Online research in philosophy

This article examines the return of love in contemporary critical theory. While recent attempts to make sense of a politicized concept of love have focused on its reconciliatory promise for our age, this article considers love as a discourse of edification for a frustrated political subject, one whose radical hopes have been forged in waiting. Those who want to resist the idea that the revolutionary horizon has for ever receded can be easily tempted and sometimes blindly seduced by the force of love. As an upbuilding discourse, the political appeal to love betrays a profound religiosity and a frustrated longing for transcendence, but it functions, also, to feminize political subjectivity, rendering it passive and wholly derivative of the dominant order. Marx’s attack on communist lovesickness and Beauvoir’s portrait of the grande amoureuse provide touchstones for a feminist critique of love, one that refuses its seductions without wholly dispensing with its critical and utopian dimension. Other critical theorists, notably Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, intimate how love furnishes, not the affective grounds for political practice, but the recollection of a poetics of thinking.

The author examines the relation between Michel Foucault's corpus and Freudian psychoanalysis. He argues that Foucault had a complex and changing relationship to psychoanalysis for two primary reasons: his own psychopathology, personal experience, and expressed desire, and due to an ineluctable contradiction at the heart of psychoanalysis itself. The author examines the history of Foucault's personal and scholarly interest in psychology and psychiatry, tracing the emergence, development, and shift in his thought and work. He then argues that Foucault's critique of psychoanalysis can be extended to the constitution of the Western educated subject, and that Foucault ultimately resolved his personal dilemma in relation to psychoanalysis by rejecting the ‘will to knowledge’ and refusing the notion of a stable and fixed identity.

Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zi zek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English.

The singularity of being -- The rewriting of destiny -- The ethics of the act -- The possibility of the impossible -- The jouissance of the signifier -- The dignity of the thing -- The ethics of sublimation -- The sublimity of love -- Conclusion: the other as face.

The notion of sublimation is essential to Nietzsche and Freud. However, Freud's writings fail to provide a persuasive notion of sublimation. In particular, Freud's writings are confused on the distinction between pathological symptoms and sublimation and on the relation between sublimation and repression. After rehearsing these problems in some detail, it is proposed that a return to Nietzsche allows for a more coherent account of sublimation, its difference from pathological symptoms, and its relation to repression. In summary, on Nietzsche's account, while repression and pathological symptoms involve a disintegration (of the self), sublimation involves integration. The article concludes with a brief consideration of some post-Freudian accounts of sublimation that represent a return to a more Nietzschean approach.

A perennial question of philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis centres on the impact of love in human living, and endeavours to offer definition and explanation of this concept. From the Pre-Socratics, through Plato and Aristotle, to Derrida and Kristeva, philosophical reflections on ‘truth’, ‘meaning’, and subjectivity inevitably involve an exploration of the centrality of love in human experience, its significance as a characteristic of being human, and its response to the question ‘how is one to live’? This essay explores, through the work of a philosopher who is considered notoriously cynical about human nature and its vicissitudes, the question of love from the perspective of its possibility in the realm of human relationships, and thereby examines the potential obstacles to its experience. Through a selected reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the possibility of love is examined with a view to confronting the impediments to its experience – evident in any analysis of the contemporary world.

The Analytic Freud is an important and stimulating corrective to this overlooked but highly significant area. Moving away from the longstanding debate over the scientific status of Freudian theory, The Analytic Freud discusses the implications of Freud for philosophy in four clear sections: Philosophy of Mind Ethics Sexuality Civilization The essays discuss both the problems Freudian theory poses for contemporary philosophy and what philosophy can ask of Freudian theory. An international team of contributors explore the tensions and dialogue between psychoanalysis and philosophical theories on emotion, will, self-deception, sexuality, love, humor, morality and social interaction, demonstrating how productive and mutually enhancing the relationship between philosophy and Freudian theory can be. Essential reading for all who are interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis, The Analytic Freud presents and enriching and timely discussion of Freud and contemporary philosophy.

“Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw” explores Adorno’s ideas about our mediated relationship with nature. The first section of the paper examines the epistemological significance of his thesis about the preponderance of the object while describing the Kantian features in his notion of mediation. Adorno’s conception of nature will also be examined in the context of a review of J. M. Bernstein’s and Fredric Jameson’s attempts to characterize it. The second section of the paper deals with Adorno’s Freudian account of internal nature. While arguing against Joel Whitebook’s view that Adorno needs a concept of sublimation, I contend that Adorno’s genetic account of the relationship between nature and mind enables him to respond to the Freudian injunction to displace the id with the ego with a view to fostering autonomy. In the final section of the paper, problems with Adorno’s ideas about external and internal nature are briefly discussed.

This essay examines the similarities and dissimilarities between Freudian psychoanalysis and the form of analysis outlined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness in relation to the theory of inten- tionality developed by Brentano and Husserl. The principal aim of the paper is to establish a suitable starting point for a dialogue between these two forms of analysis, whose respective terminologies with respect to consciousness and the unconscious appear to cancel one another out.