Continental Psychoanalysis

Gender Without Identity offers an innovative and at times unsettling theory of gender formation. Rooted in the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche and in conversation with bold work in queer and trans studies, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini jettison “core gender identity” to propose, instead, that gender is something all subjects acquire -- and that trauma sometimes has a share in that acquisition. Conceptualizing trauma alongside diverse genders and sexualities is thus not about invalidating transness and queerness, but about illuminating their (...) textures to enable their flourishing. -/- Written for readers both in and outside psychoanalysis, Gender Without Identity argues for the ethical urgency of recognizing that wounding experiences and traumatic legacies may be spun into gender. Such “spinning” involves self-theorizations that do not proceed from a centered self, but are nevertheless critical to psychic autonomy. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini draw on these ideas to offer clinical resources for working with gender complexity and for complexifying (what is seen as) gender normativity. (shrink)

Whereas traditional abolitionist arguments call for putting an end to capital punishment, French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida emphasizes its survival, writing that “even when it will have been abolished, the death penalty will survive.” My dissertation interprets this perplexing claim by attending to the specificity of Derrida’s discourse on survival or survivance, contending that the death penalty serves an irreducible role in the constitution of the (individual or collective) subject, such that, even in the event of its abolition, some form of (...) the death penalty must continue. Through close readings of Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Michel de Montagne, and Victor Hugo, as well as Shakespeare, linguist Émile Benveniste, Hungarian psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, and the nineteenth-century political theorist Juan Donoso Cortés, the dissertation provides an account of the function of the death penalty as a specific institution within the modern penal system of a collective political body and as the legacy of ancient political economies based on sacrificial rites. This analysis interprets the death penalty both structurally and specifically, accounting for the indissociable relationship between the institution and its conceptual structure more broadly. Survivance, I argue, only ever occurs through an other, leaving open the question of the survival of the death penalty to the dissemination of indefinite and unpredictable forms that could consist in its abolition. (shrink)

In this article, the notion of entropology introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss is applied and developed in the context of Georges Bataille’s anthropological philosophy: Bataille’s project is defined as entropological. Four philosophical vectors are chosen for this: the theory of general economy, the concept of decay, the idea of extinction and the notion of inhumanism. The theory of general economy allows us to understand the immanent terrestrial nature of humanity and the negative – entropic – side of the capitalist economy. The (...) concept of decay gives access to the thought of bodily disintegration and decomposition, which is temporality and mortality that split the subject. The idea of extinction speculates on the consequences of humanity’s destructiveness, libidinally charged inertia, and the extreme perspective of entropy’s impact on the planet. The notion of inhumanism suggests a radical rethinking of the human relationship with alienation and exteriority: Bataille’s philosophy is reinterpreted as inhumanist. I conclude that the Lévi-Strauss’s neologism – entropology – can be productively articulated and actualised within the framework of Bataille’s philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper the author discusses the meaning of akēdia in late antiquity. Although the term had a wide range of connotations, boredom with the ascetic life was one of its principal senses. The relevance this has for psychoanalysis lies in an understanding of the tradition of ‘spiritual exercises’ (askēsis), as a manifestation of the epimeleia heautou (care of oneself), as it was described, respectively, by Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault. In this context, psychoanalysis—particularly as it is expounded in the (...) oeuvre of Lacan—is seen as a continuation of a certain intensity in the relationship one has with oneself, which first developed in antiquity in pagan philosophy, and later flourished among the desert fathers. Here, akēdia signifies boredom with the cultivation of subjectivity. This condition is situated at the milder end of the more generic spectrum of anxietas and led to an abandonment of concern for the self, and of the spiritual exercises (askēsis tēs psuchēs) that characterised it. Specifically, a neglect for attentiveness and vigilance over one’s thoughts and dreams (prosochē), an abandonment of reading, and a disregard for enunciating who one is, through the practice of saying everything about oneself to another (parrhēsia). (shrink)

