In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari saw the difficulty of disentangling the question of Spinoza and, later, of Reich from the very limit of a system of representation by which they mean Oedipus. As A Thousand Plateaus would emphasize later, this limit brings out the question of the desire for democracy (‘democracies are majorities’). It desires Oedipus. In What Is Philosophy?, the limit question (Oedipus) gave way to the concept of a people to come. Fifty years since its publication, (...) class='Hi'>Anti-Oedipus remains a relevant text (apropos of its ‘strategic adversary’ identified by Foucault) against the background of the social pathology of neofascism, populist politics, and the rise of the alt-right and neoconservative movements in recent years. The paper tries to locate this inflexion point where the desire for democracy modulates into the bi-univocal plasticity of Oedipal desire whose dangers people already seem to know. They have unmasked Oedipus’ double impasse and have escaped it. They no longer desire fascism; they desire fascists, neocons, and right-leaning mob rousers. Fifty years since its publication, Anti-Oedipus confronts a type of people who have learned to behave like the enemies of capitalism, too careful not to overload desire and destroy its bi-univocality, its great balancing act on the Body without organs. Incidentally, in ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ Deleuze spoke about a people who know how to ‘surf’ replacing the ‘older sports.’ This applies to people who could become either schizoidal or regress to its more familiar inversion, the simulacra of Oedipus. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por finalidade apresentar como a matéria mitológica do Édipo e da Esfinge teria regulado a consideração das ciências naturais e políticas de filósofos modernos como Bacon, Hobbes e Descartes. A partir de uma consideração da ciência moderna no registro de uma racionalização do mito do Édipo e da Esfinge na filosofia de Bacon, buscaremos mostrar como o pensamento científico moderno poderia ser entendido como um tipo de conhecimento do homem sobre si mesmo e sobre sua própria (...) cultura ancestral. Nesse registro geral de uma modernidade científica entendida como um tipo de racionalização dos mitos, o presente artigo busca mostrar por último de que modo as críticas anti-edipianas de Deleuze e Guattari à modernidade teriam influenciado uma metafísica canibal inaugurada por Viveiros de Castro como crítica ao narcisismo individualista do colonialismo epistemológico e político legado à história da filosofia e à nossa própria cultura científica. Palavras chave: Modernidade, Anti-Édipo, Antropologia filosófica e Metafísicas canibal. Antiedipian criticisms of anthropocentric modernity: a cannibalistic metaphysics devouring machine men. Abstract: This paper seeks to present how the mythological matter of the Oedipus and the Sphinx would have regulated the consideration of the natural and political sciences of modern philosophers such as Bacon, Hobbes and Descartes. Starting from a consideration of modern science in the record of a rationalization of the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx in Bacon's philosophy, the work seeks to show how modern scientific thought could be understood as a type of knowledge of man about himself and about his own ancestral culture. In the record of a scientific modernity understood as a type of rationalization of myths, this paper seeks to show at last how Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal criticisms of modernity seem to have influenced a cannibalistic metaphysics inaugurated by Viveiros de Castro as a critique of narcissism individualist of epistemological and political colonialism bequeathed to the history of philosophy and to our own scientific culture. Keywords: Modernity, Anti-Oedipus, Philosophical Anthropology and Cannibal Metaphysics. Críticas antiedipianas a la modernidad antropocéntrica: una metafísica caníbal que devora a los hombres máquina. Resumen: Este artículo busca presentar cómo la materia mitológica de Edipo y la Esfinge habría regulado la consideración de las ciencias naturales y políticas de filósofos modernos como Bacon, Hobbes y Descartes. Partiendo de una consideración de la ciencia moderna en el registro de una racionalización del mito de Edipo y la Esfinge en la filosofía de Bacon, el trabajo busca mostrar cómo el pensamiento científico moderno podría entenderse como un tipo de conocimiento del hombre sobre sí mismo y sobre los suyos. cultura ancestral. En el registro de una modernidad científica entendida como una especie de racionalización de los mitos, este trabajo busca mostrar finalmente cómo las críticas antiedípicas de la modernidad de Deleuze y Guattari parecen haber influido en una metafísica caníbal inaugurada por Viveiros de Castro como crítica al narcisismo individualista. del colonialismo epistemológico y político legado a la historia de la filosofía y a nuestra propia cultura científica Palabras clave: Modernidad, Anti-Edipo, Antropología Filosófica y Metafísica Caníbal Data de registro: 30/03/2021 Data de aceite: 17/05/2022. (shrink)

