Lacan the Charlatan
Lacan the Charlatan

Author: Peter D. Mathews

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2020-07-24

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9783030452032

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This book sets out to determine the validity of an accusation made against Jacques Lacan by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 1989. He stated that Lacan was a “charlatan” – not that his ideas were flawed or wrong, but that his entire discourse was fraudulent, an accusation that has since been repeated by many other critics. Examining the arguments of key anti-Lacanian critics, Mathews weighs and contextualizes the legitimacy of Lacan’s engagements with structural linguistics, mathematical formalization, science, ethics, Hegelian dialectics, and psychoanalysis. The guiding thread is Lacan’s own recurrent interrogation of authority, which inhabits an ambiguous zone between mastery and charlatanry. This book offers a novel contribution to the field for students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, critical and literary theory.

Lacan the Charlatan
Lacan the Charlatan

Author: Peter D. Mathews

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-06-01

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 3030452042

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This book sets out to determine the validity of an accusation made against Jacques Lacan by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 1989. He stated that Lacan was a “charlatan” – not that his ideas were flawed or wrong, but that his entire discourse was fraudulent, an accusation that has since been repeated by many other critics. Examining the arguments of key anti-Lacanian critics, Mathews weighs and contextualizes the legitimacy of Lacan’s engagements with structural linguistics, mathematical formalization, science, ethics, Hegelian dialectics, and psychoanalysis. The guiding thread is Lacan’s own recurrent interrogation of authority, which inhabits an ambiguous zone between mastery and charlatanry. This book offers a novel contribution to the field for students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, critical and literary theory.

Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan

Author: Anika Lemaire

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1317761987

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The work of Jaques Lacan, eminent French psychoanalyst and influential thinker (1901-1981), is recognized as being of vital importance to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and all those concerned with the the study of man and language. Its value is not limited to the field of psychoanalysis alone, but provides the basis for a new philosophy of man and a new theory of discourse. It is, however, notoriously difficult for the non-specialist reader to come to terms with Lacan's reading of Freud and his investigations of the unconscious. Until now, there has been no satisfactory general introduction to Lacan, and this first general exposition of his work, translated and revised from the French edition, is designed to provide the conceptual tools which will enable the reader to study Lacan using the original texts.

Fashionable Nonsense
Fashionable Nonsense

Author: Alan Sokal

Publisher: Picador

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1466862408

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In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy. Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice, the two thoughtfully and thoroughly dismantle the pseudo-scientific writings of some of the most fashionable French and American intellectuals. More generally, they challenge the widespread notion that scientific theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions.

The Lacanian Delusion
The Lacanian Delusion

Author: François Roustang

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13:

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The ODÉON Series, General Editors: Josue V. Harari, Vincent Descombes, and Greg Sims A multidisciplinary series, ODÉON will serve as a transfer point--much as the station ODEON in the Paris metro--for the many provocative lines of thought that enliven contemporary cultural criticism. ODÉON will publish original works and translations that enhance the intellectual exchange between Europe and the English-speaking world in the areas of literature, philosophy, and historical and political reflection. In this critical exposition, Roustang addresses the question of the Lacanian legend and how it has functioned over the last twenty years. Exploring how it came to be disseminated, Roustang first situates Lacan's influence in the context of the social explosion of the 1960s. What attracted people to Lacan? Roustang argues that beyond a fascination with his extraordinary personage, his linguistic inventiveness, and his vast culture, it was Lacan's all-encompassing discourse that held his audiences spellbound. Lacan offered a highly original mix of philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, ethnology, theology, and more, assembled and reorganized under the aegis of a psychoanalysis that convinced disciples they had a firm hold on the reins of knowledge. Roustang analyzes this knowledge, focusing on the nature of the "Lacanian delusion," the nature of Lacanian discourse, the nature of Lacanian truth, and the reasons for Lacan's success.

Lacan
Lacan

Author: Alain Badiou

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0231548419

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Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badiou’s seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou’s year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking. In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan’s theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the “anti-philosopher,” a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou’s own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou’s more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.

The Trouble with Pleasure
The Trouble with Pleasure

Author: Aaron Schuster

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-02-26

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0262528592

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An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan. Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze's work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure." Along the way, Schuster offers his own engaging and surprising conceptual analyses and inventive examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud's theory of neurosis to Spinoza's intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate, among other things, a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.

Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit
Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit

Author: Maria Balaska

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 3030169391

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This book brings together the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan around their treatments of ‘astonishment,’ an experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant. Both thinkers have a central interest in the dissatisfaction with meaning that these experiences generate when we attempt to articulate them, to bring language to bear on them. Maria Balaska argues that this frustration and difficulty with meaning reveals a more fundamental characteristic of our sense-making capacities –namely, their groundlessness. Instead of disappointment with language’s sense-making capacities, Balaska argues that Wittgenstein and Lacan can help us find in this revelation of meaning’s groundlessness an opportunity to acknowledge our own involvement in meaning, to creatively participate in it and thereby to enrich our forms of life with language.

The Most Sublime Hysteric
The Most Sublime Hysteric

Author: Slavoj Zizek

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-08-12

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0745681441

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What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn't a platitude that we've heard a thousand times - or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek - one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time - upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliché and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions. When Lacan described Hegel as the ‘most sublime hysteric’, he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Other's desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution - his own, and the one to come. This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.

On Belief
On Belief

Author: Slavoj Zizek

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 113452272X

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What is the basis of belief in an era when globalization, multiculturalism and big business are the new religion? Slavoj Zizek, renowned philosopher and irrepressible cultural critic takes on all comers in this compelling and breathless new book. From 'cyberspace reason' to the paradox that is 'Western Buddhism', On Belief gets behind the contours of the way we normally think about belief, in particular Judaism and Christianity. Holding up the so-called authenticity of religious belief to critical light, Zizek draws on psychoanalysis, film and philosophy to reveal in startling fashion that nothing could be worse for believers than their beliefs turning out to be true.