Psychoanalysis declares itself an anti-philosophy. For Freud and Lacan and their followers, philosophy does not take into account the role of the unconscious, and depends on the self-certainty of conscious thought. These are false assertions. Aristotle, the Peripatetics, Plato and Plotinus all acknowledged the role of unconscious thought: knowledge of which we are unaware (Meno 80d, Phaedo 68b–d), intellectual activity that we do no apprehend in conscious thought (Enn. IV.3.30), thoughts that we do not consciously grasp (V.1.12), or thoughts prior (...) to conscious awareness in perception (V.1.12). Psychoanalysis, like phenomenology, is based on discursive reason (dianoia) and perceived phenomena, and neglects the role of noetic thought, thought not connected to sense perception. For Lacan, influenced by structural linguistics, the signifier must precede the signified, as the perception must precede the idea. Freud and Husserl abandoned the teachings of their professor Brentano. According to Brentano in The Psychology of Aristotle, it is only when the activity of the active intellect (of Averroes) ‘has made the images intelligible in unconscious thought’ that the material intellect ‘receives from the images the concepts of sensible things’ (1977: 10). For Plotinus, it is only when the activities of intellect are shared with perception that ‘conscious awareness takes place’ (Enn. V.1.2). Freud saw the images of the unconscious becoming conscious through language (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis), while Lacan saw the language of the unconscious becoming conscious through images (Écrits). Neither presented a complete picture of how the mind works. Psychoanalysis needs to reclaim the philosophical unconscious in order to present a complete picture of the mind. (shrink)

"...T S Eliot was unimpressed by Freud. Eliot preferred the more approachable Roger Vittoz. It was only Scofield Thayer, who in his prolonged therapy with Sigmund Freud can be said to have brought anything Freudian in the classically psychoanalytic sense to Modernism." This is from the review. The review of the book is contrarian as the book under review is. The salient points of the book are interrogated in this review.

Freud’s discussion of uncanny [unheimlich] experiences focuses on their peculiar ambivalence. On his view, the uncanny is a paradoxical feeling of both familiarity and alienation. While Freud’s analysis of this paradoxical feeling does succeed in explaining it away, it does little to explain it. One might expect a psychoanalytical demystification of the real experience that is hidden behind the superstitious overtones of uncanny experiences. Instead, the uncanny is attributed rather anti- climactically to the combination of a previous superstition (maintained unconsciously) (...) and an entirely coincidental verification of that superstition. The implication is that there is no uncanny per se. There is no distinctive category of experience, the unique character of which tends to cause or encourage superstitious beliefs; rather, such beliefs are prerequisite to having the experience. In other words, the experience suits the belief, and not vice-versa. The uncanny is the fantasized verification of a repressed fantasy. It involves a breakdown of the reality principle and the projection of beliefs into the external world, rather than a peculiarity of feeling that can be linked intrinsically to a specific category of experience. I do not intend to reject this analysis in its entirety. The basic structure, repression and return, is sound. However, Freud’s analysis of the uncanny, which resolves uncanny ambivalence into the separate categories of consciousness and unconsciousness, merely reinstates the problematical opposition of das heimliche and das unheimliche, familiar and unfamiliar, within the mind rather than in the external world. The coincidence of the two feelings in uncanny experience cannot be explained without an intervening stage between repression and return. I will suggest that Freud’s characterization of uncanniness as the return, in superstition, of the repressed is a misplacement of the experience of uncanniness. The aesthetical feeling is the cause of, but not identical to, the projected superstitions and ideas which surround it. An explanation of the feeling of uncanniness must fall not on the side of the repressed, but on the side of consciousness. The import of my position is that the feeling of uncanniness refers, in a manner of speaking, to something “real,” rather than merely to infantile ideas projected upon the external world. Freud’s explanation makes the unconscious a kind of scapegoat to be blamed for imposing fundamentally irrational beliefs into our interpretation of present experience, in that way preserving a model of the conscious ego as autonomous, fundamentally attuned to reality and ultimately independent of the unconscious. I will argue, on the contrary, that the experience of the uncanny is not merely a falling back into irrational or infantile beliefs, but an experience of a deep disunity in personhood that rightly causes us to question our everyday confidence in the unity, independence, and rationality of our conscious sense of self. The ambivalence of the feeling has its source in an irresolvable ambivalence that can exist in consciousness, and not simply in an analytically resolvable psychical ambivalence between consciousness and the unconscious. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization is a revision of his early hedonism presented in his early papers from the 1930’s, a revision necessitated by the challenge Freud’s psychoanalysis posited to the possibility of hedonism. In the first section of the paper, I present Marcuse’s critical hedonist position, mainly in “On Hedonism” (1938), where he develops a social and objective hedonism that should be set as a main political goal of a society. Accordingly, the key to (...) a transformation of society is located at the social-political level. However, Freud’s metapsychology shows that the barriers that prevent a transformation of society are located at a much deeper level and are found in the relation between the psychological structure of individuals and social pressure, between the dynamics of the instincts and society’s material welfare. Thus, the possibility of a society that asserts happiness as its principle depends on the possibility of a transformation of human metapsychology and its social manifestation. This challenge, and the manner in which Marcuse dealt with it is the subject of the second section in which I analyze Eros and Civilization as Marcuse’s rethinking of his hedonism in light of Freud. (shrink)