The present paper aims to shed light on some post-oedipal moments of the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Going beyond the stereotypical opposition between the oedipal psychoanalysis and the anti-oedipal schizoanalysis, it endeavors to reinvestigate the semiotic nature of theknotenpunktand thesinthomeby applying some Deleuzian and Bakhtinian concepts. Thus, theknotenpunktis described as a grotesque knot bringing together some heterogeneous elements. The involved disparate components establish a rhizomatic multiplicity irreducible to a common determiner. As far as thesinthomeis concerned, it is also illustrated as a (...) grotesque knot quilting the disseminated heterogeneous orders. In contrast to the dominant conception of the symptom with a complex mode of signifying (that is mainly bound to the oedipal topography), theknotenpunktand thesinthomehold a kind of hyper-formative mode of signifying. As a result, the latter may be regarded as pure formators irreducible to a meaning or a certain interpretation. Finally, the paper sets out to analyze and evaluate the relationship between thesinthomeand the foreclosure from a semiotic perspective. Accordingly, thesinthomeis explained as a reply to foreclosure which is specifically a perceptive-imperative (retroactive) contemplation (in the light of law according to the Peircean phaneroscopy) on the rhizomatic multiplicity of psychosis (the case of schizophrenia). (shrink)

Le but de cet article n'est pas de fournir une quelconque interprétation de la pensée de Deleuze ou de fournir des clés de lectures pour comprendre l'anti Oedipe. Plus modestement je tente de fournir un angle d'approche de cet ouvrage. Mon point de départ est le suivant : bien que Deleuze ait rédigé un ouvrage désormais classique sur Hume, ce dernier n'est que rarement cité parmi les sources de l'anti Oedipe. De là, j'ai esquissé quelques rapprochements afin de (...) permettre d'éclairer l'approche deleuzienne de la maladie mentale. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze et Jean-François Lyotard sont deux figures centrales de la pensée française contemporaine. Leur connivence, née dans les années 1970 alors qu'ils enseignent à l'Université expérimentale de Vincennes, procède d'une critique partagée de l'humanisme classique, d'une distance comparable à l'égard du structuralisme, enfin d'une thématisation commune du désir et de la sensibilité. La publication, à deux ans d'intervalle, de L'Anti-Oedipe et d'Economie libidinale confirme cette proximité : les auteurs y soutiennent des positions éthiques et politiques tout aussi intempestives. (...) On aurait pourtant tort de croire que leurs idées relèvent d'une même «philosophie de la différence», expression qui caractérise la seule entreprise de Deleuze. Dès les années 1980, Lyotard et Deleuze ont en effet divergé sur le sens à accorder à la psychanalyse, à l'oeuvre de Wittgenstein ou encore à l'obligation morale. Le propos du présent volume est de mettre à profit quarante années de recul pour confronter à nouveaux frais ces deux représentants de la philosophie française, en restituant l'héritage, l'évolution et le prolongement de leurs pensées respectives. Les contributions ici réunies déploient le large éventail des disciplines que Deleuze et Lyotard ont explorées et discutées. Elles s'intéressent aussi bien à la période de leur plus grande proximité théorique qu'à l'apparition des différends les opposant, au moment même de l'avènement, chez Lyotard, du concept de «différend». (shrink)

