Neuro-Philosophy and the Healthy Mind: Learning from the Unwell Brain

Buy Neuro-Philosophy and the Healthy Mind here.

Applying insights from neuroscience to philosophical questions about the self, consciousness, and the healthy mind.

Can we “see” or “find” consciousness in the brain? How can we create working definitions of consciousness and subjectivity, informed by what contemporary research and technology have taught us about how the brain works? How do neuronal processes in the brain relate to our experience of a personal identity? Where does the brain end and the mind begin?

To explore these and other questions, esteemed philosopher and neuroscientist Georg Northoff turns to examples of unhealthy minds. By investigating consciousness through its absence—in people in vegetative states, for example—we can develop a model for understanding its presence in an active, healthy person. By examining instances of distorted self-recognition in people with psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, we can begin to understand how the experience of “self” is established in a stable brain.

Taking an integrative approach to understanding the self, consciousness, and what it means to be mentally healthy, this book brings insights from neuroscience to bear on philosophical questions. Readers will find a science-grounded examination of the human condition with far-reaching implications for psychology, medicine, our daily lives, and beyond.

Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Universalism, Politics

The American University of Beirut Arts and Humanities (Mellon Grant) Faculty of Arts and Sciences held a seminar "Lacan contra Foucault Subjectivity, Universalism, Politics

While Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault are both enormously influential theorists within the humanities, their work has inspired divergent and often explicitly antagonistic theoretical agendas. What is at stake in each thinker’s work pertains to the core questions and critiques of Enlightenment and Modernity. Both Lacan and Foucault challenge the Kantian compact between reason, autonomy, and freedom, but they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences for our understanding of universalism, law, reason, habits, and the passions. The aim of this conference is to try to clarify the nature of this divergence as well as the stakes of this antagonism. It will do so by focusing on three fundamental topics of disagreement that divide Lacan from Foucault: the nature of the subject; the status of the universal; and the function of politics.

Speakers:

The Absence of the Sexual Relationship: Invariant of the Species or Historical Phase?
Lorenzo Chiesa, Genoa School of Humanities

Is what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the ‘absence of the sexual relationship’ the basic – transcendental and biological – invariant of the speaking animal? Or should it be understood as a historical product strictly linked with the advent of modern science? Also, assuming that language is structurally incomplete, and therefore that homo sapienscannot avoid the dialectic of semblance and truth, does this necessarily entail that the absence of any meta-language always correspond to the absence of the sexual relationship? In this paper I will show how, in his Seminars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lacan develops two different, if not incompatible, narratives. The paper should pave the way for a broader discussion of how the ‘historicist temptation’ Lacan finally does not succumb to intersects with Foucault’s considerations on human nature (especially in his 1971 conversation with Chomsky). Could we maintain, as has recently been suggested, that Foucault himself belongs to a ‘Freudian paradigm’ for which history is made of ‘true fictions’? Does such an understanding of the ‘Freudian paradigm’ not run the risk of turning Foucault into a Freudian only at the price of labelling Lacan as anti-Freudian?

No: Foucault
Joan Copjec, Brown University

Despite the telegraphed “no” of the title, this paper is not a full-scale rejection of Foucault, but a firm dismissal of his rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis. The latter rejection is based primarily on Foucault’s claim that in psychoanalysis every negation amounts to the same one. The simple claim of the paper is not only “not so!” but also an attempt to recover what is radical in Freud and lost on Foucault.

The Other Space of the Communist Party
Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

This paper puts Lacan’s account of the Other Space to work in a theory of the communist party. Lacan associates the Freudian unconscious with a gap, a gap where something happens but remains unrealized. It’s not that this something is or is not there, that it exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, the unrealized makes itself felt. It exerts a pressure. The function of the transference in analysis is forcing the gap. Through the transference different unconscious agencies in the subject become manifest. The transference registers the effects of an Other beyond analyst and analysand: the analytic relation is not reducible to the interaction between them; it is the site of the appearance of an Other. The transference is important for a theory of the party because of its function “as a mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious.” Insofar as the party is a form that accesses the discharge that has ended, the crowd that has gone home, the people who are not there but exert a force nonetheless, it is a site of transferential relations. Rather than rejecting these relations in a fantasy of politics without power, I emphasize the importance of the psychic effects of sociality in building collective strength. Institutions are symbolic arrangements that organize and concentrate the social space. They “fix” an Other, not in the sense of immobilizing it but in the sense of putting in relation the emergent effects of sociality. This “putting in relation” substantializes the link, giving it its force, enabling it to exert its pressure. A party is an organization and concentration of sociality in behalf of a certain politics. For communists this is a politics of and for the working class, the producers, the oppressed, the people as the rest of us. “Party” knots together effects of ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to know, and subject supposed to believe. The particular content of any of these component effects changes over time and place even as the operations they designate remain as features of the party form. I illustrate my argument with examples from The Party Organizer, a third period publication of the CPUSA. I put my argument to work in a critique of John Holloway’s Foucauldian anarchism.