The problem of affect and affectivity plays a significant role in psychoanalysis, both at a theoretical and therapeutic level. In Freud’s first interpretation of hysterical symptoms affect is considered as a certain amount of energy, and this already mirrors its aporetic intertwining with the ‘reality’ of the unconscious. On the one side, it is true that, in his Metapsychology, Freud identifies the charge of affect with instinct and explains that only ideational representation, not the affection, is found at the unconscious (...) level. This means that affectivity is something concerning the preconscious and conscious psychic life. However, on the other side, the existence of a ‘representative’ dimension within the unconscious opens the way of a dual or bifacial re-reading of it, beyond the biological-organic constitution Freud assigned to the Unbewusst. For Paul Ricœur, Freud’s psychoanalysis has a double, irreducible theoretical-procedural register, energetistic and hermeneutical; and his research about the unconscious reality reveals the significance and consequences of this double/dualistic approach. A combination of Husserl’s phenomenological and Ricœur’s hermeneutical approaches helps to find a “third, mediative way”, in which the unconscious can be reinterpreted as a “affective matter”, that is a mid-way reality placed between corporality and non-corporality, body and mind, natural causality and experiential/existential meaning. (shrink)

This paper investigates the significance of filmic analysis in the contemporary theoretical paradigm inspired by Slavoj Žižek, which we term ‘Transcendental Materialism’. After characterising its distinct peculiarities within the history of psychoanalysis and film theory, we demonstrate the limitations of previous (possible) answers, arguing they are partly formulated in response to confrontations with other paradigms. Our own approach is then informed by a study of another popular object of analysis in Transcendental Materialism – the joke. We show how Freud’s understanding (...) of the joke was adapted by the paradigm and supported further by certain philosophical insights by (among others) G.W.F. Hegel. Finally, we demonstrate how parallels can be drawn between this adaptation and the significance of the filmic form within Transcendental Materialism, inspired in part by Alain Badiou’s reading of Hegel. (shrink)

The tension between the sense-content of the idea and its scientifically proven objectivity reaches its climax in the plainly expressed claim. However, science is free neither from metaphors nor from rhetorical figures that provide a framework for interpretation, such as paradigm, model, analogy, and so on. In other words, the findings need to be accommodated in order to be received and are not otherwise communicated. [...] The hope of the editors is to offer the reader, thanks to all the contributors, (...) a textbook of quality and relevance, and perhaps a particular input to challenge and find what is given by revealing itself and/or oneself. (shrink)

A crucial philosophical problem of social robots is how much they perform a kind of sociality in interacting with humans. Scholarship diverges between those who sustain that humans and social robots cannot by default have social interactions and those who argue for the possibility of an asymmetric sociality. Against this dichotomy, we argue in this paper for a holistic approach called “Δ phenomenology” of HSRI. In the first part of the paper, we will analyse the semantics of an HSRI. This (...) is what leads a human being to assign or receive a meaning of sociality by interacting with a social robot. Hence, we will question the ontological structure underlying HSRIs, suggesting that HSRIs may lead to a peculiar kind of user alienation. By combining all these variables, we will formulate some final recommendations for an ethics of social robots. (shrink)

Art, for Hegel, is not only distinct but self-distinguishing of and from nature – it happens in and through the latter. It liberates us from being merely natural creatures, and it does so by a dynamic of a cut or break - even though this liberation is achieved only through natural sensuousness, and hence, keeps us tethered to nature in some particular way. Inspired by Todd McGowan’s emphasis on the central role of contradiction in Hegel’s philosophy, this paper considers the (...) possibility to applying the dialectic between art and nature as it is unfolded in Hegel’s Aesthetic to a more insidious constellation — namely, what Marxists came to refer to as second nature: the world of commodities, in which man-made things appear to those who produce them as a naturalised and repressive opposite, a pseudo nature, an alienated solidified history. (shrink)

