII, Denis Diderot, where she has served as Directrice of the Centre des études du vivant. In addition she is a co-founder of the Société Internationale de Philosophie et Psychoanalyse.Her publications include works on the relation of psychoanalysis to biological and philosophical discourses, hysterical conversion in Freud and Lacan, the Freudian account of drives as a “threshold” phenomenon; bodies and language, constructions of the universal, exemplified most dramatically by a consideration of “madness” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and gender and melancholia.1 The range of her work is relentless and impressive: it includes an early work on Kant’s reading of Swedenborg that initiates a critique of universality through the study of how sexuality and madness inform the text; a study of hysteria “between” Freud and Lacan that establishes her own way of negotiating between the two; several essays on drives and their various vicissitudes; theories of embodiment; feminism and philosophy; the difference between the sexes, the process of sexuation, desire, narcissism, what to do with an organless body following from an impressive, if disconcerting, study on the convergence of Deleuze with psychoanalysis. She has also written on the status of contingency in chaos theory. Although historically trained in Kant, Spinoza, and Husserlian phenomenology, she has also engaged Lacanian thought in a selective and critical way, working with its productive potentials and refusing some of its more rigid formulations. She draws from science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology to weave together a set of theoretical reflections prompted by an event, an occasion, or a challenge. Penelope Deutscher’s contribution to this volume shows how this cross-theoretical inquiry works. David-Ménard, for instance, makes use of a Foucaultian form of inquiry to establish a certain problematic within psychoanalysis and philosophy, posing questions about how the initial impetus for [End Page 81] a theoretical system both conditions, orients, and disrupts any effort at full systematicity. As Deutscher explains, the task is neither to psychoanalyze Foucault nor to apply Foucault to psychoanalysis, but to formulate and pursue an inquiry in which the driving impetus informs and precludes the systematic closure of the theory itself.And... (shrink)

Du sommaire: I -- Clinique et philosophie: Le probleme -- La polemique. II -- Eloge du masochisme, critique de la notion de plaisir. III -- Philosophie de la repetition: Les trois repetitions -- Comment une philosophie du temps revient a Masoch et a Sade -- L'inconscient et les problemes. IV -- Le corps sans organes, critique ou abandon de la psychanalyse?: Artaud et Van Gogh -- La distance prise par rapport a l'organisme -- Les devenirs et leur fin immanente. V (...) -- Les devenirs et les syntheses disjonctives: Les syntheses disjonctives et l'invention de la vie et de la pensee -- Repeter et inventer selon Deleuze et selon Freud -- Ambiguite de la repetition en psychanalyse. VI -- Philosophie de l'infini, creer des concepts est-ce circuler a vitesse infinie sur le chaos?: L'affinite de la philosophie avec l'infini -- L'infini et la raison contingente -- Sur la lecture de Deleuze par Alain Badiou -- Une invention conceptuelle met-elle en jeu l'infini?". (shrink)

Onora O’Neill is one of the foremost moral philosophers writing today. Her work on ethics and bioethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of Kant is extremely influential. Her landmark Reith Lectures on trust did much to establish the subject not only on the philosophical and political agenda but in the world of media, business and law more widely. Reading Onora O’Neill is the first book to examine and critically appraise the work of this important thinker. It includes specially commissioned chapters (...) by leading international philosophers in ethics, Kantian philosophy and political philosophy. The following aspects of O’Neill’s work are examined: global justice Kant the ethics of the family bioethics consent trust. Featuring a substantial reply to her critics at the end of the book, Reading Onora O’Neill is essential reading for students and scholars of ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

This article develops a sociology of worth that blurs the traditional disciplinary divide between economic value and social values. Through ethnographic study of a new media startup in Manhattan's Silicon Alley, we examine how a new firm in an emerging industry negotiates an uncertain environment where metrics gauging performance remain illusive as the industry itself gropes toward a clearer definition of its content and contours. Faced with complex foresight horizons, new media firms must develop an organizational capacity for learning, innovation, (...) and flexible adaptation to constantly changing requirements. We examine how the clash of evaluative criteria guiding the work of cross-disciplinary project teams becomes a source for innovation and a resource for learning when deliberation across evaluative principles is combined with an organizational and administrative structure that relies on lateral accountability. (shrink)

This latest volume of BACAP Proceedings contains some innovative research by international scholars on Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles. It covers such themes as Plato on the philosopher ruler, and Aristotle on essence and necessity in science. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.