Cutting Off the King’s Head
Mladen Dolar, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

In a famous pronouncement Foucault said: “It is necessary to cut off the king’s head: in political theory this hasn’t happened yet.” Political theory kept being stuck, in one way or another, with the framework of sovereignty, law, repression, instead of envisaging the new dispositives of power in their heterogeneous multiplicity, proliferation and productivity, the emergence of biopolitics etc. This goes also for psychoanalysis which was prey to the ‘monarchy of sex’ (as he famously put it on the last page of the first volume of the History of sexuality), unable to abandon the framework of prohibition, the father, the law and repression, instead of espousing bodies and pleasures, and was thus itself, unwittingly, a major mechanism of power it allegedly opposed. The paper will try to scrutinize some assumptions of this way of seeing the opposition and framing the question. There is something missing in the massive alternative between the monarchy of the sovereign, father, law, sex, truth on the one hand, and multiplicity, heterogeneity, proliferation, bodies, pleasure on the other, the alternative on which Foucault’s work, in its vast elaborate ramifications, seems to be premised.

Exchanging Memory: Reflections on Postwar Enjoyment
Rohit Goel, University of Chicago

My paper uses the example of Lebanon to show how memory of past atrocity is a fetish object of useless enjoyment that overshoots the very need it at once constructs and aims to satisfy: avoiding the repetition of past violence. Putting Lacan’s theory of discourse into conversation with Marx’s analysis of value in capital, I argue that postwar “transitional” justice mechanisms, hegemonic after 1989, steer toward the perpetual accumulation of knowledge about the past — what Lacan calls surplus-enjoyment or jouissance or a and Marx calls surplus-value — at the expense of working through history to overcome the recurrence of social antagonism. Along the way, I argue that reading Lacan with Marx to analyze “late capitalism” or postwar liberal society offers a high stakes corrective to structuralist and poststructuralist pronouncements of “the death of the subject.” For instance, Michel Foucault’s diagnosis of the nexus of knowledge and power as absolute tends to a politics of silence in the face of necessarily alienating discourses (on madness, criminalization, sexuality…), either retreating to a “care of the self” or self-consciously refusing to engage the constitutive contradictions of discourse for fear of reproducing the latter’s terms/potency. I conclude by suggesting alternatives to liberal transitional justice programs as well as structuralist/poststructuralist subject annihilation in the aftermath of catastrophe.

Valuation and Enjoyment: Lacan and Foucault through Marx and Bataille
Robert Meister, University of California, Santa Cruz

I begin with the questions of politics implied by a schematic reading of Foucault through Lacan: Is Foucault’s account of knowledge/power reducible to a technique for translating University Discourse into a Discourse of the Master? How can this be done except through the Discourse of the Hysteric? What else could be desired here except for a true Master? And didn’t Foucault himself become that Master in the post-modern University Discourse created by my generation of left-academics who came of age in the aftermath of 1968?

This is of course a caricature, but rather than qualify it through a more comprehensive reading of Foucault’s Lectures and Lacan’s Seminars, I want to draw out the political project of moving beyond these three quarter-turns of Lacan’s discursive dial, especially in an era of financialized capitalism. Instead of debunking Foucault in favor of Lacan, my central claim is that Foucault provides an academically assimilable version of Georges Bataille, whose Accursed Share exhibits the micro-foundations of Foucault’s early project I thus argue that Foucault carried forward Bataille’s critique of dominant strands of French Hegelianism into the realm of historical studies in much the way that Marx did for his own critique of Hegel and left-Hegelianism. Because Lacan, also had a lifelong engagement with the same critique of conscious mind (via the death instinct) that obsessed Bataille, Lacan’s late turn to Marx and materialism in response to 1968 is a good site on which to raise the question of thinking Marx with Bataille, or asking what it means for capitalism to have an unconscious.

My main argument in the paper is about why the unconscious of capitalism is especially important in the era of its subsumption by finance that Lacan and Foucault did not live to see. In financialized capitalism the creation units of capital preservation–quite literally hedges and options–has equal importance to the production of commodities and the employment of labor power in earlier version of capitalism that have been well-analyzed from a Lacanian perspective by Zupançiç, Žižek and others. I argue that financialized capitalism in important ways confesses the post-modern critique of its prehistory, denaturalizing the “real economy” and making its continuation expressly contingent on the liquidity of markets, which is itself ultimately a political/financial project involving the commensurability of public and private debt.

An effect of this transformation is that fully financialized subjects would no longer think of themselves as owners of skills, but rather as managers of a portfolio of attributes the contents of which must be continuously rebalanced and rehedged in order to provide resiliency, which is now expressly considered as a measure of downside protection against risks that are no longer worth taking now that we know what dangers we have been lucky enough to survive. What, then, can be said of our collective enjoyment of the gains accumulated by those who harvest the upside generated by this heightened volatility? My paper will analyze the relationship between security and insecurity, life and death in the unconscious of a financialized subject who no longer thinks merely as a commoditized individual. Are there political potentialities here that have been missed by more productionist versions of historical materialism that dismiss the important changes represented by finance in the Real of capitalist desire?