Beginning with Freud’s treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification’s polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. After discussing the ambivalence of identification, we review (...) Freud’s discussion of mass formations as group identifications, arguing that the work of facilitating a productive sublimation of the drives cannot be reduced to a strengthening of the artificial masses represented by social institutions such as the church and the educational system. Instead, the difference between mass formations allowing for collective sublimation and those suffering from narcissistic or melancholic blockages must be found in the productive qualities of the mass itself. In closing, we outline a few ways in which we might begin to understand the political contribution of masses to the maturation of human drives. (shrink)

This paper briefly describes the life of Otte Gross and his thoughts on sexuality, society, and repression. This provides the basis to interpret the #MeToo movement as functioning in the same way as a repressed memory that breaks through to consciousness. Gross' suggestion that society "rapes" individuals and his assertion of a primordial matriarchal society are useful insights in understanding the #Metoo movement.

Når politikere truer kontanthjælpsmodtagere, flygtninge forvises til teltlejre, og vi skal assimileres til bestemt dansk kultur, er det den samme voldelige struktur, der reproduceres, når forældre begår vold mod børn. Psykoanalysen forklarer sammenhængen mellem institutionel vold og vold i relationer.

Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and gen- uinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we constitute an intersubjective world can account for the uniqueness and otherness of other people in our experience. I contend that it can’t. I begin by explicating Husserl’s theory of empathy, paying particular attention to the reduction to a purely egoic sphere and the steps that ostensibly permit a (...) subject to re-inhabit a world of others from out of this sphere. In querying Husserl’s theory, I consider a series of problems, raised by Zhida Luo, concerning the apparent centrality of bod- ily similarity in empathy. I sketch Luo’s solution, which involves a shift to tactile similarity. While it makes for a better theory of empathy, this solution isn’t sufficient to make room for the givenness of another person not originally predicated on simi- larity. To clarify what’s at issue here, I turn to the Husserlian pictures of empathy presented by Heinz Kohut and Edith Stein. I conclude with a remark about what might be required, given the inability of Husserlian empathy to make room for the experience of others as singular and other, for a picture of our phenomenal life to have a shape that accounts for the coexistence of empathy to others who are like oneself and hospitality to others as genuine others. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the continuing viability of both Freud and Hegel to the reading of modern literature. The book begins with Julia Kristeva’s attempts to relate Hegelian thought to a psychoanalytically informed conception of semiotics that was first explored in her influential study, The Revolution of Poetic Language, and then modified in later books that develop semiotics in new directions. Kristeva’s agreements and disagreement with Hegel are important to the book’s argument, which ultimately defends Hegel against familiar, poststructuralist (...) detractions. However, the book’s conceptual argument requires a historical exposition, with chapters devoted to literary figures ranging from Spenser to Ishiguro. One of the purposes of the book is to demonstrate that Hegel’s contribution to modern thought is at least partially exhibited in the history of literature, which also corroborates some of the deeper insights of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

A Touch of Doubt traces the theme of touch in the evolution of skepticism through Platonism, German idealism, Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. Haptic Scepticism, the field of ethics emerging from this study, explores the grasp-ability of contradiction. Contradiction is a haptic marvel. We can cup it in our palms, press it against our lips, dip our toes into its coolness, and, if we are not careful, we may even burn ourselves on its surface.

Antithetical desires displayed throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship indicate the disjunctive assumption that the individual exists either in a state of increasing autonomy, expressed negatively as striving for freedom from divine constraint, or in a state of self-annihilating submission, expressed positively in terms of kenotic unification. Proximity to the divine thereby entails forfeiture of individuality, contrary to the explicit aim of Kierkegaard’s authorial project, and aversion to materiality. This essay enunciates the conflict (I), traces the crescendo of loss that births the pseudonymous (...) authorship and ends in realized longing for death (II), and approaches a more holistic vision of psycho-spiritual development (III). (shrink)

