'Psychoanalysis' tag archive

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 […]

CORRESPONDENCE ‘The Sceptical Feminist’ Dear Radical Philosophy, r r I should like to comment on Janet Radcliffe Richards’ reply to my review of her book, The Sceptical Feminist, which appeared in RP30. Richards says that I have seriously misrepresented her position, and that most of the quotations I use to support my view of her […]

CORRESPONDENCE For Lacan Dear Radical Philosophy, l I John Bird’s article on Lacan (RP 30) was so vehement that some response is necessary. But replying to Bird raises a problem. Bird has pitted himself against Lacan, and this makes any reply seem to speak for Lacan – a role it is impossible to fulfill. The […]

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 […]

can also draw on a vertical account of the development of structures of interaction. Despite this enrichment, however, critical theory – in so far as it is a theory of contemporary society – retains its essentially historical and practical nature (12). The question whether McCarthy is correct in believing that Habermas’ later writings do represent […]

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 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, […]

posItIve suggestions I have made: but I think it symptomatic of our state that we don’t have lots of ideas – and activities going about this. Maybe not everyone in sympathy with the general idea of radical philosophy feels these needs. When talk about new modes of communicating, this must include more or less regular […]

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 […]

Symposium Cornelius Castoriadis, 1922–1997Last of the Western Marxists Perhaps it was most of all the personal presence and vitality of this great intellectual of the European Left which impressed people, indeed could overwhelm them: the mighty bald head, out of which blinked two alert and sensitive eyes; the mouth which was always shaped by an […]

Time and the working mother Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’ revisited Carol watts why it should be women, and indeed certain women, who come to the fore in a part-time, low-wage economy, and why their acceptance of ʻflexibleʼ working conditions makes them a model for the future. The possibility thus arises for a renewal of a feminist […]

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 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 […]

Since the mid-1980s there has been a major revival of interest in the work of Siegfried Kracauer, focusing on the essays he wrote during the Weimar Republic for the Frankfurter Zeitung. [1] As a result of this renewed interest in Kracauerʼs early writings, a revisionist school of Kracauer criticism has emerged, particularly in the USA. […]

What is ethical experience for Alain Badiou? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? Let me begin by trying to pick out the formal structure of ethical experience, or what with Dieter Henrich we can call ʻthe grammar of the concept of moral insightʼ, [1] and explaining how such experience implies […]

Interview Jean LaplancheThe other within Rethinking psychoanalysis RP: howdid you come to psychoanalysis? what made you want to be an analyst?laplanche: Itʼs a long story. I was studying philosophy in the 1940s and psychoanalysis was not as well known as it is now. It was something new and revolutionary. But I had two professors who […]

ʻWell, Iʼll think about women thenʼ, Juliet Mitchell proposed in 1963, suggesting a topic to research as she sat, the lone woman, on the editorial board of New Left Review – alongside her husband, Perry Anderson, the freshly minted editor of the journal. The inevitable response greeted Mitchellʼs startling proposal in such circles at that […]

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 […]

Family values Butler, Lacan and the rise of Antigone Cecilia sjöholm * Judith Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Columbia University Press, New York, 2000. x + 103 pp., £14.50 hb., 0 231 11894 5. One may wonder, with George Steiner, what would have happened if psychoanalysis had chosen Antigone, rather than Oedipus, […]

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 […]

Conference report Letdown ‘Siegfried Kracauer’, University of Birmingham 13–14 September 2002 Only the superstitious would argue that the omens should have been heeded. Was it really the power of Friday the 13th that jinxed the event, such that all four ʻbig nameʼ international speakers failed to show at this two-day conference devoted to the work […]

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 […]