Desire & Pleasure: Deleuze and Foucault’s Readings of Wilhelm Reich
Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon

In this paper, I defend the thesis that in order to understand Foucault and Deleuze’s diametrically opposed views regarding desire and pleasure, one has to analyze the ways in which those thinkers have been influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s works.

Reich’s 1946 The Mass Psychology of Fascism has played a central role in framing the political questions surrounding the repression of sexuality. Deleuze’s political writings have been influenced by this Freudo-Marxist perspective, up to the point that in Anti-Oedipus (1972), he and Guattari claim that Reich, after Spinoza, has rediscovered the fundamental problem of political philosophy: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Deleuze & Guattari continue, “after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?” In this case, an appeal to ignorance would be an epistemic failure. Following Reich, Deleuze & Guattari provide us with a different explanation – one that revives the notion of desire. Our desires are positive insofar as “what we desire, what we invest our desire in, is a social formation.” Instead of extracting an object that is presumed to be the object of desire (negative explanation), we are always in the process of constructing a positive social assemblage. Deleuze & Guattari reinforce Reich’s sex-economic hypothesis since they recognize that libidinal economy and political economy are one and the same. And if our desires are social from the beginning, in a way, they are not our own. This is the only way we can understand our investment in social formations that repress us. Our desires are not just a part of one’s psychic reality. They are always already part of the very social formation one finds oneself in.

As early as 1973, Foucault distances himself from Reich’s Freudo-Marxist approach, and also from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In his Rio lecture, Foucault notes, “I admit that a problem such as this [Anti-Oedipus) is very appealing to me, and that I am also tempted to look behind what is claimed to be the Oedipus story – for something unrelated to the indeterminate, endlessly repeated story of our desire and our unconscious, but related to the history of a power, a political power.” In his 1975 talk at Columbia University (at the Schizo-Culture Conference), Foucault reiterates this point in an even bolder manner: “I now see the Reichian schema as an obstacle rather than an instrument.”(154) The Reichian schema is fully revealed as an obstacle only in 1976 in La Volonté de Savoir. Foucault’s argument assumes that any explanation of sexuality that focuses primarily on sexual repression (as Reich does) cannot escape analyzing the underlying power mechanism otherwise than in a reduced, schematic, and negative form. “Which is to say [..], these analyses assume that power exerts itself basically in the form of an interdiction and exclusion.” Against Reich, Foucault argues that rather than being deductive, the power mechanisms produce, invent, create, and ultimately normalize sexual subjects. Reich’s failure, and to a certain extent Deleuze & Guattari’s as well, is to confound and to merge the strategies of power with the interdictions of the law and with the mechanisms of domination and exploitation. Hence, “the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”

Capitalist Forms of Subjectivity: Foucault between Psychoanalysis and Marxism
Johanna Oksala, University of Helsinki

The paper argues that Foucault makes an important contribution to our understanding of capitalist forms of subjectivity – a problem that Marxism, psychoanalysis and the combinations of the two have struggled with. Moreover, I will show that Foucault’s break-through in this field of questioning, namely his account of productive power, can be understood as a critical response to the problems that both psychoanalysis and Marxism had in theorizing the relationship between power and subjectivity.

The argument proceeds in three parts. In the first section I will consider how Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality is modified in a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1976 titled ‘The Mesh of Power’. In this lecture Foucault notably develops his account of productive power in dialogue with Lacan and Marx. In the second section I will turn to Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and argue that in these lectures we find his most developed view of the homo economicus as the capitalist form of subjectivity. I will conclude by briefly considering the consequences of Foucault’s account for our current understanding of ourselves.

What Comes After “The Death of Man”: Foucault and Lacan, Sexuality and Freedom
Aaron Schuster, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam

Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, is a highly complex one. From his early enthusiasm inThe Order of Things, in which psychoanalysis is assigned a privileged place in the account of the birth of the human sciences and their possible “beyond,” Foucault ends up, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, becoming one of its most powerful critics, denouncing the “repressive hypothesis” as one of the prevalent myths of modern power. Yet some years later, in his lecture course The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-82), Foucault praises Lacan as the one of the few thinkers to thematize the relation between the subject and truth. In this talk, I will disentangle this relationship by focusing on one key moment: Foucault’s and Lacan’s interpretations of Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, and how they reflect different understandings of subjectivity and modernity. I will show how Foucault and Lacan draw two contrasting conclusions from the “death of Man,” i.e. the crisis of the human sciences and the eclipse of their vision of a central constituting subject or transcendental ego. I will then look back on Foucault’s “history of sexuality” project, and examine how these competing conceptions of subjectivity impact on the understanding of sexuality and the possibility of emancipation.