The critical theory tradition has, since its inception, sought to distinguish its perspective on society from more purely descriptive or normative approaches by maintaining that persons have a deep-seated interest in the free development of their personality—an interest that can only be realized in and through the rational organization of society, but which is systematically stymied by existing society. Yet it has struggled to specify this emancipatory interest in a way that avoids being either excessively utopian or overly accommodating to (...) existing society. Despite the fact that Hegel’s concept of reconciliation is normally thought to run aground on the latter horn of this dilemma, this book argues that reconciliation is the best available conceptualization of this emancipatory interest. It presents Hegel’s idea of freedom as something actualized in individuals’ lives through their becoming reconciled to how society shapes their roles, prospects, and sense of self; it presents reconciliation as being less a matter of philosophical cognition, and more of inclusion in a responsive, transparent political process. It then introduces the concept of reification, which—through its development in Marx and Lukács, through Horkheimer and Adorno—substantiates an increasingly cogent critique of reconciliation as something unachievable within the framework of modern society. Giving equal attention to psychoanalysis and legal theory, the second half critically appraises the writings of Rawls, Honneth, and Habermas as efforts to spell out what a concept of reconciliation more democratic and inclusive than Hegel, yet sensitive to the reifying effects of legal systems, might mean. (shrink)

Die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Freudschen Psychoanalyse, die zuerst von Foucault und dann von Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard und Baudrillard unternommen wurde, versucht den Mechanismus der ‘bürgerlichen Repressiontätigkeit,’ die die europäische Menschheit unter dem Joch der Familieninstitution hält, zu enthüllen und den Terror einer erdachten und simulativen Moral, in der Freud und seine Anhänger unwillkürlich einbezogen sind, blob zu stellen. Damit zeigt die postmoderne Lektüre von Freud, dab nur die Befreiung von diesem durch Terror-verderbten Bewubtsein im Stande wäre die wirkliche revolutionäre (...) Kraft der psychoanalytischen Kritik der Vernunft hervorbringen und die Bedeutung ihrer zwei epochalen Erfindungen-die direkte Konfrontation zwischen den Triebproduktionen und der Repression, die die Gesellschaftsmaschine auf der Triebmaschine ausübt, und die dadurch folgende Verdrängung-zurück zu gewinnen. (shrink)

Die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Freudschen Psychoanalyse, die zuerst von Foucault und dann von Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard und Baudrillard unternommen wurde, versucht den Mechanismus der 'bürgerlichen Repressiontätigkeit,' die die europäische Menschheit unter dem Joch der Familieninstitution hält, zu enthüllen und den Terror einer erdachten und simulativen Moral, in der Freud und seine Anhänger unwillkürlich einbezogen sind, blob zu stellen. Damit zeigt die postmoderne Lektüre von Freud, dab nur die Befreiung von diesem durch Terror-verderbten Bewubtsein im Stande wäre die wirkliche revolutionäre (...) Kraft der psychoanalytischen Kritik der Vernunft hervorbringen und die Bedeutung ihrer zwei epochalen Erfindungen-die direkte Konfrontation zwischen den Triebproduktionen und der Repression, die die Gesellschaftsmaschine auf der Triebmaschine ausübt, und die dadurch folgende Verdrängung-zurück zu gewinnen. (shrink)

Many commentators have claimed that Nietzsche views the “sublimation” (Sublimierung) of drives as a positive achievement. Against this tradition, I argue that, on the dominant if not universal Nietzschean use of Sublimierung and its cognates, sublimation is just a broad psychological analogue of the traditional (al)chemical process: the “vaporization” of drives into a finer or lighter state, figuratively if not literally. This can yield ennobling elevation, or purity in a positive sense—the intensified “sublimate” of an unrefined original sample. But it (...) can also yield drives that are attenuated or otherworldly, in a pejorative sense. One (but only one) kind of Nietzschean sublimation is the “translation” of drives to “imaginative and spiritual” (Imaginative und Seelische) modes of expression. I con­clude that, despite certain appearances to the contrary, Nietzsche ultimately values basic drives’ powerful expression, without preferring either that this occur specifically as “higher culture” or as “savage” natural impulse. (shrink)

This paper explores Jean Starobinski's often tacit conception of the implied author, with a view to clarifying his intellectual legacy for literary criticism. It argues that it is plausible to trace a certain strand in the intellectual genealogy of Starobinski's literary theory from the descriptive psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey to twentieth-century psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Accordingly, the question "Who is Jean Starobinski?" is formulated in a sense which seeks to move beyond the bare facticity of biographical detail, a sense that can (...) be expected to differentiate between scholarly and purely journalistic enquiry to ask: who, exactly, is the Jean Starobinski that we encounter in his major works - works like "The Living Eye" and "Transparency and Obstruction"? It is from this vantage point that the discussion proceeds to clarify Starobinski's ambivalent relations to both Rousseau and Freud, and thereby to illuminate some of the tensions and nuances inherent in his notion of the implied author. (shrink)

