The influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has extended into nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences—from literature and film studies to anthropology and social work. yet Lacan's major text, Ecrits, continues to perplex and even baffle its readers. In Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop offers a novel approach to Lacan's work based on his own theories of language. Lacan locates truth in the letter rather than in the spirit-in the ways statements are expressed rather than in their (...) intended meaning. Gallop here grapples with six of Lacan's essays from Ecrits: "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " "The Mirror Stage," "The Freudian Thing,'' "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,'' "The Signification of the Phallus," and "The Subversion of the Subject." While other commentators have chosen not to confront Lacan's notoriously problematic style in their discussions of his ideas, Gallop addresses herself directly to the problem and the practice of reading Lacan. She takes her direction from Lacan's view of subjectivity and offers a deeply personal, feminist reading of Ecrits. Concentrating on the relation of desire and interpretation, she opens up the rich implications of Lacan's thought, for psychoanalytic theory, for the act of reading, and for knowledge itself. Forceful and revealing, yet utterly candid about its own areas of uncertainty, Gallop's book will be indispensable to readers of Lacan and to scholars and students who have felt his impact. (shrink)

The Phaedo is acknowledged to be one of Plato's masterpieces, showing him both as a philosopher and as a dramatist at the height of his powers. For its moving account of the execution of Socrates, the Phaedo ranks among the supreme literary achievements of antiquity. It is also a document crucial to the understanding of many ideas deeply ingrained in western culture, and provides one of the best introductions to Plato's thought. This new edition is eminently suitable for readers new (...) to Plato, offering a readable translation which is accessible without the aid of a commentary and assumes no prior knowledge of the ancient Greek world or language. (shrink)

This work is designed to make Aristotle's neglected but fascinating writings on sleep and dreams accessible in translation to modern readers, and to provide a commentary with a contemporary perspective. It considers Aristotle's theory of dreams in historical context, especially in relation to Plato. It also discusses neo-Freudian interpretations of Aristotle and contemporary experimental psychology of dreaming. Aristotle's account of dreaming as a function of the imagination is examined from a philosophical perspective. The work is a revised and corrected version (...) of the North American edition. (shrink)

The purpose is to clarify and explain plato's theory of the forms. discussion on the theory: varieties of paradigmata, image and reality and predicates. the forms of paradigmata fill a wide range of philosophical roles. forms should be spoken of as forms rather then as structures or patterns, sets or universals, fregean concepts or eternal possibilities. (staff).

In this article I reopen some basic problems in the interpretation of Parmenides’ ‘Way of Truth’ familiar to anyone who has wrestled with his poem. The hub of my discussion is fr. B2, in which the goddess formulates two ‘routes of inquiry’, an affirmative one—‘is’, and a negative one—‘is not’. The former she commends, while the latter she rejects as ‘wholly unlearn-able’, on the ground that ‘thou couldst not know what is not, nor couldst thou point it out’.

History, according to Aristotle, relates "things that happen ; whereas poetry's function is to relate the kinds of things that happen—that is, are possible in terms of probability or necessity."1 A generic clause, expressing "the kinds of things that happen" to certain kinds of agents, distinguishes the task of the poet from that of the historian.2 History speaks of "particulars," whereas poetry speaks more of "universals." A historian might assert, for example, that Alcibiades urged the Athenians to invade Sicily, or (...) that he was later exiled, and finally murdered; whereas a poet would use Alcibiades's story to show the kind of person to whom things of that kind are likely or bound to... (shrink)

In replying to my criticism of his interpretation of this passage, Professor H-N. Castañeda has disregarded much of my argument. In particular, he has ignored my contention that a contrast between 'essential’ and ‘accidental’ predication is integral to the wider argument for immortality in which Phaedo 102b-d is embedded. This would remain the case whatever the grammar of 102b-c, and whatever the exact force of πεφυxέναι and τυγχάνει at 102c1-2. Further, Castañeda pays no heed to the difficulty of interpreting Plato's (...) other relational examples in his way, given that no analysis parallel to that of 102b-d is anywhere hinted at for them. Moreover, he disregards the difficulty that several other examples in the nearby context are analysed in terms of the Theory of Forms, and yet are not overtly ‘relational’ in the usual sense at all.Castañeda says that it is ‘clear’ from my own translation of several passages that τυΥχάνει in the Phaedo ‘has nothing to do with accident.’. (shrink)