La quatrième de couverture indique : Deleuze et Guattari étaient des lecteurs sans pareils. C'est la raison pour laquelle Alain Jugnon les lit dans ce livre ; plus précisément, il lit avec eux Artaud et Kafka, Lacan et Klossowski, Büchner et Nietzsche. N'ont-ils pas assez lu Lautréamont ; il les lit pour eux, comme eux l'auraient lu, l'ajoutant à leurs lectures, avec les outils qu'ils ont créés pour lire. Nul mieux qu'Alain Jugnon n'articule les lectures nécessaires à la défaite de (...) ce monde-ci et au surgissement d'un monde transformé : "Deleuze et Guattari ont commencé à dire dans leur livre premier, L'Anti-Oedipe : il n'y a plus de dialectique à penser ou bien d'histoires à raconter, mais il y aura des machines capitalistes et des machines désirantes, des guerres des sexes et des guerres des races, des combats de rue et des révolutions de palais, il y aura tout ça et plus encore, qui fera une bible humaine à revendre ou bien une philosophie populaire à inventer pour demain." (A.J.). (shrink)

Lettres et autres textes est le troisième et dernier volume des textes posthumes de Gilles Deleuze, publié à l’occasion du vingtième anniversaire de sa disparition. Il regroupe de nombreuses lettres adressées à ses contemporains (Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, François Châtelet ou Clément Rosset). Particulièrement importantes à cet égard sont les lettres adressées à Felix Guattari, qui constituent un témoignage irremplaçable sur leur "travail à deux", de L’Anti-Oedipe jusqu’à Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? On y retrouve aussi des lettres plus tardives (...) adressées à des étudiants qui l’interrogent sur son oeuvre et lui permettent de l’éclairer d’un regard nouveau. Y figurent ensuite un ensemble de textes introuvables ou inédits, comme certains essais de jeunesse, quelques dessins insolites, ou un long entretien de 1973 sur L’Anti-Oedipe avec Guattari. (shrink)

This work examines the impoverished image of life presupposed by the legacy of transcendent and representational thinking that continues to frame the limits of curricular thought. Analyzing the ways in which modern institutions colonize desire and overdetermine the life of its subject, this book draws upon the anti- Oedipal philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, revolutionary artistic practice, and an unorthodox curriculum genealogy to rethink the pedagogical project as a task of concept creation for the liberation of life and instantiation of (...) a people yet to come . This book invites academics, artists, and graduate students to engage the contemporary struggles of curriculum theory, educational philosophy, and pedagogical practice with a new set of conceptual tools for thinking radical difference. (shrink)

This paper will articulate an underappreciated side of the psychoanalytical Deleuze: his relation to Melanie Klein, particularly as it appears in The Logic of Sense. Deleuze's engagement with Klein largely follows his familiar strategy of re-reading a thinker off of a twist in one or two of that thinker's key concepts. With Klein, this twist involves re-reading her story of psychic development on the basis of disjunction rather than negation, so that the psychic surface that emerges generates a persistent non-correspondence (...) between self and other and between concept and thing. Deleuze thereby makes Klein a central figure in his ontology of sense and his analysis of how the physical surface of bodies generates a metaphysical surface of thought. However, Deleuze's ultimate turn is a Nietzschean one towards overcoming, the thought of eternal return, and the demolition of the Oedipal Law. As this final turn makes clear, even in his early writings that engaged more directly and affirmatively with psychoanalytical thought, Deleuze was already on an anti-Oedipal path. (shrink)

Under the pretext of being « anti-Oedipal », Guattari has been portrayed as an enemy of psychoanalysis. His project, however, is antinomical to this reputation. Rather than polemics and denunciation, he delighted in invention and promotion of new ideas. His work and his activism attempted to give its full scope to the Freudian invention of an unconscious desire : he tried to unfold its implication in the therapeutic field, in philosophical thinking and in revolutionary action.

