“There is no longer any world,” wrote the late philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in 1993, and in this paper, the sense of this loss of world is analysed in terms of the modal notions of necessity, impossibility, and possibility. Modal differentiation can illuminate what constitutes the sense of actuality in a world, and hence, what it is that has been lost regarding this actuality of being in a world. Modal thinking does not rely on knowledge of the true state of affairs, (...) nor on having a constant grasp on necessity: modal thinking enables us to discern the actual by way of the relations between necessity, possibility, and impossibility. It is on the basis of these relations that a mode of rethinking actuality is suggested. In order to pursue this line of thought, I rely on Jacques Lacan’s understanding of modalities as writing operations, concentrating mostly on certain sections from his Seminar XXI, wherein he refers to Aristotelian modal logic and mentions the analytic philosopher Jaakko Hintikka. This ternary relation between Aristotle, Hintikka, and Lacan suggests a different outlook on the actual being-such of a world. The being-such of a world, its actuality, is understood as a contingency, a possibility emerging from the relation between what is declared necessary and what is impossible. The paper shows the implications of such a modal understanding of actuality, as demonstrated in Lacan’s view of human sexuality and sexual difference. (shrink)

Lacan with the Philosophers creates a dialogue between the oeuvre of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosophy. Major philosophical figures to which Lacan vastly referred are examined around key concepts fundamental to philosophy - being, truth, knowledge, the good, the subject.

Finitude as an affirmative moment is what stands at the center of this paper. While death cannot be represented or conceptualized, it is present in events of death in the life of an individual and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth about Narrative, Or:How Does Narrative Matter?Ruth Ronen and Efrat BibermanIn the summer of 1898, a sixteen-year-old girl, intelligent and good looking, entered Freud's clinic in Vienna. The girl, whom Freud would call Dora, suffered recurrent attacks of aphonia (inability to speak) and of coughing, attacks that came on and passed off spontaneously. Freud soon discovers that Dora's illness is connected to the love affair her father is (...) having with a Frau K., a family acquaintance, while the lover's husband is courting Dora herself. In analyzing the history of Dora, Freud unfolds the course of events that brought Dora to the clinic and produces her case by means of a fragmentary discourse consisting of Dora's speech, her dreams and thoughts as revealed to Freud while the analysis was going on. The psychoanalytic discourse yet also consists of Freud's own reports and interpretations of Dora's dreams, actions and speech and of his overall understanding of her case, an understanding that undergoes a few radical changes during the analysis. When Dora decides to leave the treatment three months later, which is much too soon in Freud's view, Freud interprets her act as an act of vengeance against himself, repeating her neurotic reactions to the romantic complexity she recounted through the person of Freud. However, when Freud learns later that Dora got married and has overcome her hysterical sicknesses, he re-reads her second dream as announcing that Dora was about to tear herself free from her father (from Mr. K. she tore herself free through an act of vengeance) and "had been reclaimed once more by the realities of life."1How has the narration of the case of Dora by herself and by Freud, changed her situation from a hysterical subject who suffers from severe symptoms, to a subject "able to be reclaimed by the realities of life"? [End Page 118] How has Dora's spoken words to Freud, and his way of responding and directing her speech, changed her situation so radically? What is the power of narrative in changing or affecting the object of narration? What constitutes the "true story" of a subject and how is it affected by the narrative modes by which the story is presented? Can narrative change the facts of the matter narrated? In this paper, as part of the attempt to define the constitutive power of narrative, a power that cannot yet reduce the constituted subject to an effect of discourse (Dora after psychoanalysis surely cannot be viewed as a construct of discourse, yet is so different from what she was prior to analysis), we will examine these questions as addressed in two, apparently diverse, contexts: that of analytic aesthetics and that of psychoanalytic thought. We will show that these two perspectives tackle similar problems regarding narrativity yet choose to solve them in ways that raise important questions regarding the effects of narrative.IIt is a widely spread opinion about narrative that it creates its own world in the act of telling, that "the structures of narrative impose some kind of barrier between language and fact; rather than being directly 'mirrored', the facts, as represented in narrative, are filtered through layers of linguistic artifice."2 The diagnosis that narrative somehow distorts or constructs the events it recounts, that narration changes the modality of what is narrated, is one important implication of the booming interest in narrative in the 1980s and 90s. To understand how such an implication was drawn, requires that the nature of the interest in narrative is more closely qualified as part of the growing attention paid to the pervasiveness of narrative in discourses traditionally considered to lie outside the domain of narrative rendering, and to the naturalness of narrative presentation in extra-literary contexts. These pervasiveness and naturalness of narrative were often interpreted as reflecting the literariness or fictionality of discourses that officially claim to be committed to reality and truth.Yet, how did it come about that the discovery of narrative elements in a wide variety of contexts was interpreted as entailing the fictionalizing of these discursive contexts? As narrative entails the imposition of structure on... (shrink)

