Abstracts
Volume 18, Number 1September, 2007
- Abstract: Freudian theory historicizes sexuality, makes it temporal in a new way. Is there a relation between the rethinking of time in Heidegger and the temporality of sexuality? Jean Laplanche asks a similar question, and attempts to answer it. The paper takes up Laplanche's question, and provides a different answer, by focusing on the work of contemporary analysts who have extended the theory of sexuality into the realm of the transitional, and on related conceptions from Derrida and Deleuze. A stricter integration of Freud and Heidegger on sexuality and time is proposed via a reading of Freud's obscure notion of primary, intermediate organizations of the drives. --ab
- Abstract: Although Alain Badiou's early work is deeply critical of French theories of libidinal economy that sought to synthesize Marx and Freud in the wake of May 1968, this essay seeks to summarize the central tenets of libidinal economy theory--the emphasis on the desire structure proper to use value; the boundaries of the human explored through the death drive; a thought of radical inertia--and argues that there is more overlap than might be thought, especially concerning inertia. Badiou's interest in Mao is considered in its connection to problems of periodization, of counting a century, and the thought of the party, and these link back to theories of libidinal economy through a shared fascination with the intemporal, if not the unconscious. --ek
- Abstract: This essay considers a line of thought about the possibility of political action in psychoanalytic theory. In the mid-1930s George Bataille asked why popular political movements during this period yielded, ultimately, fascism rather than communism. He responds by suggesting that for the reverse to take place, the very structure of knowledge needs to be reworked, and argues that the Freudian unconscious represents a possible commencement for that reworking. In "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis," a seminar delivered during the Parisian student movements, and one famous for introducing the "four discourses" (of the master, the hysteric, the analyst, and the university), Lacan examines in detail this thesis, revealing how an analysis of the unconscious might help reshape our thinking on popular movements, especially insofar as that thinking is derived from Marx. The essay concludes by investigating the recent fierce debate between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek about populism, a dispute largely informed by psychoanalysis. --bl
- Abstract: Philip K. Dick's Valis trilogy staggers as seemingly separable phases the elements he metabolized all together in such works as Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. From the intersection crowded with science fiction, schizophrenia, and mysticism in Valis (the novel) we pass through the fantasy genre (in The Divine Invasion) as the temptation that science fiction must repeatedly overcome and end up inside the recent past of the scene of writing of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which we traverse via modern Spiritualist attempts to keep in touch with the departed. With the Valis trilogy's cross-sectioning of the psy-fi condition as illustration and inspiration, the essay revisits--as endopsychic allegory--the stations of Freud's and Benjamin's crossing with or through Schreber, and concludes with a reading of Dick's "first" science fiction novel, Time Out of Joint, in which the author deliberately seeks to engage or stage Schreber's narrative.--lar
Eleanor Kaufman, The Desire Called Mao: Badiou and the Legacy of Libidinal Economy
Brett Levinson, In Theory, Politics Does not Exist
Laurence A. Rickels, Endopsychic Allegories
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