L'hypothèse que l'on proposera ici est que le dispositif du «médecin de la civilisation» monté par Deleuze en 1962 dans sa lecture de Nietzsche, loin de pouvoir être généralisé comme tel (comme si la suite de l'oeuvre n'en était que l'application différée ou même la continuation par d'autres moyens), n'y est effectivement agissant qu'à force de décaler l'énonciation deleuzienne par rapport à l'instance de la philosophie clinique qu'il définit. Et que pour cette raison, la figure du philosophe médecin de la (...) civilisation permet d'autant mieux de problématiser certaines difficultés que rencontre la tâche d'une symptomatologie des modes collectifs d'existence. À prendre cette tâche au sérieux, j'avancerai enfin que le déplacement du dispositif nietzschéen de part et d'autre de la rencontre avec Guattari et de L'Anti-OEdipe, trouve un point de résolution, ou en tout cas de cohérence et d'équilibre, dans la détermination d'une pratique analytique sui generis, celle-là même que Guattari nommera «schizo-analyse», et plus spécifiquement dans le concept d'agencement qui, de L'Anti-OEdipe à Mille plateaux, en supportera de plus en plus clairement les coordonnées propres. (shrink)

Cohle is at ease with his lack, and his ease enables him to remain fixated on the desire of the other. This is precisely what makes Cohle the better detective, indeed the True Detective. It is because Cohle himself is unable to experience guilt— the true sign of any noir hero. Gilles Deleuze argues that the core structure of the detective's search for truth follows an Oedipal trajectory. Sophocles' classic myth of Oedipus presents the basic structure of the detective genre. (...) Cohle develops a philosophy, specifically what is referred to as anti‐natalism, or the belief that human beings should not procreate. The Lacanian philosopher Alenka Zupancic points out that Oedipus was the first noir hero precisely because in Oedipus the hero is also the villain— the two become indistinguishable. Cohle can read the signs all around him, however he has surpassed Oedipus. The ending of season one represents the ending of Cohle's trajectory of a psychotic subject. (shrink)

Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity are reinscribed but also (...) reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism ed. by Janae Sholtz and Cheri CarrJami Weinstein (bio)Janae Sholtz and Cheri Carr, eds., Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2019, 304 pp., ISBN 978-1-3500-8042-3Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism is a timely, ambitious, and wonderfully diverse collection of essays that aims to forge a new feminist methodology. Described as a “delirium” with the potential to “unleash new (...) ideas, new desires, and new imaginings” (Sholtz and Carr, 1), the editors adopt Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis as the basis for this methodology. They argue that this juxtaposition of feminist theory and schizoanalysis might synthesize and advance research on notions like becoming-woman, rhizomatics, deterritorialization, assemblage, immanence, and material vitalism (2) that have propelled feminist work on Deleuze and Guattari over the last several decades. Moreover, in the volume’s critical reevaluation of schizoanalysis, it strives to reimagine “the philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, and political” (1) by incorporating the evolution of feminist thought since Deleuze and Guattari’s time. The volume is, indeed, important reading for feminist continental philosophers in search of fruitful applications of Deleuzo-Guattarian thought to a wide, intersectional diversity of feminist theory.Citing Buchanan and Colebrook’s Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000) as the origin of a productive and less skeptical feminist engagement with their work, the volume aims to advance a new generation of feminist Deleuzo-Guattarian thought that departs from a radically heterogeneous, schizoanalytic foundation [End Page 192] asking, “what can philosophical concepts do?” (2). The editors also mention the recent uptake of schizoanalysis as a methodology by reference to the Schizoanalytic Applications series in which the volume is published. There, its application “to contemporary issues and uses in critically oriented and socially engaged philosophical approaches” (4) is explored in a variety of otherwise targeted collections. They suggest that the relevance of schizoanalytic methodology “to feminist theory can be similarly situated in providing a new lens for critical and social engagement,” which the volume explores under the guise of discovering what this “new encounter” between feminism and schizoanalysis “might yield” (4). Thus, the collection is a dual-pronged, dynamic investigation, where one trajectory investigates the potentials for forging a feminist schizoanalytic framework and the other considers the ways that feminism might nuance or reshape the contours of schizoanalysis that were established across Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works (1).Furthermore, the editors cite the publication of Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013) as additional inspiration. And it is, indeed, in part from Guattari’s visionary work that the joint project with Deleuze—including the articulations of schizoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, and A Thousand Plateaus— came into being (see: Guattari 2006). As Stephane Nadaud explains, their collaboration was designed to “counter... despotic, solitary enunciation—with their own collective one,” which transcends the Cartesian “unity of our ego—the famous I that thinks, and therefore... the cogito” (Guattari 2006, 19). It is, thus, curious that the volume’s title omits Guattari’s name (though other books in the series include it) and that contributors make scarce reference to his individual work. For, it is the very process of their collaboration, which entails their essential duality and the schizoanalytic becoming-imperceptible of their respective individualities, that becomes an archetype for schizoanalytic praxis.The aforementioned delirium, which is at the heart of schizoanalysis, originates from the split or break implied by the “schizo,” meaning that schizoanalysis seeks to locate then mobilize these breaks toward the creation of delirious, impersonal subjectivities. Merging desire and delirium, which he considers “in a deep sense” indistinguishable, Deleuze emphasizes that “desire-delirium is by its nature a libidinal investment of an entire historical milieu, of an entire social environment” (2004, 275). The schizoanalysis process, according to the editors, thus aspires to be a liberatory short-circuit of the rigidly enclosed “Oedipal constraints on the unconscious,” which, in turn, decouples “the unconscious libidinal investment[s]... from the preconscious investments of class and interest” (Shultz and Carr, 4). This echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known invocation: “Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction— a whole scouring of the unconscious, a... (shrink)