Biopolitics, Sexuality, and the Unconscious
Alenka Zupančič, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

The lecture deals with the way in which Michel Foucault first introduced the notion of ‘biopolitics’ through the referential frame of sexuality and psychoanalysis. It focuses on the concept that is utterly and conspicuously missing from Foucault’s account, in The History of Sexuality, of the psychoanalytic take on sexuality – namely the unconscious. It argues that this omission amounts to a conceptual decision which has important and far-reaching consequences for the (Foucauldian) concept of biopolitics as such.
 

Slavoj Žižek: Why Todestrieb is a Philosophical Concept

Public lecture by Slavoj Žižek within the framework of the ICI’s core project “Tension/Spannung” 6 Mär '09

Sigmund Freud introduces his notorious concept of the “Todestrieb”, the “death drive” in his famous essay “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”) of 1920. This text has intrigued and puzzled many readers as it relates the death drive to both the so-called “Nirvana principle” aiming at a state without tension and the repetition compulsion, the almost mechanical kernel of the drive itself. If Freud’s death drive stands here philosophically between negation (Schopenhauer) and affirmation (Nietzsche) of the will, Slavoj Žižek insists that we should not confuse the death drive with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension. As his Parallax View states, the death drive is, on the contrary, “the very opposite of dying – a name for the 'undead' eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.” In Žižek’s Lacanian reading, the (death) drive represents a 'diabolic' dimension of human beings in opposition to a desire for the lost object that would overcome all differences and tensions. Its articulation as a philosophical concept is certain to lead us also to a deeper understanding of the concept of tension.

See also - Zizek's Sigmund Freud Lecture: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive

Reading Žižek – Where to Start?

ZIZEK BOOKS

Humanizing Evil: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical and Clinical Perspectices

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Psychoanalysis has traditionally had difficulty in accounting for the existence of evil. Freud saw it as a direct expression of unconscious forces, whereas more recent theorists have examined the links between early traumatic experiences and later ‘evil’ behaviour. Humanizing Evil: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical and Clinical Perspectives explores the controversies surrounding definitions of evil, and examines its various forms, from the destructive forces contained within the normal mind to the most horrific expressions observed in contemporary life.

Ronald Naso and Jon Mills bring together an international group of experts to explore how more subtle factors can play a part, such as conformity pressures, or the morally destabilizing effects of anonymity, and show how analysts can understand and work with such factors in clinical practice. Each chapter is unified by the view that evil is intrinsically linked to human freedom, regardless of the gap experienced by perpetrators between their intentions and consequences. While some forms of evil follow seamlessly from psychopathology, others call this relationship into question. Rape, murder, serial killing, and psychopathy show very clear links to psychopathology and character whereas the horrors of war, religious fundamentalism, and political extremism resist such reductionism.

Humanizing Evil is unique in the diversity of perspectives it brings to bear on the problem of evil. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, and Jungians. Because it is an integrative depth-psychological effort, it will interest general readers as well as scholars from a variety of disciplines including the humanities, philosophy, religion, mental health, criminal justice, political science, sociology, and interdisciplinary studies.

Ronald Naso, Ph.D., ABPP is psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in independent practice in Stamford, CT. The author of numerous papers on psychoanalytic topics, he is an associate editor of Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, and contributing editor of Division/Review and Journal of Psychology and Clinical Psychiatry. His book, Hypocrisy Unmasked: Dissociation, Shame, and the Ethics of Inauthenticity, was published by Aronson in 2010.

Jon Mills, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto. A 2006, 2011, and 2013 Gradiva Award winner, he is Editor of two book series in psychoanalysis, on the Editorial Board for Psychoanalytic Psychology, and is the author and/or editor of thirteen books including his most recent works, Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics, and Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, which won the Goethe Award for best book in 2013.

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Deleuze and Desire

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The engagement of Deleuze with psychoanalysis has led to the development of a remarkable and highly influential theory about human desire. The most systematic account of this theory, crucial for anyone interested in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, can be found in the discussion of the dynamic genesis of sense, a pivotal part of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense.

In Deleuze and Desire Piotrek Swiatkowski picks up the challenge to provide an ad literam commentary of this text. Swiatkowski makes use of a broad range of examples, from psychoanalytic case studies to art, literature, and film, and analyses in an accessible and clear way the impact of the work of psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein on Deleuze.

Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Mind: Unconscious Mentality in the Twenty-first Century

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Of the topics found in psychoanalytic theory it is Freud's philosophy of mind that is at once the most contentious and enduring. Psychoanalytic theory makes bold claims about the significance of unconscious mental processes and the wish-fulfilling activity of the mind, citing their importance for understanding the nature of dreams and explaining both normal and pathological behaviour. However, since Freud's initial work, both modern psychology and philosophy have had much to say about the merits of Freudian thinking. Developments in psychology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis raise new challenges and questions concerning Freud's theory of mind.

