Continental Philosophy

PSYCHOANALYSIS, CULTURE & SOCIETY

July 2009 Volume 14 Number 2, pp 109 – 212

Constructing the enemy-other: Anxiety, trauma and mourning in the narratives of political conflict

Jeffrey Stevenson Murer

Ideology and identity: A psychoanalytic investigation of a social phenomenon

R D Hinshelwood

Psychoanalysis and ideology: Comment on R.D. Hinshelwood

Yannis Stavrakakis

Killing and dying for the sacred object: Commentary on R.D. Hinshelwood, ‘Ideology and Identity: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of a Social Phenomenon’

Richard Koenigsberg

Ideology, psyche and the historical significance of 9/11

Nancy Caro Hollander

Subjectivity, identity and 300 Spartans

Stacey Scriver

‘I felt a funeral in my brain’: The politics of representation in HBO’s Six Feet Under

Sophie Smith

Abstract

This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre-symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing pre-discursive forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti-racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggesting a rapprochement of discursive and psychoanalytic modes of analysis, I argue that Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides a means of understanding racism as both historically/socially constructed and as existing at powerfully embodied, visceral and subliminal dimensions of subjectivity. Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides us with an account of a pre-discursive (that is, a bodily, affective, pre-symbolic) racism, a form of racism that comes before words, and that is routed through the logics of the body and its anxieties of distinction, separation and survival. This theory enables us, moreover, to join together the expulsive reactions of a racism of the body to both the personal racism of the ego and the broader discursive racisms of the prevailing social order. Moreover, it directs our attention to the fact that discourses of racism are always locked into a relationship with pre-discursive processes which condition and augment every discursive action, which escape the codifications of discourse and which drive the urgency of its attempts at containment.

Hook, Derek (2006) ‘Pre-discursive’ racism. Journal of community & applied social psychology, 16 (3). pp. 207-232

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Judith Butler, “Uncritical Exuberance”

Jacques-Alain Miller, “Obama: Métis or Hermaphrodite?”

Josefina Ayerza
To resume again…
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII1.html

Jacques-Alain Miller
A Reading of the Seminar From an Other to the other IV
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII2.html

Jacques-Alain Miller
The Other Side of Lacan
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII3.html

Alain Badiou
The Son’s Aleatory Identity in Today’s World
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII4.html

Lilia Mahjoub
The Image in the Fantasy
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII5.html

Massimo Recalcati
Madness and Structure in Jacques Lacan
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII6.html

Jean-Luc Nancy
Strange Foreign Bodies
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII7.html

Slavoj Zizek
Why Lacan Is Not a Heideggerian
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII8.html

Josefina Ayerza
Cecily Brown, Doug Aitken
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII9.html

On Love
http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=263

Lacan used to say, ‘To love is to give what you haven’t got.’ Which means: to love is to recognize your lack and give it to the other, place it in the other. It’s not giving what you possess, goods and presents, it’s giving something else that you don’t possess, which goes beyond you.

To Forget is Murder
http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=278

Love is never a whole, except perhaps the love of God. If only because it puts you in dependence vis-à-vis the loved subject, it raises necessarily aggressiveness, even hatred. Forgetting is already in itself a symbolic murder.

Sarah Palin : opération « castration » – Jacques-Alain Miller

Jacques-alain Miller, psychanalyste

Le choix de Sarah Palin est un signe des temps. En politique, l’énonciation féminine est désormais appelée à dominer. Mais attention ! Il ne s’agit plus des femmes qui jouaient des coudes en se modelant sur les hommes. Nous entrons dans l’ère des femmes postféministes, qui, sans barguigner, font la peau aux hommes politiques. La transition a été parfaitement visible durant la campagne de Hillary : elle a commencé par jouer le commandant en chef, et ça n’a pas marché. Alors, elle a envoyé un message subliminal qui disait quelque chose comme : « Obama ? Il n’a rien dans le pantalon. » Elle a aussitôt remonté, mais trop tard. Sarah Palin prend le relais, mais, plus jeune de quinze ans, elle est autrement féroce, elle manie le sarcasme féminin avec un naturel incomparable, elle châtre ouvertement ses adversaires mâles, et avec une franche jubilation, tandis que les malheureux restent cois : attaquer une femme qui joue de sa féminité pour les ridiculiser et les réduire à l’impuissance, ils ne savent pas. Pour l’instant, une femme qui abat la carte « castration » est imbattable.

En France, on avait pu voir Ségolène accomplir l’opération « castration » sur Fabius et Strauss-Kahn, mais par la suite, toute à se polir une image de madone, elle négligea Sarkozy, qui sut la peindre en évaporée nunuche. Quant aux Martine Aubry ou Michèle Alliot-Marie, c’est l’ancien modèle.

Quelle est précisément la différence entre les femmes de ces deux époques ? Les premières imitent l’homme, elles respectent le phallus, et font comme si elles l’avaient. Les nouvelles savent que ce n’est qu’un semblant, elles ne le prennent pas au sérieux : c’est la féminité décomplexée. Une Sarah Palin n’affiche aucun manque, n’a peur de rien, pond des enfants tout en maniant le fusil, se présente comme une force qui va, « un pitbull avec du rouge à lèvres ».

