radical philosophy

Name of the Father, ‘One’ of the Mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan

To Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragossa, perched on her column, ‘But there is something more, a puissance beyond the phallus.’ If I take a few aspects of the thought of Jacques Lacan, and investigate their relation to Simone de Beauvoir around one specific point, I have no intention of making him out – [...]

Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012

Jean Laplanche, one of Europe’s most eminent and original psychoanalytic thinkers, died on 6 May, at the age of 87. His death brings to an end a remarkable intellectual career dedicated to the meticulous analysis and rigorous critical expansion of the Freudian discovery. Laplanche was born on 21 June 1924 to a family of wine [...]

Noam Chomsky

Peter Hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we have an affirmation of absolute freedom [...]

David Macey, 1949-2011

David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intenselyprivate person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer outside the [...]

Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire

Philip Derbyshire (‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysisin Argentina’, RP 158) should be commended for his insightful consideration of the literary and psychoanalytic writings of Oscar Masotta, one of the most important Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to make a case for juxtaposing these texts with Masotta’s idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary explorations [...]

Who was Oscar Masotta?

As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s sardonic detective Pepe Carvalho ruefully observed, in a dictionary of Argentine clichés, psychoanalysis would have a crucial place, along with ‘tango and the disappeared’.1 ‘One’ knows that along with Paris, Buenos Aires is one of the centres of psychoanalytic practice, and one of the leading training centres for Lacanians. What is [...]

Mirrors without images

Remembering Adorno

Enigma variation

Oedipus as figure

Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002

‘Siegfried Kracauer’, University of Birmingham, 13–14 September 2002

The introduction of the Oedipus Complex and the reinvention of instinct

Family values

Psychoanalysis and politics

Wishful theory and sexual politics

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche is the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day. Setting out from a critical reconstruction of Freudʼs terminology, he has developed a systematic rethinking of psychoanalytic metapsychology under the heading of a ʻgeneral theory of seductionʼ. Still best known in Britain for his early joint work with Pontalis – ʻFantasy [...]

Demanding approval

Childhood experience and the image of utopia

Cracking the cultural code