The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to be as (...) applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand. (shrink)

Researchers often talk about a powerful heuristic potential of the Kantian heritage, but sometimes they do not show concrete examples in defense of this opinion outside Kantianism and Neo- Kantianism. This article contains an attempt to demonstrate that on the example of how efficiently C.G. Jung used Kant’s ideas to construct the theoretical basis of analytical psychology in general and his conception of archetypes in particular, we can see the urgency of Kant’s heritage not only for his direct spiritual successors. (...) In addition the question is discussed: why did Jung claim that epistemologically he took his stand on Kant? (shrink)

From Augustine’s (death) drive towards an imaginary time before speech to Marx’s drive toward an imaginary time after speech as we know it, we learn that we are always already within the bonds of the mother tongue. In the late twentieth-century, Derrida turns to both Augustine and Marx to repeat the fantasy of escaping the mother (tongue). Derrida responds to Marx’s analysis of our repeated failure to forget the mother tongue by turning to Augustine’s analysis of the mother’s touch: we (...) cannot forget the mother tongue because it is licked upon our skin. Drawing on Derrida’s relationship to Augustine and Marx on the topic of touch and language, I argue that although the bond of the mother tongue is inescapable, its very real grip upon our skin is founded upon a number of fantasies: the fantasy of the Mother, of a cut with the Mother by the Mother, which separates us from an original shared skin and binds us to the Mother tongue, the fantasy of self-articulation in the death of the Mother. I suggest that the symptoms of the fantasmatic foundation of our entrapment by the mother tongue-touch is expressed in barely perceptible glitches—a shiver passing over one’s skin, a stutter in one’s speech. (shrink)

This chapter combines the insights of Sigmund Freud and Theodor W. Adorno to explain some of the psychoanalytic mechanisms that contributed to a scenario where people voted for a leader who undermines their very existence. Trump successfully exploited the feelings of failure of the millions of Americans who have not lived up to the liberal capitalist ideology of success. By replacing their ego ideal with their leader, Trump voters could get rid of the frustration generated by such an ideology. The (...) people “fell in love” with Trump because he gave them the illusion that they “can become great again.” Moreover, by lifting moral restrictions to being openly classist, racist, and sexist, Trump generated a permanent festival where the American people can feel better than classed, raced, and gendered Others and thus satisfied with themselves again. (shrink)

This chapter shows that taboos erected around crimes inhibit individuals and nations' work of mourning for the victims of crimes. The work of mourning is the precondition that individuals and nations take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims and their descendants, and make sure that such crimes are not repeated. I bring Theodor W. Adorno and Sigmund Freud in conversation to explain the connection between taboos and the failure to mourn. I further detail this connection with Antigone (...) as an example of taboo and denied mourning. I also explain that the taboos erected around the National Socialist genocide on Roma and Sinti ("gypsies") do not allow Austrians to mourn the loss of this population. As a result, their taking responsibility for this crime remains stifled, and they fail to show solidarity with the Roma and Sinti genocide victims. (shrink)

Freud’s psychoanalysis of Little Hans is a defining moment in psychoanalytic theory, because it marks the first psychoanalytic attempt ever to analyze childhood as an actuality rather than a set of recollected experiences. This article aims to explain Deleuze and Guattari’s dismissal of Freud’s interpretation as an act of silencing the children that is meant to corroborate his own theories of psychosexual development and particularly the Oedipus complex. Deleuze and Guattari are not against psychoanalytic interpretation in and of itself as (...) a creative intervention into the lived actuality of the analysand, but they think that Freudian psychoanalysis misses the opportunity by tracing every aspect of individual existence back to familial figures and relationships. While Freud considers the case of Little Hans as a verification of his theory of sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari regard the case as a perfect example of how psychoanalytic suggestion often distorts the utterances of the analysand for its own interests, thereby failing altogether to grasp the logic of becoming as an escape from familial determinations. (shrink)

This out-of-print, two-volume, photocopy packet, in the area of "Surrealism and the Politics of the Particular" includes readings on language, meaning, and surrealism from Adorno, Benjamin, McCumber, Breton, Heidegger, Freud, Kristeva, Ricouer, and Bataille.