This book addresses the psychoanalytic concept of mind in the 21st century via a joint scientific and philosophical appraisal of psychoanalytic theory. It provides a fresh critical appraisal and reflection on Freudian concepts, as well as addressing how current evidence and scientific thinking bear upon Freudian theory. The book centres upon the major concepts in psychoanalysis, including the notion of unconscious mental processes and wish-fulfilment and their relationship to dreams, fantasy, attachment processes, and neuroscience.

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Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism

Buy Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism here.

Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics.

Bringing together Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim Themi focuses on their conceptions of ethics and on their accounts of the history of ethical thinking in the Western tradition. Nietzsche blames Plato for setting in motion a degenerative process that turned ethics away from nature, the body, and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for reason, science, and a creative, flourishing life. Dismissing Plato’s Supreme Good as a “mirage,” Lacan is very much in sympathy with Nietzsche’s reading. Following this premise, Themi shows how Lacan’s ethics might build on Nietzsche’s work, thus contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche, and also how Nietzsche’s critique can strengthen our understanding of Lacan.

Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics

Buy Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics here.

Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them.

At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes.

Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics.

Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

See also

Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics

Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting

Buy Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting here.

The perennial interest in psychoanalysis shows no signs of abating and the longevity of psychoanalytic theory is seen in the varied extensions and elaborations of Freudian thinking in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive theory. Nevertheless, the scientific standing of psychoanalysis has long been questioned and developments in the fields of the philosophy of science and psychology require a fresh assessment of the scientific standing of psychoanalysis. While there are a range of views on the topic of whether psychoanalysis is in fact scientific, any satisfactory approach to understanding mind and behaviour requires an approach that is at once both philosophic and scientific. Accordingly, to even approach the question regarding the scientific nature of psychoanalysis, a foundation comprising a sophisticated conceptual and philosophical framework is required.

This volume represents the junction where philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis meet and presents arguments critical and supportive of the scientific standing of psychoanalysis, including debates between Adolf Grünbaum, Edward Erwin, Linda. A. W. Brakel and Vesa Talvitie, as well as fresh approaches from Anna Ursula Dreher, Agnes Petocz, Thomas Wallgren, and Simon Boag. While mainstream psychology is largely dismissive of psychoanalysis, the themes covered within this volume have important implications for science as a whole, including the nature of scientific explanation, philosophy of science, as well as the psychology of science.

Jacques Lacan’s Lecture at Louvain (1972)

Jacques Lacan’s Lecture at Louvain

This footage is from an extremely rare recording of Lacan giving a lecture at Louvain University on 13th Octover 1972.

See also: Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) came to psychoanalysis by way of medicine and psychiatry. In 1951 he turned his attention to the training of analysts, and this was one of the issues which led him and his circle to part company with the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. He became, in 1953, the first President of a new group, the Société Française de Psychanalyse, whose declared aim was a return to the true teaching of Freud. Eleven years later the Société Française was dissolved and, under Lacan’s direction, gave birth to the École Freudienne de Paris. Jacques Lacan was a practising psychoanalyst and teacher up until his death in 1981.

´~ Lacan For Beginners
 

The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank

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Otto Rank, an Austrian psychologist, was a protégé of Sigmund Freud, who saw in young Rank a gifted mind and drew him into his inner circle. The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank is author Fay B. Karpf’s historical and comparative introduction to the theory and therapy of Otto Rank, his relation to Freud, Jung, and Adler and to significant developments in the fields of analysis, psychotherapy, counseling, education, and social work. Fay B. Karpf was one of the earliest Jewish American woman sociologists. Born in Austria in 1893, Karpf eventually immigrated to the United States, where she attended the University of Chicago. She immersed herself in the “Chicago School of Sociology,” and her first book, American Social Psychology: Its Origins, Development and European Background (1932), was a standard textbook in the field of social psychology. She studied with the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, and she later taught social work at the Training School for Jewish Social Work in New York. After the school unfortunately closed, Karpf moved with her husband to Los Angeles, where she became a practicing counselor and psychotherapist, and she continued contributing to the fields until her death in 1981.

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

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A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art.

At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.

The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women’s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death.

Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.

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Vienna 1913: When Freud, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito and Stalin all lived in the same place

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the "Phenomenology of Spirit" by Alexandre Kojeve

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"This collection of Kojeve's thoughts about Hegel constitutes one of the few important philosophical books of the twentieth century―a book, knowledge of which is requisite to the full awareness of our situation and to the grasp of the most modern perspective on the eternal questions of philosophy."―Allan Bloom (from the Introduction)

During the years 1933–1939, the Russian-born and German-educated Marxist political philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) brilliantly explicated―through a series of lectures―the philosophy of Hegel as it was developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This collection of lectures―originally compiled by Raymond Queneau and edited for its English-language translation by Allan Bloom―shows the intensity of Kojève's study and thought and the depth of his insight into Hegel's Phenomenology. More important―for Kojève was above all a philosopher and not an ideologue―this profound and venturesome work on Hegel will expose the readers to the excitement of discovering a great mind in all its force and power.