This book deserves far more attention from philosophers and from the general public than it has so far received. Perhaps it is too much to hope that the hoary old myths about Philosophy having no practical relevance will ever be completely exploded. But if a sizeable number of thinking adults were to read this succinct and readable work, it might go a long way towards their demolition.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making the "One" ImpossibleJane Gallop (bio)The last paragraph of the first chapter of Mother Tongues presents the book's argument. "What I hope to argue in this book," writes Johnson, "is that the plurality of languages and the plurality of sexes are alike in that they both make the 'one' impossible" [25]. While I am not convinced that Mother Tongues actually demonstrates the similarity between the plurality of languages and (...) the plurality of sexes, my reading nonetheless does find its thesis in this sentence. I would say that Johnson's project in this book is to "make the 'one' impossible," that throughout this book, Johnson continually and consistently argues against the "appeal" of "the 'one'"—repeatedly locates herself in, and exhorts us to join her in, resistance to the powerful seductions of "the 'one.'"In the sentence I just quoted, the word "one" is in quotation marks because the word is not quite the proper name for what Johnson is talking about. When I use the phrase "the 'one'" here, as I do in my title ("Making the 'One' Impossible"), and as I will do throughout this paper, the word "one" will always be in quotation marks, scare quotes.In Mother Tongues, "the 'one'" goes by a number of different names. In the last paragraph of the first chapter, for example, where we found our thesis, it is called "universality." Under that guise, we might recognize the politics of this resistance to "the 'one'" (a politics we are, at this point in critical history, all more than ready to climb on board for). Johnson's resistance to "the 'one'" in Mother Tongues, however, usually appears—I'm happy to say—in other, less politic, more perverse guises.The most widespread elaboration of Mother Tongues's resistance to "the 'one'" is through its active interest in the practice of translation. The theory and practice of translation elaborated in this book is one I'd like to call insubordinate translation. At a number of places, Johnson looks at multiple translations of a text along with the original, not in order to determine which is closer to the original, but in order to enlarge the network of meaning. At times, Johnson productively follows meanings which appear in a translation but are not in the original.The first time this occurs is in the first chapter, in a section entitled "Translation." Johnson is looking at two different English translations of Kafka's The Trial: an "old translation" she "happened to have on hand" and "a more recent edition" in which the old translation "had been revised." Studying the first sentence of the novel in the original and the two translations, Johnson seizes on the word traduce, which she finds in the old translation but not the revision and proclaims: "The translation... is thus even better than the original" [16, emphasis added].The next chapter of Mother Tongues gives us a sense of where, theoretically, this insubordination comes from: "the theory that transformed literary studies utterly transformed the practice of translation. Translating Derrida or Lacan became an art in itself" [32]. "An art in itself" suggests a primary creation, not secondary. (We would certainly want to recall here that Johnson herself translated Derrida's Dissemination). [End Page 77]In the third chapter, "The Task of the Translator," we find Johnson comparing an English translation of Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" to the German original. At one point she ponders the associations of "light" in the word lightly, which is translating the German fluchtig, associations that are not in the original. She concludes: "We have no way of talking about these creations ex nihilo of translation" [57]. Like the earlier "an art in itself," the phrase "creations ex nihilo" again makes translation a primary rather than secondary art. We may have "no way of talking about" these creations, but Mother Tongues does talk about them, regularly, throughout the book.The fifth chapter opens with an epigraph from a letter Benjamin wrote to Horkheimer, or rather an English translation of that letter. The conclusion to the first section of the chapter returns to the word apprehend, which appears in this epigraph: "the psychological... (shrink)

Phaedo. As I recall. when these points had been granted him, and it was agreed that each of the forms was something, and that the other things, partaking in them. took the name of the forms themselves, he next asked: ‘If you say that that is so, then whenever you say that Simmias is taller than Socrates but shorter than Phaedo, you mean the, don't you, that both things are in Simmias, tallness and shortness?’.

In the early seventies, American feminist literary criticism had little patience for psychoanalytic interpretation, dismissing it along with other forms of what Mary Ellmann called “phallic criticism.”1 Not that psychoanalytic literary criticism was a specific target of feminist critics, but Freud and his science were viewed by feminism in general as prime perpetrators of patriarchy. If we take Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics2 as the first book of modern feminist criticism, let us remark that she devotes ample space and energy to (...) attacking Freud, not of course as the forerunner of any school of literary criticism, but as a master discourse of our, which it to say masculinist, culture. But, although Freud may generally have been a target for feminism, feminist literary critics of the early seventies expended more of their energy in the attack on New Criticism. The era was, after all, hardly a heyday for American psychoanalytic criticism; formalist modes of reading enjoyed a hegemony in the literary academy in contrast with which psychoanalytic interpretation was a rather weak arm of patriarchy.Since then, there have been two changes in this picture. In the last decade, psychoanalytic criticism has grown in prestige and influence, and a phenomenon we can call psychoanalytic feminist criticism has arisen.3 I would venture that two major factors have contributed to this boom in American psychoanalytic criticism. First, the rise of feminist criticism, in its revolt against formalism, has rehabilitated thematic and psychological criticism, the traditional mainstays of psychoanalytic interpretation. Because feminism has assured the link between psychosexuality and the socio-historical realm, psychoanalysis now linked to major political and cultural questions. Glistening on the horizon of sociopolitical connection, feminism promises to save psychoanalysis from its ahistorical and apolitical doldrums.The second factor that makes psychoanalytic reading a growth industry in the United States is certainly more widely recognized: it is the impact of French post-structuralist thought on the American literary academy. There is, of course, the direct influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis which promotes language to a principal role in the psychoanalytic drama and so naturally offers fertile ground for crossing psychoanalytic and literary concerns. Yet I think, in fact, the wider effect in this country has come from Derridean deconstruction. Although deconstruction is not strictly psychoanalytic, Freud’s prominent place in Derridean associative networks promises a criticism that is, finally, respectably textual and still, in some recognizable way, Freudian. Although this second, foreign factor in the growth of American psychoanalytic criticism seems far away from the realm of homespun feminist criticism, I would content that there is a powerful if indirect connection between the two. I would speculate that the phenomenal spread of deconstruction in American departments of English is in actuality a response to the growth of feminist criticism. At a moment when it was no longer possible to ignore feminist criticism’s challenge to the critical establishment, deconstruction appeared offering a perspective that was not in opposition to but rather beyond feminism, offering to sublate feminism into something supposedly “more radical.” Jane Gallop, professor of humanities at Rice University, is the author of Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski , The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis , and Reading Lacan . She wrote the present essay while awaiting the birth of her first child. (shrink)