This essays argues that Freud’s vision of the rule of law may be worthwhile pondering by legal scholars. It can heighten awareness of its unconscious dimensions and point to a variety of ways in which the law functions as part of culture or civilization, rather than as a system with its own rules. The first two parts of the essay seek to reconstruct Freud’s notion of the rule of law as a dialectical or paradoxical civilizatory force, restraining the passions even (...) though they drive it. These two parts retrace Freud’s genealogy of the law’s prehistoric origins and unconscious dynamics, which can be found in Totem and Taboo and, in summary form, in Moses and Monotheism. Then, the third section critically assesses the problems and limitations of some of the uses legal scholars made of Freud’s genealogy. Finally, the essay returns to the intellectual context of Freud’s conception of the rule of law, concluding with the claim that a Freudian perspective implies, in fact, that legal studies should be conceived as cultural studies. (shrink)

Statistics are key elements of contemporary life. They figure prominently in the media, in political discourse, and in daily conversations. They also weigh heavily within the economic and political spheres of modern societies. Yet, the study of statistics in the public sphere has been neglected by social scientists in favor of a focus on their production and history. This article remedies this lacuna by focusing on the public life of statistics. Through a case study of a financial indicator—country risk—that exhibited (...) a rich public life in Argentina in 2001, it argues that statistics are not simply transparent fragments of information, but rich symbols and collective representations able to condense multiple meanings and generate deep emotional reactions. Using in-depth interviews, newspaper covers, headlines, and leads, cartoons and archival materials, this article shows that country risk became a powerful collective representation and introduces a new concept, the fact-totem, to make visible the cultural life of statistics. A fact-totem is a statistic with high media presence that captures the imagination of diverse publics and becomes articulated with basic identity narratives of a collectivity. This article begins to elaborate dramatic dimensions of statistics in public. (shrink)

The author interprets idolatry, totemism, sacrilege and taboo through her theory of sexual difference and her study of Eastern spirituality. She argues that the taboo on spirituality in Western culture has cancelled difference, resulting in our current forms of idolatry. Preserving difference, however, would allow the transcendence of the human other to exist. The task of learning to respect difference is central to human spirituality and spiritual progression. The article is a translation of “La transcendance de l’autre” in Autour d’idôlatrie: (...) figures actuelles de pouvoir et de domination, Ed. Bernard Van Meenen, Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels: 2003. (shrink)

Totemic myths are one of the most common types of myth-making activity of human tribal society. At the same time, they are one of the types of myths that have previously fallen into view of ethnographic researchers, psychologists and psychiatrists, philosophers and literary critics.

Deconstructing Azawad -- The plundering of Mali, past and present -- The African trace -- The Sahelian specter -- The duty of violence -- Nyama, fratricide, and reconciliation -- What is to be done? -- Zongo, Sankara, and the Burkinabe revolution.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Argues that critical comments appended to early printed editions of Petrarch’s Rime sparse inflected the reception and understanding of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in Renaissance Europe.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 216 Seiten: 225-248.

In diesem Beitrag geht es um die Betrachtung des SARS-CoV-2-Virus als machtvolles Naturphänomen aus der Sicht einer phylogenetisch überformten Kultur und ihrer Wirksamkeit. Ausgangspunkt dieser Zuwendung ist die These, dass Phänomene des Umgangs mit dem SARS-CoV-2-Virus als Aktivitäten eines affektiven Symbolisierungsprozesses betrachtet werden können, also ähnlich jenen für ein Totem. Der Text sucht nach Spuren dieses Prozesses, registriert Eindrücke und Abdrücke im Kontext des Virus und des Totems. Daraus ergeben sich Annäherungen, Überblendungen, Abweichungen und Differenzen im Hinblick auf den (...) Pandemie-Diskurs. Der Beitrag schraffiert somit Grauzonen, die Bild und Begriff des Totems nicht starr justieren, sondern als Suchbild offenhalten. Veränderungen sollen sich auf diese Weise erkennen lassen und zu einem prozessualen Verständnis von Totem und Pandemie beitragen. Dies wird an zwei Beispielen erläutert. Beispiel (1) fragt nach der Alltagsbezeichnung Corona im Insgesamt des Pandemiegeschehens. Hier wird der Mensch als homo narrator herausgestellt, der nach Sprechweisen sucht, die sein Verhältnis zur Natur (-geschichte) und ihrer Wechselwirkung auf die Kultur (-geschichte) adäquat, d.h. abstrahierend und anschaulich auszudrücken vermögen. In Anerkennung der Grenzen dieses Ansinnens thematisiert Beispiel (2) die Abbildungspraxis mit ihren symbolischen Ausprägungen. Aus den Überschneidungen und Abweichungen mit totemistischen Praktiken werden neue performative Ausprägungen erkennbar. (shrink)

A close examination of the relationship between media, art, and the "Electra complex" The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra is a philosophy of "the girl" as a model of contemporary transgressive subjectivity. Elisabeth von Samsonow asserts that focusing on the girl's escape from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art. Presenting an interpretation of contemporary technics, Anti-Electra argues that technology today encompasses Electra's gadgets and toys. According to (...) von Samsonow, satellite drive technologies such as wireless telephones, WLAN, and GPS echo the "preoedipal constellation" that the girl specializes in. And with the help of the girl, the cartography of overlapping zones between humankind and animals, as well as between humankind and apparatuses, is redesigned through what the book holds as a "radical totemism." Anti-Electra ultimately offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society. (shrink)

