'Sexuality' tag archive

Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror, Verso, London and New York, 2012. 326 pp., £19.99 pb., 978 1 84467 755 9. Bruno Bosteels is probably best known to readers of Radical Philosophy as translator of and commentator on the work of Alain Badiou – most […]

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 […]

COMMENTARY Post-sexual ity? The Wilde Centenary Joseph Bristow A lmost one hundred years ago to the day, Oscar Wilde found himself in the midst of the first of three trials that would eventually go against him. Although it was Wilde who initially sued for libel, the defendant rallied sufficient evidence to have him sentenced to […]

‘When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say?’ Sue Bridehead’s question – or rather exclamation – in Jude the Obscure – is, of course, rhetorical; and Hardy has surely been vindicated in this appeal to […]

Studying Child Sexual Abuse: Morality or Science? Sue Clegg Child abuse has become a major topic of public polemic and academic research. I Modem feminists, like their nineteenthcentury sisters, have singled out sexual abuse for special attention. 2 After decades in which sexual abuse was the concern of a limited number of professionals who dealt […]

COMMENTARY Sexuality and Subcultures in the Wake of Welfare Capitalism A/an Sinfie/d When the British Parliament eventually debated the Gulf War – journalists had earnestly demanded this, pretending to believe that it might somehow make a difference; when we finally got this debate, just two new ideas were produced. One, from an Ulster Unionist, was […]

The Human Body in Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and the Repressive Hypothesis Russell Keat 1. Are human bodies human? / recurrent issue in both philosophy and the human sciences has been the possibility of identifying distinctively human characteristics – such as the capacities for language, purposive action and conscious experience; sodallty, historlcity, and cultural diversity; […]

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 […]

Feminism: History and Morality Jean Grimshaw Janet Radcliffe Richards’ book The Sceptical Feminist (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, £12 hb) is an attempt to extricate feminism from what she sees as ideological commitments that are not essential to it, and serve merely to confuse feminists themselves, and alienate potential supporters. The image of the feminist […]

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 […]

Birth of the Subject Colin Gordon Since 1970 Michel Foucault has published three books, L ‘Ordre du Discours (The Order of Discourse), Surveiller et Punir (Surveillance and Punishment) and La volonte de savoir (The Will to Knowledge), none of which has yet appeared in English in this country. 1 This body of untranslated work, which […]

It was a matter of analyzing … the problemizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problemizations are formed. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure1Michel Foucault is well known for having periodically redescribed his previous studies in light of his current project. [2] […]

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 […]

Political identities have received bad press for quite some time. Sexual identities constitute no exception to this trend. Nearly ten years ago Judith Butler expressed her ambivalent relation to identity categories by calling them ʻnecessary errorsʼ, whilst at the same time holding that ʻthere remains a political imperative to use [them]ʼ.1 In more recent times, […]

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 […]

The central tenet of Charles Fourierʼs theory was the promise of universal happiness and social unity through a radical revision of manʼs relationship to labour. Vehemently opposed to both the violence of mass insurrection and the hypocrisies and corruption of burgeoning industrial capitalism, he dreamed of a pacific cultural revolution that would emerge from the […]

What is feminist phenomenology? Thinking birth philosophically Johanna oksala In one curious and exceptional fragment from 1933 Husserl discusses sexuality phenomenologically. Even if his taciturnity and his heterosexual prejudices concerning sexuality hardly make him a very original thinker on the topic, this fragment is interesting in relation to the question of the phenomenological importance of […]