This essay draws a parallel between Macaulay’s stint as the “lawgiver” of India under the East India Company and the Anglicists-Orientalists debate that he brought to a decisive end on the one hand and on the other the culture/canon wars of the 1980s, and the neoconservative ascendancy that followed it and remained influential during the second Iraq War. Although neo-conservativism’s fierce resistance to a more inclusive liberal arts curriculum in the 1980s and its towering role during the militarization of the (...) US foreign policy in the last decade has established it as the most Eurocentric and logocentric intellectual movement at present, post-colonial studies is yet to take a serious reckoning of this ideological movement. This essay tries to fill this lacuna with an attempt to first establish Macaulayite Whiggism as a precursor of the American neo-conservatism and then to focus on Macaulay’s oedipal hostility with Sir William Temple, who was not just the most accomplished statesman of English Restoration Era (that Macaulay himself considered the golden period of English history and became its historian laureate), but also stood on the exact opposite pole of Macaulay’s Whiggish Eurocentrism. Finally, the essay will briefly consider Temple’s little-known essay “On the Ancient and Modern Learning” and its genuine and uniquely anti-logocentric outlook on non-European cultures and their histories. (shrink)

In Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus volumes, revolution, social transformation, and the possibility of a new future are all linked to desire: minimally, to the freeing of desire from the false refuges of Oedipalization and its constructs of molar sexuality. Everywhere, they seek to uncover the potential of desire, sexuality, and love, asking us to consider that what we take to be the most personal is impersonal, how the most intimate is the collective and social. Thus, it calls us to (...) rethink our material and affective relations and reconceptualize the sphere of intimacy itself. I develop the concepts of delirium and revolutionary love, suggesting that we interpret these as perpetual processes of transformation and conjugation, initiating relations of intimacy and advocate for more nuanced, complex forms of subjectivity and to become more sensitive to the varying relational complexes within a given space. Revolutionary love gains its newness from both the extension of Deleuzian desire and from its return to several heritages of feminisms which have themselves been marginalized in the forward sweep of new materialist and posthumanist discussions. The point is to sharpen our focus on the conditions that produce certain social bodies, certain kinds of consciousness, and certain molar identities—not to deny the realities of the socius or reject subjectivity, but to move from a majoritarian to a minoritarian politics that widens our purview of what forces and desires exist within these spaces so that we may transform and build less fascistic, more attuned relational complexes. (shrink)

