Mental Illness as a Moral Concept

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••• mEDTAllllDESS AS A mORAL [OD[EPT ………………………. SEAnSAVERS (, The concept of mental illness has been the subject of heated controversy in recent years; and this debate has caught the attention of a wide public. The reason for this is not simply that the debate has sometimes been conducted in heated terms; but, more importantly, […]

Mind, reality and politics

Mind, reality and politics Andrew collier this list a few pages without getting controversial. Some of the facts about human nature have clear implications for legislation. For instance, the fact that our physiology is such that the present level of motor pollution in the UK leads to nearly thirty deaths a day implies that, other […]

Colonizing citizenship

Commentary Colonizing citizenship Françoise vergès ʻWe are not the victims but the children of a crime against humanity.ʼ [1] Commemorations are important events in France. If, on the one hand, they offer the government the opportunity to reinforce a ʻcertain idea of Franceʼ, on the other hand they give historians, researchers and activists the possibility […]

Childhood experience and the image of utopia: The broken promise of Adorno’s Proustian sublimations

Childhood experience and the image of utopia The broken promise of Adorno’s Proustian sublimations Matt F. Connell adjustment, amounting to an uncritical internalization of the reality which insists that the infant must only enjoy that which is socially sanctioned. Children must progressively give up earlier forms of happiness and pleasure, which demand everything in an […]

Wishful theory and sexual politics

Across the last two or three decades identity and desire have been ʻtheorizedʼ relentlessly. Influences have been diverse: I remember especially the impact, for gay writing, of Barthesʼ dream, or plea, in 1975, for a radical sexual diversity wherein there would no longer be homosexuality (singular) but homosexualities, a plural so radical it ʻwill baffle […]

The introduction of the Oedipus Complex and the reinvention of instinct: Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905, is undoubtedly one of Freudʼs most important texts and, in many respects, the most contemporary. It is a summa in which Freud summarizes and articulates his insights into the meaning of sexuality for human existence in general, and for psychopathology in particular. As can […]

Oedipus as figure

Oedipus as figure Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe It is probable, or at the very least plausible, that Western humanity now models itself on two figures or types – two ʻexamplesʼ, if you like. They appear to be antagonistic (or are at least supported by antagonistic discourses), but their antagonism also binds together, and founds, their kinship, as […]

Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002

Obituary Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002Norman O. Brown was born in New Mexico in 1913 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the University of Wisconsin. His tutor at Oxford was Isaiah Berlin. A product of the 1930s, Brown was active in left-wing politics – for example, in the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign – […]

Enigma variation: Laplanchean psychoanalysis and the formation of the raced unconscious

In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills argues that contemporary structures of white domination in the West operate by means of an epistemology of ignorance for white people. [1] White people suffer from cognitive dysfunctions such that they cannot understand the racially (and racistly) structured world in which they live and, indeed, helped create. For Mills, […]

Remembering Adorno

Remembering Adorno John abromeit In his sociology of religion, but also in his analyses of bureaucracy in modern societies, Max Weber analysed the process by which ideas that aim for qualitative change, for a transvaluation of values, are worn down in the historical process, codified and routinized by interpreters, gradually brought back into line with […]

Who was Oscar Masotta?: Psychoanalysis in Argentina

Who was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina Philip derbyshire 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 […]