Kojève: Consciousness and Desire

Jacques Lacan: Kant with Sade

Translated by James B. Swenson Jr.

This text should have served as a preface to Philosophy in the Bedroom. It appeared in the journal Critique (no. 191, April 1963) as a review of the edition of the works of Sade for which it was destined.*

That the work of Sade anticipates Freud, be it in respect of the catalogue of perversions, is a stupid thing to say, which gets repeated endlessly among literary types; the fault, as always, belongs to the specialists.

Against this we hold that the Sadian bedroom is equal to those places from which the schools of ancient philosophy took their name: Academy, Lyceum, Stoa. Here as there, the way for science is prepared by rectifying the position of ethics. In this, yes, a ground-clearing occurs which will have to make its way through the depths of taste for a hundred years for Freud's path to be passable. Count sixty more for someone to say the reason for all of that.

If Freud was able to enunciate his pleasure principle without even having to worry about marking what distinguishes it from its function in traditional ethics, even without risking that it should be heard as an echo of the uncontested prejudice of two millenia, to recall the attraction which preordains the creature to its good, along with the psychology inscribed in various myths of goodwill, we can only credit this to the insinuating rise across the nineteenth century of the theme of "happiness in evil."

Here Sade is the inaugural step of a subversion, of which, however amusing it might seem with respect to the coldness of the man, Kant is the turning point, and never noted, to our knowledge, as such.

Philosophy in the Bedroom comes eight years after the Critique of Practical Reason. If, after having seen that the one accords with the other, we show that it completes its we will say that it gives the truth of the Critique.

For this reason, the postulates in which the latter culminates: the alibi of immortality where it represses progress, holiness, and even love, anything satisfying which might come of the law, the guarantee which it requires from a will for which the object to which the law refers would be intelligible, losing even the flat prop of the function of utility to which Kant had confined them, restore the work to its diamondlike subversion. Which explains the unbelievable exaltation which any reader not forewarned by academic piety receives from it. Nothing which might have been explained about it will ruin this effect.

[...]

Assuredly Christianity has educated men to pay little attention to the jouissance of God, and that is how Kant slips by his voluntarism of the Law-for-the Law, which really piles it on, so to speak, with respect to the ataraxia of Stoic experience. One might think that Kant is under pressure from what he hears too closely, not from Sade, but from some mystic nearer to home, in the sigh which stifles what he glimpses beyond having seen that his God is faceless: Grimmigkeit? Sade says: Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness.

Pshaw! Schwarmereien, black swarms, we expel you in order to return to the function of presence in the Sadian fantasy.

This fantasy has a structure that one will find further along and in which the object is only one of the terms in which the quest which it figures can die out. When jouissance is petrified in it, it becomes the black fetish in which the form-most definitely offered in such a place and time, and still today, for one to adore the god-can be recognized.

It is this which befalls the executor in sadistic experience when, at its most extreme, his presence is reduced to being no more than its instrument.

But that his jouissance congeals there, does not withdraw it from the humility of an act to which he cannot but come as a being of flesh and, to the bones, the serf of pleasure.

This duplication does not reflect, nor reciprocate (why wouldn't it mutualate?) the one which occurs in the Other of the two alterities of the subject.

Desire, which is the henchman [suppot] of this splitting of the subject, would doubtless put up with being called will-to-jouissance. But this appellation would not render desire more worthy of the will which it invokes within the Other, in tempting this will to the extremity of its division from its pathos; for to do this, desire sets forth beaten, promised to impotence.

Because it sets forth submitted to pleasure, whose law is to turn it always too short in its aim. A homeostasis which is always too quickly recovered by the living being at the lowest threshold of the tension upon which it subsists. Always precocious is the fall of the wing, with which he is given to sign the reproduction of his forms Nevertheless this wing here has the task of raising itself to the function of figuring the link of sex to death. Let us leave it to rest behind its Eleusinian veil.

Thus pleasure, down there the stimulating rival of will, is here no more than a faltering accomplice. In jouissance's own time, it would be simply out of play, if fantasy did not intervene to sustain it by the very discord to which it succumbs.

[...]

Thus we are in a position to interrogate the Sade, mon prochain whose invocation we owe to the perspicacity of Pierre Klossowski. Extreme, it dispenses him from having to play the wit [des recours du bel esprit].20

Doubtless it is his discretion which leads him to shelter his formula behind a reference to Saint Labre. We do not find this reason compelling enough to give him the same shelter. That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily.

But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment.

For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.

Sade thus stopped, at the point where desire is knotted together with the law. If something in him held to the law, in order there to find the opportunity Saint Paul speaks of, to be sinful beyond measure, who would throw the first stone? But he went no further.