Philosophy prides itself on beginning with Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, this death is transfigured into an entry into truth. One can...

Ever since Plato expelled the poets from his ideal state, the ethics of art has had to confront philosophy's denial of art's morality. In Art before the Law, Ruth Ronen proposes a new outlook on the ethics of art by arguing that art insists on this tradition of denial, affirming its singular ethics through negativity. Ronen treats the mechanism of negation as the basis for the relationship between art and ethics. She shows how, through moves of denial, resistance, and denouncement, (...) art exploits its negative relation to morality. While deception, fiction, and transgression allegedly locate art outside morality and ethics, Ronen argues they enable art to reveal the significance of the moral law, its origins, and the idea of the good. By employing the thought of Freud and Lacan, Ronen reconsiders the aesthetic tradition from Plato through Kant and later philosophers of art in order to establish an ethics of art. An interdisciplinary study, Art before the Law is sure to be of interest both to academic philosophers and to those interested in psychoanalytic theory and practice. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉLe goût, en tant que faculté d'appréciation esthétique, implique un individu, et pourtant suppose une communauté. Dans cet article, nous constatons qu'une disposition singulière à l’égard des objets de goût est conditionnée par le consentement d'autrui et par l’être-avec autrui. De cette façon, une communauté esthétique est établie. Cette idée de communauté esthétique remonte au sensus communis de Kant et à la notion de préservation de Heidegger : dans les deux cas, c'est la présence d'une communauté qui conditionne l'expérience esthétique.

Places anxiety at the heart of the aesthetic experience.

By closely reading Lacan’s references to the way philosophers (primarily Kant and Aristotle) use the notion of the “soul,” this paper suggests that the soul represents whatever in the body is unattainable to thought. The paper aims to reveal the philosophical moment in which a soul distinguishes itself from both mind and body and to show that this moment, in which a soul is summoned by philosophers, is needed in order to overcome the fundamental alienation of the body with regard (...) to thought. Lacan’s way of addressing the soul along these lines suggests why having a soul carries ethical implications. (shrink)

By closely reading Lacan’s references to the way philosophers use the notion of the “soul,” this paper suggests that the soul represents whatever in the body is unattainable to thought. The paper aims to reveal the philosophical moment in which a soul distinguishes itself from both mind and body and to show that this moment, in which a soul is summoned by philosophers, is needed in order to overcome the fundamental alienation of the body with regard to thought. Lacan’s way (...) of addressing the soul along these lines suggests why having a soul carries ethical implications. (shrink)

This study offers a new perspective on the object represented by art, specifically by art that succeeds to create in its receiver a sense of "the real", a sense of approximating the true nature of the represented object that lies outside the artwork. The object that cannot be accessed through a concept, a meaning or a sign, the thing-in-itself, is generally rejected by philosophy as being outside the realm of its concerns. This rejection is surveyed in a number of philosophical (...) discussions, from Kant to Hilary Putnam. Turning to the psychoanalytic object, an object inexhaustible in terms of its external existence, or in terms of its conceptual status or meaning (the object is always suppressed, partly known, inaccessible), another notion of the object. The Real is suggested as what can neither be contained in language nor reduced to a linguistic referent. This solution does not lead away from philosophical interests but rather exposes this dilemma about the object of representation as fundamentally philosophical. Cases of artistic realism discussed range from perspective painting to abstract art, from tragedies to the literary representation of minds. (shrink)