In a comment on concupscentia, Rahner says that while we may properly draw a distinction between “the spiritual and the sensitive as between two really distinct powers of man,” we must recognize that no human power can be conceived as a “thing.” Given that caution, what would Rahner think of the Freudian “Id”—a word which Freud chose to characterize the nonhuman “it” (thing) at the base of human motivation? Not surprisingly, Rahner says that with the strength of faith we can (...) see in the unconscious “the power of the Holy Ghost.”The essay at hand turns, then, to a significant anti-Freudian theorist, Julia Kristeva, who has developed an extended analysis of the meaningful structures of the psyche prior to the development of self-consciousness in the standard Freudian Oedipal scenario. In contrast to the law of the “castrating” Father who establishes the world of consciousness, of self and other: abstract self-consciousness and abstract signigcation, Kristeva holds out the realm of the Mother in which self andother are “one.” The paradigm of the realm of the Mother is not separation of self and other, but the fusion of self and other in the event of pregnancy. Kristeva’s metaphor of pregnancy is used as a comparison to the relation of God and the human. Prior to the thematic, self-conscious sense of self, there is an ontological relation of God and the human which is the foundation of self.Kristeva’ s realm of the mother constitutes a world of “body language.” The essay concludes with a discussion of the “positivity” of sexuality as body language. In so far as sex leads one back into the body, into “the sensitive” it opens up a realm of meaning that is fatally absent from the abstract self-consciousness produced by the Law of the Father. (shrink)

"Moses and Monotheism" is Freud's last book on religion. It was published in its entirety only after his flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Moses is perhaps Freud's most controversial book on religion. It is both an apology and a curse. It is a critique of traditional Judaism (by way of an Oedipal analysis of a deified Moses), a defence of a modern humanistic Judaism (a Judaism of moral and intellectual values), and a bitter critique of Christianity (a religion not of the (...) Father but of the sons, a failed religion, which expresses its failure in anti-Semitism). A defiant and rebellious book, one might say, one in which an old man rises to meet his fate and does so with surprising wilfulness and vigour. But Moses also reveals a dogmatic Freud defending a critique of religion that is intellectually flawed and politically misdirected. (shrink)

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)

In a comment on concupscentia, Rahner says that while we may properly draw a distinction between “the spiritual and the sensitive as between two really distinct powers of man,” we must recognize that no human power can be conceived as a “thing.” Given that caution, what would Rahner think of the Freudian “Id”—a word which Freud chose to characterize the nonhuman “it” (thing) at the base of human motivation? Not surprisingly, Rahner says that with the strength of faith we can (...) see in the unconscious “the power of the Holy Ghost.”The essay at hand turns, then, to a significant anti-Freudian theorist, Julia Kristeva, who has developed an extended analysis of the meaningful structures of the psyche prior to the development of self-consciousness in the standard Freudian Oedipal scenario. In contrast to the law of the “castrating” Father who establishes the world of consciousness, of self and other: abstract self-consciousness and abstract signigcation, Kristeva holds out the realm of the Mother in which self andother are “one.” The paradigm of the realm of the Mother is not separation of self and other, but the fusion of self and other in the event of pregnancy. Kristeva’s metaphor of pregnancy is used as a comparison to the relation of God and the human. Prior to the thematic, self-conscious sense of self, there is an ontological relation of God and the human which is the foundation of self.Kristeva’ s realm of the mother constitutes a world of “body language.” The essay concludes with a discussion of the “positivity” of sexuality as body language. In so far as sex leads one back into the body, into “the sensitive” it opens up a realm of meaning that is fatally absent from the abstract self-consciousness produced by the Law of the Father. (shrink)

The rise and fall of the historian of British India -- A classical education -- History, philosophy, and history -- Induction and deduction -- Rational persuasion -- Good government.

This book explores various connections of John Stuart Mill's thought to ancient Greek philosophy primarily in relation to his conception of happiness. It argues that a better understanding of Mill's background in ancient Greek thought and his reading(s) of Plato's dialogues leads to innovative interpretations of his moral and political thought.