Obama a-t-il déjà perdu ? En ne choisissant pas Hillary comme partenaire-sur les instances de son épouse, dit-on, elle aussi très pitbull-, il a ouvert un boulevard à McCain, qui s’y est engouffré. Grâce à Palin, McCain est revenu dans la course. Sarah passionne l’Amérique, elle apporte en politique un nouvel Eros. Si Obama gagne, elle a les meilleures chances d’être son challenger dans quatre ans. Si c’est McCain, Hillary sera son adversaire numéro un. Dans tous les cas, une nouvelle race de femmes politiques monte en puissance.

Link

(h/t: Robert Sinnerbrink)

http://www.lacan.com/symptom/

TOC

The Narration of Collective Trauma: The “True Story” of Jasper, Texas — Kalina Brabeck and Ricardo Ainslie

“Two Brotherless Peoples”: On the Constitutive Traumas of Class Struggle — Akis Gavriilidis

Psychotherapy and Political Activism: Examining The Israeli–palestinian Case — Nissim Avissar

Other Pasts: Family Romances of Pan’s Labyrinth — Janet Thormann

The Notion of the Work of Culture in Freud’s Writings — Eric Smadja

An interview with a sociologist who blames Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty!

Jodi Dean has a number of posts on Laclau and Copjec

TOC 

Editorial Introduction: Politics and Psychoanalysis — Henry Krips

The Masquerade, the Veil, and the Phallic Mask — Ellie Ragland

The Masquerade, The Veil, and The Phallic Mask: Commentary — Marilyn Charles

The Hijab, the Veil, and Sexuation — Henry Krips

The Case of the Missing Signifier — Todd McGowan

The Next Step for APCS: Organizing Social Action Task Forces — Mark Bracher

The Citizen Psychoanalyst and the Psychoanalytic Social Activist — Karl Figlio

Too Close For Comfort: Psychoanalytic Cultural Theory and Domestic Violence Politics — Janice Haaken

Narcissism, Personal Life and Identity: The Place of the 1960s in the History of Psychoanalysis — Eli Zaretsky

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The University of Utah has many Tanner lectures available on pdf.

Of possible interest: Appiah, Benhabib, Cavell, Foucault, Fraser, Geertz, Habermas, Honneth, Lear, Nussbaum, Rorty, and many more.

Link

When Sophie Fiennes approached me with the idea to do a "pervert's guide" to cinema, our shared goal was to demonstrate how psychoanalytic cinema-criticism is still the best we have, how it can generate insights which compel us to change our entire perspective. The "pervert" from the title is thus not a narrow clinical category; it rather refers to perverting – turning around – our spontaneous perceptions.

The usual reproach to psychoanalytic criticism is that it reduces everything to family complexes: whatever the story, it is "really about" Oedipus, incest, etc. Instead of trying to prove that this is not true, one should accept the challenge. The films which are furthest from family dramas are catastrophe films, which cannot but fascinate the viewer with a spectacular depiction of a terrifying event of immense proportions. This brings us to the first psychoanalytic rule of how to read catastrophe movies: we should avoid the lure of the "big event" and re-focus on the "small event" (familial relations), reading the spectacular catastrophe as an indication of the family trouble. Take Steven Spielberg: the secret motif than runs through all his key films – ET, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List – is the recovery of the father, of his authority. One should remember that the family to whose small boy ET appears was deserted by the father (as we learn in the very beginning), so that ET is ultimately a kind of "vanishing mediator" who provides a new father (the good scientist who, in the film's last shot, is already seen embracing the mother) – when the new father is here, ET can leave and "go home."

Continue here 

My good friend Alex has sent this interesting link.

TOC

Beyond totem and idol, the sexuate other — Luce Irigaray, Karen I. Burke

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis — Sara Beardsworth

The errant name: Badiou and Deleuze on individuation, causality and infinite modes in Spinoza — Jon Roffe

The practical absolute: Fichte’s hidden poetics — Anthony Curtis Adler

A ravaged site: on time and the law — Peg Birmingham

Richard Polt: The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy — Stuart Elden

Stuart Elden, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation — Richard Polt

Alan Paskow, The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation — Robert J. Dostal

We invite abstracts or complete manuscripts on psychoanalysis and world literature and critical readings of psychoanalytic literary theory for a collection that arose from the 2006 “Literature and Psychoanalysis” conference at the University of California, Berkeley (www.berkeleypsychoanalysis.com). The collection will be published by Cambridge Scholars Press. The collection seeks to provide an advanced introduction to various psychoanalytical approaches to literature and film and to explore the theoretical tensions of psychoanalysis as literary and critical theory.

The collection seeks to explore the tensions of psychoanalysis within gender, race, film, and postcolonial studies of literature and film. In particular, the volume will address critical contexts that remain in antagonism to psychoanalytic interventions. The collection aims to dispel
the essentialist or reductive critiques of psychoanalytic readings and theory while also offering a collection of beautiful readings of literature and theory.

As a volume intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, the coverage of the volume will address multiple areas often overlooked in studies of literature and psychoanalysis. Thus, the collection will be divided into five sections that cover:
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