To understand the achievement of Jacques Lacan, one must turn to his roots. This book explores the grounding of Lacan's psychoanalytic work in the intellectual and artistic movements of the modernist period. More specifically, it examines masculine anxiety in the modernist novel in terms of Lacan's work on psychosis, masochism, and narcissism, viewed against the broader cultural context of the modernist era. In the process, this book illustrates how Lacan's intellectual apprenticeships and encounters (both real and imaginary) play out in his mature work, beginning with the first seminars of the 1950s. Like other thinkers of the early twentieth century, the trajectory of Lacan's psychoanalytic career is shaped by tendentious confrontations with peers, forebears, and intellectual traditions.
Can Luther's writings inform us on the fundamental questions of Freudian psychoanalysis? Does an intellectual filiation between early Reformation thought and psychoanalysis exist? Does Lacanian psychoanalysis offer an instrument for analysing theological writings? In The Heart of Man's Destiny, Herman Westerink offers a new reading of Lacan's seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Working from an innovative perspective, this book explores the close relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the ideas of the early Reformation. Lacan claimed that to be unaware of the connection between Freud and early Reformation constituted a fundamental misunderstanding of the kind of problems psychoanalysis addresses. Westerink carefully explores these problems and shows that Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on desire and law, transgression, and symbolization, draws on fundamental ideas first formulated in the writings of Luther and Calvin. By relating psychoanalysis to early Reformation thought, Westerink not only shows Lacan's writings in a completely new light, but also makes possible an innovative reading of early modern theology itself. The Heart of Man's Destiny breaks new ground by providing both a controversial as well as a fresh perspective on both Luther and Calvin, and on Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis. This valuable contribution to the complex character of psychoanalysis will be of interest to analysts and psychotherapists, as well academics and postgraduates with an interest in theology, philosophy and ethics.
The voice traverses Beckett's work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice's multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject's vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett's work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation
Justin Clemens examines psychoanalysis under the rubric of 'antiphilosophy': a practice that offers the strongest possible challenges to thought. Drawing on the work of Badiou, Freud, Lacan, Zizek and Agamben, he examines the relationships of humans to dr
In Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory Nicholas Miller re-examines memory and its role in modern Irish culture. Arguing that a continuous renegotiation of memory is characteristic of Irish modernist writing, Miller investigates a series of case-studies in modern Irish historical imagination. He reassesses Ireland's self-construction through external or 'foreign' discourses such as the cinema, and proposes readings of Yeats and Joyce as 'counter-memorialists'. Combining theoretical and historical approaches, Miller shows how the modernist handling of history transforms both memory and the story of the past by highlighting readers' investments in histories that are produced, specifically and concretely, through local acts of reading. This original study will attract scholars of Modernism, Irish studies, film and literary theory.
Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a “pathos of distance,” the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsche's and Benjamin's ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliot's post-war despair, Jean Cocteau's formidable selfmythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedt's novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzee's dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise.
This third edition of Modern Criticism and Theory represents a major expansion on its previous incarnations with some twenty five new pieces or essays included. This expansion has two principal purposes. Firstly, in keeping with the collection’s aim to reflect contemporary preoccupations, the reader has expanded forward to include such newly emergent considerations as ecocriticism and post-theory. Secondly, with the aim of presenting as broad an account of modern theory as possible, the reader expands backwards to to take in exemplary pieces by formative writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Marx, Freud and Virginia Woolf.. This radical expansion of content is prefaced by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides a rationale for the collection and demonstrates how connections can be made between competing theories and critical schools. The purpose of the collection remains that of introducing the reader to the guiding concepts of contemporary literary and cultural debate. It does so by presenting substantial extracts from seminal thinkers and surrounding them with the contextual materials necessary to a full understanding. Each selection has a headnote, which gives biographical details of the author and provides suggestions for further reading, and footnotes that help explain difficult references. The collection is ordered both historically and thematically and readers are encouraged to draw for themselves connections between essays and theories. Modern Criticism and Theory has long been regarded as a necessary collection. Now revised for the twenty first century it goes further and provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the complex landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think – and live – in the world today.
Focusing on our complex relationship with technology, The machine and the ghost explores our culture’s continued fascination with the spectral, the ghostly and the paranormal. Through a series of critical case studies and artists’ discussions, this lively new collection examines topics ranging from contemporary art to cultural theory. Produced with renowned specialists within the field, including the artist Susan Hiller and the writer Marina Warner, the book combines the historical with the contemporary in exploring how the visual culture of paranormal phenomena continues to haunt our imaginations. Informed by history and the visual tradition of spiritualism and psychical research, the collection is very much concerned to site that tradition within our contemporary concerns, such as landscape and environment, and recent technological developments. Aimed at a broad academic and cultural audience, the collection will appeal to all academic levels in addition to those interested in art and culture more widely.
This bold collection of essays demonstrates the necessity of understanding fascism in cultural terms rather than only or even primarily in terms of political structures and events. Contributors from history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology describe a culture of fascism in Japan in the decades preceding the end of the Asia-Pacific War. In so doing, they challenge past scholarship, which has generally rejected descriptions of pre-1945 Japan as fascist. The contributors explain how a fascist ideology was diffused throughout Japanese culture via literature, popular culture, film, design, and everyday discourse. Alan Tansman’s introduction places the essays in historical context and situates them in relation to previous scholarly inquiries into the existence of fascism in Japan. Several contributors examine how fascism was understood in the 1930s by, for example, influential theorists, an antifascist literary group, and leading intellectuals responding to capitalist modernization. Others explore the idea that fascism’s solution to alienation and exploitation lay in efforts to beautify work, the workplace, and everyday life. Still others analyze the realization of and limits to fascist aesthetics in film, memorial design, architecture, animal imagery, a military museum, and a national exposition. Contributors also assess both manifestations of and resistance to fascist ideology in the work of renowned authors including the Nobel-prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Kawabata Yasunari and the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shirō. In the work of these final two, the tropes of sexual perversity and paranoia open a new perspective on fascist culture. This volume makes Japanese fascism available as a critical point of comparison for scholars of fascism worldwide. The concluding essay models such work by comparing Spanish and Japanese fascisms. Contributors. Noriko Aso, Michael Baskett, Kim Brandt, Nina Cornyetz, Kevin M. Doak, James Dorsey, Aaron Gerow, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Angus Lockyer, Jim Reichert, Jonathan Reynolds, Ellen Schattschneider, Aaron Skabelund, Akiko Takenaka, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, Keith Vincent, Alejandro Yarza
The current rise in new religions and the growing popularity of New Ageism is concomitant with an increasingly anti-philosophical sentiment marking our contemporary situation. More specifically, it is philosophical and psychoanalytic reason that has lost standing faced with the triumph of post-secular "spirituality". Combatting this trend, this treatise develops a theoretical apparatus based on Hegelian speculative reason and Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the aid of this theoretical apparatus, the book argues how certain conceptual pairs appear opposed through an operation of misrecognition christened, following Hegel, as "diremption". The failure to reckon with identities-in-difference relegates the subject to more vicious contradictions that define central aspects of our contemporary predicament. The repeated thesis of the treatise is that the deadlocks marking our contemporary situation require renewed engagement with dialectical thinking beyond the impasses of common understanding. Only by embarking on this philosophical-psychoanalytic "path of despair" (Hegel) will we stand a chance of achieving "joyful wisdom" (Nietzsche). Developing a unique dialectical theory based on readings of Hegel, Lacan and Žižek, in order to address various philosophical and psychoanalytic questions, this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in German idealism and/or psychoanalytic theory.
