The truth is a lemon meringue

Jacques Lacan, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, trans. Bruce Fink, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2015. 368 pp., £30.00 hb., 978 0 74566 039 4. Bruce Fink, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2015. 288 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 1 50950 049 9 hb., 978 1 […]

199 reviews

The reversal of authority Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation), trans. Hager Weslati, Verso, London and New York, 2014. xxxiv + 107 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 78168 095 7. Since the publication of Arendt’s essays on authority, the debate around authority has been mostly dominated by her diagnoses of its crisis. […]

Name of the Father, ‘One’ of the Mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan: With introduction by Penelope Deutscher

An introduction to Françoise Collin’s ‘Name of the father’ Penelope deutscher In 1973 the philosopher Françoise Collin (1928–2012) founded, with Jacqueline Aubenas, the first Frenchlanguage feminist journal, Les Cahiers du Grif. Collin was also a writer of fiction and récits (Rose qui peut, Le jour fabuleux, 331 W 20, Le Rendez-vous), a poet (Le jardin […]

More than everything: Žižek's Badiouian Hegel

More than everything Žižek’s Badiouian Hegel Peter osborne There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although no one has actually read them page by page… a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. Slavoj Žižek1 Allow me […]

Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon

Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon Pierre macherey The text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, where he puts forward the thesis of the individual’s interpellation as subject, is no doubt one of his most innovative, but it is also particularly disconcerting: its exposition, in exploiting a […]

Historicism and Lacanian theory

In 1977 Luce Irigaray published a passionately written article in the journal Critique, entitled ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’. The text is a richly woven tapestry of diverse references and poetic resonances, and merits a close reading. However, rather than using Irigaray’s essay as an exercise in textual analysis, I will use it here as a […]

Fatal Attraction: Jean Laplanche on sexuality, subjectivity and singularity in the work of Sigmund Freud

Fatal Attraction Jean Laplanche on sexuality, subjectivity and singularity in the work of Sigmund Freud Philippe Van Haute Freud considered sexuality to be the shibboleth of psychoanalysis. With a surprising stubbornness, he repeats over and over again: ‘and yet the libido is sexual’. 1 But when we ask for his arguments for this rather audacious […]

Fleshy Memory

Fleshy Memory Kelly Oliver Freud conceived of the ego as energetically self-contained, though formed in relations with the maternal and paternal figures of the Oedipal situation. In his Hegelian reading of Freud, Lacan emphasises the relationships that give rise to (and undermine) a sense of ego identity with his famous account of the infant’s self-recognition […]

Socialism, Feminism and Men

Socialism, Feminism and Men Peter Middleton Feminism has been both welcomed and resisted by socialist men in the past twenty years. As a critique of exploitation and inequality, feminism has been easily recognisable to socialism. Women can be added on to its emancipatory project as another oppressed class to be liberated. In practice this has […]

51 Reviews

REVIEWS ANTI -ANTI -ALTHUSSERIANISM Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, London, Verso, 1988, 359pp., £29.95 hb, £10.95 pb. Few events in the recent history of the intellectual left in Britain can have had as disruptive an effect upon its prevailing orthodoxies and habits of mind as the onset of ‘Ahtusserianism’ in the early 1970s. […]

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context: Including Chris Arthur's 'Notes on the Animal Kingdom of the Spirit'

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context David Macey At risk of caricature, the received Anglo-Saxon image of Lacan might be formalized as Freud + Saussure = Lacan (2). The received formula owes much to one of the first texts to introduce Lacan’s work to an English-speaking audience, namely the translation of Althusser’s ‘Freud and […]

Jacques Lacan: the French Freud?

Jacques Lacan – the French Freud? John Bird French intellectual life appears to exercise a fascination, some might say a dreadful influence, on the .English intellectual avant-garde. In the 1960s it was the tortuous debate between Sartre and LeviStrauss; in the 1970s, the ‘true’, dehumanised Marxism of Althusser; and as we enter the 1980s, we […]