Adrian Johnston is well known for his work at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis, German idealism, contemporary French philosophy and most recently cognitive neuroscience. In the context of the current issue, Johnston represents the most complete development of a contemporary theory of Transcendental Materialism. In the following interview we explore both the implications of Johnston’s previous work, as well as the directions his most recent projects are taking.

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche. Moving beyond the recourse of sublimation, post-Freudians attacked reason’s hegemony in quelling disruptive psycho-dynamics and, (...) focusing upon the social domain, they sought strategies to counter the oppressive (repressive) social restrictions and conformist impositions impeding individual freedom that result from thwarted desire. Postmodern celebration of desire at the expense of reason and sublimation leaves the Enlightenment prospects altogether and moves psychoanalysis into a new terrain, where the very notion of rationality and an autonomous ego upon which much of Freudianism rests has been deconstructed. Thus the debate that begins with Freud’s social theories reflects the deeper divisions, which arose with postmodern ethics and discarded Cartesian–Kantian notions of personal identity. Here we consider the moral framework in which Freudian social theory sits and a contrasting understanding of agency that confronts his modernist conception. In that debate, we discern the larger humanist confrontation with postmodernity. Yet, all who engaged Freud shared some version of his utopian ethos, albeit radically restructuring the theory upon which social reform might occur. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate Freud’s study of infantile zoophobias. According to Freud, in nearly all cases of infantile animal phobias, the feared animal functions as a father figure. The feared animal takes on the prohibitive role as the father substitute. The substitutability of the animal and the father is crucial for Freud, as it anchors his theory regarding the familial, social, and religious structure of a patriarchal society. In light of this standard animal-father substitution, Freud’s biography of Leonardo da (...) Vinci stands out as a provocative exception. In this psychoanalytic biography, Freud examines da Vinci’s relationship with a vulture—only here the vulture is an androgynous creature that serves as a mother substitute. More significantly, unlike other accounts of infantile zoophobia, the vulture has an empowering rather than crippling effect on the infant da Vinci. With the story of the androgynous vulture, I argue that Freud’s interpretation of da Vinci opens up a new way to understand our relationships with animals—a way that not even Freud himself anticipated. In short, I analyze the significance of this deviant case of animal obsession in Freud’s corpus and its ramifications for reconceiving the human-animal relationship. (shrink)

In this book, I develop the novel concept of embodied reflective judgment, which outlines the interconnection between feeling and thinking in judgment. I explain that defense mechanisms to repress feelings of guilt can effectively shut down critical judgment. Finally, I analyze post-war trial cases of Austrian Nazi perpetrators and contemporary debates about Austria’s involvement in Nazi crimes to expose the mechanisms used by individuals and nations to fend off individual and political guilt. Only by confronting guilt can individuals and nations (...) take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes and their descendants, and ensure that such crimes are not repeated. I also develop two concepts to break the cycle of negative consequences resulting from repressed guilt about a nation’s violent past: Embodied reflective spaces, which allow us to reflect on our guilt feelings, and subjects-in-outline, which means that we abstain from wholly identifying with a nation to counter defensive mechanisms when confronting guilt. I ground my analysis in critical theory (Arendt and Adorno) and psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

If we are to understand why psychoanalysis extends ordinary psychology in the precise ways that it does, we must take account of the existence of, and the interplay between, two distinct kinds of explanatory concern: functional and idiographic. The form and content of psychoanalytic explanation and its unusual methodology can, at least in part, be viewed as emerging out of Freud's attempt to reconcile these two types of explanatory concern. We must also acknowledge the role of the background theoretical context (...) that shapes Freud's functional thinking about the mind. A neglect of the role of the background theory in shaping the extension of ordinary psychology leaves us with puzzles about the nature and direction of the psychoanalytic extension and gives rise to an unbelievable history of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

If we are to understand why psychoanalysis extends ordinary psychology in the precise ways that it does, we must take account of the existence of, and the interplay between, two distinct kinds of explanatory concern: functional and idiographic. The form and content of psychoanalytic explanation and its unusual methodology can, at least in part, be viewed as emerging out of Freud's attempt to reconcile these two types of explanatory concern. We must also acknowledge the role of the background theoretical context (...) that shapes Freud's functional thinking about the mind. A neglect of the role of the background theory in shaping the extension of ordinary psychology leaves us with puzzles about the nature and direction of the psychoanalytic extension and gives rise to an unbelievable history of psychoanalysis. (shrink)