With the upsurge in various forms of religion, especially dogmatic forms that kill in the name of good versus evil, there is an urgent need for intellectuals to acknowledge and analyze the role of religion in contemporary culture and politics. If there is to be any hope for peace, we need to understand how and why religion becomes the justification for violence. In a world where religious intolerance is growing, and the divide between the secular and the religious seems to (...) be expanding, Julia Kristeva’s writings bridge the gap and once again provide a path where others have seen only an impasse. Her approach is unique in its insistent attempt to understand the violence both contained and unleashed by religion. Moreover, she rearticulates a notion of the sacred apart from religious dogmatism, a sense of the sacred that is precisely lacking in fundamentalism. (shrink)

Wolf Totem is not a novel which advocates ‘molar’ wolf characteristics such as violence, brutality and bloodthirstiness, and ‘molar’ wolf laws such as the law of the jungle and the law of profiting at others’ expense, but a novel which reveals to readers a brand new life experience, different affects possessed by the ‘molecular’ wolf, and the becoming-wolf of human beings. Becoming-wolf is not to imitate the above-mentioned characteristics of the ‘molar’ wolf, but to see or imagine what affects (...) the ‘molecular’ wolf has, and make the life force or the assumed life force possessed by the ‘molecular’ wolf transverse a person, so that he or she can also have those affects. Becoming-wolf is to find a line of flight between man and wolf, to get rid of all the restraints imposed by the Confucian culture on the law-abiding, abjectly obedient people, and thus regaining the force of the ‘impersonal, inorganic’ life, so as to become different by endless desiring productions, and enhance mankind's power. (shrink)

While the motif of the double serves a prominent role in Freud’s writings from early on, this essay is an examination of the determinative power of the double in two key texts, texts in which specific, new sets doubles emerge for the first time in Freud’s career. Totem and Taboo features a double that manifests itself primarily in the form of ambivalence. Beyond the Pleasure Principle features a double that manifests itself primarily in the form of a very peculiar (...) conflict that also entails complicity. (shrink)

After reading the research of Mexican anthropologists concerning the possible retention of traditional indigenous African beliefs in contemporary Mexican communities of African descent, I interviewed women of the region who migrated to Atlanta, Georgia about their spiritual beliefs and practices. I was surprised by the similarities in their reports to those recorded by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, who worked in Mexico over 60 years ago. I traveled to the town of Chautengo in coastal Guerrero state in 2005 to talk with women (...) about their beliefs, especially those that relate to the existence of a relationship between humans and animal-tonos. The human–animal-tono relationship exemplifies a belief in an intimate relationship between humans and totem animals. The well-being of the human partner depends upon the well-being of the animal. Keeping the human–animal relationship balanced is key in the conceptualization of illness and informs related healing practices. I present an interview with a woman from Chautengo with an interpretation that exemplifies the persistence of ideas related to human–animal relationships that are possibly informed by traditional indigenous African cosmologies, brought by enslaved Africans over 500 years ago, and have been archetypally preserved in isolated communities along the Pacific coast of Mexico. (shrink)

Avec Totem et tabou, Freud entame la première démarche majeure d’interprétation psychanalytique de données ethnographiques, le conduisant en particulier à situer le complexe d’Œdipe au fondement des premières institutions sociales et à repérer l’action de processus inconscients dans leur élaboration. De plus, en posant l’universalité du complexe d’Œdipe tant psychique que culturelle, il réalise une véritable effraction dans le champ d’investigation des anthropologues, suscitant chez eux des réactions aussi violentes que variées. C’est cette histoire souvent faite de méconnaissance, de (...) défiance et de malentendus entre la psychanalyse et l’anthropologie — ces deux sciences de l’homme toutes deux nées au XIXe siècle — que relate Éric Smadja. Après avoir exposé les conditions épistémologiques et historiques d’instauration de ce débat conflictuel, l’auteur le développe suivant un fil chronologique qui l’amène à explorer ses déterminants et ses enjeux, mais aussi les caractéristiques de ces deux disciplines. Se dévoile alors un moment de l’histoire des idées. (shrink)

Totemic unity as key to community in thought and action -- Myth : the emergence of diversity within unity -- The individual in the Greek polis -- The synthesis of personal uniqueness and social unity in Christian and Islamic thought -- Modern alienation of individuals and society -- Opening a new paradigm for civil society and social harmony : a contemporary metaphysics of freedom -- The diversified unity of a global whole.

One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open (...) an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2 1. See Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson et al., pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac.2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question Juive, Dominique O. Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose d’abandon, as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, which received an American Book Award. (shrink)

The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his Totem and Taboo and discussing his often neglected vision of language.

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would (...) be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (shrink)

Hésitation vaccinale, refus de la 5G, théories du complot suscitent de nombreuses lamentations sur la montée de l'irrationalité et la perte de confiance dans la communauté scientifique. Pour y faire face, certains continuent d'en appeler à l'autorité de la science et des 'faits' comme à des totems. Cet affrontement rend aveugle aux problèmes inhérents à la fabrication des savoirs, et sourd aux préoccupations des publics concernés. Du changement climatique à la pandémie de Covid, les auteurs analysent les récentes controverses et (...) proposent ainsi une réflexion sur les pratiques de recherche et d'expertise en temps de crise. En donnant des clés pour repenser les rapports entre sciences, industrie et démocratie, cet essai salvateur plaide pour une transformation de la méfiance généralisée en une défiance exigeante, seule capable d'activer de nouveaux modes de production et de réception des sciences en société"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)