The primary aim of this collection is to show that the topicality of Lacan’s legacy to contemporary philosophy is particularly evident with regard to current debates which, in attempting to overcome the spurious divide between continental and analytic traditions, as well as between the human, social and natural sciences, have been thoroughly rethinking the notions of realism and materialism, along with their implications for aesthetics, ethics, politics, and theology. More or less explicitly, all the essays included in the present volume tackle such a complex speculative articulation by focusing on the way in which a Lacanian approach can shed new light on traditional concepts of Western philosophy, if not rehabilitate them.
The ‘new’ in the ‘new generation’ that gives the title to the present collection of articles is far from rhetorical. All the authors included are under fifty years of age, and several are under forty. Without exception, they have, however, already secured a prominent position in debates concerning the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, or are in the process of doing so. The other contiguous novelty of this volume that marks a major shift from previous attempts at presenting Lacan in dialogue avec les philosophes is its markedly international dimension. Contributors reside and work in seven different countries, which are, moreover, not always their countries of origin. As the reader will be able to confirm by taking into consideration the respectful intensity of the many cross-references present in these essays – which should be taken as a very partial sedimentation of exchanges of ideas and collaborative projects that, in some cases, have been ongoing for more than a decade – geographical distance appears to have been beneficial to the overcoming of Lacan’s confinement to the supposed orthodoxy of specific – provincial – schools and their pathetic fratricidal wars, whilst in parallel enhancing intellectual rigour. These pieces rethink philosophically through Lacan, with as little jargon as possible, in this order, realism, god, history, genesis and structure, writing, logic, freedom, the master and slave dialectic, the act, and the subject.
Contents
Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Editorial Introduction. Towards a New Philosophical-Psychoanalytic Materialism and Realism’
Alenka Zupan?i?, ‘Realism in Psychoanalysis’
Felix Ensslin, ‘Accesses to the Real: Lacan, Monotheism, and Predestination’
Adrian Johnston, ‘On Deep History and Lacan’
Michael Lewis, ‘Structure and Genesis in Derrida and Lacan: Animality and the Empirical Sciences’
Matteo Bonazzi, ‘Jacques Lacan’s Onto-graphy’
Guillaume Collett, ‘The Subject of Logic: The Object (Lacan with Kant and Frege)’
Raoul Moati, ‘Metapsychology of Freedom: Symptom and Subjectivity in Lacan’
Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Wounds of Testimony and Martyrs of the Unconscious: Lacan and Pasolini contra the Discourse of Freedom’
Justin Clemens, ‘The Field and Function of the Slave in the Écrits’
Oliver Feltham, ‘The School and the Act’
Alvise Sforza Tarabochia, ‘Lacan with Basaglia: Psychoanalysis and Anti-Psychiatry’
About the Author
Lorenzo Chiesa is Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent (UK), where he also serves as Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Thought. His research interests are in the area of Lacanian psychoanalysis; 20th century French thought; contemporary Italian philosophy and culture; Marxist theory.
The Anti-Oedipus Complex critically explores the post-‘68 dramatic developments in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Beginning with the decline of patriarchy and the master, exemplified by Freud’s paean for the Father, the revolutionary path was blown wide open by anti-psychiatry, schizoanalysis and radical politics, the complex antinomies of which are traced here in detail with the help of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Levinas, Steiner, Žižek, Badiou, Derrida and Girard, as well as theologians, analysts, writers, musicians and film makers.
The more pressing wager of the book is that, by introducing Nietzsche's thinking into contemporary debates about the nature and function of the psychoanalytic clinic, the future of that clinic can be better secured against attempts to discredit its claims to therapeutic efficacy and to scientific legitimacy.
From its etymological roots, sex is related to a scission, Latin for sectus, secare, meaning “to divide or cut.” Therefore, regardless of the various studies applied to defining sex as inscribed by discursive acts, i.e. merely a ‘performatively enacted signification,’ there is something more to sex than just a social construction or an aprioristic substance. Sex is irreducible to meaning or knowledge.
