Since the death of Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche is now considered to be one of the worlds foremost psychoanalytic thinkers. In spite of the influence of his work over the last thirty years, remarkably little has been available in English. Essays On Otherness presents for the first time in English many of Laplanche's key essays and is the first book to provide an overview of his thinking. It offers an introduction to many of the key themes that characterise his work: seduction, persecution, revelation, masochism, transference and mourning. Such themes have been increasingly both in psychoanalytic thought and in continental philosophy, social and cultural theory, and literature making Essays On Otherness indispensable reading for all those concerned with the implications of psychoanalytic theory today.
An account of the Copernican Revolution, focusing on the significance of the plurality of the revolution which encompassed not only mathematical astronomy, but also conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion.
In recent years memory has attracted increasing attention. From analyses of electronic communication and the Internet to discussions of heritage culture, to debates about victimhood and sexual abuse, memory is currently generating much cultural interest. This interdisciplinary collection takes a journey through memory in order to contextualize this current "memory boom." Memory Cultures focuses on memories "outside"--in the many fields within which understandings of memory have been produced. It focuses less on memory as an object whose inner workings are to be studied, and more on memory as a concept. It traces the genealogies of our contemporary Western understandings of memory through studies of the early modern arts of memory. It also discusses nineteenth-century evolutionary museums, and the modernist explorations of artists and writers. Here it explores the differences between Western and non-Western concepts of the lived past and compares understandings of memory in history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The volume is divided into five parts: "Believing the Body"; "Propping the Subject"; "What Memory Forgets: Models of the Mind"; "What History Forgets: Memory and Time"; and "Memory Beyond the Modern." Individual essays by many of the foremost international scholars in memory studies trace memory's intimate association with identity and recognition, with cities, with lived time, with the science of the mind, with fantasy and with the media. Memory Cultures will be of essential interest to those working in the fields of cultural studies, history and also anthropology. Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin teach in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the University of East London.
In May, 1539, a young, German mathematician named Georg Joachim Rheticus traveled hundreds of miles across Europe in the hopes of meeting and spending a few days with the legendary astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, in Frombork, Poland. Two and a half years later, Rheticus was still there, fascinated by what he was discovering, but largely engaged in trying to convince Copernicus to publish his masterwork-De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavens), the first book to posit that the sun was the center of the universe. That he was finally able to do so just as Copernicus was dying became a turning point for science and civilization. That he then went on to a legendary career of his own-he founded the field of trigonometry, for example-will be one of the many surprises in this eye-opening book, which will restore Rheticus to his rightful place in the history of science.
Freud and the Sexual is the translation of Laplanches Sexual: La sexualit largie au sens freudien, his work from 2000 to 2006. Clear and direct, often witty, this volume is a pleasure to read and represents the culmination of his work. It includes: 1. Drive and Instinct: distinctions, oppositions, supports and intertwinings 2. Sexuality and Attachment in Metapsychology 3. Dream and Communication: should chapter VII be rewritten? 4. Countercurrent 5. Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation 6. Failures of Translation 7. Displacement and Condensation in Freud 8. Sexual Crime 9. Gender, Sex and the Sexual 10. Three Meanings of the Term Unconscious 11. For Psychoanalysis at the University 12. Intervention in a Debate 13. Levels of Proof 14. The Three Essays and the Theory of Seduction 15. Freud and Philosophy 16. In Debate with Freud 17. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy 18. Incest and Infantile Sexuality 19. Castration and Oedipus as Codes and Narrative Schemas
A daring new vision of the quantum universe, and the scandals controversies, and questions that may illuminate our future--from Canada's leading mind on contemporary physics. Quantum physics is the golden child of modern science. It is the basis of our understanding of atoms, radiation, and so much else, from elementary particles and basic forces to the behaviour of materials. But for a century it has also been the problem child of science, plagued by intense disagreements between its intellectual giants, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking, over the strange paradoxes and implications that seem like the stuff of fantasy. Whether it's Schrödinger's cat--a creature that is simultaneously dead and alive--or a belief that the world does not exist independently of our observations of it, quantum theory is what challenges our fundamental assumptions about our reality. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, globally renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin provocatively argues that the problems which have bedeviled quantum physics since its inception are unsolved for the simple reason that the theory is incomplete. There is more, waiting to be discovered. Our task--if we are to have simple answers to our simple questions about the universe we live in--must be to go beyond it to a description of the world on an atomic scale that makes sense. In this vibrant and accessible book, Smolin takes us on a journey through the basics of quantum physics, introducing the stories of the experiments and figures that have transformed the field, before wrestling with the puzzles and conundrums that they present. Along the way, he illuminates the existing theories about the quantum world that might solve these problems, guiding us toward his own vision that embraces common sense realism. If we are to have any hope of completing the revolution that Einstein began nearly a century ago, we must go beyond quantum mechanics as we know it to find a theory that will give us a complete description of nature. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, Lee Smolin brings us a step closer to resolving one of the greatest scientific controversies of our age.
Radical alternatives to consent and trauma Contemporary discourse on sex and sexuality is fixated on consent as a means of mitigating danger and avoiding forms of sexual trauma. Sexuality Beyond Consent dares us to step into a different territory, where we do not guard the self but risk experience. Avgi Saketopoulou maintains that we are overly focused on healing trauma and need to reroute our attention to what subjects do with their trauma, in the process taking up a series of provocative questions: Why is sexuality beyond consent worth risking, and how does risk become a way of soliciting the future? Why might surrendering to the fact that your pain is not going away enable you to do things with pain? In what ways are race and racism shot through with the erotic? How can something proximal to violation become a site of flourishing? Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about maintaining control but risks sexuality beyond consent. Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to show us how the force of the erotic surges through the aesthetic domain. Grounding its arguments in the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the rousing of the strange in ourselves, not in order to master trauma but to rub up against it, may open us up to encounters with opacity and unique forms of care.
What is at stake in Freud’s enduring preoccupation with a process supposedly diverting sexuality into cultural activity? In this study, a leading scholar of psychoanalysis and literature re-opens the old question of sublimation in a critical reading that explores one of the last remaining puzzles of Freudian thought. Using the rigorous framework provided by Jean Laplanche, Luke Thurston resituates sublimation as an unfinished Freudian concept bound up with a much wider history of philosophical and literary reflection. Exploring the misunderstanding and reinvention of sublimation both in accounts of cultural history and in Lacan’s celebrated reading of Antigone, Thurston challenges some of the prevalent assumptions still seen in contemporary “theory.” Thurston links his critical investigation of psychoanalysis to modernist literature, discovering both parallels and alternatives to Freud’s idea of sublimation in little-known works by May Sinclair and David Jones. The study concludes by arguing that these modernist artists, both of whom were significantly affected by trauma during the First World War, produced work radically at odds with the established canons of representation, and that this “anti-hermeneutic” art can be linked to a “Copernican” sublimation, a process not controlled by the ego but vitalizing it and decentring its habitual structure.
