In this book, Moati systematically replays the historical encounter between Austin, Derrida, and Searle and the disruption that caused the lasting break between Anglo-American language philosophy and continental traditions of phenomenology ...

This paper praises Martin Hägglund for his general take on Derrida, while objecting to a certain rigidity in the use of the concept of survival. This concept allowed Hägglund to reject the temptation of a ‘religious’ Derrida in Radical Atheism, but in Dying for Time, it leads to a hurried reading of psychoanalysis. My objections revolve around several forms: the role of gods for Plato and Greek thought; the reductive reading of Diotima's speech in the Sympoisum, and an all too (...) rapid rejection of the idea of the Todestrieb in Freud and Lacan. I go back to Derrida's reading of Freud in The Postcard to point out that he too had misread Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Finally, I argue that there can be something like a non-proper or improper immortality. (shrink)

This article discusses Alfred Jarry as a precursor of French modernism. With a particular focus on Messaline, Roman de l’ancienne Rome and Le Surmâle, Roman moderne, I analyse the subtle ways in which the past and the future are intertwined and Jarry’s philosophy of sexual excess. In both novels, the main characters seek a paroxysmal erotic pleasure from which they die after reaching world records in sex-making. Read together, the novels work to create a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity symbolically (...) represented, in modernism, by the speeding bicycle. In both novels, sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into a rigid phallus, underlying which is the fantasy of bisexualism. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Jean-Michel Rabaté takes Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, studying in detail Freud's integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his myriad theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Rabaté subsequently surveys other theoreticians such as Wilfred Bion, Marie Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. This Introduction is organized thematically, examining in detail important terms like deferred action, fantasy, (...) hysteria, paranoia, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. Using examples from Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare to Sophie Calle and Yann Martel, Rabaté demonstrates that the psychoanalytic approach to literature, despite its erstwhile controversy, has recently reemerged as a dynamic method of interpretation. (shrink)

Starting from the various ways in which the name of James Joyce is evoked in Cixous's critical books and essays, I sketch her unique position as a writer between psychoanalysis and philosophy. If James Joyce's last name can be translated as ‘Freud’ in German, if his first name can be variously Jim, James or even Jacques, then we may translate him into French as Jacques Joyeux. Taking my cue from varying strategies of address deployed in The Exile of James Joyce, (...) I conclude by calling upon my own father, another Jacques, to provide a vignette that aims at replacing Joyce's gnomon between the psychoanalytic symptom and the deconstruction of the letter by the postcard. (shrink)

Die thematisch breit gefächerte Reihe umfasst Schriften zur Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft, Kulturgeschichte und Philosophie.