It is not only that for him as for the rest of us the flesh is weak, it is that the spirit is too prompt not to be lured. The apology for crime only pushes him to the indirect avowal of the Law. The supreme Being is restored in Maleficence.

Listen to him bragging of his technique, of immediately putting everything which occurs to him into operation, thinking moreover, by replacing repentance with reiteration, to have done with the law within. He finds nothing better to encourage us to follow him than the promise that nature, woman that she is, will magically always yield to us more.

It would be a mistake to trust this typical dream of potency.

It sufficiently indicates, in any case, that it would not be possible for Sade, as is suggested by P. Klossowski even as he notes that he does not believe it, to have attained the sort of apathy which would be "to have reentered the bosom of nature, in a waking state, in our world,"21 inhabited by language.

Of what Sade is lacking here, we have forbidden ourselves to say a word. One may sense it in the gradation of the Philosophy toward the fact that it is the curved needle, dear to Bunuel's heroes, which is finally called upon to resolve a girl's penisneid, and quite a big one.

Be that as it may, it appears that there is nothing to be gained by replacing Diotima with Dolmance, someone whom the ordinary path seems to frighten more than is fitting, and who-did Sade see it?-closes the affair with a Noli tangere matrem. V . . . ed and sewn up, the mother remains forbidden. Our verdict upon the submission of Sade to the Law is confirmed.

Of a treatise truly about desire, there is thus little here, even nothing. What of it is announced in this crossing taken from an encounter, is at most a tone of reason.

R. G. September 1962



* For which it was destined on commission. I add here, because it's droll, that they put themselves in the position of having to re-commission it from me when the success of Ecrits rendered it plausible ( to the person who replaced me?)

Source: lacan.com

Kojève: Consciousness and Desire

This short text is quoted from Kojève, Alexandre: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Basic Books, New York, 1969. Beginning and End.

Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when – for the “first” time – he says “I.” To understand man by understanding his “origin” is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed by speech.

Now, the analysis of “thought,” “reason,” “understanding,” and so on – in general, of the cognitive, contemplative, passive behavior of a being or a “knowing subject” – never reveals the why or the how of the birth of the word “I,” and consequently of self-consciousness – that is, of the human reality. The man who contemplates is “absorbed” by what he contemplates; the “knowing subject” “loses” himself in the object that is known. Contemplation reveals the object, not the subject. The object, and not the subject, is what shows itself to him in and by – or better, as – the act of knowing. The man who is “absorbed” by the object that he is contemplating can be “brought back to himself” only by a Desire; by the desire to eat, for example.The (conscious) Desire of a being is what constitutes that being as I and reveals it as such by moving it to say “I….” Desire is what transforms being, revealed to itself by itself in (true) knowledge, into an “object” revealed to a “subject” by a subject different from the object and “opposed” to it. It is in and by-or better still, as “his” Desire that man is formed and is revealed-to himself and to others – as an I, as the I that is essentially different from, and radically opposed to, the non-I. The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire.

The very being of man, the self-conscious being, therefore, implies and presupposes Desire. Consequently, the human reality can be formed and maintained only within a biological reality, an animal life. But, if animal Desire is the necessary condition of Self-Consciousness, it is not the sufficient condition. By itself, this Desire constitutes only the Sentiment of self.

In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire disquiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the “negation”, the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object: to satisfy hunger, for example, the food must be destroyed or, in any case, transformed. Thus, all action is “negating.” Far from leaving the given as it is, action destroys it; if not in its being, at least in its given form. And all “negating-negativity” with respect to the given is necessarily active. But negating action is not purely destructive, for if action destroys an objective reality, for the sake of satisfying the Desire from which it is born, it creates in its place, in and by that very destruction, a subjective reality. The being that eats, for example, creates and preserves its own reality by the overcoming of a reality other than its own by the “transformation” of an alien reality into its own reality, by the “assimilation,” the “internalization” of a “foreign,” “external” reality. Generally speaking, the I of Desire is an emptiness that receives a real positive content only by negating action that satisfies Desire in destroying, transforming, and “assimilating” the desired non-I. And the positive content of the I, constituted by negation, is a function of the positive content of the negated non-I.

If, then, the Desire is directed toward a “natural” non-I, the I, too, will be “natural.” The I created by the active satisfaction of such a Desire will have the same nature as the things toward which that Desire is directed: it will be a “thingish” I, a merely living I, an animal I. And this natural I, a function of the natural object, can be revealed to itself and to others only as Sentiment of self. It will never attain Self-Consciousness.