Contemporary sociosemiotics is a way to transcend borderlines between trends inside semiotics, and also other disciplines. Whereas semiotics has been considered as an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence, sociosemiotics can point directions at transdisciplinary research. The present article will try toconjoin the structural and the processual views on culture and society, binding them together with the notion of signification. The signification of space willillustrate the dynamic between both cultures and metacultures, and cultural mainstreams and subcultures. This paper pays attention (...) to the practice of sociocultural semiotisation of space and territorialisation by diverse examples and different sociocultural levels that imply semiotic cooperation between several members of groups that can be characterised as socii. We analyse territorialisation by graffiti, by furnishing spatial environment through artistic manners, by shaping the semiotic essence of cities through naming, renaming and translating street names, by pinning and structuring territories with monuments, by landmarking and mapping cultural space through individualisation of cities. We will see how principles of semiotisation of space are valid on different levels (individual and social, formal and informal, democratic and hegemonic, cultural and subcultural) and how these principles form a transdisciplinary object of study as ‘semiotisation of space’, and how space can be regarded as a genuinely transdisciplinary research object. Individual, culture, and society are connected in such an object both as constituents and as a background of study. (shrink)

The article views the development of the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school from the analysis of texts to the study of spatial entities (semiosphere being most well known of them). It comes to light that ‘culture’ and ‘space’ have been such notions in Tartu–Moscow School to which, for instance, the ‘semiosphere’ does not add much. There are studied possibilities to join Uexküll’s and Lotman’s basic concepts (as certain grounds of Estonian semiotics) with Tartu–Moscow School’s treatment of culture and space through the notion (...) of ‘semiotic subject’. Such an approach allows to see transdisciplinarity, which has come to issue only during the last decade, already in the first conceptions of Tartu–Moscow School where transdisciplinarity revealed itself in the symbiotic use of ‘culture’ and ‘space’. (shrink)

This chapter argues that two distinct, yet connected, contexts – Mill's “mental crisis” and his task as a “Logician” – led to the formation of two arguments on the value of art. On one hand, Mill argued that aesthetic cultivation was important as an end in itself. Excellence was to be pursued disinterestedly as part of a beautiful life. On the other, Mill argued aesthetic cultivation was important as a means to the utilitarian end – strengthening the social sympathies made (...) social happiness attainable. The first argument highlights what Mill thought was missing from the theory of his utilitarian predecessors, while the second brought Mill closer to this tradition, rather than moving him further away from it. (shrink)

James Mill'sHistory of British India(1817) made a rather strange claim: first-hand experience of India was not vital in writing a history – potentially, it led to false ideas about its subject-matter: eyewitnesses are susceptible to bias. The historian was thus to perform his task as a judge: sifting through various testimonies to obtain a ‘more perfect’ conception of the whole than those who witnessed its various parts. Although strange, Mill's claim does not bewilder his readers: after all, Mill was a (...) ‘militant’ exponent of theorizing utilitarianism. I argue that such a reading of Mill's method is injudiciously restrictive. Not only did Mill draw on well-known methodological concerns in contemporary historiographical practice, not necessarily linked with Jeremy Bentham or the Scottish theoretical historiography, but he also seemed to adopt the vocabulary of forensic rhetoric, making his claim that his was a ‘judging’ history more literal than it has been supposed. (shrink)

Summary John Stuart Mill's classic tale of disillusionment from a ‘narrow creed’, an overt as much as a covert theme of his Autobiography (London, 1873), has for many years served as a guide to the search for the causes and sources of his ‘enlargement-of-the-utilitarian-creed’ project. As a result, in analyses of Mill's mature views, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and friends—commonly take centre stage in terms of influence, whereas John's father—James Mill—is reduced either to a supernumerary or a villain in the last act (...) of John's intellectual development. However, students of Mill's works should not take at face value the story presented in Autobiography. Mill's own emphasis on the role of his ‘new influences’ has led scholars to disregard the role of his ‘old influences’ in his attempt to create a broader theory of living—one which takes into account both the intellectual and the emotional capacities of individuals. A close look at key aspects of John Stuart Mill's ‘enlargement project’ suggests that James Mill may have played a more positive role than is usually acknowledged. A way into the intellectual affinity of the two Mills is the person they both kept returning to for guidance and inspiration throughout their lives: Plato. (shrink)