For there to be Self-Consciousness, Desire must therefore be directed toward a non-natural object, toward something that goes beyond the given reality. Now, the only thing that goes beyond the given reality is Desire itself. For Desire taken as Desire – i.e., before its satisfaction – is but a revealed nothingness, an unreal emptiness. Desire, being the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality, is something essentially different from the desired thing, something other than a thing, than a static and given real being that stays eternally identical to itself. Therefore, Desire directed toward another Desire, taken as Desire, will create, by the negating and assimilating action that satisfies it, an I essentially different from the animal “I.” This I, which “feeds” on Desires, will itself be Desire in its very being, created in and by the satisfaction of its Desire. And since Desire is realized as action negating the given, the very being of this I will be action. This I will not, like the animal “I,” be “identity” or equality to itself, but “negating negativity.” In other words, the very being of this I will be becoming, and the universal form of this being will not be space, but time. Therefore, its continuation in existence will signify for this I: “not to be what it is (as static and given being, as natural being, as `innate character’) and to be (that is, to become) what it is not.” Thus, this I will be its own product: it will be (in the future) what it has become by negation (in the present) of what it was (in the past), this negation being accomplished with a view to what it will become. In its very being this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is. This I is a (human) individual, free (with respect to the given real) and historical (in relation to itself ). And it is this I, and only this I, that reveals itself to itself and to others as Self-Consciousness.

Human Desire must be directed toward another Desire. For there to be human Desire, then, there must first be a multiplicity of (animal) Desires. In other words, in order that Self-Consciousness be born from the Sentiment of self, in order that the human reality come into being within the animal reality, this reality must be essentially manifold. Therefore, man can appear on earth only within a herd. That is why the human reality can only be social. But for the herd to become a society, multiplicity of Desires is not sufficient by itself; in addition, the Desires of each member of the herd must be directed – or potentially directed – toward the Desires of the other members. If the human reality is a social reality, society is human only as a set of Desires mutually desiring one another as Desires. Human Desire, or better still, anthropogenetic Desire, produces a free and historical individual, conscious of his individuality, his freedom, his history, and finally, his historicity. Hence, anthropogenetic Desire is different from animal Desire (which produces a natural being, merely living and having only a sentiment of its life) in that it is directed, not toward a real, “positive,” given object, but toward another Desire. Thus, in the relationship between man and woman, for example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants “to possess” or “to assimilate” the Desire taken as Desire – that is to say, if he wants to be “desired” or “loved,” or, rather, “recognized” in his human value, in his reality as a human individual. Likewise, Desire directed toward a natural object is human only to the extent that it is “mediated” by the Desire of another directed toward the same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy’s flag), can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal reality, is created only by action that satisfies such Desires: human history is the history of desired Desires.

Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan by Alenka Zupancic

Buy Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan here.

The idea of Kantian ethics is both simple and revolutionary: it proposes a moral law independent of any notion of a pre-establishment of fear. In attempting to interpret sucha a revcolutionary proposition in a more 'humane' light, and to turn Kant into our contemporary - someone who can help us with our own ethical dilemmas - many Kantian scholars have glossed over its apparent paradoxes and impossible claims. This book is concerned with doing exactly the opposite. Kant, thank God, is not our contemporary; he stands against the grain of our times. Lacan on the face of it appears to be the very antithesis of Kant - the wild theorist of psychoanalysis compared to the sober Enlightenment figure. His concept of the Real, however, provides perhaps the most useful backdrop to this new interpretation of Kantian ethics. Constantly juxtaposing her readings of the two philosophers, Alenka Zupancic summons up and 'ethics of the Real', and clears the ground for a radical restoration of the disruptive element in ethics.

The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan by Slavoj Zizek

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What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn′t a platitude that we′ve heard a thousand times – or a self–satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek – one of the most provocative and widely–read thinkers of our time – upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliché and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions.

When Lacan described Hegel as the most sublime hysteric , he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Other′s desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution – his own, and the one to come.

This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.

The Universal Exception by Slavoj Zizek

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Slavoj Zizek is one of the world's foremost cultural commentators: a prolific writer and thinker, whose adventurous, unorthodox and wide-ranging writings have won him a unique place as one of the most high profile thinkers of our time. The Universal Exception brings together some of i ek's most vivid writings on politics. Bringing together high theory, popular culture and passionate engagement with politics, i ek here brings us startlingly new perspectives on such topics as multiculturalism, capitalism and Bill Gates, the revolutionary potential of Stalinism, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

A Voice and Nothing More by Mladen Dolar

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Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work. The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels -- the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice -- and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.

Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism

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Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism explores some long neglected but crucial themes in German idealism. Markus Gabriel, one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary philosophy, and Slavoj Žižek, the celebrated contemporary philosopher and cultural critic, show how these themes impact on the problematic relations between being and appearance, reflection and the absolute, insight and ideology, contingency and necessity, subjectivity, truth, habit and freedom.

Engaging with three central figures of the German idealist movement, Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, Gabriel, and Žižek, who here shows himself to be one of the most erudite and important scholars of German idealism, ask how is it possible for Being to appear in reflection without falling back into traditional metaphysics. By applying idealistic theories of reflection and concrete subjectivity, including the problem of madness and everydayness in Hegel, this hugely important book aims to reinvigorate a philosophy of finitude and contingency, topics at the forefront of contemporary European philosophy.