It seems that eudaimonistic reconstructions of John Stuart Mill's conception of happiness have fallen prey to what they thought Mill should have done with regard to the role of pleasure in his notion of happiness. Insisting that utility and eudaimonia make conflicting claims, something which mirrors Mill's ‘conflicting loyalties’, they downgrade pleasure to just one of the ingredients of happiness. However, a closer look at Mill's intellectual development suggests otherwise. By focusing on Mill's radical background, this paper argues that pleasure (...) retains a central role in his conception of happiness – even from a eudaimonistic point of view. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill considered his A System of Logic , first published in 1843, the methodological foundation and intellectual groundwork of his later works in ethical, social, and political theory. Yet no book has attempted in the past to engage with the most important aspects of Mill's Logic . This volume brings together leading scholars to elucidate the key themes of this influential work, looking at such topics as his philosophy of language and mathematics, his view on logic, induction and (...) deduction, free will, argumentation, ethology and psychology, as well as his account of normativity, kinds of pleasure, philosophical and political method and the "Art of Life.". (shrink)

In the past decade, research on the dark triad of personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) has demonstrated a strong relationship to a number of socially aversive moral judgments such as sacrificial utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas. This study widens the scope of this research program and investigates the association between dark triad personality traits and anti-natalist views, i.e., views holding that procreation is morally wrong. The results of this study indicate that the dark triad personality traits of Machiavellianism and (...) psychopathy are strongly associated with anti-natalist views. Further, depression is found to be both standing independently in a relationship with anti-natalist views as well as functioning as a mediator in the relationships between Machiavellianism/psychopathy and anti-natalist views. This pattern was replicated in a follow-up study. These findings add to the literature on dark triad personality traits and their relationship to moral judgments, suggesting that personality and mood play a substantive part in variation in anti-natalist views in a lay population. (shrink)

While anti-exceptionalism about logic is now a popular topic within the philosophy of logic, there’s still a lack of clarity over what the proposal amounts to. currently, it is most common to conceive of AEL as the proposal that logic is continuous with the sciences. Yet, as we show here, this conception of AEL is unhelpful due to both its lack of precision, and its distortion of the current debates. Rather, AEL is better understood as the rejection of certain (...) traditional properties of logic. The picture that results is not of one singular position, but rather a cluster of often connected positions with distinct motivations, understood in terms of their rejection of clusters of the various traditional properties. In order to show the fruitfulness of this new conception of AEL, we distinguish between two prominent versions of the position, metaphysical and epistemological AEL, and show how the two positions need not stand or fall together. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 1, Page 204-207, January 2012.

Contemporary sociosemiotics is a way to transcend borderlines between trends inside semiotics, and also other disciplines. Whereas semiotics has been considered as an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence, sociosemiotics can point directions at transdisciplinary research. The present article will try to conjoin the structural and the processual views on culture and society, binding them together with the notion of signification. The signification of space will illustrate the dynamic between both cultures and metacultures, and cultural mainstreams and subcultures. This paper (...) pays attention to the practice of sociocultural semiotisation of space and territorialisation by diverse examples and different sociocultural levels that imply semiotic cooperation between several members of groups that can be characterised as socii. We analyse territorialisation by graffiti, by furnishing spatial environment through artistic manners, by shaping the semiotic essence of cities through naming, renaming and translating street names, by pinning and structuring territories with monuments, by landmarking and mapping cultural space through individualisation of cities. We will see how principles of semiotisation of space are valid on different levels and how these principles form a transdisciplinary object of study as ‘semiotisation of space’, and how space can be regarded as a genuinely transdisciplinary research object. Individual, culture, and society are connected in such an object both as constituents and as a background of study. (shrink)